Tips and Ideas for Landing Pages and Sites

iPhone - Or Why Your Days May Be Numbered

So the iPhone is out, and it is beautiful.  My brother, James, referred to his as "Perhaps the best-designed object I have ever held in my hand".  As a former architect, this means something.

Thousands of corporate folks (millions?) will buy one, and only a small few will recognize their own fate in its screen. If you are creating products, sites, or stores that are driven by anything other than a fervor for customer engagement, you are slow-walking towards obscurity.

For years, the cell phone industry has been focused on engineering and defensibility.  Smaller devices and batteries have been a boon.  Crappy interfaces that try to plug proprietary services have been a bust.  Every phone I have had for a decade has been programmed with one or another of the wireless providers private information services as a default on the main screen.  I couldn't remove it, and it was always unusable.

I suppose the thinking was that you had to use it because they took away your choices.  But really I just bade my time until I could change. 

Now I can get a phone designed by people who want to make it fun and easy to do the things I actually desire to do, not what they want me to do.

In the Web world this is so prevalent it is almost sickening. The design of Retail Banking web sites are almost uniformly an expression of either the org chart or power structure of the bank than any customer objective. The question is always, "How do I get eyeballs," not "What does this particular visitor want". 

And so these customers are just waiting for the iPhone.

They are waiting for that company that says "I want it to be easy, fun, engaging, and relevant.  I want you to want me, not suffer me".  And it will happen.

Who will bring the iPhone moment to your customers? Why not you?

Andreeson on Hiring

Way off topic for me, but this article by Marc Andreeson on how to hire (and fire) is worth a read. 

I agree completely and totally with the issue of hiring people with drive.  In my experience, there are two major categories of prospective employees: people who get things done, and people who don't.  This dichotomy is completely divorced from college pedigree, number of advanced degrees, IQ, and many other factors.

The most valuable thing that an employee can give you (in any department) is execution.

I would add one learning to Marc's list - how to evaluate someone's title.  Anyone who has hired into a startup has faced the issue of title-inflation.  Seriously, why does a company with $25MM in net revenue need a "Chief Marketing Officer"?  Why does anyone?

So how do you level people in a world where specialization can create amazing talent and effectiveness in relatively young people?

For me, your title is how far ahead you can predict the future.

You can tell your boss what will get done that day and usually execute - you are a coordinator/specialist/administrator
You can identify the outcome of a week or two of work for a team and execute - you are a manager
You can project quarterly results and execute with relative frequency - Now you are in Director land.
You get the picture.

Yes, ability to manage staff, the size of budget, all of this is important.  At a very large company, critical.  But there are an extraordinary number of Directors and VPs that cannot reliably assess what can get executed in the time horizon that they should control.

There are critically important exceptions - at times you must decide to coach very talented people in order to calibrate them.  But they must have demonstrated their "execution window" at another company, and you take the risk that they are the rare person who is capable of performing in more than one business area.

Make sense?  Let me know.