Breaking Glass by Rishi Dean

Summary: We often talk about undertaking an initiative in order to create “competitive advantage”, but what does that really mean? What are things you can, and should be doing? Here we examine, the five sources of durable competitive advantage. E-mail. Tweet.

There have been some pithy posts (for example here, and here written on creating durable, or sustainable, competitive advantage; however, the best I’ve ever seen was buried deep in the footnotes of a deck by Khosla Ventures.

In this deck it outlines five major sources of durable competitive advantage:

1. “Special Access” to Scarce Supply
2. High Switching Costs
3. Fixed Cost Leverage
4. Real-Time Business Process Advantage
5. Ownable Network Effect

While the footnotes of the deck don’t go into much more detail, I’ll do my best to provide some explanation, and practical examples, on each of these.

Click here to learn more about each of these factors

I’m continually fascinated at how good product design & development can come down to basic psychology. I’ve previously written about how to use Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory for product design by understanding consumer decision biases. However, customers and developers alike can fall in to the same “decision traps”, as my friend and former business partner Professor J. Edward Russo, would put it.

Here we’ll look at some of these common decision traps, and how they can become roadblocks to qualitative customer research, on the road to finding product/market fit.
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When you’re deep in the trenches, these are often heard phrases, which if you don’t take with a little humor, can drive you nuts:

1. “Why don’t you just…” This also crops up under variations such as: “What you need to do is…”. To me, this one implies that you aren’t doing something obvious, and that obvious thing is simple to execute. This phrase is most uttered by current MBAs who just read a case study, or management consultants.
2. “That was my [friend/aunt/cousin's] idea…” Now I don’t mean this as they actually started a business, more that they had a tangentially related idea in the shower, or over beers, and never did anything with it….Kind of like how I “thought of” LinkedIn in 2001.
3. “Since you work for yourself, can’t you take today off?” Uttered by those who don’t understand your internal sense of urgency driven both internally (your desire to change the world), or externally (customers, competitors, or distaste of Ramen noodles).

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When wrestling with finding Product Market fit, via a Minimum Viable Product, (MVP), I constantly find myself referring to an issue I call the Engineer’s Paradox:

Engineers want to build for adoption, that is a carefully designed system that accommodates user adoption with the requisite features and performance they require, or else they will risk losing customers. Yet, to truly understand what users want, and how they will use the system, one needs to release a “suboptimal” product in order to gain customer feedback.

So, if you release junk early, no one will ever want what you build, but if you release a fully operational system too late, it may not conform to what user’s want. So, let’s see how we can find a happy medium…
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I recently came across the blog of a former classmate, Gummi Hafsteinsson. While always insightful, Gummi’s post, entitled “What makes a good product manager for software development?” is particularly noteworthy.

Gummi’s keys to excellent product management
In his post Gummi argues that to be successful, one needs the following core traits:

• Deep technical understanding
• Speed of execution and juggling skills
• Obsessive enthusiasm about the product experience

While I wholeheartedly agree with Gummi (and I would highly encourage you to read his post to fully understand his perspective), here’s another way to think about what it takes to be a great PM…

My take: Be like Jake

Yes, shamelessly capitalizing on Avatar’s popularity, I think the core traits a good software product manager needs are well embodied by Sam Worthington’s character in Avatar: Jake Sully. These are simply:

• Brains
• Guts
• Charisma
• Character

Here’s how good product managers use each of these.
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As the year, and decade, come to a close, it’s time to reflect and to celebrate some of your accomplishments.

There’s no such thing as unequivocal success in a start-up
Too often in start-up life there is the elusive ideal that you will have those “unequivocal successes” to celebrate. The truth is, those never happen. Too often things move in such a way that there is never a natural moment to stop, take a breath, and soak in what you’ve done.

For instance, suppose you’re working on a big deal with a major strategic partner or sales agreement, when is the right time to pop the champagne? After you reach verbal commitment, you’re probably embroiled with lawyers, terms, and conditions, knowing that things could change with any moment. When the signature finally does come, you’re waiting already for a ong time, and have moved onto the next pressing matter of implementation or transition such that actually receiving it seems trivial when contrasted with what lies ahead. So, there really isn’t such a time where you can have that feeling of “unequivocal success” — it may happen in movies and sports, but not in a start-up, so you have to make those moments happen by celebrating the little victories.

Raise a glass to what you have accomplished so far
So many times, you don’t know when the next big thing is going to come, you’ve been working your tail off so the only way to celebrate your success is to take a pause and look back on what you’ve accomplished. It could be getting your product to market, reaching a sales milestone you didn’t expect but somewhere along the way, I’m sure you’ve made more progress than you thought, in a lot of areas.

So this evening, raise a glass and look back on 2009 (and even the previous decade) and celebrate your hard work and accomplishments, whatever they may be…knowing bigger things are yet to come.

Happy New Year to all.

Summary: RIM needs a stronger consumer play, or a new mobile killer app, if it’s going to be relevant this decade.E-mail. Tweet.

Being back in Canada for the holidays, has me a little nostalgic – recalling my days at Waterloo, and since watching the meteoric rise of RIM in the past decade, along with Nortel’s precipitous fall from grace. Watching the new wave of mobile devices (formerly known as “smartphones”) and related consumer behavior patterns emerge, it got me thinking about what lies in store for RIM in this upcoming decade, and I’ve come to the realization that RIM may be on it’s way to become this new decade’s Canadian poster child as a high-tech also-ran.
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This past weekend, I finally watched the latest Star Trek movie (quite entertaining). In reconnecting with the franchise, it reminded me how innovative Gene Roddenberry (and his writers) were in developing some remarkable ideas, like the Transporter.

But despite the “genius” of Roddenberry’s ideas, it’s a stark reminder that ideas aren’t inventions; meaning just because you’ve thought of something doesn’t make it your invention. Last time I checked, Gene doesn’t have a patent on the Transporter, the Replicator, the Warp Drive, or any other Star Trek created idea. Turning ideas into reality is hard, and that’s where the true genius is – let’s not forget the words of Thomas Edison:

“Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Here we’ll explore the requirements for an “invention”, and the stages for successful commercialization.
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As the Global E-Week site puts it: “25,000 Events, Millions of Participants, 1 Week”. Certainly an impressive initiative that we should all continue to do our part to support. Personally, I could only make it to three events in Cambridge MA which were absolutely incredible – here’s my recap of those.
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In working through a number of recent product decisions, it quickly occurred to me that the fields of prospect theory and product management are linked together. In that customers (and internal employees) perceive removing vestigal, unused features as being far worse than never developing it at all. Here’s a breakdown of why that is, using the field of prospect theory as a guide.
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