How do you prioritize projects?

Being a former engineer and now a dedicated product manager, it really is tough for me to ask this question. At my prior gig, several of our products had been existence for more than a decade and still had large R&D investments in them beyond low cost maintainence projects and now you see maturing app on the web that have not changed visibly.

In reality, every product reaches a point in its lifecycle where the benefit of building new features significantly outweighs the cost. If you are one of the market leaders in your space, and that space is maturing it is best to take a step back from your day-to-day duties and think about where should we be five years from now. Building one off enhancements may delight a portion of your userbase, and generate some incremental revenue but once you are large enough the incremental revenue no longer matters in the grand scheme of things. Customer satisfaction is definitely priority #1, but there needs to be a good way of prioritizing requests from customers beyond focusing on how much have they spent with me already. The goal should be to keep them happy, but also ensure you are using your staff to keep thousands or millions of other customers happy. Focusing on the head of the tail is definitely profitable but at a certain point you maximize your reach.

With mature products, you should step back and think about changing the lives of people in a way they never thought about with your existing product set, or attacking whole new areas. Focusing on the same area repeatedly increases complaceny within an organization, frustrates the workforce, and ends up being detrimental to your customer base in the long run. Imagine how much easier it will be to motivate your R&D organization if your focus is always being the most innovative product, and for your sales team if your product is so different from anything else on the marketplace.

In the end, the more innovation are thought leadership you provide your customers the better off they are going to be.

"Enterprization of the Consumer"

Over the past couple of years, everyone has been talking about "consumerization of the enterprise." All the folks from Generation G(oogle) are demanding the Google/Amazon like user experience from their enterprise apps. That is definitely true, but I am not sure if a change in user interface is compelling enough for an enterprise to pour millions of dollars into a new software package. I would be the first person to agree that my enteprise apps should support the search capabilities I get with Google Search or one click shopping capabilities of Amazon, but if I was running a company that is running on an existing solution with a few unhappy users would I be willing to make a wholesale change. Being the conservative guy that I am, the answer is no. There needs to be a huge return on investment to make a change in enterprise solutions.

However, I do think enterprise vendors get a rap for being old and stodgy. I think they could innovate faster and wish they would, but if you look at what is happening in the consumer world today a lot of those problems have already been attacked by enterprise vendors extremely successfully. Here are a few examples:

Customizability

For the year and a half, everyone was talking about how the facebook platform, and home pages like Netvibes are going to enable the end users to tailor applications to meet their needs. Widgets are cool and fun, but if you want to see a really robust application platform check out the offerings of PeopleTools or Salesforce APEX. Being able to modify a business app with zero coding is pretty cool.

Data Portability

There is a lot of buzz on the web about concerns with walled gardends and supporting things like OpenID. Enterprise software vendors have had to deal with this challenge for years. The fact is most companies have not standardized on a single (let alone ten) and being able to operate with different vendors and support things as single sign-on is an absolute must. Sure you may need consultants at times to build integrations but a lot of the infrastructure is available.

Partnerships

Nowadays when you hear of a partnership between a Facebook and Bebo it is huge news. Partnerships in the enterprise world is an absolute must. For example, SAP is a partner of Oracle as many of its customers use the Oracle DB as their backend. These partnerships are common place and different incarnations of them are forged regularly.

Backward Compatibility

Enterprise vendors must maintain backward compatibility on APIs, and allow admins to revert to the original version of the app if an upgrade goes awry. In the consumer world that is often ignored by vendors and it is assumed developers and end users will often love the latest and greatest version of an application. That is not necessarily true as you see more and more apps offering users access to the original version and newer version of applications.

Hosted Platforms

There are probably more vendors supporting some type of support for hosted your apps on their cloud, however, enterprise vendors have been getting into this space for a while. Salesforce has been hugely successful, and Oracle/SAP are trying to catch up.

In the end, I think the enterprise software folks have tackled a lot of issues that are affecting the consumer arena but not gotten their share of attention. It is too be expected since not many people touch an enterprise app on a daily or even weekly basis beyond their corporate calendar and e-mail apps. There is a lot of learning that can be done on both sides of the fences.

Easy Access to Sports Scores

I am not sure if ESPN had this for a while but they finally released some widgets that will be very useful during the run to the Final Four. The widgets actually look pretty good in iGoogle. I may actually start using iGoogle now as I keep trying to optimize the number of key strokes and mouse clicks I use to access useful information. Plus there is now an iPhone version of iGoogle which looks pretty good.

Qik is Probably Waiting for the 3G Version of the iPhone

On Twitter, I have seen a lot of links point to individual streaming video of themselves on Qik.com. I followed a few links and I think it is an interesting concept. If you are somewhere interesting rather than twittering about it and risking RSI you can just chill with your camera phone.

With all the reports about the iPhone dominating the mobile web usage market I bet Qik is anxiously waiting for the iPhone to support 3G and a video camera. It is a tremendous market opportunity. I use the camera on my iPhone to share things with people, and having video will be icing on the cake. Qik better ensure they can scale up when it does happen, since the blogosphere will be pissed if they have any downtime.

Great Deal on MacHeist.com

MacHeist.com has a great bundle of software available for only 49.95. I really like 1password and CSSEdit. I hope to improve my design skills in the near future and hopefully I'll be able to leverage Pixelmator a bit more.

Be warned, CoverSutra only works on Leopard. That was the app I was hoping to play with most but I have not upgraded yet.

If you don't mind it would be great if you could use the following link before you make a purchase. It will help me get two additional apps and I am hoping to use Launch Bar and see how it compares to Quick Silver.

Is Apple Really Going to Release this Tomorrow?

I think the name Air is appropriate. Apple's frequent product releases make my wallet feel like it is holding nothing but air as well lately. If the AIR is as good as "rumorized", I need to figure out how to ditch my macbook pro.

Web Apps Win in My Opinion

A week or two ago the blog world was abuzz about NewsGator making their Blog Reader apps freely available. I thought it was great. I am an avid Google Reader user but I thought having an app running on my desktop would be better as long as it could insure my "reading status" was synced across machines. I installed NetNewsWire since I use a Mac and I was just unimpressed.

There was no compelling reason for me to continue using it and move off of Google Reader. I have become so accustomed to the Google Reader shortcuts, interface, and love the iPhone application. I had programmed myself to expect the same interface from any other Blog Reader I installed. When I couldn't find the "Email This" or "Share This" links at the bottom of a blogpost in NewsGater I just got frustrated. I did not want to learn a whole new set of commands just to have a desktop client. I think people call this "consumer inertia". It is the same reason the enterprise space is so slow since people do not switch apps once they are reasonably happy with a certain version, and the reason mapquest is still the most popular map app in the US despite all of its shortcomings.

Web apps rule when they are done right and more importantly they are not a click away from being obliterated. As long as you listen to your end users, and build the right functionality the "people will come". I have the same experience with my iPhone. I installed the "Apollo IM" and other chat clients via Installer.app, however, I still use meebo or beejive. They just did a better job with their apps, and I do not need to hack my iphone to get them to work.

At work right now, we use all of our own apps and every once in a while people comment if they lost their hard drive today they would not be at a lost. Most of our work is stored on the cloud so we can access it from anywhere and anytime. It is great to be hard disk independent and still work with great applications!