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What's your pause button?

 

The TiVo is an amazing piece of machinery.  Everyone who has one will tell you that it changed their life.  It certainly changed mine.  "Time-shifting" has entered the vernacular and "tivo" has been verbified (much to the company's dismay).  But incredibly, the product still hasn't truly penetrated the marketplace, now eight years after the company's founding.

Sometimes it seems that everyone you know has a TiVo, but let's put it in perspective.  The company says it has 3.3 million subscribers.  That's decent growth over the past couple of years, but it's absolutely dwarfed by the number of DVD players sold, now well over 90 million in the United States alone.

Sources: CEA DVD Player Sales, SEC: TiVo Annual Reports (10-K)

(OK, so this chart isn't perfect - I'm comparing DVD units with TiVo subscribers, and I'm not showing data for all DVR sales, just TiVo's.  Still, I think it's stunning).

I would certainly argue that my TiVo is at least as valuable to me as my DVD player, maybe even more valuable.  So why don't the other 57 million American households agree?  Why can't the TiVoted convert the unbelievers?

There are plenty of arguments for TiVo's failure to gain market penetration - it was overpriced, the company cut bad distribution deals, the subscription fee was a barrier, their marketing was idiotic, they should have given away the hardware, early units angered users by not allowing them to record one show while watching another, etc.  I'm not going to rehash them here.  Instead, I want to understand what lessons product developers can learn from TiVo's struggles, in particular from the company's sometimes blockheaded inability to explain what the product actually does.

It does what again?

I was a TiVo early adopter.  Like lots of other TiVoted fanatics, I got the religion and wanted to evangelize it to the masses.  I told everyone I knew about TiVo, and how it had totally changed my life.  Unfortunately, those conversations were usually really frustrating for me.  They went something like this:

"You should definitely get a TiVo, it's amazing!"

"What does it do exactly?"

"It's great, you can tell it what shows you like and it'll automatically record them."

"Oh, I already have a VCR."

"But with Tivo, you just tell it what shows you like and it records them!"

"My VCR has that too, it's called VCR Plus and I just enter those numeric codes from TV Guide - it's easy."

"No, it's nothing like a VCR - it does it all digitally."

"So it's a VCR with a hard drive?  Does it ever need to be rebooted?"

"You can skip commercials!"

"I skip the commercials with my VCR too.  And you know what?  I don't really watch that much TV anyway."

"C'mon, it's nothing like a VCR - it's so much better!"

"Is it $500 better?  That's what it costs.  And you have to pay a monthly fee too?"

"Well, the subscription is for the channel guide."

"What?!  I already have a channel guide from my cable provider and I pay them plenty.  Why would I want to pay someone else more money for something I already have?"

"But Tivo will make recommendations for other shows you should watch too!"

"Like I said, I really don't watch that much TV, and I don't have time to watch more, so I don't see why I'd need it.  The last thing I need is more shows to watch."

"With Tivo you'll actually watch less TV, but better quality TV!"

"Well, it all sounds very technical..."

"Arrgghh!  Just believe me, you have to get one."

 

It became clear pretty early on that TiVo had issues.  I've come to call it The TiVo Problem - a breakthrough product that delights everyone who uses it but bewilders anyone who doesn't.  Why did TiVo have such a hard time explaining its product to consumers?  They tried highlighting each of the features I did, but none of them stuck.

To get a clue, let's tune back in to my old conversations:

"And you can pause and rewind live TV too - great when watching sports or for potty breaks or when the baby's crying."

"Now that's definitely cool!  You can really pause TV?  How does that work?!"

Interesting.  People who love TiVo think the pause feature is cool, but nowhere near as awesome as the other features (even though the pause button is well-designed).  In fact, after several months of TiVo-living you barely watch live TV anymore, so the feature isn't as delightful as the Season Passes, the search engine or the recommendations.  But to someone who's never used a TiVo, the feature sounds downright magical.  "Pausing live TV? Who would have imagined!"

Sell the pause button

What's the lesson for product developers?  When you're blazing new trails with a brand new product in an emerging market, customers will inevitably compare your offering to existing solutions, in the context created by those old markets.  This is guaranteed to happen even when those old solutions are far inferior (see also: "horseless carriage").  Unless the product is experienced, it just doesn't sound suitably differentiated.  But most innovative, breakthrough products have a feature (or a few features) that are completely beyond the capabilities of the existing paradigm.  TiVo's pause button was unlike anything that had come before - it was disruptive.  When people heard about it, they became attentive because they'd never imagined it was possible.  Yes, features can be classified as disruptive or evolutionary just as whole products can.

Interesting.  People who love TiVo think the pause feature is cool, but nowhere near as awesome as the other features (even though the pause button is well-designed).  In fact, after several months of TiVo-living you barely watch live TV anymore, so the feature isn't as delightful as the Season Passes, the search engine or the recommendations.  But to someone who's never used a TiVo, the feature sounds downright magical.  "Pausing live TV? Who would have imagined!"

Sell the pause button

What's the lesson for product developers?  When you're blazing new trails with a brand new product in an emerging market, customers will inevitably compare your offering to existing solutions, in the context created by those old markets.  This is guaranteed to happen even when those old solutions are far inferior (see also: "horseless carriage").  Unless the product is experienced, it just doesn't sound suitably differentiated.  But most innovative, breakthrough products have a feature (or a few features) that are completely beyond the capabilities of the existing paradigm.  TiVo's pause button was unlike anything that had come before - it was disruptive.  When people heard about it, they became attentive because they'd never imagined it was possible.  Yes, features can be classified as disruptive or evolutionary just as whole products can.

Why is this a big deal?  Because the developers of these products often resist marketing or promoting those disruptive features at the expense of the evolutionary ones.  "But TiVo has so many great features - it's so much more than a pause button!" you can imagine the marketers shouting (of course, I'm making this all up - I have no idea what went through the minds of the original TiVo team).

To emphasize the disruptive feature and de-emphasize the others feels reductionist to the product managers and engineers who worked so hard to bring the product and its 150 features to market.  Instead, lengthy FAQs, spec lists, competitive feature matrices and endless bullet lists are churned out.  But in these situations, promoting your pause button at the expense of your Season Pass may be exactly what the market needs.  Simplifying your product messaging around a truly disruptive feature shifts the customer's perception.  It reframes your product in a context where you can win, where it's beyond comparison.  It hooks their interest and just might convince them to try your product (where they can eventually find out about the other cool things it does).

What's your pause button?

Daylight savings idiots

I've been following with interest Congress' effort to extend Daylight Savings Time to save energy costs.  At first, I was excited about the longer evening sunlight, but now I'm realizing my morning bike rides will be in the dark so my opinion is mixed.  I admit I'm not sure if the energy savings estimates are accurate, and I'm quite skeptical of the prediction that longer daylight will noticeably lower crime.  But mostly I've been fascinated by the arguments against extending the schedule.  Sure, the fear that children may have to go to school in the dark is valid, but the other main arguments are poppycock:

• Farm animals can't adjust to the time change.  This one boggles the mind.  According to CNN "many farmers complain that their animals have difficulty adjusting to the time change."  Please tell me I am missing some obvious but essential fact here.  Why the hell do the cows care what the clock says?  Can't the farmers adjust their schedules?  Or do they have alarm clocks that are permanently and inflexibly set to go off at 4 a.m.?
• The International Association of Fire Chiefs is opposing the move because they advise the public to replace the batteries in our smoke detectors when we change the clocks.  (I'm surprised the battery industry isn't actually behind this one - my detectors' nine-volt batteries certainly last a lot longer than six months.)  O.K., so changing the battery in your smoke detector is important, but does Daylight Savings Time really exist for that?  And surely we can give these guys some of the energy savings we reap to find a new schedule for smoke detector marketing.  How about the Fourth of July and Christmas?  Lots of families are about to burn down their houses with illegal fireworks and jumbled Christmas tree lights anyway.
• The airline industry says it will lose out on international flights.  Look, the airline industry has so many problems I refuse to believe a word they say.  I think it really comes down to not wanting to fix a bunch of crufty software for resolving international timetables.

Again, maybe I'm missing something obvious.  On the one hand: energy savings, a reduction in crime and an extra hour of Trick-or-Treat.  On the other: farmers resetting their alarm clocks, annoyed Duracell executives and the airline industry.  C'mon.

In the end, Congress does what it does best and comprised, compromised, compromised.  Instead of extending DST by a month on each end, they're extending it by a week in the Fall and three weeks in the Spring.  But it's happening nonetheless.

Ultimately, the only rational argument I could find against DST was made in the Forties by novelist Robertson Davies:

"I object to being told that I am saving daylight when I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the boney, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy, and wise in spite of themselves."

The International Brotherhood of Battery Salesmen, Airline Executives and Clock-Watching Cows has a new spokesman.

 

Lifehack: Managing your magazine subscriptions

I have too many magazine subscriptions.  Last weekend, while taking the recycling out, I realized I was dumping a six-inch stack of unread magazines.  Sometimes there are two or three untouched issues of a weekly magazine like, say, The Nation, sitting in our pile of mail.  (This is actually a good time to complain about The Nation - every month or so we get two issues on the same day - the current week's and the previous week's.  What's up with that?)  Worse, each subscription excitedly brings not only a pile of magazines but a plethora of "renew now!" mailings, sometimes once a week per subscription.

So I decided to do something about the mess.  Here's what I did:

1. Make a list of every magazine subscription. This took about twenty minutes, mostly by walking around the house, peering into piles, and looking in the recycling bin.  Collecting all of the magazines as you go makes step #9 below much easier.
2. Rank the magazines in the order in which you'd like to read them.  Next, I imagined I was about to take a long plane ride and had a stack of fresh copies of every magazine I subscribe to.  In what order would I read them?  Of course, this never happens in reality - all of the new magazines arrive the day after you take off on a trip, but suspend disbelief for a few minutes and bear with me.  It was surprisingly easy to do.  Within a few minutes I had a rank-ordered list of my magazine subscriptions.
3. Note the frequency, Kenneth.  Now, next to each magazine in your list, mark whether it is a monthly, quarterly or weekly publication.
4. Consider keeping anything that is quarterly.  In my case, I realized I really enjoyed each of the few magazines that only come quarterly like Skeptic or MAKE.  Plus, I have three whole months to read them.  So keep them on your list.
5. Draw a three hour line.  Imagine reading through that stack on your three-hour flight.  How many could you get through?  In my case, I figured I'd probably read the first six.  So I'm keeping those.
6. Cancel any weekly subscriptions below the line.  In my case, I had a bunch of weekly magazine subscriptions that didn't make the top six.  Since they come every week, these are the ones that are piling up.  I'm going to cancel all of them.  If I wouldn't pick them to read on a long flight, I'm certainly not going to find the time to read them every week.
7. Cancel any below-the-line magazines that are associated with memberships.  Below my line, I had several magazines that I get only because I automatically get them for being a member of professional associations or non-profits - such as Communications of the ACM and IEEE Spectrum.  I'm going to call those societies and opt out of their publications.
8. Consider canceling most other subscriptions below the line.  This was harder for me, most of the rest of the "below-the-line" magazines were monthly, and I found several reasons for keeping them.  But in the end, I've decided to cancel most of them.  Instead of canceling all, I'll probably let a bunch of them lapse without renewing.  (But I should be careful with the let-it-lapse strategy, since one of those is Wired.)
9. Recycle all of those old magazines.

Now I feel much better, and hopefully our home will be less cluttered.  For those that are interested, my top six read-them-on-the-plane, non-quarterly picks were Bicycling, The New Yorker, VeloNews, Business 2.0 and Newsweek.  In that order.  My quarterly keepers are Skeptic, The Skeptical Inquirer, MAKE and my college and graduate school alumni magazines.

Five star product management

Martin Cagan authors one of my favorite email newsletters on product management, the Silicon Valley Product Group Newsletter.  Subscribe now.

In this week's piece, he quotes General George Patton:

"Never tell people how to do things.  Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

The advice to PMs?  Don't tell people on your team how to build the product, instead tell them what it needs to do.  Then stand back and let them do their jobs.  Martin continues:

What I haven't yet talked about is the other side of this point, where the product manager tells the UI designers and engineers how to design and build the product, rather than telling them what the product needs to do.  This is an especially common problem with UI design (aka product design, interaction design, or information architecture).  This problem is exacerbated by the fact that companies typically have too few design resources, and sometimes the product manager is in fact the only person available to do the interaction design.

[...]

The engineering team doesn’t appreciate the product manager spelling out the details of the implementation any more than the product manager wants the customer to dictate the specifics of the requirements.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how product managers are expendable: "in a world without PMs, everyone simply fills in the gap and goes on with their lives."  It's true, without product managers, everybody else picks up a piece of their job and moves on.  Martin touches on the other side of that: as a PM, sometimes it's tempting to do other people's jobs in addition to your own.  It's easy to fall into that trap, and I've certainly been guilty of it myself, especially shortly after I'd made the transition from engineering to product management.  Since PM typically interfaces with more functions than any other role at the company, they're often ready to jump straight right in to somebody else's pool.  Maybe resources are scarce, the team is shorthanded, or the person assigned just isn't getting it.  But it's dangerous, both for the quality of the product and for the long term stability of the team. 

The experts are there for a reason.  You have interaction designers, engineers, and marketers on the team because they're the best at doing those jobs, far better than you'll ever be.  If they're not capable, replace them (or ask for a replacement).  If they don't understand what needs to be done, maybe it's because you're spending too much time on the how instead of the what.

See the movie DiG!

I finally saw DiG! last night and loved it.  DiG! is a feature-length documentary filmed over seven years.  It follows two terrific indie bands, The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Dandy Warhols, as they develop, tour, and attempt to gain success.  During the course of the film the two bands go from close friends and co-influencers to silly enemies (in the Blur-Oasis mold).

I love the Dandies, and that's what attracted me to the film.  (If you've never experienced them, listen to three songs - "Everyday is a Holiday," "We Used to be Friends" and "I Am Sound").  The movie is great because the personalities are larger than life, especially Anton Newcombe, Jonestown's tortured but brilliantly talented lead singer.  Newcombe is a prolific performer turned junkie who seems to think that success and talent are incompatible.  One concert staged specifically for music executives dissolves into fistfights after Newcombe fires his band on stage.  In another, he's carted away by the police after kicking an audience member.  You couldn't make this stuff up.

Now that I've seen the film I want to check out Jonestown's music.  I felt like I had completely overlooked them, but after seeing the movie it's easy to understand why.  I downloaded a couple of albums from iTunes and am listening to them now.  So far I'm impressed. 

In the movie, the camera tracked a conversation between two members of The Dandy Warhols as they talked about The Brian Jonestown Massacre: "They're stalking us now. I will not have them anywhere near me again."  Pause.  "I'll still buy their albums though."

Tagging, spam and drunken roommates

Steve Rubel says he's found tag spam in Yahoo My Web 2.0, less than two weeks after he took credit for the whole product idea.  Yahoo!'s Chung-Man Tam says it's not spam.  Whoopee.  Hollering about finding spam in a search engine is a bit like jumping up and down after seeing the first ant at a picnic.  Any useful system has parasites.

Ironically, if you look you'll find that Steve's "spam" is hardly nefarious, Viagra-hawking filth.  Evidently someone imported hundreds of saved sites and their tags are overwhelming the global tag cloud.  My Web is new, and the user base is still small, so this doesn't come as a surprise.  Nobody notices a crying baby at the Super Bowl, but her screams can spoil a ballet.  It also reminds me of an inside joke in the search industry that spam stands for "sites positioned above mine."

The hubbub about spam in the universal folksonomy misses Yahoo!'s point.  My Web 2.0 is built around a social network, so the comprehensive tag distributions are useful to the search engine for relevance purposes, but not so useful to individual users.  What matters is your own personal view of the web - your community's tags.  Take an example: the tag cloud at del.icio.us is a snoozer - "blog", "business", "education"?  Compare that to my community's tag cloud in My Web - "wine", "palo alto" and "cycling" are more interesting to me.  I don't have a use for the universal tag cloud any more than I care what the New York Times Best Seller list says when I have Amazon recommendations.

The distinctive aspect of a social network is context for people.  Nobody is anonymous because they're known directly to you, or at least known to somebody you know.  (At Yahoo! I argued that two degrees of separation should be the practical limit in My Web).  In a tight social context, actions have consequences and reputation is traded like currency.  That's why strangers on the street can afford to be ruder in Manhattan than in North Dakota.  When relationships are transparent, there are social ramifications for our actions.  Indeed, Yahoo! realized the importance of reputation and relationships when it built My Web.  As Clay Shirky put it, "[communities] that lack any mechanism for ejecting or controlling hostile users ... have often broken down under the weight of users hostile to the conversation."

My social network in My Web is the mechanism for controlling hostility, just as my real-world relationships serve the same purpose.  If I throw a party, and your obnoxious, drunk roommate barfs on my carpet, you can be sure he won't be invited again (and you might not be either).  If you deliberately spam My Web, I'll disconnect from you.  If you connect to people who spam, I'll ask you to stop it or, if that doesn't work, shut you off entirely.  If the system works, the network will isolate you and your reputation will suffer.

The jury's still out on My Web, and there's a long, difficult road ahead for the product.  But spam is the least of its problems.  In fact, spam will continue to be a bigger problem for non-social web search engines like Google than for My Web so long as Yahoo! gives us the right tools.