The importance of strong product management

There's a lot of folks who whine about Windows 8, "Why did Microsoft have to change the UI? I like the old one!" The thing is, the old one simply isn't working well for a lot of people anymore. Hard drives have gotten so big, and people have installed so many programs on their systems, that the Start menu has achieved a depth that nuclear submarines would envy. Because the population is aging and eye-hand coordination is declining, both seeing all the tiny print on that Start menu and navigating it through several levels of sub-menus has become increasingly hard for a large percentage of the population. And finally, the Start menu paradigm simply doesn't work for tablets. If eye-hand coordination diving through the menu is an issue with a mouse, with a tablet touchscreen it would simply be impossible.

In other words, the notion that the Windows 8 UI change is all about "marketing" is pretty much nonsense. It's been well known that the Cairo user interface introduced with Windows 95 has reached its logical limits for quite some time, and ideas for changing the UI to meet the new challenges of the 21st Century have been floating around inside Microsoft for years, if a look at the Microsoft Research web site is any guide. I'm sure that Marketing told engineering, "we need a UI that will be usable on a tablet! And oh, make it usable on a desktop too!", but at worst Marketing merely hurried what was already in progress, rather than being a direct cause of the changes in Windows 8. The writing was on the wall for the Cairo UI, and sooner or later it would have been consigned to the dustbin of history regardless of Marketing's frantic panic about tablets.

So unlike a lot of people, I'm not surprised at all that Windows 8 has a significant shift in UI functionality. What I *am* surprised at is that it was done so badly. Microsoft has a lot of good people, and Windows 8 has all the raw tools in it to be a great operating system. Yet there's some needless complexities in its operation that shouldn't be there, and some important missing functionality that should be, such as IOS or Android style icon folders (without that, you're in endless sideways-scrolling territory to get all your most-used programs onto the start screen). So what gives?

In my opinion, the biggest issue with Windows 8 is caused by a clear failure of product management. Good product managers are hard to find because the job requires an understanding of customers at an intuitive level such that you can devise workable requirements to meet their needs, yet sufficient technical chops to understand what is doable and guide engineering toward producing the product that is going to meet those requirements. It also requires taste -- the ability to look at a product and say, "yes, that is tasteful and will please our customers" or look at a product and say "that is a pile of garbage, get it out of my sight until you do X, Y, and Z to it." Furthermore, product managers have to be empowered to be able to make those sort of judgements and have them stick. For better or for worse, Steve Jobs provides the template for what a strong product manager looks like -- opinionated, tasteful, with an intuitive understanding of the customer, with enough technical chops to understand what can be done, and power to make it stick.

Thing is, it's hard to find product managers like that because the geeks and nerds who typically run engineering departments wouldn't know good taste if it bit them on their bum, while the sales flunkees who typically run marketing departments wouldn't know technical chops if said chops bit off their ear. You almost need a Steve Jobs to do it. Unfortunately Microsoft doesn't appear to have a Steve Jobs to find good product managers, or if they do have good product managers, haven't empowered said product managers to make critical decisions about the product. Which is a shame. Because Windows 8 has a lot of good ideas, and the underlying technology is good. It just fails because of a lack of good taste (and courage, but see my prior blog on that), not because of a lack of technical chops.

Which just goes to show that putting out a great product isn't a matter of having great technology. It has to be a team effort, and if you don't have that, what you'll get is either a product that doesn't meet the needs of the marketplace, or a product that's far less great than it should be. Something to think about, if you're thinking about forming or joining a new startup. Do you have the kind of team that it will take? Does the company you are thinking of joining have such a team? Important questions, yet pretty much every startup I've encountered is all about the technology, and the rest of what it takes to have a great product is completely ignored. Which is probably why so many startups fail. So it goes.

-ELG

People are NOT fungible

One of the things that happened during the transformation from being "employees" to being "human resources" is that large corporations apparently decided that employees are fungible. That is, if you have two employees, employee A and employee B, and employee A is making a lot more money than employee B, it's fine to just drive off employee A and replace his position with employee B then hire a contractor for even less to fill employee B's position. Hey, an employee is an employee, right? Interchangeable, just like cogs, eh?

Much has been said about Microsoft's T-Mobile Sidekick disaster and what that says about the notion of "cloud computing" (hint: As I said earlier, cloud computing does not eliminate normal IT tasks other than actual hardware maintenance). But it says even more about the whole concept of "human resources". The infrastructure that Microsoft purchased with Danger included Oracle databases, Sun servers, and a set of non-Microsft NAS or SAN systems. None of these are things that Microsoft has experience with. The current hypothesis is that Microsoft contracted a contractor to do an Oracle database upgrade, and the contractor did exactly that, and Oracle -- as it often does -- ate its database during the upgrade. This was compounded by, apparently, the database backups being unreadable by the new version of the database. All of this is remediable if you have sufficient Oracle expertise on staff, but apparently neither Microsoft nor their contractor had such expertise -- they'd all left Danger after the acquisition after being shifted to positions dealing with other technologies that they didn't like or did not have the skills to do successfully.

Lesson for managers: Identify the critical skills that you need in order to continue to have a viable business, and retain those people. It's a lot easier to retain the people you need, than to find new people with those same skills to replace them once they do leave and you discover that suddenly you no longer have a viable enterprise because critical tasks are no longer being done for lack of expertise to do them. Employees are not fungible. You simply cannot replace an Oracle database expert with a contractor hired off the streets or with an expert in Microsoft databases, Oracle databases are black magic and the people who can successfully maintain them are worth every penny you pay them.

Of course, it's easy to throw stones at Microsoft here, but it's not a Microsoft problem. It's an industry-wide problem. Managers industry-wide are failing at the task of properly identifying the skills they need in order to perform the tasks needed to have a viable business, and when the people with critical skills leave are blind-sided. Thus you get disasters like Sprint's Nextel disaster, or this Sidekick disaster, where critical infrastructure people left and the infrastructure fell apart and rendered the enterprise non-viable. Employees are not fungible, and if you fail in your job of identifying the skills needed to keep your business operating and retaining the people with those skills, you may not get the press of the Sidekick disaster, but your business will operate slower, less efficiently, and have difficulty getting product out the door. And especially look at IT and operations people. That's not sexy stuff, but both Sprint/Nextel and Microsoft/Danger show that you simply cannot fire all the operations people you just acquired and replace them with your experienced employees who are experienced with a totally incompatible technology. It doesn't work. It just doesn't. And remedying the disaster that arises after you do this will be far, far more expensive than just retaining those critical infrastructure people in the first place.

-E

Leadership vs. arrogance

At a recent meeting, we were talking about Carly Fiorina, what she did to HP that almost destroyed the company, and the sad state of leadership in corporate America today. "They're arrogant," someone said. "They had it good for so many years, and thought it was all their own doing." I disagreed. "Steve Jobs is arrogant. The problem is leadership, not arrogance."

To put it bluntly: Steve Jobs is an arrogant jerk. He has decided opinions about what his products should look like, and if you're one of his employees and going to go up against him, you better have a darn good reason for why what you're going to do is going to make the product easier to use for the majority of customers or add functionality that the majority of customers (not just a few geeks) need. You better have data, reasons, pretty pictures showing how it makes the product more consistent and easier to use, and so forth. If you can't do that, he'll tell you to go away and do it his way. When Steve came back to Apple he came back to a company in chaos, where multiple fiefdoms were feuding, where all attempts to replace the failing MacOS 9 were shot down as "too risky", where Apple's products were starting to look just like everybody else's beige boxes except running an OS far inferior to Windows NT or even Windows 95 on any technical basis. There was no shortage of talent. What there was, was a shortage of leadership -- someone who would take that talent, listen to what they had to say, process it, then say "This is what we're going to do, bang bang bang" and people walk out with their marching orders knowing exactly what they're going to do, why they're going to do it, and that failing to do it is not an option. It took, in effect, a real jerk being in charge who could rein in all these prima donnas and get them all rowing in the same direction.

Unfortunately, it's as if all of modern-day corporate America thinks being a jerk is how to be a leader. It's not. Rather, having decided opinions about what makes a product line the best in the world, opinions informed by listening to dozens of people then applying your own judgement, is what makes a leader. It's that whole vision thing, once again. That takes a certain degree of arrogance to push that vision onto a company because, let's face it, most of us in engineering are pretty arrogant ourselves. If we've been in the business for a number of years, we've seen companies come and go, we've seen products come and go, we've developed our own opinions about what makes a good product and what makes a bad one. But what a lot of managers and far too many CEO's get confused about is that they think being arrogant is leadership. It's not. It's a common product of leadership, but leadership is something else entirely -- call it vision. And given that many CEO's got their job by sucking up to the Board of Directors rather than having any vision of their own, they're followers by nature, not leaders. They're like the former CEO of DEC whose idea of "leadership" was to survey current owners of DEC VAX minicomputers asking them what they wanted as future products from DEC. Their answer was, of course, bigger and faster DEC VAX minicomputers. You'll notice that DEC is no longer in business -- because following is not leading whether you're following customers, following industry trends, or following conventional wisdom. And you can follow for only so long before you fall so far behind that you end up going down the tubes.

Yet these followers believe that, by being arrogant and expressing uninformed opinions that they refuse to change despite all data to the contrary, that this turns them into leaders. That is the problem with far too many companies today -- they are led by scared followers who are afraid that they're going to be found out as frauds, as not really being leaders, and who thus try to bluster their way into being seen as leaders via arrogance and inflexibility. But for a real manager, whether we're talking about a team lead or a CEO, all that manages to do is create an unmotivated, disillusioned work force that in the end is not going to create the innovations needed to move the company forward.

And that's the end of today's discussion of leadership. I'm going to return to this more in the future, because leadership is one of those things that is hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it. I'll further attempt to quantify it anyhow because, well, I'm just arrogant that way (heh), I always want to understand things and the best way to do that is to quantify it. And hopefully that effort might be useful both to myself, and to future team leads. We'll see, eh?

- Eric