In your moment you will find your way in Your moment you will make a fortune in your Moment you will have a great life so why don’t you find your moment This moment in time the one that will make you Rich so why don’t you find your moment this Moment is the one to grasp as they say you can’t win til you play hay today is a good day

“there’s more boobs in that :30 clip that any full length porno could ever hope to display”

Let’s just say, the movie is far from a porn and there’s no exposed flesh in the trailer… but the commentary had the entire room in awe and giggling.

Advance the roll to 2012 and Kodak’s stock dropped below $1 on the NYSE and they declared Chapter 11 protection and the concept of advancing a roll is all but a phrase of little meaning for many with nostalgia being its only tie to modern culture.

Nostalgia

When the Kodak company made the camera commonplace in every household over the last century they did more than sell a product to us, they helped shape who we were as a society. For the first time in human history moments were being captured in all their rawness without the aid of artist or poet or musician interpreting it for us.

We, as people, were empowered. Image-making, once held to that of professionals, was now a commoners task. Anyone could capture the moment, and do so in breath-taking detail on film. Anyone could fasten their eye’s image seemingly permanently on any ceremony from a birth to a birthday, from a graduation to a wedding, but more importantly the common moments, the ones not traditionally captured could be held fast, forever. Anyone could decide that this, whatever this was to them, should be remembered and shared.

As beings, we are visual, but the personal camera took that idea to an obsessive level. In-as-such a company like Kodak that put such much emphasis on the act of capturing that memory, that emotion, that imagery, that “moment” helped define our relationship with pictures in a new way. They weren’t just someone else’s picture, they were our photographs, our stories, our family, our history.

Kodak’s business model was similar to that of razors. In providing an inexpensive camera and then turning large margins from consumables such as film, chemicals, paper, flash bulbs, etc. Kodak was able to introduce personal photography to the masses and still derive a strong corporate experience. The foresight to discount the camera to increase adoption that drove personal photography’s success.

For anyone that remembers film cameras you remember then with mixed emotions. Never again will there be the excitement of waiting to get a roll of film developed and reliving those memories. Never again will there be the agony of poorly exposed photos that you can never retake. Never again will there be that tangible feeling of holding those crinkly edged aged prints or a photo fresh out of the chemical bath. Never again will there be ruined prints because of oily fingers or fighting with those chemical baths in the first place. Never again will you squint through a view finder

My listening usually gets a little more moody this time of year and in that, sometimes it takes some interesting turns to artists that might not always get my full attention in the up-tempo chaos that makes the rest of the year go round. It’s easy enough to sit back, relax and allow the textures of the music take control of experience. Here’s what the winter weather brought to my recent listening… see if you can tell what I mean:

Muse “Exogenesis part 2″ from Exogenesis
Junius “Betray the Grave” from Reports from the Threshold of Death
the Deftones “Digital Bath” from White Pony
the Echelon Effect “Distant Desire” from Distant Desire
Antimater “Everything You Know is Wrong” from Lights Out
Massive Attack “Teardrop” from Mezzanine
the Gathering “Souvenirs” from Souvenirs
Lamb “One” from What Sound
Anathema “Judegement” from Judgement
Radiohead “Karma Police” from OK Computer
Thrice “For Miles” from Vheissu
Enochian Theory “At Great Odds With…” from Evoution: Creatio Ex Nihilo
Oceansize “One Day This Could All Be Yours” from Effloresce
Zao “Song of the City of the Damned” from Funeral for a God

A common theme that comes up is how I personally take a general notion or idea and turn it into a more defined product concept. Everyone seems to have some kind of opinion on how this is to be done from educators to authors to CEOs to even the kid in the mail room who’s plotting his own self-made start-up. There are some common themes that seem to come up from each of these seemingly divergent ways of doing this which are actually the basis from which I derived my own “checklist.” I define it as a checklist because you can tick off the box for completion at any time and not necessarily go in order because starting points can actually be anywhere.

Value Proposition

As anyone who worked with me knows, I usually ask first “What’s in it for (consumer type)?” and not, “How will this make money? or “What will this do?” My intuition tells me, if you solve for what a need is then the question of how to monetize it becomes easier than vice versa. There are plenty of white papers and thesi to defend this notion too.

Therefore, when I start plotting the course of a product concept, I begin first and foremost with the value proposition. Think of this in terms of the Maslow hierarchy of needs in concept. Don’t just solve for the basic need fulfillment search for the inherent gratification that the need fulfillment is attributed to. By tying it to an emotional value it will address the consumer need from the perspective of demand (I desire this because) rather than supply (You want this because).

The reason I usually circle around to begin here from a product standpoint is two-fold:

First, by starting with this high level-consumer concept to drive product development you are creating a common basis for all development and a benchmark for what should be developed. It makes it easier to trim the fat when the first question you ask is how would this new feature idea influence the underlying value proposition. It also makes it easier to define optimization strategy when optimizations are done from the question of how will changing this strengthen the adherence to the value proposition. If something doesn’t immediately impact the value proposition it doesn’t necessarily have to be discarded, but it definitely loses priority because it isn’t addressing the core.

Second, most good marketers use this concept in some way to help position the product in the marketplace. By adhering to this standard from the on-set there isn’t that inherent tension between marketing and product that can occur. There becomes a continuity between the consumer message and the consumer experience which impacts both how the company internally operates and the external expectation of the consumer. Basically, the promises marketing is making are actually delivered by the product because they are both flowing from the same underlying framework in this well defined value proposition.

There is an opportunity to even do your first round of testing at this point to see if the basic assumption you are making in your value proposition is even true. Don’t over-estimate the insights generated by testing, but it makes for at least a foundation justification for moving forward. If the need you assumed actually can be fulfilled by the concept you pitched in this most amorphic form you might be on to something.

Use Casing

There’s a little bit of the chicken or the egg going on. Sometimes in order to find the value you need to work through the use cases, sometimes the value itself will define the use cases for you. I’ve had it happen both ways and talked to many other PMs who encountered the same general scenario. In reality, the order matters not as long as you do both.

I usually start by working through all the different possible touch-points for the product. Just start jotting down every different way that someone could find it that you can image and then once they have how they would engage with it. It can be tedious and time consuming and a great many of the answers that come up may not even be necessary to address but it makes for a great brainstorm session and starting point. There are no wrong answers, just theories and ideas which will help guide at high level the next few steps. You’ll come back later to refine the results too.

Competitive Set

Once you answer the value proposition, the inherent why of your product’s existence, you can then determine a true competitive set, since no product exists in a vacuum. Without the right why you won’t understand who you are really competing with and knowing what is really vying for your consumer’s attention you won’t be able to effectively build for a customer base (remember a consumer is any user, a customer is who is actually going to pay you for it).

Take for example, if you make some kind of digestible product and your value proposition is “to refresh the body and soul with a burst of youthful, all-natural energy.” You might be a water, or a juice, or a soda, or an energy drink, or a tea or coffee, and you might even be an alcohol. You might be a snack food, or a pill, or some kind of other food product. If you defined yourself purely by being, say, an enriched water, you’d miss how each of those has some competitor that actually speaks to the same value proposition. You’d incorrectly be trying to compete only with water.

In looking at the full competitive set from this point of view from the product standpoint you see better how the features themselves create both similarity and differentiation at the same time. The market opportunities and threats become more defined though this, which will help define what features to focus on in diving further into how to solve for the underlying value proposition. Since, chances are, a good marketing department should be doing this kind of evaluation to determine their strategy incorporating the concept phase again helps unify that divide between what is being built and what is being messaged. Everyone understands how the product concept fits into the marketplace from the same point of view and therefor is working toward the same goal in fulfilling the value.

It is very possible that ongoing competitive analysis might produce a new use case or a value proposition idea that actually begins the process. Many times a thorough competitive analysis provides insights into the market that otherwise wouldn’t be considered, so don’t feel obligated to only do this step after the value proposition is defined, just remember to continue to revisit the competitive set against the value proposition so you aren’t missing competitors.

Monitization

Just because I personally don’t start with “how do we make money off of this?” doesn’t mean that I don’t respect that it needs to be asked. Like I mentioned before, once you know why something is going to be used the rest should more easily flow from it. The competitive set provides insight into when people might consume it and how much it might be worth to them if they do. So, now there’s a benchmark for taking a real, honest look at if there is a justification for monitization.

I start by a revisit of the use-case list and identifying all the touch-points and then imagining all the different possible ways to attach monization to them. Don’t worry about anything other than enumerating all the scenarios at this point and remember, no idea is too crazy, yet.

Narrowing the list down comes in stages, but don’t throw out any idea completely even if it doesn’t make the cut at a specific state, it may be justifiable at a later time in the life cycle. I prefer to start with contrasting the monitization idea against the value proposition. Some ideas will run dead against fulfilling the value proposition and should be put aside immediately. Some will be neutral or will require actual user testing to understand their impact. A few might even support the value proposition and should be embraced.

Next, look at the competitors and contrast how your monitization strategy stacks up to what you’ve defined as theirs. I suggest doing the self-analysis first because it should allow for the gestation of unique ideas rather than adhering to the status quo in the market place. You will better identify differentiation and redundancy through self-examination first. Ask yourself: Are there apparent strengths or opportunities in yours? Do you see weaknesses or threats? Did you miss anything you should be considering? You will approach these questions much different if you are conceiving a monitization strategy synchronizes solely with competition than if you answer them independently and then overlay both.

Internal Audit

Now that there is a clearer understanding of the concept it is time to examine for existing synergies and possible efficiencies. It is possible to begin from here, say, in the case of trying to develop line extensions based on ongoing competitive analysis too, as inherently there is always an ongoing question of if the resources are actually available to do this in the first place.

Synergies can come from anywhere, from existing infrastructure to human capital to brand good will, so strive to thoroughly understand how to leverage the entirety of the company when considering the move forward. A missed internal efficiency can do more than just add time or money to a project, it may affect worker productivity or consumer good will as just two more examples. For example, by not looping in engineering into this process you might miss that there is an existing platform that is currently under-used and could fulfill the value proposition and when other methods are used instead it makes the developer feel as if their previous work wasn’t appreciated and reduces their buy-in and therefor effort on making the new platform work, thus creating layers of inefficiency in lost opportunity and disenfranchised workers.

RIO

Just because something offers a consumer value and can be monitized doesn’t make it a good return on one’s investment.

Defining the return is as much engrained in some companies cultures as it is anything else. It may not be worth doing if you don’t believe you can be the market leader (and if you’ve ever read the book Good to Great, that definition of return runs through every successful company’s analysis of ROI) or it might mean being able to generate a specific ongoing profit margin regardless of overall piece of market or mind-share, or perhaps the product itself is a component of brand good will and not for pure financial gain so that a high adoption rate and best share-of-mind over everything else thus is the necessary return.

ROI is usually calculated with profits in relation to capital invested creating cost ratios that seek to explain how much it costs to earn this much. This is why it is imperative to understand how you are defining what makes a successful return because the inputs define the outputs, like with all statistics. Different ROI models create different variations of success and since no calculation is ever made in pure isolation and to be all encompassing it is imperative to consider defining success before blindly plugging numbers into an equation, no matter how tempting that might be.

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I haven’t done much on the waiver wire as I considered my draft pretty solid core for my unit – save for fixing some unanticipated problems. My very first move was dropping Brian Rafalski and picking up Ian White (a move I should have never had to make in the first place, but I digress). Most recently, I dropped Duchene as soon as he went down and picked a surprising Dave Backes who should have never been available on the waiver wire at that point and also let go of Ehrhoff due to the +/- and picked up Sheldon Souray in his place.

Some of the trade proposals over the last few months were laughable, to say the least (no, I’m not letting Ovi go for a pile of hockey pucks, I’m hoping he will turn it around!). One of the teams closer to the basement needed some help on D and was willing to take a chance on Carlson turning it on in the second half while having several solid LW to move around (Vanack, Hartnel & Parise). We packaged Cammalleri in the deal that send those two away for NJD’s Zach Parise. To make up for the open roster spot, I took Brent Burns on D off the waiver wire. I don’t know how the deal will pan out but so far there’s no grumbling from anyone, myself included.

Offense

Under-achiving Ovechkin might have shown flashes of brilliance on the ice for the Caps at times but hasn’t stacked up as well as I would like day-to-day as a first round pick (again, hoping he turns it around). Throw in Cammalleri’s struggles in that terrible Montreal system along with a lackluster Johansson and Duchene (now on IR) at Center and you can see where despite a top line of Marleau-Giroux-Kessel that was pieced together from my draft wasn’t enough to dominate and necessitated some moves. The “top line” then becomes Parise-Giroux-Kessel with Marleau-Kopitar-Perry as a second and then I can move around my misc. positions a little more freely with Ovechkin, Lucic and Backes available with .

LW Alex Ovechkin (Wash) – ALL STAR
LW Zach Parise (NJD)
LW Milan Lucic (Bos)
C/LW Patrick Marleau (SJ)
C Anze Kopitar (LA)
C Dave Backes (STl)
C Marcus Johansson (Wash)
C/RW Claude Giroux (Phi) ALL STAR
RW Phil Kessle (Tor) ALL STAR
RW Corey Perry (Ana) ALL STAR

Defense

Built soundly on a top pairing of either White, Byfuglien or Yandle as puck movers, most nights they are anchor enough. Losing Carlson opened a spot for Burns who’s offensive output isn’t as high but San Jose are competitors and his +/- is solid. Souray and Enstrom are serviceable on the back-end, though I’m watching the waiver wire closely to clean up some +/- that needs to be taken care of or grab someone with a little more goal scoring potential. You’ll notice the corps is very west coast overall, which isn’t surprising because some of the best kept secrets particularly on D are out there playing in a league of East coast fans.

D Dustin Byfuglien (Win) ALL STAR
D Keith Yandle (Pho) ALL STAR
D Ian White (DET)
D Brent Burns (SJS)
D Sheldon Souray (Dal)
D Tobias Enstrom (Win)

Goalie

I haven’t moved anyone, yet. Howard is, of course, THE backstop right now, while Price and Hiller are underachieving. I would say Price’s numbers are more due to the collapse of the Habs than anything he’s doing wrong in net and are more than good for a serviceable #2, while Hiller is a combination of poor play in Anaheim and him being off his game. I’m sure there are plenty of people who would hold Hiller as their only backup and I’m counting on him turning it around as the team reacts to their owners ultimatum, if not any increase in a few wins and save percentage points will be considered.

G Jimmy Howard (Det) ALL STAR
G Carey Price (Mon) ALL STAR
G Jonas Hiller (Ana)

Let’s start with this simple statement from me:

1) I know the value of Intellectual Property. I am a musician. I am a writer. I am a photographer. I occasionally demonstrate some other creativity that can be worth something to someone other than myself.

2) I understand more than just the basics of how IP works. I have a certification in IP Law from an accredited CLE University. I studied it as well both as an undergrad in the Music Business program and again as a Marketer in grad school as a centerpiece to my elective material. I also worked in the entertainment and communications industries for 15 years leveraging copyrights and to a lesser degree trademarks as part of my work.

3) I am an American citizen who truly respects the Constitution, which is why I wrote about the Importance of Copyright previously.

That being said, I truly believe that body of law surrounding IP rights and piracy is already very robust and the importation of draconian measures to create another layer of it is not going to contribute to better intellectual property being created or more money to be made from it. Rather, I feel very strongly that the execution of such a body of law would be infringing on the very elements that embolden most creators to create in the first place, by silencing them through imposed censorship.

Let’s break down the failure of SOPA & PIPA one step at a time… just so you see where I am coming from.

Economic Impact

The economy sucks right now, sure. But the MPAA and RIAA would have us believe that the entertainment industry would contribute more to job growth if only piracy wasn’t undercutting their business models. It’s a nice play on the heart-strings of hurting Americans to think that these industries would suddenly change upon the laws passage and hire the near double digits of the unemployed. Sadly, though, that’s simply not true.

Even at their golden eras the two organizations memberships, and essentially all of entertainment based entities taking it further, didn’t amount to nearly the same percentage of the population employed as by the technology sector that would be castrated by the bills, nor did the entertainment industry contribute to the economy as a whole nearly as much. Consider how it would impact Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft if all of a sudden the rules of the internet drastically changed. Their stocks would tank throwing the exchanges in a tizzy collapsing the economy further. Add in AOL and Yahoo! (neither stock probably blows you away) plus Facebook and Twitter (who don’t have publicly traded stock) and it gets really interesting. Their layoffs would put multitudes out on the street. And, their sites and cloud servers being closed off would cripple eCommerce, mCommerce, advertising and the pathway for web communications and news distribution. Granted these are also tech giants and probably wouldn’t feel the immediate wrath of being flipped off, in part because of the legal ramifications of the bills that subdgicate due process. Take them out though and a number of internet powerhouses could still cripple the information superhighway including possible shutdowns of WordPress, Tumblr and other user content services and Stumble Upon, Reddit and related book marking sites.

Considering the ramifications, imagine Amazon without user reviews, or iTunes, or the Android Market or any other site that depends on them to help sell products through social recommendation, that would drastically change commerce, and probably not for the better. Under SOPA any reference to pirated material could easily turn a site to being in violation and the entire site could be shut down, so to avoid the shutdown the sites would be far less useful at thrusting dollars into the economy. It’s been shown in several studies that user generated feedback greatly impacts the off-line buying habits as well, which means removing it takes away total dollars, not just eCommerce dollars.

Let’s then take that whole thing one step further and note that most sites that have commenting also have advertising. These range from social nets like Facebook, Twitter and ironically MySpace (who’s owner Murdoch is a staunch advocate of the bill despite it’s potential impact on his online presence overall) to portals like Yahoo, AOL and MSN, to user-generated spaces like Blogger, YouTube, WordPress, Tumblr, Flickr, etc. These sites depend on advertisements, but their traffic is generated by just the kind of content creation that SOPA / PIPA could kill. Removing this content removes interest in the sites which in turn diminishes the economic return and affects ad networks, creative agencies, advertisers who depend on responses to make sales and so on.

Content Creation

Let’s build from this content removal angle for a second … It was proven long ago that financial gain is only part of the motivation for copyright creation and patent invention. Financial motivation is important, but so too are a number of other aspects of the process. The bills seek to only address big corporate financial gain from leveraging copyright while not acknowledging the overall value of intellectual property to all of the varying creators of it.

By working SOPA / PIPA in the way they are currently structered

To that end, I coincidentally found myself listening to many of those early innovators lately and sketched this list together out of some of the songs that were playing back in my mind. It probably isn’t as definitive as I would make it if I were going to air it on the radio, or a cleanly segued, or remotely thorough, but my home listening, believe it or not, isn’t always super constructed and the occasional train-wreck transition is actually welcome (because it in fact keeps me interested and on my toes)

Billie Holiday “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues”
Count Basie “Whit a Little Help from My Friends”
John Coltrane “Blues for Tomorrow”
Duke Ellington “
Cannonball Adderly “If Life Were All Peaches and Cream”
Miles Davis “Don’t Lose Your Mind”
Louis Armstrong “What a Wonderful World”
Ella Fitzgerald “I’ve Got the World on a String”
Thelonious Monk “Black and Tan Fantasy”

and for good measure, Sammy Davis, Jr. doing a Porgy & Bess medley

For the last few years I’ve struggled with finding the best execution for this. Different company cultures necessitated different approaches to it and competing theories only further to complicate matters. Most development can be done somewhat a-syncronis, and dependencies have varying levels of return or relative importance to those outside of the process.

I get asked this question quite often now that I’m interviewing regularly, which has caused me to put some serious analysis to what my own experience with it is.

Task Categorization: Important versus Urgent

Categorizing tasks is a necessary first step in understanding how to balance potentially conflicting needs. Categories alone don’t answer the question of priority order, but they do lend insight by creating buckets for link-minded tasks that make comparisons easier.

Important tasks are ones that are necessary for moving forward. This could be the first in a series of dependencies or a core component from which optimizations or other features would arise. Important tasks usually are tied directly to the business model. Basically, these are things that, in theory, need to occur sooner, rather than later. They are known up front and would be generally speaking built into the roadmap to be accomplished at specific points.

Urgent tasks are tasks that arise, usually unanticipated, and directly effect the progress of a project or status of the existing business. These could be emergencies, such as a hack or blackout. These could be bugs. These could be changes in legal affairs that directly impact part of the product. Most of the times they are not built into the roadmap but are in some way critical to be addressed.

All other tasks can be filed into categories such as Routine (should happen on a regular basis, such as code refactoring and general debugging), Non-Critical (should happen but aren’t immediately necessary for success), etc. These too are competing for limited resources and need to be considered in allocation but generally fall outside of the typical top-priority scale. Failing to address these in due course can turn them into future problems so they can’t be completely overlooked.

Since Important and Urgent both need to be addressed with more immediacy and are both competing for those top level priorities, simply knowing the category isn’t enough to make a decision as of yet. Lets use a quick example of a house. If one only executes on Urgent matters the team is constantly in fire drill mode. Sure, the house won’t burn down, but it also won’t be built up and expanded upon. Conversely, if one executes on Important matters the team is constantly in production mode, the fires stay lit and burn away at the structure while in the mean time new structures are constantly going up. Neither one alone is productive, which is why it is important to understand the impact of the tasks in other ways.

Task TIR: Short Term Success versus Long Term Gain

This is what I’ve dubbed as the Time Impact Result. When it comes to tasks that potentially add value there are two usually competing scenarios to consider, short-term success and long term gain. This is a matter of productivity in some ways, relating how long it takes to accomplish what type of value-add to the product.

Short-term success is something which can be executed easily will have an immediate impact on the product. These are the low-hanging fruits and quick kills that are easy to leverage as examples of progress because they are routinely visible in their execution. The impact typically won’t be enormous (although it can be), but because they take less effort and offer quick gratification they are very approachable. Short term successes become a focus because the perceived pay-off is now even if the contribution itself probably wont’ be lasting.

Long-term Gain is achieved by tasks requiring more resources to achieve but the end-benefit should have lasting and usually large results. The resource drain in accomplishing these more complex tasks finds the pay-off occurring at points in the future and progress getting to that point may not always be visible but the end-product usually is.

Both types of tasks need to be done in order to be successful. Both have visible gain, but not always in the same way and therefor there can be a tendency to over-emphasize one or the other. Let’s revisit the house example to see why this can produce problems. If one only builds to short-term success this could be represented by having a very good looking room because painting and hanging pictures was quick and easy but not much stability to the overall architecture. Whereas, if one only built to long-term gain there might be a very solid foundation and framework featuring state of the art innards but not much to be said for any of the individual rooms decor because all the effort was on the big projects.

As a note, there are tasks that are essentially zero-gain, they need to be done but aren’t going to yield necessarily qualified results such as routine maintenance work. Sure, if you neglect it it becomes a problem, but so long as it is being done it isn’t adding new value to the product.

Task ROI

Different than TIR, Return on Investment typically looks at the whole cost investment associated with a particular build, rather than just the time component. RIO is usually calculated by a ratio of cost-to-projected earnings. Where developers and programmers like to look at the scope through the lenses of a resource productivity which makes TIR analysis useful, ROI is more typically finance or marketing driven look. The two offer differing pictures of the same type of things.

Low projected ROI using cost calculation doesn’t necessarily mean low overall product value. It is entirely possible that just because something is quick and fairly easy to accomplish the cost of doing so could still outstrip the ROI because it doesn’t generate enough revenue to cover its cost. But, just because there isn’t an immediate revenue in a project doesn’t mean it’s lifetime contribution isn’t important. Lets assume a number of low ROI projects are done in succession and all somewhat related in the feature set. The individual parts provide no visible return, but the sum of them together provides a positive return. Similarly, a low ROI project may become part of a foundation for higher ROI projects that come up in the future, but because those future projects don’t yet exist in the calculation means the assumed current value is artificially low. Then again, some critical tasks just cost more even though they seem to do less.

High projected ROI doesn’t necessarily mean high product value either. A long or complex project could cost a lot up-front but upon release the revenue generated easily nets a positive ROI. However, just because a project has a high ROI doesn’t necessarily make it the right choice. Some individually high ROI projects could have dependencies that are low ROI or the cost may be in stress on the team to produce them or the TIR

Stakeholder Contribution