This I Believe Business Cards

I’ve been playing around with creating some new business cards and wanted to do something a bit different. I still haven’t settled on a design that I really like, but I have found a format that I’m getting really excited about sending off to be printed.

One thing that I’ve held on to for the past five years or so is a list of phrases that represent things that I believe. When I turned 30 I wrote out 30 things that I deeply believed in (inspired by Tom Peters and This I Believe! – Tom’s 60 TIBs).

I continue to add, remove, and remix this list constantly. Most of these items are things that I’ve read or heard in one place or another. Very few of these items are original, but they are all things that I value deeply.

So – what better way to customize a business card than by printing each business card with a different TIB on the back? I narrowed my list down to 100 and as soon as I come up with a general design that I like, then I’ll have them printed up.

Although they don’t exist yet, I thought I’d share the design since I’ve mentioned them to a few people here and there over the past week…

… and there are 86 others that I plan on printing.

An Introduction to The Business Model Canvas

This post refers to an upcoming session that I’ll be facilitating at the RallyOn Conference (on May 10th on the Frontiers track)…

Do you have a Business Model? Chances are that you do.

Can you describe it? Chances are that it’s a struggle to describe – at least succinctly.

Business Model Innovation has been one of the major proving grounds for both existing and growing companies over the past decade. The Wikipedia page on Business Model Innovation indicates that approximately 14 of the 19 entrants to the Fortune 500 between 1997 and 2007 owe their success to business model innovation.

While we frequently talk about different aspects of our Business Models, it’s rare that we ever have a common language that we can use to show the entire system that exists behind our companies and/or products. The Business Model Canvas is a simple way to visualize a business model and explore alternatives while seeing the systemic impacts that tweaks or pivots might have.

Why am I talking about this at RallyOn?

I think we have seen tremendous success with agile over the past decade and I’m confident that given the right environment that teams can succeed with agile principles and practices. My observations over the past few years have brought me to the conclusion that although we can prepare the environment for execution of strategy – it’s rare that strategy is taking advantage of the acceleration in delivery.

The Business Model Canvas is a tool that we can use to help see, accelerate, and pivot strategy in a thoughtful, visible, and intentional way.

The Holstee Manifesto

I’m not sure it could have been said any better.

Thank you Holstee.

*Poof* There Go The Comments

Well, I decided to switch over to Disqus for comments to simplify the maintenance of these posts. That also means that all of the old comments are gone. Sorry about that – but it was time for some cleaning.

Forget About Your Competition

I was recently having a discussion around a set of “This I Believe” statements that I’ve thrown together over the years and the statement…

“Focusing on competition is a waste of time.”

… came up as a point of discussion. It’s certainly meant to be a provocative statement – but it also needs to be followed with some deeper reasoning to fully understand what is underneath it. This is absolutely something I deeply believe, so I thought I’d take a shot at explaining myself in this blog post.

To start with, it helps to understand that I think that most enterprise software sucks. It’s a strong statement – but in my experience it’s true. There are many reasons for this – and as a general statement I think it’s hard to refute. Sure, there are scenarios and there are subsets that might not suck – but on a product-basis it’s rare that I would even say that an enterprise software package deserves to be labeled as anything beyond mediocre.

Feature-matching competitors is common practice in the enterprise software market. My observation is that this mentality leads you to building another me-too product and to enter a downward spiral of commoditization. When this happens then the market naturally becomes crowded, pricing pressures mount, and manipulations are used to push product. I don’t necessarily think that this is wrong – I just think that it “is.”

The tactic of focusing on competition is fine if you are in a market that is being commoditized and if you are focusing on playing the political game and supporting the “I won’t get fired for choosing X”-buyer. Honestly, this is the enterprise software game and the reality is that most companies will do this in order to continue to support growth projections. Typically, prices go down and differentiation becomes non-existent. As the spiral continues then competing on price and manipulations is all that’s left. The product and market have simply progressed along the diffusion of innovation curve.

As an alternative, I’d much rather focus on user goals. I can stand behind adding features and functionality to allow users to accomplish tasks that lead to fulfilling their needs. I think this approach is much more likely to get you beyond mediocrity and existing as just another member of the herd.

Simply stated, my preference is to spend my time trying to build great software.

Business Model Generation

Experiences With Empathy Mapping

It’s easy to fool yourself into believing that you understand your customers. It’s very common for teams to say that they have a solid understanding of their customers when they don’t.

Building solutions for your customers doesn’t necessarily mean that you understand them. In fact – I’d say that it’s a rare exception that I talk to a software team that has any idea about who their users really are.

This is how the typical conversation seems to go…

Me: How many of you feel like you have a good understanding of your users?
Team: (85 – 90% of the hands go up)
Me: How many of you have ever visited one of your users?
Team: (uncomfortable silence)

Well – I have to say that I’m not really satisfied to believe that you can understand your users by reading a requirements document or by writing code to implement features that somebody told somebody that told you to implement the functionality. Even if you are an Agile team – just putting a “why” at the end of your user story doesn’t mean that it’s valid.

Because this situation seems to be so common (and because I’m really sick of using software that sucks) I decided to try and find some low-effort / high-value ways to start to address this situation. One of these techniques that I’ve been using lately is a concept called Empathy Mapping. This can be a really powerful exercise and I wanted to take a few minutes to share my experiences so far.

I’ve seen Empathy Mapping pop up in a few different places over the past year and I’ve seen multiple people credited for the creation of the technique can be attributed to Scott Matthews of XPLANE. The technique has been described in The d.school Bootcamp Bootleg, Gamestorming, and Business Model Generation. All of the techniques are mostly the same and they all have the same goal of helping you or your team empathize with your users.

The basic technique is simple:

1. Draw a head in the middle of your paper.
2. Give it a name (this could be a role, a persona, a stakeholder, or a real user)
3. Put your place in your user’s shoes and indicate what you see, what you hear, how you feel, and what you think.

As you fill in the sensory areas, it’s common to find yourself guessing or doubting the validity of your answers. If you do the exercise as a team – it’s common to have disagreements and to have different individuals have vastly different understandings (or leaps of faith) about who your users really are or what they see, hear, feel, and so on. It’s very easy to find significant gaps in your understanding of your users. The exercise of filling in the map brings visibility into the gaps and visibility into the unknowns.

The Empathy Map can be a powerful exercise as a pre-cursor to doing any user-centered work (like creating a business model canvas, creating a story map, or putting together campaigns). The resulting map can also result in a wonderful visual to have around a team room or to review as you learn more about your users.

I encourage you to try out this exercise and see where you end up.

Do You Really Know Your Users?

I’m always amazed by the lack of understanding that most teams have about the users of their application or service. Rarely do I come in contact with people who are building software or managing a team that have a deep understanding of their users.

It’s easy to make assumptions about the people that are using your software. Do yourself and your users a favor – stop guessing and start learning. Life is too short to be writing shitty software and building mediocre experiences.

Get yourself and your team out of the building and go visit a user. After you do that, do it again (and again, and again, and again).

You’ll be surprised at what you see.

Rethinking The Boarding Pass

Beautiful boarding pass redesigns. Be sure to view the comments as well.

Here are a few teasers from the article…

Subtraction (Again)

Wow. The new Magic Mouse is beautiful.

When you look deeper, it’s another example of extreme subtraction…

No cords. No buttons.

By loosing the excess, the mouse gains functionality and capability. All of the sudden, lots of new worlds and possibilities open up. We have the capability for multi-touch and a (mostly) unrestricted canvas for rich interaction because of the items that have been removed from the mouse.

Sound familiar?

This is the same design that opened up a new world of phones by removing the physical keyboard.

Thank you Apple