Darryl.net

It’s that time of year again – when product managers look out into the future and try to predict what their products will look like 3 years down the road. Usually you can get to within 50% of next year’s reality, and perhaps less than 10% for years 2 and 3. It’s a tough and fuzzy exercise, but is inevitably demanded by any large public company.

I recently gave a lecture at Haas on what roadmap planning is like for a product manager at a large company, and presented my Top 10 Tips & Tricks for Roadmap Planning. Since it is that time of year, I figured I should distribute it more widely and try to help my brothers (and sisters) out.

Best of luck in the process this year – and remember to give us something different than what we have grown accustomed to!

Last week, we launched Yahoo! Photos v3 to the U.S. You can read the official press release, or check out the usual suspects. This is the culmination of over a year’s worth of effort – an entire re-write of the site from the ground up. Because we were able to start from scratch, you will notice many new features and “web 2.0″ concepts not found on other sites of this scale.

One of the most difficult questions that any product manager faces is ‘when do you launch the site?’ The old Photos site was launched in 2002 and was showing its age. While still the most visited photos site on the web*, it lacked some of the newer features of the competition. While we managed to add many new features, we could have added many more. Do you launch when all the feedback coming in from the beta is favorable? Or do you add the common enhancement reqeusts? Do you push to exterminate all the minor bugs, or do you live in eternal beta – always asking forgiveness from your customers for your experimentation?

Perhaps one of the tools that helped us most is user research – where we sit novice users in a lab and walk them through common tasks. Ealier versions of the site had some usability problems. For example, when users realized they could drag photos around, they started dragging them everywhere – even out of the browser. We started to notice common patterns, like dragging to an album on the left hand side navigation. Bit by bit, we fixed these common complaints until we no longer heard of them. Soon, the feedback changed to a more general ‘this is really cool.’ At that point, we made a branch, made it stable, and launched.

As a product manager, you are too close to the product to be able to make this call in a vacuum. Start walking your friends and relatives through the site. Do they get it? Do they like it? If not, keep going. If so, give it a bit more so the influencers digg it, then give it to the world.
* Many people point out that according to some sources, PhotoBucket receives more page views. However, you should understand how this site works: the user hosts their picture at PhotoBucket and posts it to MySpace. In the end, PhotoBucket receives credit for people viewing hosted pictures on MySpace, even if the visitor to MySpace never notices where that picture lives. These are ‘empty page views’ and distort the reach of the site as seen by the press. It works though – so if you’re a startup, do it.

You know what’s good for your business. But you don’t know what’s possible with your product. Sure, you have an engineering background, and you know generally how things work, but let’s be honest – you don’t know the half of what is the plumbing behind your product. This is why you have to tell the team how the business should work, not just what the product should be.

Many product managers usually concentrate on one or the other – the product, or the business. It depends on the PM’s background, their role within the organization, what they are comfortable with, etc. The product is more fun. The business is what feeds the family. One cannot survive without the other. Therefore, you must further both in tandem.

One easy way to do this (if you know the business behind your product) is to tell the team about the business. How do you make money? What are your costs? If people are logged in to your website, is your advertising more targeted? If you drive 30% more page views, will you see 30% more revenue? Or will you see 60% more revenue and 100% more in costs? If people open your application just 1 more day out of the month, do you gain any benefit? What are all the levers that are important to feeding the family?

Tell your team about these levers and dials and they will start to push and turn them in ways you never imagined. Even better – set up a program that rewards them in proportion to the amount of money they gain or save for you.

As a product manager, you are often the gateway between expectation and reality. The powers that be who circle above hear great things and expect the world. Your team knows what is and is not possible, and often, what is best for the user. But the two groups do not talk to each other – except through you.

Since you spend most of your time with the team making sure you ship, they might find it a bit strange if you start emailing them every day with the team’s latest status. So don’t. Now, the powers that be circling above might also find it a bit strange, but… once you realize that you are at the top of their mind and that they know exactly where the product is and what you need to be successful, you’ll be spamming them on a regular basis.

Ok, so maybe not every day, but at least once a week. Use some majordomo program or an Outlook group. Just get them the goods, be honest, SHOUT when good things happen… and savor the well-deserved attention.

It’s time to step up the editorial quality of the postings on my site. So far I’ve been posting about launches – and there have been many in the photospace as of late – but it’s time to dig a little more into the meaning of each launch.

A few days ago, Flock finally put up a public beta of the branch of the Firefox code they have been working on for some time now. I’ve heard some outcry that Flock is doing a bad thing by taking our beloved Firefox in a different direction and – God forbid – making a commercial venture out of it. Why not contribute back to the Firefox tree? Why ‘pirate’ the hard work of thousands of dedicated developers to line the pockets of a few?

This is capitalism at work. The market had a hole in it: people have been using the same ho-hum browsing experience for a decade now, and as websites and services have advanced, the browser has done nothing (besides add the Javascript, clean up the memory leaks, accept plug-ins, etc etc – which is a lot) to integrate the experience with the rich functionality of the desktop. In fact, the goal has been to isolate it from the desktop for security reasons.

In comes Flock and says “hey, we can make a better broswer that blurs the lines between desktop and web, and, by George, we’ll get paid by the search engines if people come our way.” So, the ever-present drive for innovation (and IPOs) has given us what is, in my opinion, a great new browser.

I met w/ Bart, one of the founders of Flock, last week and he took me through the experience of sharing Photos with my friends. The ease with which he could upload photos, blog photos, or view new photos from his friends was astonishing. A perfect blend of the desktop and web. I predict many downloads for Flock this summer. If this happens, the people will have voted.

The same debate ensued when Apple made OS X out of the Berkeley Systems port of UNIX. Most people on both sides of the debate probably own a Mac by now – OS X is, after all, the most widely-sold UNIX-based operating system.

With newer digital cameras shooting high-quality video, many users are looking for services and sites that solve the pain that is video manipulation.

A friend of mine who “transforms home video into memories” just launched her website, Time Capsule Films. She can make your graduation, baby, or wedding video into a valuable keepsake, rather than a long, boring video that gathers dust on your shelf.

Some photo sites, like One True Media and Snapfish, have taken on the problem, correctly assuming that consumers won’t venture too far away from what they are already used to when sharing pics from their digital camera. 

Expect online video sharing to become as commonplace as online photo sharing in the coming years.  If you’re not convinced, check out You Tube.

Today, Yahoo! Photos launched a limited beta of the new site. We’ve completely revamped the backend to support meta-data and search, incorporated some javascript wizardry on the front end to make a slick drag-and-drop interface, and will be opening our API to 3rd party developers. Here’s the AP article, and a couple other interesting takes. If you want to join, look for the “Join Beta” link at the top right of the page (note that it is not available on SBC/Yahoo or Verizon/Yahoo):

One commonly requested feature is the ability to download high-resolution photos — your own, or your guest’s. Many photo sites, like Ofoto and Snapfish, charge you for this since the bandwidth is expensive and they want to keep you locked into the service. This is the beauty of branded advertising – we can offer customers what they want… for free. In order to keep people from taking their photos elsewhere, we’re just planning on offering a better product.

Today, AOL partnered with Walgreens to offer print-to-store functionality for AOL Pictures. This is a big deal for AOL for two reasons: 1) Walgreens has many, many stores nationwide that are within a few miles of most of the country’s population, and 2) customers love this feature – many have probably been flocking to competitors who have added this goodness over this past year. Indeed, the Target-Yahoo connection has been great for consumers.

While print-to-store is a boon for consumers, it’s really only a boon for the consumers who shop at those stores already. If you use one online photo service that works with a retail store you never visit, you might actually end up putting photos on many services depending on which way you are driving home that day. The online photo site that offers more choices will acquire and retain more users… sending more people to each retail partner.

Consumer Reports just released their Annual Photo Guide and covered online and retail photofinishing as part of their review. They named Yahoo! Photos as the “best online choice overall,” along with Kodak EasyShare Gallery and the Target Photo Center (which, incidentally, is just a co-branded version of Yahoo! Photos). With the new Yahoo! Photos service launching sometime this summer, we look to further our lead.

Is Google finally launching an online complement to Picasa? TechCrunch reports that some inadvertent links on the Picasa site revealed their intentions to launch on online “Web Albums.” No other reports than I can find just yet on what this service will be. Having an integrated desktop-online photo experience could be very interesting, depending on how the integration works. When I was at Ofoto (sorry… Kodak EasyShare Gallery), the EasyShare Software generated a large proportion of the uploads and sharing activity, even though the integration wasn’t as good as it is now.