Lessons Learned

For the past 18 months, I've been VP of Social Architecture at a well-funded, fast-growing Silicon Valley startup. As of 2004, I am (by choice) a free agent once again - a thrilled to have some time to relax, travel, play, and mull over what I’ve learned from this exhilarating, fascinating, frustrating, and challenging experience.

If I could reach back in time & give myself hard-earned advice about building successful online products, here's what I'd say. I hope these ideas resonate for you as well. If you’ve had similar experiences, I’d love to hear from you.

Build something small and successful that can scale

This is an old lesson in a new context. It was a cornerstone idea in my book, Community Building on the Web -- and after my recent management experience, I believe this more strongly than ever. The most successful online companies all seem to follow a similar product development path:
1) offer a targeted, highly useful service to early adopters
2) make that service financially successful at a small scale, and then
3) add scale and complexity from there

eBay and Google are great examples of this pattern. eBay started life as an indispensible trading post for small-time collectors, and reached profitability early-on through listing fees. Similarly, Google found initial success with the leading edge of the technology community, and then developed a streamlined, cost-effective advertising service that was a hit with online-savvy businesses. Amazon, Yahoo and AOL are also good examples; although these companies didn’t reach profitability quite so early-on, each started life as a targeted service for early adopters and grew from there.

When in doubt, simplify and focus your product offering early-on, and make it indipensible for a core group of early adopters. Trying to be everything to everyone is a dead-end path - ESPECIALLY early-on in the technology adoption lifecycle.

Turn your early adopters into evangelists

This is another old-lesson-in-a-new-context -- and one that's particularly crucial for socially-oriented online products & services. At my previous company, we got this partly right; our service attracted an early-adopter, wildly enthusiastic audience who are eager to share the experience with their friends. These folks recruited their buddies in droves with our Refer-a-Friend program, and built an impressive collection of fan sites to showcase their passion for the product.

Unfortunately, our product only runs on fast PCs (800 MHz P3 or higher) with certain 3D graphics cards (nVidea GeForce/NForce & some ATI Radeon cards), and since we were explictly targeting non-gamers, many potential customers simply couldn't run the product. Thus, our early-adopter enthusists couldn't easily import their social networks into There, which put a real damper on their evangelizing efforts. In the context of Maslow's Pyramid, offering widespread access to a socially-oriented online service is foundational; all the bells & whistles in the world don't matter if your product breaks the links in an existing social network because of platform requirements.

Micromanagement is lethal

I've worked in many different corporate environments & never before encountered the level of micromanagment I recently experienced. This management style created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia, and sapped the initiative and creativity out of everyday conversations. Even after the source of the problem was removed, the entire organization continued to operate in this way, out of habit and inertia. It was an incredibly painful and eye-opening experience, and something that I'll pay much closer attention to in the future.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson for me is was the shock of seeing myself start to double-check the work of my team, and feel that I had to do everything myself if I wanted it done right. I hardly recognized myself -- I was falling into the same micro-managing patterns that were driving me crazy. This was a sobering lesson in social dynamics; it reminded me of Stanley Milgram's infamous Prisoner's experiment. Behavior doesn't exist in a vacuum; the social environment we're in molds our choices, often in ways we're unaware of.

Know yourself, and seek out environments that bring out your best

The gift of experiencing a crippling management style is that I now have a clearer picture of how this style affects an organization, and deeper self-knowledge about my own talents, tendancies & needs. I'm a self-starting, entrepreurial-type person; I have strong ideas born of years of experience, and I love to see my ideas challenged & honed by the heat of healthy, constructive debate. I'm great at working with smart people who don't care whose ideas are implemented -- only that the product is the best it can be. I'm terrible at taking & executing orders that I don't believe in, especially when my pattern-recognition receptors are firing madly, telling me that the orders are wrong.

Now that I have a clearer picture of who I am and what I have to offer, I feel much better equipped to choose and create environments that will bring out my best qualities, and keep me (and others) happy and productive.

Comments

[bardia]

I have also had similar expereinces regarding the culture of an organization. My experience mathces the findings of the book called "built to last, successful habits of visionary companies" by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras; In my opinion and experience, the most important aspect of a company (specially start-ups) is its mission statement. Everything else, including the management style will follow. If the mission statement is close to the true beliefs and values of the founders and leaders of the organization, it will be a tremendous asset to the company in clarifying and maintaining its direction.

I also have learned that whatever I do has to be aligned with my own mission statement. Something that is dear to my heart and aligned with my own values. That way, I am at least guaranteed to enjoy the ride.

[dave davison]

I learned of your blog from a posting in the onlinefacilitation@yahoogroups.com.

It's rare when one posting like "Lessons Learned" synthesizes so much and says it so well.

I have sent a link to the CEO of a social network startup where I serve as an advisor. I think your advice is very timely and appropriate and I thank you for publishing it.

[David Fox]

Hi Amy Jo,

Great summary! I never worked There, and now I'm glad I didn't. After spending 10 years at Lucasfilm/LucasArts, where the culture and management style (within our division) was very supportive of creativity and excellence through mutual respect (and the best brainstorming sessions I've ever been a part of), I thought all companies operated that way. Boy was I naive!

The next game company I worked at (in the early 90s) had a great mission statement, but the management style was very confrontive, abusive, combative, and demeaning. I began to think I had lost my management and creative abilities because my style was so out of step with my superiors. It really felt like a dysfunctional family, where the father was out of control abusive, and the mother then abused the kids who abused the dog and cat. When I finally left after 1 1/2 years, it took me a while to process the experience and realize it really wasn't me! When the source of the abuse was removed (after I left) I think it was too late for the company to recover. But I now look at the management of a company and spend time talking to the employees before jumping onboard.

[John Wampler]

Hi AJ & David

The thing that resonates with me is your comment about micromanagement. Seems to me that it's a critical flaw in the "internet time" model.

I started out with 15 other people and all of us had a clear vision of what we wanted to do, and, of necessity, all wore a number of hats. As time went by, we raised small amounts of money and slowly grew staff to 30 like minded people.

Then came the IPO. We almost immediately added 50 people for a total of 80. Over the next 18 months staff grew to over 300 and then, almost as quickly, shrank back to 15.

During this period everyone was caught up in the first to market mentality, and we frittered away resources chasing any number of ideas that were really peripheral to the original vison.

The rapid hiring process did bring in needed skills but they were at the expense of the original vision.

The sales force sold with little understanding of the products they were selling and how they fit into our capabilities or the customers' needs. The Product Management team was driven to design new products that were hot in the market rather than those that met our members' needs or were within our capacity to design, deploy and support, and through it all, the original members had to try to maintain the focus on what we'd set out to do, and wound up trying to do damage control in all the functional areas we'd been trying to delegate through new hires.

In hindsight we'd have been better served to stay small, grow more slowly, and maintain focus on our expertise. That's easy to say now but was much more difficult at the time.