To add lemon juice to the cut, engineers typically thrive on thinking of and handling every edge case - that’s what makes good code. The opportunity cost is usually too high though, and writing a giant try { } catch statement usually allows you to move on to the next big thing that will acquire users / make more money / look flashy.

However, what if those edge cases cause make your customers want to leave?

Here’s two stories of where I was taken to wit’s end:

Citibank
Today, I wanted to open a savings account to be held under a trust (you should make one if you have kids!), so I walked into a branch since I figured it would be *somewhat* complicated. The agent said I would have to open a checking account first, then apply for the linked savings account online since the high interest savings accounts all required online registration. I asked “Are you sure I can open it online if the account is in a trust?” “You should be able to,” was the answer. Good enough - I opened the checking account at the branch.

I got home tonight, and tried to open the savings account online. No dice, I couldn’t seem to select the trust credentials as the primary account holder. I called customer service: “Sorry, you can’t open a trust account online, you’ll have to open it in the branch.” “But the branch ones have super-high minimums I can’t meet,” I said. “Sorry, nothing we can do from here.”

So, even though I’ve been a Citibank customer for 10 years, I started browsing Vanguard’s site.

Money Management
Not too long ago, I purchased Quicken for the Mac after ditching my PC. [Hmmm - another money example. Perhaps I feel the pain most when it involves money.] I then tried to download my transactions from Citibank only to find that they don’t support Mac. Turns out, Intuit charges banks more for the Mac connector - which most banks don’t buy. I don’t know who to mad at, Intuit or Citibank.

Well, off I went to Mint, an online money management site where I had been collecting transactions for a few months already. Perhaps now was the time to switch. Unfortunately, I found that I could not enter arbitrary categories. I also couldn’t exclude items from Mint. Both of these ‘exceptions’ ended up making the categorization and charts pretty useless. Frustrated, I switched back to Quicken after taking a whole month to sign up for Direct Connect with Citibank. [Kudos to Mint: turns out Mint added these two features later - perhaps after they received lots of feedback.]

What to do?
After you launch a product:

• Watch your customer feedback carefully to find any repeated edge cases
• Have customer care keep a pareto chart of issues
• Fix them quickly. Customers you lose b/c of them will likely never come back.

As a product person, I’d be pretty upset with marketing for choosing this stance. How can I reasonably assure that we can have the fewest dropped calls? How can we measure it? The connection depends on the phone, the environment, the age of the equipment, the weather… The minute you can’t live up to it - is the minute that ad campaign starts to backfire (and people like me and this guy start posting on their blogs).

A few key points I’d like to elaborate on:

1. Other networks will open up their platforms. Both MySpace and LinkedIn have indicated they will open their platforms. MySpace has specifically said that app developers will keep 100% of the ad revenue on their “canvas” page. As long as competition is offering the same nugget to developers (and MySpace is big competition), Facebook will be forced to keep this offer open in order to keep developers interested in extending their platform.
2. The market is moving very quickly. This means that innovation on advertising within the social format will also occur very quickly. Even if Facebook or MySpace offer their own advertising tools to developers, it would be silly to cripple or shut down any ad network or format that has learned how to more efficiently monetize their traffic. In fact, it would make more sense to buy such a company or license their technology since it could then be applied to advertising beyond just the “canvas” pages. If they reduce the percentage of ad revenue that developers take home, they would stifle the ad innovation that is ultimately to their benefit.
3. Facebook, while popular, isn’t the only social network. MySpace is still the king in terms of traffic and will be opening their platform in short order. If a company can figure out how to use information from both to increase effective CPMs across either - than developers will scream for this solution over a locked-down one-network solution.

You have an idea, you gather as much information as possible from as many stakeholders as possible, then you convey the idea to others.

Often, during requirements gathering (building giant “product requirements documents” or “feature lists”), you forget what it is you set out to do. Because of this, you don’t know what you’re explaining to other people - so your team is not sure what to build. Then you launch something that doesn’t really meet any of your stakeholders objectives.

I’ve learned this both the hard way and the good way: set a vision, keep it simple, and be ruthless in cutting out everything that doesn’t meet that vision.

It was six men of Indostan,
To learning much inclined,
Who went to see the Elephant
(Though all of them were blind),
That each by observation
Might satisfy his mind.

The First approach’d the Elephant,
And happening to fall
Against his broad and sturdy side,
At once began to bawl:
“God bless me! but the Elephant
Is very like a wall!”

The Second, feeling of the tusk,
Cried, -”Ho! what have we here
So very round and smooth and sharp?
To me ’tis mighty clear,
This wonder of an Elephant
Is very like a spear!”

The Third approach’d the animal,
And happening to take
The squirming trunk within his hands,
Thus boldly up and spake:
“I see,” -quoth he- “the Elephant
Is very like a snake!”

The Fourth reached out an eager hand,
And felt about the knee:
“What most this wondrous beast is like
Is mighty plain,” -quoth he,-
“‘Tis clear enough the Elephant
Is very like a tree!”

The Fifth, who chanced to touch the ear,
Said- “E’en the blindest man
Can tell what this resembles most;
Deny the fact who can,
This marvel of an Elephant
Is very like a fan!”

The Sixth no sooner had begun
About the beast to grope,
Then, seizing on the swinging tail
That fell within his scope,
“I see,” -quoth he,- “the Elephant
Is very like a rope!”

And so these men of Indostan
Disputed loud and long,
Each in his own opinion
Exceeding stiff and strong,
Though each was partly in the right,
And all were in the wrong!

MORAL,

So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean;
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!

“It’s like travel size toiletries with everything that you love about the Yahoo messenger application in a lighter size.” Ok, so that’s a fun quote - but it is actually designed not to have everything - only what you need while you are away from your prized personal PC.

In fact, one interesting thing I [re]learned is that people only really need about 1/10th of what is normally shipped with any given product. The first thing we did when we started was to decide what it would not have. It would not allow you to set your image, change your stealth settings, pull up your web cam, share photos, transfer files, load plug-ins, change themes, etc. etc. You have an installable client that can do that. It would solve one user case: I cannot or do not want to install the client (perhaps I’m on the road, or at work, or in a cafe). By keeping scope limited, we were able to build it from the ground up in just a few months (thanks, in part, to our crack team - and, in the other part, to Adobe’s cool new tools).

Find out more about Yahoo! Messenger for the Web, and make sure to watch the embarassing video that I narrated. Here’s some of the early press: TechCrunch, Reuters, CNET, and this glowing blogger.

According to this WSJ Article, Toyota and other car manufacturers are successfully reading between the lines. Toyota’s 2008 Highlander has a middle seat that can be removed and stored under the center console (see picture). What do you get with this? Two kid carseats in the captain’s chairs and the ability for people to get in the back without having to do any fancy chair-lifting acrobatics.

Toyota’s press release says “On the outside, Highlander moves away from traditional SUV styling cues with a statement of strength instead of ruggedness; of intelligence over toughness. Calty Design Research in Newport Beach, Calif. sculpted clean, crisp lines, a wide, stable stance and muscular contours to give Highlander an advanced, contemporary, forceful and dynamic personality.” In other words, you get the minivan without the minivan image.

Brilliant. I predict a long waitlist for this car when it comes out later this year.

In The Wisdom of Crowds, James Surowiecki posits that ‘the crowd knows’ better than any individual expert. Especially if three conditions are met: Diversity, Independence, and Decentralization. On TechCrunch, readers work in different capacities for a diverse set of companies - but they’re probably all working in the tech industry. Most bloggers are making a relatively independent decision to write a post and link it to TechCrunch, and there’s no overarching authority over bloggers. Whether or not TechCrunch’s audience meets James’s requirements can be debated, but there’s some chance we can trust this data. Or is there? Let’s see the results:
I wrote a script to get the top 20 stories in terms of trackbacks since the dawn of TechCrunch time until around the Apple iPhone post:

1. Exclusive Screenshots: Google Calendar (365 trackbacks)
2. AOL Proudly Releases Massive Amounts of Private Data (246 trackbacks)
3. Google Has Acquired YouTube (202 trackbacks)
4. Completely Unsubstantiated Google/YouTube Rumor (186 trackbacks)
5. The State of Online Feed Readers (185 trackbacks)
6. The Online Storage Gang (143 trackbacks)
7. Web 2.0: The 24 Minute Documentary (135 trackbacks)
8. PayPerPost.com offers to sell your soul (128 trackbacks)
9. Comparing The Flickrs of Video (97 trackbacks)
10. Google Calendar is Live (95 trackbacks)
11. Digg Does The Acquisition Dance With News Corp. (93 trackbacks)
12. Digg 3.0 To Launch Monday: Exclusive Screenshots and Stats (91 trackbacks)
13. AOL-Netscape Launches Massive “Digg Killer” (90 trackbacks)
14. Yahoo.icio.us? - Yahoo Acquires Del.icio.us (84 trackbacks)
15. Companies I’d like to Profile (but don’t exist) (83 trackbacks)
16. Amazon: Grid Storage Web Service Launches (82 trackbacks)
17. Bill Gates On The Future Of DRM (80 trackbacks)
18. AllPeers Is The FireFox “Killer App” (79 trackbacks)
19. Comparing the Mapping Services (72 trackbacks)
20. Facebook Users Revolt, Facebook Replies (71 trackbacks)

I’ve bolded the ones that I think deserve attention, but I wouldn’t say this creates a perfect list. First of all, I can’t see how Google Calendar would beat out AOL opening its doors or Google buying YouTube - unless maybe, just maybe, people are desperate for a worldwide MS-Exchange-like system and we thought this would be the end-all be-all. More likely, there are many prolific bloggers working at Google who read TechCrunch. Second, the prominence of “The State of Online Feed Readers” and Digg articles leads me to believe that the people ‘voting’ with these trackbacks are not very diverse. Finally, AllPeers?

Nevertheless, we do see some of the bigger tech stories of 2006 represented here: the YouTube acquisition; Digg, Del.icio.us, and ‘web democracy;’ AOL opening its walled garden, and the immaturity of DRM. It would be interesting to run this script on some other blogs and see what happens… perhaps on another rainy day.

Bathroom

Originally uploaded by GotreK.

In the traditional waterfall approach of software development, people document unknowns. Specifications are written at the beginning of the process. The team attempts not only to lay out the features they want to build, but also to posit the most efficient manner of development. By doing so, the team draws on the past mistakes of its members. Next, the team guesses what mistakes they might encounter based on the features requested and attempts to prevent these mistakes. The PRD and TRD are complete.

Why not just rely on your team members to recognize these mistakes if they encounter them?

What do we gain if we skip the unwieldy specifications process and only document the mistakes we see along the way? First, if your team members do not recognize the mistake when they see it appearing, then they didn’t have enough experience to predict it in the first place. You save time by not thinking about what might never happen. Second, design errors are now clearly visible and can be discussed and addressed. Normally these mistakes go undocumented (except the bug report which is the symptom, not the cause). Finally, while your PRD may be useless to other teams in the company, a database of mistakes and solutions is pure gold.

Let’s consider one of the most basic ‘user needs’ as an example: “I need to go to the bathroom.”

When the first bathroom was designed, the Neanderthal architect did not say: “For version 3 of our bathroom, we will have large common rooms with privacy stalls. To prevent theft of the materials that compose these stalls, we should begin making screws now that cannot be unscrewed.”

Instead, it went something like this:
“I need to go to the bathroom, so I’ll dig a hole.”
Mistake: No privacy with hole outside. Build shack.
“Our workers should wash their hands, let’s attach a sink to the outhouse.”
Mistake: It’s freezing outside in the wintertime. Attach shack to shop.
“It smells in the shop now, let’s add a vent.”
Mistake: Flies come in vents. Use fan to make forced air vent.
“The fan sparked an unnoticed fire and burned the block down.”
Mistake: Bathrooms are seldom visited spaces. Install fire detectors and sprinklers.
“Bathrooms are boring. Let’s put up funny pictures.”
and so on…

These mistakes and solutions were recorded and now comprise a county’s “building standards.”

Now, imagine if you had this “database of mistakes” within your company:
Mistake: TCP does not work well for voice applications on our proprietary servers. Use UDP for voice applications.
Mistake: If you install company_widget_g and company_widget_f together, people can break in to the system. Have your application use one or the other, or make this modification to company_widget_f.

By doing a quick search for ‘company_widget_f’ when you are about to install it, you’ll avoid a few weekends at the office. By looking at another project’s PRD or TRD, you wouldn’t have discovered this bit of gold.