While I’ve been called a marketing genius on stage by Aaron Forth, VP of Product at Mint.com, I hardly warrant such a title.  It takes a lot more than just a simple name to create a successful product and brand like Mint.

Here’s are a few highlights of what it does take:

Cultural Trends – understand where the consumer culture that your product is using is headed.

Design – think about ways to design each element and use them as touch points to interact with your customer and evoke an emotional response.

Find out what business you’re in – list all the service and the emotional benefits you create for customers.

Know the entire business category – use a competitors products to see what advantages and disadvantages it possesses.

Get your hive on & Knock down the walls – siloed organizations do not lead to innovation (another reason why great firms fail).  You need to foster a collaborative culture within your organization across departments, and make sure that information is flowing between the departments, instead of it being hogged or withheld by a few.  If need be jump across silos, but be aware that it might cost you your job.

Absolute – strive to be the superlative in a field (fastest, smallest, quickest)

Design to your weakness – confront the big hairy monster that is standing in the way of your organization’s success and find ways to design around it.

Good short read for anyone who wants to infuse life into a flailing product, create a new product, and most importantly tell a compelling and gripping story to keep customers engaged.

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In his book, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail, Clayton M. Christensen illustrates how disruptive technologies have emerged primarily via startups, and how large firms despite having good leadership and capable individuals are unable to successfully compete.  He uses several industries as case studies to prove his theory: hard disks, personal computers, and mechanical excavators.

I thought this was a good read for those who are in large companies and trying to compete against start-ups or entrepreneurs who are trying to tackle a well-established product or market.  Here are some takeaways from the book:

Great Firms Fail – failure of great firms in emerging technologies isn’t due to mismanagement, it is because the customer base is very different from its existing one e.g. 3.5 and 2.5 Hard Disk Drives targeted the emerging personal computer market, whereas the existing hard disk market was focused on mainframes.

Value Networks – pursing a new value network requires time and resources to understand the new value network, which established firms cannot do because it takes away from resources of current value network.

Disruptive Technology – new firms enter into markets and understand the value network, position themselves to the usage of this new technology and make it hard for established firms to enter.

Match the size of the Organization to the size of the market – Large companies pursue large opportunities, if the payout isn’t as great, they will not pursue it.  Because emerging markets are small they aren’t as attractive to large firms that are looking for large revenue opportunities.  It is also easier for growing companies to justify investment in new products and technologies than established

First Mover vs. Second: in disruptive technologies first mover has better advantage.  Second mover trades market risk  involved in entering an emerging market because the disruptive techology might not take off, for a competitive risk the risk of entering against established competition.

How Large Companies try to Compete: Large companies could tackle disruptive technologies but not at the cost of taking away resources from existing revenue generating technologies.  Usually they set up independent teams to pursue the new disruptive technology, and keep the management scheme autonomous from the parent company.  Otherwise the thinking of the main company and product permeates and detracts from the innovation of the new technology, which requires a different approach.  Some organizations acquire smaller companies who have proven success in disruptive technologies, but often times the company that is bought doesn’t continue to succeed because of parent company’s influence and mindset.  Large companies should continue to improve upon conventional technologies and be followers in adopting new ones.  The dilemma is in the case of disruptive technologies being a follower is detrimental – but it is hard to allocate resources if the market size is small and returns don’t match organization size.  Being small and independent is more advantageous – market size is small and more capable of understanding needs of the customers.

“Projects make sense to people if they address the needs of important customers, if they positively impact the organization’s needs for profit and growth, and if participating in the project enhances the career opportunities of talented employees.”

“…start-ups which propose to commercialize a breakthrough technology that is essentially sustaining in character have a far lower likelihood of success than start-ups whose vision is to use proven technology to disrupt an established industry with something that is simpler, more reliable, and more convenient.  The established firms in an industry have every incentive to catch up with a supposed sustaining technological breaththrough while they have strong disincentives to pursue disruptive initiatives.”

Capabilities and Disabilities: each organization has processes and values that enable it to succeed.  However, these same processes or capabilities often stand in the way of its success against new markets resulting in disabilities.  It is hard to change these processes once they are established because they will start to hinder the organization’s progress in existing markets ultimately impacting is existing revenue base.  Hence it is often times easier for a start-up or independent entity to advance, because they can setup new processes and an organizational structure that can tackle the new technology.

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The premise of the book is how the “Curse of Knowledge” can impede a person who has ideas from effectively influencing others. Think back to college, the one class you almost-failed-out-of because you were either bored out of your mind or the professor was sitting so high in his ivory tower that you didn’t learn the essence of the subject. Made to Stick tries to tackle that problem by giving readers the following tips.

“Dont bury the lead”: if you’ve ever read a NYT article or anything sensationalistic you’ll see that the first thing the writer has done is presented the reader with a hook which is often times the headline or the opening sentence. Then they proceed to back it up with details and facts, but presenting this information first causes readers to loose interest or get lost in the myriad of minutiae.

“Follow Succes to test for stickiness”: The first “S” is for simple – the tagline for ideas should be simple and help people understand the direction of the idea. “U” is unexpected – creating curiosity gaps using mystery keeps people hooked, this is highly applicable to presentations and teaching. “C” concrete – people don’t respond well to abstractions, it helps to have a image for them to understand the gist of the idea. “Credible” – credibility is important, i.e. backing up ideas with authority figures and stats, but often time impossible if the person presenting the idea is a newbie to the field. In such cases, he will have to rely on “E’ and the final “S”. “E” emotional – does it touch people, or have a human interest component to it. And the final “S” storytelling – it is more compelling than stats or facts.

Some of the initial case studies used are long, but they help convey how to create a sticky idea. The author also does a good job of reviewing the concepts at the end, which helps them stick!

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I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and the format makes it easy to digest.  However, it took me a while to get through, because I wanted to mentally process each programmer’s hard and soft skills, and lifestyle.  I thought it was an accurate depiction of what I believed the life of a programmer to be, and what it took to be stellar in the field of software.

There are a few common themes amongst these rock stars.  The vast majority of them have trouble with work life balance, the exception being British programmers, such as Adrian Colyer, CTO of SpringSource, who spends weekend with his family.  But for the rest, life is about solving problems and thinking about problems all the time.  The younger programmers, especially, have trouble balancing a family life, and attest to the fact the have to be told spend time with family or have learned to make time.  As far as hard skills go, Burns spent most of his time asking how these programmers keep up with technology trends, which blogs they read, and how to spot the latest language fads.  When it comes to soft skills, a few believe it is important to have a business sense if you want to advance, but there are a few in the minority, who would rather focus their efforts on development and technology.

I also enjoyed the historical perspective of the book.  Burns interviews programmers who pretty much started out with punch-cards, to those who have never had to manage memory.  Having been an electrical engineer, it is very interesting to see how hardware technology improved the overall productivity of programmers, and from the software side it peaked my curiosity of what’s to come in areas such as cloud computing and thinking about the computer as a network rather than an individual self-contained processing unit.

After finishing the book I started thinking of issues that I felt the book did not handle, the most obvious being there were no female programmers interviewed!  While I don’t believe it necessarily detracts from the essence of the book and what it takes to be a rockstar programmer, I think it highlights one of the fundamental problems that exists in the software industry: lack of female role models.  Those who did exist such as Grace Hopper, have yet to be  replaced by a new generation.  And I don’t think it is because software is particularly difficult, there are plenty of women surgeons and lawyers.

Leaving aside the gender bias, I also thought the book was too biased in interviewing programmers who worked for purely software based companies like Microsoft, SpringSource, and Sun.  While I think programmers at these companies are highly capable individuals, IMHO, they do not have the same resource constraints (both programmers and technology), and consumer driven issues such as security and high availability that programmers at places like Amazon.com, Facebook, and Mint.com face.  It has hardly, if any programmers like myself, who work for consumer web services, and are constantly fighting to solve scalability, security, and performance issues.  I would have liked to have learned about how people handle thinking about such issues given the fact that the age of the Internet is causing more software engineers to go into web services.

Overall, I would highly recommend reading Burns’ book, especially for those who are a few years out of college like myself, who are wondering what the next steps are in their career, and interested in learning from those who have paved the way.

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