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Our way of thinking is not linear, yet we put a lot of effort trying to work, write and plan in a linear fashion. Off course this leads us to dead ends and difficult situations. I’ve seen and experienced this myself.

One of the meanings of “being agile” is that you are prone to see things in a diferente perspective. One that embraces changes, last minute ideas and that you not only embrace a non-linear way of think, but you try hard to enforce it. Even though we realize it, changing our behaviour pattern is not that easy. Here are a few hints of how I have been able to overcome it.

Teamwork: many people really do think better

As the P.O. for Brasigo (www.brasigo.com.br) I have a team working *with* me not *for* me. That might seam obvious, but in fact is a great insight. Think about it for a minute: as a species humans are not the strongest, fastest or have the best senses and yet, we dominate the planet. That is so because our greatest strenght is to be good working in teams. It makes sense to enforce teamwork. When you work in teams you’re naturally allowing non-linear thinking to happen. This leads to the next point.

Allow non-linear thinking, embrace it, enforce it

Linear thinking, in most cases, is anti-natural. Why do companies spend so much energy enforcing linear thinking, throught papers, forms and a whole bunch of processes? Almost always people loose focus on the product and start working to follow pre-determined processes that have been implemented by someone else. If they screw up, whose fault is it? Working in teams means everyone has a stake for the sucess or the failure. I am not saying that there should be no process. I am saying you sholud have as little process as possible. Workng in teams will naturally enforce non-linear thinking. It’s almost like a constant brainstorming state. There is a sutile, but important difference between being in state of mind that allows you to have ideas all the time and being in a state of mind in which you enforce your team to be crazy, lazy or out of focus. Crazy won’t get you far.

Discipline and commitment
Those are important factors to achieve high performance. It is quite common that people in your team mislead this into some sort of unwanted behavior. Often if people are not mature enough they will loose focus in the name of “wild thinker” sindrome. And they are in this state it is sometimes kinda hard to bring them back to reality. So there has to be a pace, aimed at creating a “locomotive effect” imprinted by the PO. As a PO you should be contagious.

Translate thoughts in written language

This is hard. One great discovery of Jaques Lacan was that our subconscious operates over language. So what he did was: he used that together with Freud’s findings to create his own psicanalysis. When you can anouce, say in a phrase, the problem, you will be able to solve it. In business, you have to translete your ideas (your team’s ideas) into written stories. And it has to be done in a way that anyone upon reading them, will be able to understand. If you take a hundred pages to do it you are not doing a good job for the sake that no one will read it, thus people will pretend to understand it and you will never get what you want implemented the way you thought. Here are handful of artifacts to help you:

• Mind maps (try Freemind and Xmind)
• Work Breakdown Structure 
• Drawings 
• Post its (and alikes)
• QFD charts 

Mind Maps are a great visualize what has to be done, but there are some caveats: they are not so easy to spot the SEQUENCE you will do things. Things I like to answer via a Mind Map: What is this all about? For whom is it made? When? Where?  

A Work Break Down Structure, or WBS is a very simple artifact that can be derived from you Mind Maps. It helps you to visualize how things will be done and begin to wonder in which order.

Drawings are always nice. Get a sheet of paper, and start drawing your diagrams, ballgrams on it. Do that alone AND with your team. Writeable walls are nice, but they get erased, paper you can keep and refine your thoughts. Drawings are a good resource for deciding what will be done, generally done after your mindmaps.

Post-Its can be used in many ways: TO DO lists, as Kamban and keeping you personal passwords (NOT!). Let give one example on how I like to use them. Gather your team in a room and start a collective mindmap about every possible way something can be failled. After a while, you will notice that some categs/patterns will emerge. Write down on the wall those categs and start placing Post-its of everything in the current pipeline. Voilá, now your entire team can see where you’re week or strong. Hints for using Post its: use diferent colors and sizes to diferenctiate things. Use red for critical things.

QFD (Quality Function Deployment) is a japanese technique that allow you to understand “WHATs x HOWs”. It is very useful artifact since it allows you, in a simple way, to decide based on a spreadsheet that measures what you want to do versus how you will do it. QFD is an entire world itself, so it will fit best within a post for itself (and I promisse one post only about it soon).

Last, but not least: bear in mind that you should always adapt.
There is no right formula that will work everywhere, or even all the time. As a PO you should know what to use in whcich situation. As a rule of thomb I like to decide what will be used based on ROI. I ask myself if the time invested in some task will pay out. Why spend 4 hours putting together a diagram when I can simply draw it, take a picture an attach to the stories I writting? Maybe the story needs the diagram, so it pays off. 

Maybe you’re working for an Advertising Agency, so things are a little different, you can always adapt. Whenever adapting have in mind one thing: you’re adapting the form, not the principle.

As Darwing would state: Adapt or die!

The perfect notebook should me made of metal… titanium or aluminum. Even though it is metal, it should be light, 2 kg max. And it has to be rounded so it is easier to carry around.

It should have a widescreen of 15′ and 1680 resolution. The design should be slick, only the necessary. An by that I mean: only the necessary. I think the Macs go over too much on this… Macs don’t have an Insert Key, neither do they have a backspace key.

Battery should last at least 3 hours. I mean 4 hours is great, but I can live with 3 hours.

I don’t care too much about it’s speakers, they need to produce good sound… I know that if I want to throw a party I’de use external speakers!

The harddisk should bee at least 7200 rpm and at least 250Gb. Don’t get me wrong here: I need speed! So at least 4Gb of RAM comes handy too.

The keyboard should lit in the dark (MacBooks Pro and Alienware do it!) and the mouse pad should suport gestures. Really guys, it really makes all the difference!

One thing I hate is when a notebook heats up. They always do and my hands get all sweat… I hate that. So please find a way to make notebook heat somewhere else, but not the keyboard!

A nice webcam would be nice. Say 3mp and gook Carl Zeiss lenses (dream on you fool).

I want to record DVDs, blue ray and everything else too.

I have when I buy an expensive notebook and nobody has put an universal card reader on it. Terrible!

Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB, Firewire are commodities.

Uhn, please be relevant: Apple what’s that “dock” on the left side of MBP ?

The perfect notebook should be my pal. This means we will work together and we will have fun together. As I am an workaholic I will want work in bed or maybe whatch movies. So it is useless when the screen(the top part) doesn’t open more that 120 degrees. AL LEAST 180! Ideal: 360!In this aspect, those Tablet PCs are nice!

Thouch screen should be fun, but not a must! he he he

Talking about screens, I must confess that I hate those new reflexive screens. They make me feel kinda dizzy. Rather have the old-style non-reflexive.

Last, but not least, it should cost no more that 2k dollars.

In a naive effort to help spreading the word about Scrum (yeah, I do that for things I believe) I have been teaching it through a simple workshop of about 3 hours. Last month I did it at iG (www.ig.com.br) and for the guys at boo-box (www.boo-box.com).

It is great to see people understanding how good Scrum (and Agile in general) can be to them. The questions asked always are good, and they make me think and learn more.

So, because some of the people have asked me make the Key Note file avaiable, here it is in PDF (so everyone can reade it, not only Macs).

Uh, by the way, it is in portuguese… download it!

There are 3 things that are very important (I like to think of them as mantras) when you’re doing Online Marketing:

Acquisition is the art of getting people to your website

Conversion is the art of convencing those people to commit, to buy your product or sercive

Retention is art of keeping that costumer happy and, therefore, buying more

It is pretty obvious that each one feeds in to the other. No Retention without Conversion and no Conversion without Acquisition. Pretty much like a pyramid or a funnel if you rather. Ideally you would like to do well in each one of these key activities. Let’s explore them in a little more detail:

Acquisition

Acquisition is all about calling people’s attention and making them come to you. There are many, many internet users out there… how do you get them come to your website? There are many ways to to do that, here a list with the most used ones:

• SEO - Search Engine Optimization. This is basically 2 things: generating proper content and organizing the pages on your website in a way that it is easy for search engine’s robots to go throught it. The main idea: when pages of your website are highly ranked on Google’s and Yahoo’s you will get a lot of trafic.
• Paid Search - Basically it is paying Google or Yahoo to appear on a special place on their results pages. To be efficient here you need to know which words to bid, bid the right way (sometimes it is not just how much you pay) and keeping the creatives and Landing Pages relevant.
• Banners - A very well known way of getting visitors to your website. There are many diferent banner formats and generally you hire an OnLine Midia professional to tell you where to place your banners, which formats to use and so on.
• Affiliates - Supose you have a blog or a website that you want to monetize. What do you do? You enroll in one of the Affiliates program out there, place and ad from this Affiliates and start making money (I’ve seen people making cents and people making hundreds of thousants). As you’ve probably guessed, affiliates programs are generally very  “long tail” and work pretty well not being so broad as the above alternatives.
• E-mail marketing - Who likes to receive spam? Although when you user base is well worked it can bring you good results.
• Viral actions - This can be a funny post on you blog, a video on YouTube an e-mail chain with a PPT attached and so on. This works, but is very difficult to plan.
• Member get member - There are many different ways to accomplish this… I believe I could explore it a bit more in detail in another post, since it goes wat beyond the scope of this one.
• The list goes on: Social Networking, On Line video Ads, Printed Ads, PR, Direct Marketing, Catalogs and so on.

Your goal is: bring people in! Be aware, however, that you should focus on qualified type of traffic - that is: people who are within your product’s target. Be aware that sometimes other audience (rather than the intended one) is comming and Converting. My advice: take them! Do not change you strategy just because the people you thought would come are not coming. Instead, make room for the “new people”.

No matter what, pay attention to what people are doing once they’re in. It is mandatory to have web analytics. By knowing where people came from and figuring out what drives them, you will be able to fine-tune the ways you acquire prospects, thus increasing your results.

Start small, think big, grow fast (ooops, I’ve heard this somewhere else…). Test what you are doing to do first, I know this sounds pretty obvious, but don’t go arround spending big bucks on a Google campaign just because everybody talks about it. Do a small test, measure the results, fine tune, and grow - step by step. If you want to do it right, know that it might take some time.

Conversion

If you’ve done the earlier step well, this means you are going to get people landing on your website. They will land in diferent places on your website: your home-page, a product-page and so on.  Where they land is what we call the “Landing Page”. Your Landing Page can be your home-page, a product-page, and depending on what you want: a specially build page.

When your goal is very defined it can be a good thing to have specially built Landing Pages. For example: supose your are selling an Anti-virus and you want to attract people based on “easyness” and “safeness”, then you should create at least 2 diferent Landing Pages (one for each). Each one of these Landing Pages will try to convince whoever comes in using an aproach that will work better for each type of visitor. Go ahead and create a Paid Search campaign and have 2 (at least) Ad Groups: one for each appeal (easyness and safeness).

Although those 2 Landing Pages are for people sensible to different appeals, there are some things you should respect always. Here is a cake recipe:

• Be relevant -> Your Landing Page should have only relevant information.
• Be clean -> This means: have only what matters written. Even though your product might have a lot of different features, people’s brain usually freeze when they are in front of too much information.
• Give the visitor the possibility of “knowing more” -> This means: even though you gave him just about enough info to make a call, give him a “details” or “know more” link and there you could stuff a lot of info
• Have the most relevant information within on scroll of the screen (find out the screen resolution through your web analytics software)
• No outbound links -> It sounds wise not to give your visitors links ta point to outside your Landing Page. Enough said.
• Use call to actions -> A call to action can a phrase like “Click here” ou “Buy now” and as weird as it might seam, statistically it has been demonstrated that it works. People obbey orders.
• Try to avoid the use of the word “NO” -> For some reason this word generates some crazy pattern inside peoples brains.
• Give the user some sort of experience -> In a traditional store people can handle what they intend to buy, but it is not possible to do so online. Zoom-in pics and reviews are a good way to achieve this.
• Have a nice shopping cart -> I’ve cases where I wanted to buy something but I didn’t know which creditcards the store accepted or even how much the product cost was. Horrible.
• Don’t ask your prospect to do something you wouldn’t -> Imagine this: you want this guys to commit to a $10 bucks / month product. And you make him go through hell filling up a ton of forms with personal information (not to mention when the javascript on this forms don’t work well). By all means: make this guys life easy (it pays!).
• Don’t lie about your product.

Conversion if a subject I enjoy talking about. So expect more posts about it!

Retention

Last but not least. It seams everybody talks about how to sell online and little is said about how to keep selling online. If you are selling a service, how can you keep your base of subscribers? Furthermore how can you do up-sell or cross-sell to your current costumer base?

You guessed it right when you thought that it is not only up to you, but the guys who do CRM and the Product People in your enterprise. Yes, because if there’s not a well mantained product (I’ve seen VoIP that doesnt route well, or Wi-Fi service that doens’t work anywhere …) how can you get that guy who bought something from you to keep buying? And I am not even considering that a happy costumer will recomend you to 3 other people and an unhappy costumer will make sure he tells 10 people about how terrible you are.

One of the things I like to do if always go through the buying process and see where it fails. Keep many diferent account and use the products to check how they do. Ask “off line people” to use the product (and whatch them use it) and so on. The bottom line is: test your products.

Keep an eye on your product’s churn rate and be close to the CRM people. If you’re small enough no to have a CRM peolple, than be your own CRM people by creating metrics and understanding things like costumer life cicle. Act upon your costumer life cicle! If you discover that the average costumer drops out about 6 months after he/she commited, that you could do up-selling or cross-selling before 6 months, this way you could keep them longer.

It is less expensive to have stickness than to go out and acquire new costumers!

Today is a very sad day. It is a day of shame for all men of our time.

This very day, years ago, innocent men and women died. And may I ask why? (I still don’t get it)

In respect for all the victims of 9/11 I extend my sorrow. I hope this day shall be remembered forever and the memory of the victims never forgotten.

What does it mean to be a Scrum Product Owner?

The PO role in a Scrum project is important because it is up to the project owner to understand, from a business perspective, what is important. Bellow a few hints for On-Line Project Owners.

Clear understanding the diference between strategy and tatics. Meaning: understand where your company is headed and how your product fits in. You have to understand pretty well what your costumer’s demands are. This accounts knowing in details what your product needs to be as well as how it fits in the big piture.

A petty good understanding of On-Line Marketing. Meaning: Acquisition, Conversion and Retention. You may use a handful of tools to get there and this include (but are not restricted to): Web Analytics (Google, Analytics, Ominiture, Crazy Egg, etc.), POM (Google & Y!) and Auto-bid tools, Landing Page optimization, SEO and so on.

A good technical command. Meaning: it is ok not understand anything about the nuts and bolts of how software and the internet itself works. But it does help to be able to explain and discuss with the team in technical terms. You should try to bridge the gap between the marketing / business world to the techy world, oh boy, it feels good.

Willingness to listen. Meaning: It is not only about you talking. It is also about listening to what the team has to say. Maybe they will come up with pretty good ideas (they often do). I like to think it in terms of an exchange. Together you are more powerful.

They do not belong to you. Meaning: the Scrum Master is not a project manager noar is he at your serve. The team does not belong to you. Neither do you belong to them. When you understand that you don’t take your ideas as “your ideas”, but instead it’s everyone’s. Understand that your ideas might the best as well as they might suck too. This works the same for everyone.

Keep in touch. Meaning: Off course you have a meeting every sprint, but you can (should) be close to everyone trying to make sure peolpe understand your points. Comunication problems accounts for over 90% of trouble mankind has seen. (but don’t be a pain in the neck, please)

Don’t tell people what to do. Meaning: there is a difference between telling someone what to do and telling someone what needs to be done. If you are telling people what to do, you’re missing the whole point of SCRUM.

Read a lot. Meaning: read a lot, study and be prepared.

Even though people are more or less unpredictable, we can map people’s behaviour pretty well nowadays. We know for sure that evey buyer goes through stages before buying something.

The first step is to “identify the need” of something. For example: I have a pretty old cel phone and I start to notice all my work mates own smart-phones… and they actually become more productive. So I begin to consider the possibility of getting one.

I start to search the web looking for information on smartphones and best model for me. I use Google and Yahoo for this. Ok, I now know I will be getting either a iPhone or a BlackBerry. So I beging to read reviews online and what people are saying in the blogsphere.

Then I finally run into a big store like Amazon, E-Bay, Shopping.com etc. and start searching prices and payment conditions. If the store is kind to me I commit. Maybe the store has been nice to me in the past, so I just commit again…

Some points I want to get accros:

• Every buyer has diferent mental stages in his process to buy something. More or less they all follow the same path: recognize the need, search for information, choose the model and, finally, buy it
• Every one has many diferent roles during a day. You can a mother a mother in the morning, a tech guy during the day and a drunk person at night. You get the point, whatever you are being influences your perception of the world and the way you are going to react to a product ad
• Knowing what to offer (and how) is pretty damm hard, but it sure pays off. You can rely on CRM technics, model your Y! and Google Ads, costumize your landing pages …

This is a small graph sowing the buying likeability during each phase.

Off course there are some quite important conclusions that can help you improve your results in your Google and Yahoo campaings, on your landing pages and even how you handle your costumers.

I shall go into details on the next post, stay tunned!

I have seen it over and over: websites promessing something and delivering something else (I am talking about quality of services, not products). And I repeat it over and over: DO NOT CHANGE THE RULES.

Let me give you a quick example of what I mean. Lately, I have been studing SCRUM a lot. The natural way, after reading everything I could on the web was to buy a book. And I did, at least I tried to.

So I went to big bookstore (not Amazon, ok?) and picked a book I thought suited me. I did not want to use my credit card so I printed the bank form (called boleto in Brazil) and payed it cash.

For this particular book they claimed I could receive the product the SAME DAY or 1 working day after payment was confirmed. And, since I did not use my credit card, I expected the product for the next working day.

I felt really weird when, upon calling the bookstore, I found out that my book would take 6 weeks to arrive. I imediatelly canceled my order and will only buy from those liars when I and if I have no option left.

This is my advice: do no change the rules.

When I bought the book there was nothing there telling me that if I didn’t pay using my credit card it would take 6 weeks rather than ONE DAY.

BlogBlogs.Com.Br

It is well known that the 3 great forces behind the buying decision are:

1. Drive for exclusivity
2. Punishment for not having something (lost oportunity)
3. Reward for having something

We live in a time where basically everyone can have anything, they only need to pay for it. And there are many, many ways to pay for something. Credit cards, split paiments or even saving money are ways to get there.

Having things is a easy way to tell the world where you stand, who you are. Off course there are other ways, but they usually require some work and self discipline. Having a Mac generally tells the world that you are creative, having a Rolls Royce says you’re powerfull and conservative as well as having a sports car may mean you are powerfull and are willing to take risks. Having exclusive stuff means you’re unique.

Every other week I receive an e-mail from DELL with a notebook offer. They go like: “limited offer, great notebook for only $X. Only today.” So my mind thinks: “oh, such a good oportunity! If I don’t buy it I’ll loose this chance!”.

What is Dell doing? They are using points 2 and 3. Punishment and reward. Even though *I know* they will send and e-mail like this every other week I just keep reading them.

Now imagine a biz model to use the 3 points above: exclusivity, reward and punishment. That is exaclty what 200nipples.com does. They sell t-shirts (exclusive ones) in a limited edition fashion. Every edition has only 100 copies so number 1 costs $1 and number 100 costs $100.

Punishment: if I don’t hurry I won’t have number 1, or 69 or my lucky number and so on. Reward: I get my exclusive t-shirt, thus I am unique. Punishment: if I don’t hurry I’ll loose it.

Genious hun? So why don’t E-bay or Amazon do it? Because this strategy will only work on products that you can make many different editions (it works for Ferraris - in fact Ferraris are numbered…) and to really make money you should be abble to repeat it many, many times. That is: you need scale or to sell Ferraris! (more on that in the comming posts)

Since I was not able to buy a printer from americanas.com (follow the story here, here, here, here and here) I decided to buy my new printer at Fnac. For those of you who do not know, Fnac is a french company. They have awsome stores and also sell online.

First thing I notice in their website is that search does not work properly. I want a printer, right? So, as soon as website loads, I go right to the search and type: printers. What do I get? A message saying that nothing was found: “We have found 0 products”.

No, no, no! A thousand times no! A prospect willing to buy a printer (notice I was not just browsing around) comes to your website and search and receives a message saying that ZERO results were found ??!!?? Gosh guys, could you just be a little more creative? Even if you don’t have he product don’t give your customers this message.

Anyway, I am bold. So I look around and try to figure it out. Yes, it’s there: there is a little combo in which I can say what part of the website I want to search, so I finally find the printer I want and try to buy it.

Funny, they only tell me what cards do they accept in the end. So I have to go through all the way to know if they are going to accept my card.

Don’t you sense something is wrong here?