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.
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