mattwaltoncouk - Tumblr blog

mattwaltoncouk · 7 years

Text

Roadmaps for product leaders

There’s much written about the process of creating product roadmaps, not least the six great articles written by my own team in this series. But there’s surprisingly little written about your role in the process as a product leader.

I believe the actions of a product leader are all too often the root cause of a “bad” roadmap. Without thoughtful leadership around them, it may not be in product manager’s gift to achieve a “good” roadmap. This is because product leadership is genuinely a hard thing to do and quite distinct from the job of a product manager, something that is often misunderstood.

I would define a good roadmap as one that the team understand and feel ownership over, includes the right problems that are driving the company strategy and is useful to both those in and outside of the team.

This article captures my reflections on your role in ensuring that your team is empowered to create good roadmaps.

1. Ownership

Perhaps the biggest mistake you can make as a product leader is believing that you should ultimately own the roadmap(s). Is can easily happen if your role is changing and you’re becoming less hands on in a rapidly growing startup or simply if you’re new to a leadership role.

And it’s not just a mistake made by those in product leadership role, it can equally apply to founders, CEOs and other members of the leadership team. Their ideas about ownership can add complexity to how you perform your role as not only do you need to avoid falling into the trap yourself but you need to make sure others are not doing so or pushing you into acting in this way.

Here’s why you should avoid getting hands on in the process of creating the roadmaps, beyond the important job of inspiring, coaching and challenging your team.

In order to deliver the right solutions to problems, your team needs to understand them and feel motivated to solve them.

The collaborative process your product managers and their teams go through to define the problem space and prioritise the opportunities is as valuable as the roadmap that emerges from the process.

The team also has more time than you to understand the potential impact of different candidates. They are typically closer to the users in order to properly understand the nuances of potential problems and solutions.

A roadmap that is either handed to them or where they only feel like a contributor and not the owner will inevitably lead to less good solutions. They’ll have a more limited understanding of the problem and might be less motivated because they may not be convinced they are spending their time on the right problems.

Not getting hands on is really hard, particularly where you see roadmaps being created that are very different from what you would do yourself or you are under pressure to make sure something specific is included. But direct intervention should be avoided wherever possible for the reasons above.

So as a product leader, if you’re hands off in the creation of a roadmap, what is your role and how do you make sure that your teams are creating good ones?

2. Purpose, Vision, Mission and strategy

In order for your team to create effective roadmaps that drive the business forward, they need to understand the context it exists within. It’s your job to interpret the company’s strategy into something useful for product people and make sure they understand it.

As a product leader, you may be involved in defining the purpose of your company or responsible for the vision for the product, or it may be something that is already set. Whichever it is, your job is to make sure that some kind of “north star” exists, is supported by the rest of the leadership team and that your team understands it. This is important to ensure that any plans they create are ultimately driving towards the same shared goal. You need to keep telling the story of the product and showing how what people work on every day is driving towards this goal.

At FutureLearn we have a purpose (why we exist), a vision (what we’re aiming to create) and a mission (how we’re going to do it over the next few years).

Under this mission sits our company strategy, which we typically revisit every twelve months. The strategy sets out the things we need to do over the next year to move us closer to achieving our mission. This year, we have six strategic objectives.

An example of one of our strategic objectives is “Grow the number of Advancers (learners whose motivation is to advance their career) who will pay for an aspect of a course or qualification”.

There’s lots of approaches to vision and strategy that you can take but the important thing is to make sure that these things exist and are understood.

3. Team organisation, missions and metrics

As a product leader, the biggest impact you have on product roadmaps is how you organise your teams and define their missions.

From very early on at FutureLearn, we started to organise our product teams around our strategic objectives, with a cross functional team working towards each objective, rather than on a specific set of features or part of the product. We have found this successful as it focuses the team on the impact that they are creating rather than the features they build and maintain.

Each team’s mission mirrors the strategic objective. In addition to this, each team has a metric that is their key measure of success. For the growth example above, we measure the number of course enrolments and have a monthly target to drive towards.

As a product leader, the definition of the mission and agreement with the team about how you will measure success is one of the biggest levers you have to guide what the team will work on. Getting this right is worth time and effort and it will make things more straightforward later on if you want to challenge what the team are deciding to work on.

This approach has been successful enough for us to adopt it beyond the product part of the organisation. Now the majority of the company, including people from marketing, business development and content disciplines come together into cross functional teams alongside product managers, software engineers and designers to work on a shared strategic goal.

This highly collaborative and matrix approach has its own challenges — as a product leader you need to work closely with others in the leadership team to arrive at ways of organising and defining missions that work not only for product people but the rest of the business too. This may require some compromises and certainly requires you to be empathetic, diplomatic and tenacious.

4. Creating alignment and encouraging communication

At FutureLearn, we organise to optimise for speed by giving cross functional teams autonomy. Once the team has a mission and a metric, they are broadly free and empowered to achieve this in whatever way they see fit.

This means that another key leadership role I play is ensuring alignment between teams, encouraging communication and looking out for the coherence of the overall product portfolio.

When we first moved to ensure that the product managers owned the roadmaps (rather than me), this autonomy extended to when the roadmaps were reviewed and how they were presented.

This led to a situation where they were extremely useful to the teams themselves but with every team taking a similar but different approach, became quite confusing and less useful to others across the business. It was hard for others to plan and coordinate the impact of changes across teams. This resulted in ultimately, the roadmaps not achieving two of their key purposes: clear communication of what we’re working on and stakeholder buy in.

How did we fix this? By aligning the roadmap review process for all teams with our quarterly business planning process and enforcing a standard approach to to what we meant by “now”, “next” and “later”. We also agreed a consistent way to manage and present them.

This also gives the product management team the opportunity to share their developing plans with each other for me to provide some high level direction as context for planning.

Other important ways we achieve alignment is by encouraging teams to attend each others sprint reviews, running a fortnightly product management team meeting and making sure that key things are presented to the company at our monthly all hands meeting.

5. Coaching your team

One of the other big impacts you can have on roadmaps is through how you coach your team. Wherever possible, it’s best to resist the urge to tell members of your team what should be on their roadmap. It’s unlikely to be productive for the same reasons outlined above.

However, it is your role to keep asking them good questions, push them in the direction of key pieces of insight or research, highlight relevant things other teams are working on, help them think about the bigger picture, give them the benefit of your fresh pair of eyes and challenge any woolly thinking where their plans are unlikely to deliver on the agreed mission or are in conflict with the company purpose/vision.

There’s lots of ways to do this, via 1:1s, sharing documents, encouraging them to connect with others etc. And this should be a constant process not just when they are reviewing their roadmap.

6. Creating a product-friendly culture

Finally, to successfully achieve much of what I have talked about above requires the company to have a “product-friendly” culture. Your other key role in helping ensure good roadmaps is cultivating this. What you will need to do here will depend on the organisation, who the people in senior positions are and how they are used to working.

Typically this involves establishing buy-in of the principles of a roadmap driven approach, encouraging everyone to focus on the results we want to see, rather than the things we think should be built, working with others in the leadership team to agree a clear set of strategic priorities and providing the teams with protection from leftfield requests. To do this, Business Development is an area you may need to get more involved in.

Knowing what questions to ask to understand what’s in your CEO’s and other key stakeholders heads is also a valuable set of skills to focus on developing. In general being honest with them that this is what you’re trying to do is probably the best approach and this gives them the opportunity to talk about their expectations.

Encouraging your team to relate successes and achievements to what was planned on the roadmap will also help to establish, reinforce and maintain trust in the process. Essentially, constant communication and celebrating success is often the key.

Your role, in summary

In practice, every company will be different and will present someone in a leadership role with a very different set of challenges around how you help your team develop roadmaps.

However, wherever you are, remember that your role is to:

Make sure your team owns their roadmaps.

Ensure that there is a clear strategic context to inform their work and that the missions and success measures of the teams are clear.

The process, framework and cadence for roadmapping is consistent, understood by your team and bought into across the organisation.

There are processes in place to encourage communication and collaboration across teams.

Your team is inspired, supported and challenged appropriately.

Cultivating and maintaining a “product-friendly” culture.

If you’re able to do all of that, you should find that your teams naturally create good roadmaps and, equally as important, are passionate about delivering them. Ultimately, it’s what ends up in the hands of the end user that matters.

#product roadmaps #product leadership #Product Management

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 7 years

Text

Albums of the year 2017

My favourite albums of the year summarised into one easy to consume playlist.

Compiling this list has made me realise what a fantastic year for music it has been, with some great albums from old favourites like Laura Marling, Father John Misty and Grizzly Bear and some fabulous new discoveries like Phoebe Bridgers, Julia Byrne and Sylvan Esso. Joint album of the year: the utterly lovely This Is The Kit and Jesca Hoop who has finally lived up to her promise. Full sleeve notes below.

I’ve now been compiling my albums of the year on Spotify for a decade. You can find previous playlists here: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016. Enjoy.

Dangerous - The xx

taken from I See You

The xx’s third album sees them escape the pure minimalism of their first two albums and go exploring. Judicious use of samples by Jamie xx meets the understated dueling vocals of Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim. An RnB version of The Pixies meets DJ Shadow.

 Lights Out - Royal Blood

taken from How Did We Get So Dark?

Brighton’s heavy rock two-piece Royal Blood, expertly treading a similar path to Queens of the Stone Age and Jack White for their second outing. Visceral and even more commanding than their debut.

Mourning Sound - Grizzly Bear

taken from Painted Ruins

The wonderful Grizzly Bear continue to create lovely, layered and intricate prog-folk. Follow the idiosyncratic melodies through the fuzzy landscape of sound.

Soothing - Laura Marling

taken from Semper Femina

Laura Marling’s study of femininity is one of her most accessible albums so far. Frank, deadpan observations on the nature of female relationships combined with her trademark bold compositions.

Follow My Voice - Julie Byrne

taken from Not Even Happiness

Ethereal American folk from a modern day Joni Mitchell. Lovely finger picking and a dreamy voice. Apparently she’s a ranger in Central Park as well as a gifted singer songwriter.

Die Young - Sylvan Esso

taken from What Now

A long way from the previous work of duo Amelia Meath (choral folk trio Mountain Man) and Nick Sanborn (rootsy rockers Megafaun), Sylvan Esso make marvellously bouncy electro folk pop in the same vein as Tune-Yards. Die Young might be one of my tracks of the year.

Kerala - Bonobo

taken from Migration

Something of a comeback for Bonobo and building on his folktronica roots with an album oozing mature confidence, sometimes banging, sometimes delicate dance music.

 Bullet Proof - This Is The Kit

taken from Moonshine Freeze

The second full LP from Kate Stable’s London collective, the utterly charming This Is The Kit. Homespun, bric-a-brac melodies and touchingly down to earth and quirky lyricism. My joint album of the year.

 Ballad of the Dying Man - Father John Misty

taken from Pure Comedy

Josh Tilman’s third LP is a lush epic of gentle sardonic fury reflecting on the complexity of the modern world and humanity in general backed by ever ambitious arrangements. “Eventually the dying man takes his final breath but first checks his newsfeed to see what he’s about to miss.” Still brilliant.

Third of May / Ōdiagahra - Fleet Foxes

taken from Third of May / Ōdiagahra

Seattle's folk combo retain their lovely choral harmonies whilst finding new expansive musical territory. The big landscapes of their current sleeve artwork serves as an appropriate metaphor for their latest direction.

The Lost Sky - Jesca Hoop

taken from Memories Are Now

Mostly just Jesca and her guitar, allowing some fabulous songwriting and every edge of her captivating voice to shine. Her fifth album and to my mind, easily her best and my second joint album of the year.

Smoke Signals - Phoebe Bridgers

taken from Stranger in the Alps

Californian Phoebe Bridgers natural fills the space that Bon Iver vacated when he moved away from stripped down guitars and ramshackle ghostly noises. A lovely album that sounds like a candlelit cold night.

The Architect - Jane Weaver

taken from Modern Kosmology

Jane Weaver has been around for years but she’s truly arrived with this collection of psych cosmic space pop that transcends Alison Goldfrapp disco melodies. All analogue synths and urgent drums.

Everything Now - Arcade Fire

taken from Everything Now

Arcade Fire embrace the eighties and take their uplifting and rousing sensibilities up a notch. Not necessarily their best, but surely their most anthemic. The title track Everything Now is a corker.

 Deadcrush - alt-J

taken from RELAXER

Alt-J’s third LP and they continue to be one of the most innovative off kilter pop acts around. They’ve grown in their confidence to be intelligently wonky.

 oh baby - LCD Soundsystem

taken from american dream

The return of James Murphy after a gap of a several years with his fourth album of New York disco funk punk. The break clearly did him good: it’s an ace collection.

Nice And Quiet - Bedouine

taken from Bedouine

Strong echoes of Nick Drake, both in acoustic songwriting and the string arrangements from Matthew E White’s Spacebomb stable. The sixties folk sounds of Syrian-born wander Azniv Korkejian sits nicely next to label mate Natalie Prass.

Finale - Hurray For The Riff Raff

taken from The Navigator

Hurray for the Riff Raff are hard to pin down with their folk, rock’n’roll, doo wop and Latin American influences. This concept album takes you on a timeless and constantly interesting ride.

Punk Drunk & Trembling - Wild Beasts

taken from Punk Drunk & Trembling

A bonus track as this isn’t strictly an album track, instead lifted from the mighty Wild Beasts farewell EP. One of my favourite bands announced their split this year and the music world is the poorer for it.

#albums of the year #music

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 8 years

Text

Albums of the year 2016

My pick of 2016’s long players.

Radiohead - A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead haven't produced a bad album over their twenty years but this is up there with the best of them and more up beat and accessible than most. Thom York’s lyrics are more personal and human, less cynical and angsty and the band sound more relaxed and as if they are enjoying themselves than they ever have done.

Playlist track: Burn The Witch

Wild Beasts - Boy King

Muscular, sexy, sleazy and as ‘80s influenced as the airbrushed cover suggests. This is a confident pivot for the Lake District quartet but sounds as individual as their previous four excellent LPs. It’s constrained excess, with tight hammer-on guitar solos, performed in leather with slicked-back hair.

Playlist track: Big Cat

Sunflower Bean - Human Ceremony

A taught pop punk rock debut from this trio who herald from and sound unashamedly New York. Taking an eclectic range of influences from Blondie, Elastica, Lush and The Sundays to The Cure, Smashing Pumpkins and Led Zep, yet making them sound fresh as if discovered for the first time.

Playlist track: Easier Said

Angel Olsen - My Woman

A new LP of folk-country-grunge from Sharon Van Etten’s label-mate feels like it might be something of a breakthrough and make more people sit up and take notice. Cut from a similar cloth to PJ Harvey and Cat Power, My Woman feels like a bigger and more finished record than her previous work.

Playlist track: Shut Up Kiss Me

Wilco - Schmilco

I’m ashamed to say that Wilco have somewhat passed me by over the years but their latest collaboration of melodic Americana is great and is inspiring a hasty relook at their extensive back catalogue.

Playlist track: If I Ever Was A Child

Whitney - Light Upon The Lake

Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s charismatic drummer steps up to frontman. Falsetto vocals, soulful groves and classic song writing are delivered with understated charm. And there's plenty of horns. I love horns.

Playlist track: No Woman

Bat For Lashes - The Bride

It was only a matter of time before Natasha Khan produced a concept album and sure enough, her latest LP tells the story of a bride whose groom dies on the way to the wedding. Not many would be able to pull off such a contrivance with so much style and endearing conviction.

Playlist track: Sunday Love

The Avalanches - Wildflower

After more than a decade, the Australian sample diggers are back with another painstaking kaleidoscopic collage that is as joyous a slice of summery off-the-wall bric-a-brac pop as their brilliant debut.

Playlist track: Frankie Sinatra

Unloved - Guilty Of Love

The latest project from David Holmes, teaming up with LA singer-songwriter Jade Vincent and pianist Keefus Ciancia. Holmes describes it as a modern day Wrecking Crew, the legendary soul session musicians from the '60s and you can see what he means.

Playlist track: Guilty Of Love

Andrew Bird - Are You Serious

I’ve lost count of the number of albums Andrew Bird, Chicago’s virtuoso singer songwriter, has produced. This is his first straightforward, guitar-driven album for a while. Although, being Bird, it’s not straightforward at all, containing layers of strings and intricate looping arrangements marrying simplicity and complexity to produce a very satisfying collection.

Playlist track: Capsized

Quilt - Plaza

They’re from the US but they clearly aspire to be from England, wearing their influence of British Psychedelia from The Beatles to Fairport Convention proudly on their sleeve. A nice, tidy, timeless collection.

Playlist track: Elliott St

Laura Gibson - Empire Builder

Country folk born of the disaster of Gibson’s flat burning down. A voice that is reminiscent of Portishead’s timeless Beth Gibbons takes centre stage, amongst arrangements that rumbling along like a train. The record has the sense of travel, rootlessness and freedom, that echo Gibson’s own journey from the west coast to the east coast.

Playlist track: Damn Sure

Sam Beam & Jessica Hoop - Love Letters From Fire

A collaboration between Iron & Wine’s songwriting force and Jessica Hoop. Some sweet and playful acoustic duets, with harmonies that sound like they were born to sing together.

Playlist track: Every Songbird Says

King Creosote - Astronaut Meets Appleman

Kenny’s latest LP swiftly follows his last album, a homage to his beloved Scotland but with a more cosmic vibe. Kenny’s lovely lilting, occasionally mischievous voice weaves its way through celtic swinging folk rock and the odd sound of tastefully placed bagpipes.

Playlist track: You Just Want

Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Skelton Tree

A heartbreakingly naked album documenting Cave grieving and coming to terms with the tragic death of his son, Arthur. Immediate and improvised and without Cave’s usual perfectionist crafting, it’s pure raw emotion. A hard but rewarding listen.

Playlist track: Skelton Tree

Jack White - Acoustic Recordings (1998 - 2016)

Not really an album of the year as this is a compilation of acoustic tracks spanning nearly two decades but it’s a great collection of White’s unplugged and gentler moments and worthy of mention.

Playlist bonus track: City Lights

#music #albums of the year

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Text

So what exactly does a Head of Product do?

I’ve been involved with FutureLearn for almost exactly three years. Initially, I was one of a small group of people involved in building the company and was tasked with establishing a product vision and creating a plan for how it might be delivered.

Since then, my role has continually evolved through hiring and product managing a small team to launch a Minimum Viable Product, to leading alongside our CTO Joel Chippindale and Creative Director Lucy Blackwell, a team of more than forty brilliant developers, designers and product managers engaged in developing and delivering our product.

On my third anniversary, as FutureLearn enters a new chapter of growth, now seemed like an appropriate moment to reflect on and rearticulate what exactly it is that I aspire to do. Hopefully this will be useful to those that work with me but might also be useful to people in a rapidly evolving product leadership role.

Product trio

Together, Joel, Lucy and I provide leadership to those involved in delivering our product to ensure that we ship the right things to our learners and educators, as efficiently, effectively and creatively as possible.

Between us, we represent the three core disciplines of technology, design and product management, at management level and set the stage for collaboration, creativity and delivery across all of our cross functional teams. It is our job to set the tone, create a fertile environment and keep it healthy.

My own role is primarily about communication and coordination, and providing direction and focus.

Storytelling and inspiring

I tell the story of the our product. To everyone who works at FutureLearn, our partners and the world. Working with the rest of the management team, I’m responsible for establishing a vision for FutureLearn and communicating it in simple and inspiring terms. Along with others, it’s my job to think about the future, help the company gain a taste for it, and understand what we’re building to in the longer term.I make sure that that our successes are celebrated and shared and that people feel a sense of pride in their work.

Providing purpose and direction

My role is to help provide an overarching sense of purpose and direction. I need to ensure that the teams always feel like they are moving forward and going in the right direction.

Through how we organise the teams and set their missions, I help provide a high-level prioritisation and focus. I work to ensure the teams feel a strong sense of ownership over their own mission and goals and also have support from the CEO and other stakeholders about how they go about achieving them.

I help guide the direction by providing suggestions of what the destination might look like and how we might know when we get there. I make sure that that the road is clear, help people understand where on the journey we are and support the team when a change in direction is required. I always makes sure that the teams are the ones doing the driving.

Exploring and reporting

I gather information from the across the business, our partners and the world in general, make sense of it and share it with the teams. It’s my job to help find and highlight the opportunities and problems and explain the reasons why we might do things in simple terms that make sense to all.

By ensuring that everyone understands the problems and opportunities we need to tackle, I empower our teams to devise and deliver effective and creative solutions. It’s also part of my role to inspire everyone to think bigger and bolder than they are necessarily comfortable with and help to remove the sense of fear when taking risks is what’s required.

I may also do some early exploratory and investigatory work into new areas, informing our strategy and helping the business understand how we might make them a reality before passing them on to others better placed to work out how best to execute.

Listening and explaining

I help build empathy across disciplines and teams. I need to listen to everyone’s input, ensure everyone who needs to be involved in product decisions is and also buys into what the teams are doing. I need to speak everyone’s language and communicate why we’re doing things, who’s doing them and when, to remove the potential for misunderstandings or any sense of secrecy.

It’s my job to ensure that through user research and data analysis, the learners are at the heart of all product decisions and promote this way of thinking. It’s my responsibility to champion right over easy and simplicity over complexity in order to protect the coherence and long-term sustainability of our product. This may involve saying ‘no’ but always by explaining why.

Supporting and empowering

I lead, coach and mentor the product management team. Inspiring our product managers, supporting them, helping them prioritise and providing challenges and nudges where required. I provide them with a fresh pair of eyes, give them back up where required and help them see the bigger picture by playing a coordinating and a holistic role across the whole of the product. I provide the breadth, whilst they provide the depth.

My team better understand the problems they face than I do, so it’s my job to help them find solutions and not propose them. I do what I can to make sure they feel empowered and supported, with a sense of independence and autonomy.

Coordinating and collaborating

It’s my job to identify impediments to creativity, collaboration and delivery across the teams and work with others to remove them. Ultimately, it’s my job to make sure that the product teams are able to regularly ship by providing clear direction and focus, clearing a path and helping to removing obstacles in the way.

Along with the rest of the management team, I need to be attentive that a brilliant culture continues to develop and evolve and help foster effective collaboration.

And as FutureLearn continues to grow, I need to be mindful to keep evolving what it is that I do. It’s a challenge I very much relish.

#Product Management #leadership #product development

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Text

Albums of the year 2015

My pick of last year’s long players.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Multi-Love (Jagjaguwar)

An eclectic roller coast ride of reimagined psychic soul pop, in the vein of Alt J but echoing the 60s, 70s and 80s. Giddy and good.

Playlist track: Multi-Love

Laura Marling - Short Movie (Virgin)

Marling’s fabulous Judas moment: she’s gone electric. She’s also moved to LA and you can tell. The fifth album from the prolific folktress, the Director’s Cut is also worth a listen, with some souped up reworkings.

Playlist track: False Hope

SOAK - Before We Forgot How to Dream (Rough Trade)

A beautifully accomplished debut from the 19 year-old Northern Irish singer-songwriter, Bridie Monds-Watson. Laura Marling meets The XX with a touch of The Cranberries.

Playlist track: B a noBody

Father John Misty - I Love You, Honeybear (Bella Union)

My favourite album of the year by far. J. Tillman’s alter ego’s second longplayer is a brilliant, funny and poignant concept album, with lyrics so excruciatingly honest, you wonder where Tillman ends and Misty begins. The man is a master showman both on record and live.

Playlist track: Chateau Lobby #4 (In C for Two Virgins)

Natalie Prass - Natalie Prass (Spacebomb)

Marvellously old fashioned soul, smoldering and passionate, confident yet intimate, romantic but damaged, laden with horns and strings, deftly produced by Matthew E White. Prass’ voice just gets me every time.

Playlist track: Your Fool

Sufjan Stevens - Carrie & Lowell (Asthmatic Kitty)

An emotional collection, written in the wake of the death of Steven’s mother, Carrie. Very much a return to form, harking back to his earlier albums exploring US states.

Playlist track: Should Have Known Better

C. Duncan - Architect (Fat Cat)

A Mercury Prize nominated debut album of pastoral English psychedelic choral folk and dreampop. Lovely stuff.

Playlist track: For

Rozi Plane - Friend (Lost Map)

Rozi plays bass for This Is The Kit (also on this list) but her own solo album is a lovely, charming and nicely wonky collection.

Playlist track: Actually

Ultimate Painting - Green Lanes (Trouble In Mind)

Cut from the same cloth as Teenage Fanclub and Graham Coxon, this is a very nice melodic bedroom indie.

Playlist track: Kodiak

Guy Garvey - Courting The Squall (Polydor)

The first solo outing from Elbow’s frontman, more raw and adventurous than with his band with touches of jazz and afrobeat, he’s clearly having fun exploring on his own terms. And his voice is a gruff yet tender as ever.

Playlist track: Unwind

Julia Holter - Have You In My Wilderness (Domino)

An interesting album from someone who apparently has quite an avant garde past: this collection is very pleasantly accessible. Dream-like experimental pop with a touch of Talk Talk and Kate Bush.

Playlist track: Feel You

This Is The Kit - Bashed Out (Brassland)

I love this band who’ve been around for sometime. Bashed Out proves to be somewhat of a breakthrough album: charming and whimsical, with beautiful harmonies and nagging homemade grooves.

Playlist track: Vitamins

Jessica Pratt - On Your Own Love Again (Universal)

Pratt follows nimbly in the footsteps of Nick Drake with a gentle nod to likes of Joanna Newsom. She’s a talented finger picker and songwriter with a quietly affecting voice.

Playlist track: Night Faces (taken from Jessica Pratt, On Your Own Love Again is unavailable on Spotify)

The Tallest Man On Earth - Dark Bird Is Home (Dead Oceans)

Swedish songwriter Kristian Matsson is not the tallest man on earth, having the physique of a man you might see fired out of a cannon. After three albums of virtuoso minimalist folk, this time he’s got a band and is feeling noisy.

Playlist track: Singers

Ryley Walker - Primrose Green (Dead Oceans)

Retro jazz-folk, haunted by the spirit of Bert Jansch and Jon Renbourn, it’s not innovative but it is rather beautiful.

Playlist track: Primrose Green

BONUS PLAYLIST TRACK: Father John Misty - I Went To The Store One Day

Because I love the album so much and this is such a heartbreakingly good closing track.

#albums of the year #music

1 note · View note

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Quote

Be amusing, never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.

Benjamin Disraeli

#quotes #inspiration

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Quote

We do not learn from experience... we learn from reflecting on experience.

John Dewey

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Text

Amy

I’ve just watched a preview screening of Amy, Asif Kapadia’s moving patchwork documentary, telling the story of the Amy Winehouse’s troubled rise to fame and capturing an intimate portrait of a special talent.

I was particularly touched by the film as it featured a clip of an interview that I did with her at the Big Chill Festival in 2003 for the BBC’s Collective website. It’s an interview I haven’t watched for many years and to see it included as part of a montage of her life was quite haunting.

I thought I’d write down my memories of the interview and session that we did with her twelve years ago.

One afternoon in Collective’s office, I opened one of the many packages of records we received on a daily basis. This one was particularly intriguing: a white label with no information other than the phone number of record plugger it had come from. I put on the vinyl and was immediately blown away by the voice that came out of the speakers.

I rang the plugger to find out more. “Her name’s Amy Winehouse,” I was told. “She’s 19 and doing her first gig this weekend at the Big Chill.” This was good news: Collective was covering The Big Chill. “Do you think she’d be up for doing an interview and maybe an acoustic session?” I asked. “I’ll see what I can do…” came the answer.

Sure enough, a few days later I found myself wandering around the festival with Amy and her guitarist looking for a quiet place to record. We ended up in the carpark field, where we were unlikely to be disturbed and a comfortable distance from the stages.

Simon our cameraman set up as Amy settled herself on the grass and I placed a microphone in front of her.

dailymotion

We started with a short interview. She was candid, frank and a little brassy: all of the things that she would come to be known for, but more open and less guarded. I think it was one of the first interview’s she had done, so she was unjaded in answering my questions. I could tell she was a special character, a personality and, perhaps, a little troubled. Simon later described her to me as a “rough diamond”, not least because he’d had to reframe the shot so as not to be able to see her knickers.

She talked about her love of jazz, inspired by her father (the now infamous Mitch) and how there was very little modern music that she felt she connected with. Apart from Miss Dynamite: “there is no one else.”

youtube

We then recorded two songs: Take The Box and There Is No Greater Love. She sat, cross legged, casually picking at the grass as her guitarist picked out the chords. And then she opened her mouth and out came that voice.

youtube

I feel very lucky to have stood a few feet from her, in a field on a glorious summer’s day as she gave Simon and I an amazing, intimate, raw, effortless yet highly polished performance. It was August. Her debut album Frank wasn’t due out until October but I immediately knew that she would be a star and it was an interview I would look back on.

She was amazing. What Kapadia’s movie does is look past the media image of her and captures her as the funny, rich character and special talent that she was. Forget the tabloid caricature and remember the talent that was Amy.

#amywinehouse #film #amy movie #music

1 note · View note

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Quote

You don’t have ideas. Ideas have you.

Dan Kieran @ The Do Lectures 2015

#inspiration #quotes #dolectures

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Quote

Having a digital strategy will soon seem as ridiculous as having an electricity strategy.”

Kay Boycott, CEO, Asthma UK

#Product Management #inspiration

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Text

A story of innovation through positive disruption

Last week my good friend Julie Dodd asked me to speak at the launch of The New Reality, a brilliant new research study about how digital technology will deliver the next step-change in social impact.

Julie has spent a nearly a decade working with charities and social enterprises and has witnessed first hand the lack of innovation and brave digital leadership that so often hampers the sector. Her report is a product of Julie’s passion: she believes the issue needs highlighting and that there are some commonly agree themes about how we can affect positive change. If you work in the sector, I would encourage you to read it, it contains much sound advice.

For the study, she spoke to more than 50 industry leaders. I was honored to be one of them. I’m head of product for FutureLearn, a social learning network. We work with some of the world’s leading universities to offer short courses, online, for free. We launched 18-months ago and now offer over 150 course on a myriad of subjects including oceanography, museum curation, liver disease, forensic science and business innovation.

During my interview I spoke about how we had begun FutureLearn: a digital start up, set up as commercial company by a large established charity and a world leader in distance learning, The Open University. She asked me to come and tell our story, as an inspiration to others in the sector.

This is the story I told. I believe many of the principles that we put into action are equally applicable to other organisations. I hope that our story provides a source of inspiration and encouragement for others to be bold in their approach and to make the world better through positive forms of disruption.

Prologue: The innovator’s dilemma

Before I tell our story, I’d like to set the scene by telling you about Steve Sasson. In 1975, Steve created the world’s first digital camera. It weighed 3.6kg and the images it took were in black and white and their resolution was only 0.01 megapixels. The image was captured onto a cassette and the process took a total of 23 seconds. Despite its limitations, this invention would eventually lead to the demise of the mass produced film camera.

Steve Sasson and the world’s first digital camera

What makes this tale particularly notable is Steve’s employer. Steve worked for Kodak. But despite the early lead that Steve had given them, Kodak failed to invest and develop digital cameras for the mass market for fear of killing its all important film business. And in 2012, after more than a hundred years of dominating the photography industry, it went bankrupt.

This isn’t an unusual story. A similar tale has been told about the video rental company Blockbuster, the bookshop Borders and the mobile phone manufacturer Nokia.

An academic call Clay Christensen has written a book about this phenomenon. He calls it The Innovator’s Dilemma. Here’s a quote from the opening chapter:

“The only instance in which mainstream firms have successfully established a timely position in a disruptive technology were those in which the firm’s managers set up an autonomous organisation charged with building a new and independent business around the disruptive technology.”

Clay Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma

Not for profit organisations are, of course, different from the cut throat world of commercial business. But are they that different? The problem of the Innovator’s Dilemma was very much something we were conscious of when we began FutureLearn.

And so, on to our story…

1969: The University of the Air

The Open University was conceived in the late 1960s by Harold Wilson’s Labour government. It was dubbed The University of the Air, the idea was to use the new technology of TV and radio to make higher education accessible to many more people than before. The Open University disrupted the education market of the 1970s.

An early broadcast of the Open University

It is now the UK’s biggest university with over 2 million alumni, despite having no students on campus. It has embraced digital technology to deliver many of its course materials. But in 2012, a new kind of competition began to emerge in the USA.

2012: The year of the MOOC

In 2012, an approach to distance learning known as the Massive Open Online Course - or MOOC - began to come of age, led by three notable companies: Coursera, EdX and Udacity. All three were based on a similar concept: create courses using videos and text content, make them available for free at a specific time and a attract a large number of people to learn together.

Writing in the Guardian in December 2012, the academic and digital commentary Clay Shirky wrote a piece on the rise of the MOOCs.

“It’s been interesting watching [disruption] unfold in music, books, newspapers and TV. But nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watch it happen in my own backyard. Higher Education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course and our Napster is Udacity, the education start up.”

Clay Shirkey, The Guardian, December 2012

And by the end of 2012, these growing American businesses had begun looking at the UK’s universities as potential partners.

Bold leadership

Fortunately, The Open University had at its helm an inspirational leader, Martin Bean, now the Vice Chancellor of RMIT University in Australia. Martin had an unusual CV for a university vice chancellor. Before being appointed to run the OU, he had worked for Microsoft.

Seeing what was happening in the USA, he decided that the Open University could not sit by and fail to respond. If any time in its recent history had been it, now was the OU’s moment. He decided to set up FutureLearn and through sheer willpower and charisma, persuade twelve other UK universities to back the venture in only a week. Universities are not known for their swift decision making, so this was quite a feat.

FutureLearn was set up as a commercial company. It provides us with an interesting dynamic: we have the discipline necessitated by the commercial imperative but, unlike some of our competitors, we have a benevolent shareholder that is as much interested in our mission as it is us making a profit.

Our first chairman Martin Bean (left) and our CEO Simon Nelson (right)

Martin hired a guy called Simon Nelson to run it. Simon, my boss, is also an unusual and bold choice of CEO for an education business. His background, like my own, is the BBC: mass consumer digital media, rather than education. He ran Radio and Music Interactive, launching the BBC Radio Player and podcasting service and was subsequently an influential figure in the launch of BBC iPlayer. He brought in me and a couple of others, initially as consultants, to help establish a vision for the product and a plan for how we might deliver it.

Creating a product vision

Despite pressure from some within the Open University to get on and deliver something using some of the OU’s existing technology, we persuaded Simon to take a short amount of time to develop a vision for the product. Only once we knew what we were setting out to achieve, should we think about the technology that might be required to deliver it.

Working closely with key stakeholders at the OU, the product vision that we arrived at was “to inspire the best learning experiences by telling stories, provoking conversation and celebration progress”. We had quickly established that social learning would be at the heart of our product: the principles of learning through conversation are well understood as a powerful way to help people learn, as is the internet’s strength at delivering compelling social experiences.

We also passionately believed that a simple, friendly user experience, now expected by digital consumers was sorely missing from the education sector and the existing MOOC platforms. This, combined with building on more than forty years of distance learning expertise in the Open University and sound pedagogic principles was what we meant by “the best” learning experiences.

Building a prototype

We built a prototype in three weeks. This was key to establishing trust amongst our growing partnership that we could deliver. It also helped ground the conversations about what the product would do and how it might work and enabled us to test our ideas with educators and potential learners.

You can see the origins of FutureLearn’s DNA in this prototype. We also delivered it with a responsive design. We knew that a ‘mobile-first’ approach would be key and we quickly wanted our stakeholders and partners to understand this relatively new concept.

The delivery plan

The delivery plan was a key document. It was effectively a manifesto for the approach that we would take. It established our working practices, notably a single, small, highly collaborative multi disciplined team; a product owner with the decision making authority to deliver upon an agreed product vision and represent the team to business stakeholders; use of an agile product development methodology and an emphasis on working software rather than documentation; and the freedom to use technology that is industry standard but may not be standard for the Open University.

Perhaps most importantly, we set out the strategy of delivering what is known as a Minimum Viable Product: our aim, to get to market as rapidly as rapidly as possible with a product that delivered on the vision in its smallest, simplest form and then find out how real learners and educators used it, in order to help us rapidly iterate on what we had delivered.

The ‘Submarine’

In my first meeting with Simon, I remember saying, “If you want to create something new, innovative, that has the freedom to potentially disrupt your own business model, then you probably don’t want your existing IT team to deliver it. What you want is a room, a bunch of great people, with laptops, whiteboards, squeaky pens and a mission just going for it.”

The basement of the Open University’s Camden office, FutureLearn’s first home

Our original home was the basement of the Open University’s satellite office in Camden. It had no natural light and we nicknamed it “The Submarine”. It was cheap to get us started. And looking back with nostalgia, engendered the right spirit. All good startups begin in a garage or a basement.

Key milestones

We gave ourselves a deadline: we would launch in September, giving us six months. In order to hit this aggressive timetable, we decided to set ourselves a goal that we would run a course, with a small audience after three months. Three months is long enough to produce something of worth, but not long enough to go too far astray, spend too much money or lose sight of the original vision.

We ran our first ‘alpha’ course with 150 friends and family in July 2013. Three weeks later, we repeated the exercise with 1,500 of the OU’s alumni network. We learnt a lot and focused on what we found our first guinea pig learners really wanted. We launched on time, on 18 September 2013 and ran our first course three weeks later on 14 October.

We capped our first courses to 10,000 learners whilst we continued to rapidly iterate our product based on feedback and ensured it would scale to run many courses with thousands of learners. We removed the cap in January 2014 and in April, we introduced our first premium product, Statements of Participation, to begin testing the business model. Our approach is a classic freemium model. We attract large numbers to do courses for free and our aim is convert some of them to purchase something they would find useful: proof of learning.

On our first birthday, we removed the ‘beta’ label that had sat next to our logo for 12-months. We dubbed it version 1.0. We wanted to signify that the product had reached a certain maturity, but indicate that we still weren’t done and we have continued to rapidly develop the product ever since.

Today

Today, just over 18-months since we launched, we have over 1.6 million registered learners, have partnered with over 50 of the world’s leading universities, along with a range of other specialist organisations interested in education such as the British Museum, British Library and the BBC. We have a growing staff of nearly 50 people and an office with natural light.

We are currently running what we believe is the largest online course in the world, a course on preparing for the English Language exam IELTs that has over 400,000 learners signed up from over 150 countries. And alongside the mothership, we are continuing the Open University’s mission to make education accessible to many more in a new and innovative way.

Epilogue: words of encouragement

I’ll finish my story with a few words of encouragement. They are not my own words but words written by one of our partners. A couple of days before our launch, we receive an email from one of our project leads who was initially quite skeptical but who quickly became one of our favourite people to work with.

The email concluded:

“I realise that we are just one of 23+ and your dependence on us is fairly diluted, but that’s not how we see it this side of the Newport Pagnell Services. Our commitment to FutureLearn has changed from the initial “foot in the door” a year ago to seeing it as a major strategic commitment in this age of globalisation and I can’t think of a better partner to make it happen.

This quick sea change has not been an easy one for a university steeped in tradition, committees and “splendid campus” but it is happening, led from the top though VCs, PVCs (and me I hope a little). I feel it is through the personal relationship with you that we are making this progress in changing our culture.

So don’t be shy to tell me what you need us to do or nag me about it. There is naturally a degree of inertia with a big organisation like [a university] that I am sure that ‘agile’ people like you find frustrating, but we will cut through all that.

So, to sum up, many thanks for your help, support, your patience and especially your politeness and tact! Really looking forward to Wednesday, it will be brilliant.”

I hope that others, working for established organisations might be encouraged, as we were by these words and that, with some bold leadership and vision, it really is possible to change some of the biggest and most traditional of institutions and do something innovative that changes the world for the better.

#Product Management #futurelearn #disruption #innovation #innovatorsdilemma #mooc #education #startup #charity #non profit

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Photo

A trip to Lyon, with Maria on the new Eurostar route. Good architecture, good eating. Would heartily recommend Les Canut & Les Gones. See more on Flickr.

#photos #lyon #eurostar

0 notes

mattwaltoncouk · 9 years

Text

Reflecting on SxSW Interactive

A couple of weeks ago, I attended SxSW, or “South by” as it’s affectionately referred to. Despite working in tech and being a music and film fan, it’s the first time I’ve been.

These are my reflections. I’ve structured my thoughts around seven key themes it inspired me to think about, plus there’s a brief round up of seven other things that seemed to recur during the festival more generally.

The subjects I focus on are inevitably driven by my own preoccupations as a head of product working for an education start up and the sessions I chose to attend. But I’ve tried to tell a coherent and accessible story that, hopefully, will do justice to some of the presenters that I found to be most inspiring and provide some food for thought.

1. Thinking epic

The biggest sense I came away with is the need to think epic, to borrow Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote’s session title. At SxSW you get an overwhelming sense of positivity and ambition: many of the attendees of SxSW, mostly made up of American tech folk, are people that want to change the world. And seemingly have little doubt that they will.

As a Brit that comes from a culture that is more conservative, but who is helping grow a company with an audacious goal, I found the whole experience an inspiring shot in the arm, much more so than I expected.

Avoid the rocks

Phil’s talk was amongst my favourites. Using the metaphor of scissors, rock and paper, he described the three phases of business maturity. Scissors are start ups. They’re job is to snip a chunk out of a big established business: paper. As they grow and graduate to the next phase they become rocks. They want to avoid being ‘wrapped’ by paper, but can ‘blunt the scissors.

If you’re thinking of starting a business, Phil’s advice is to find a sector with ‘paper’ - a number of traditional incumbents, but no ‘rocks’ - start ups that are now established with scale. Rocks remember what it’s like to be a start up and have the resources and users to be able to quickly replicate the innovative ideas of scissors. When Evernote started, there were no rocks tackling productivity, just paper.

When you’re scissors, you shouldn’t worry about the competition, you just need to attack the paper. You should simply aim to build something great, you want to get noticed. You want to grow ‘tall enough to ride’. You’re like a three year old. It’s all about you. Be precocious. Be loud. Be impressive. And to do this you need to think epic.

What if it’s great?

Phil then described a problem with the way humans make decisions, which often stops us thinking this way. We suffer from negativity bias, born of the older part of the brain that deals with fear and evolved the instincts of fight or flight. This part of the brain is useful for safe, short term decisions about survival but bad for long term leaps of faith as the answer it tends to give is ‘no’.

When making pros and cons lists, we tend to look at which option has the least number of cons, when often to make a game changing long term decision, it’s better to look at which has the most number of pros. Go for the most good - the most epic option - not the least bad. Worry about the problems later. Long term epic thinking is about blocking out the bad and focusing on the good. It’s about asking “What if it’s great?”

Stay focused

When you reach the status of rocks, it’s about continuing to apply pressure in a focused way until you move the world a little. The thing that screws you up is conflicts of interest.

On focus, he quoted Jonny Ive, quoting Steve Jobs: “Focus is not say no to things you don’t want to do. Focus is saying no to things you’d love to do.” He then spoke about Evernote’s recent decision to focus on “the modern workplace” rather than also expanding into food. He would love to do food but he realised the need to focus and again, he asked what was the best that could happen in both scenarios and concluded that “the modern workplace” looked more 'epic'. Rocks need to change from being impressive, like scissors, into business that can sustain pressure over a sustained period.

What happens when you become paper? Phil has no idea. He hopes to avoid it. Perhaps you can create a rockslide instead... He wants to create a hundred year startup.

Mooshots

Astro Teller, ‘Captain of Moonshots’ at Google X, Google’s innovation lab also of course had plenty to say on epic thinking. ‘Moonshots’ is a phrase inspired by Kennedy’s 1961 “we choose to go to the moon” speech. Their focus is not on incremental change, it’s on things that could be ‘10x’: ten times better.

They’re creating self driving cars, better wind turbines, balloons to help remote locations get connected and, most famously, Google Glass. His talk focused on failure. His vision is a ‘moonshot factory’ where they rapidly get technology into the real world in order to learn as quickly as possible. He wants to fail as often and as quickly as possible, in order to learn the most. His talk was about his inspiring stories of learning by failing.

During the talk he spoke frankly about Google Glass, which I had already heard a number of speakers and attendees poke fun at. He wanted to get real people using it to understand the social issues surrounding it. His biggest regret is that they positioned it wrongly and allowed, even encouraged people, to think that it was a finished product, rather than a prototype they wanted to learn from.

Bold visions

On being epic, I also found Logan Green inspiring. He’s the CEO of Lyft, a competitor to Uber. I say competitor but where he inspired was his vision for the product: he wants to make it unnecessary to own a car. This is opposed to Uber, whose vision is for everyone to have their own private driver. He doesn’t want to make a better taxi, he wants to solve traffic.

Logan wants there to be less cars on the roads with just one person in and for travel to be more affordable and household expenditure on cars to be less. He quoted that half of the land in LA is dedicated to the car: as well as freeways, there are four parking spaces for every car. If there are less cars on the road, then traffic goes away. And imagine what humans could do with all that extra space. Now that’s epic thinking.

2. Articulating vision

On the subject of visions, I was also inspired by AirBnB’s head of product, Joe Zadeh. He explained how when AirBnB was trying to work out what the long term vision for their company was and how to build consensus around it, they were inspired by Walt Disney. They had wondered about exploring other elements of ‘the sharing economy’ such as car sharing, but settled on trips. Their vision is about great trips. And to articulate this they borrowed a technique that Disney invented: the storyboard.

In the 1930s when Walt Disney decided to create a feature length cartoon of Snow White, it was generally seen in Hollywood to be 'Disney’s folly'. It was such an ambitious project, requiring the coordination of many people who needed to share the same vision. Most didn’t believe it was achievable. To solve the problem, Disney storyboarded every scene so that everyone had the same vision to work from. It was the first time storyboards had been used in the movie business.

Inspired by this story, AirBnB hired an ex-Pixar artist and storyboarded two stories: the perfect trip for a guest; and the perfect rental experience for a host. These storyboards now run around the walls of each of their offices, for everyone that works for the company to refer to.

Joe described the benefits:

It keeps you focused on the customers

It’s not about features, instead it's about the user's story

It also helps you see where you’re absent in the story: how can we be present in more frames?

At AirBnB, they have a vision. It’s long term and lasts 3-5 years, possibly longer. To support this they have goals. These are the metrics they are currently interested in: the number of trips and the quality of trips. They organise their product teams around these goals. They then create projects to improve these metrics. Projects should be nimble and only last as long as they are actively improving their goal. And as well as the vision storyboard, they often storyboard each project.

3. Finding metrics to support your vision

I asked Joe about how AirBnB go about picking ‘experience’ metrics, the ones that measure the quality of the experience that users are having, rather than quantitative things such as number of trips, listings or gross profit. Joe said experience metrics were really tough and they now look at a combination of things (that he wasn’t able to share). His advice was, pick one, try and improve it, and by doing so, you’ll learn a lot.

Connecting metrics to vision also came up in a number of other useful sessions. Biz Stone, spoke to how he and Ev Williams settled on the metric Total Time Reading, rather than the more standard pageviews for Medium. They sell curated collections to advertisers based on the total time a user spends reading, which ultimately benefits both their readers and the brands that help fund them.

He also suggested that we needed to redefine the success metrics of capitalism and that there should be three ingredients: financial success, social good and joy at work. The first slide he shows at every board meeting is the number of hours of voluntary work done. In his opinion the future of marketing is philanthropy. If there’s two products to chose between, you pick the one with most meaning. If your business has meaning, then you attract the best talent.

Phil Lipin talked about how Evernote had rejected an advertising business model as their vision is all about making people more productive and ultimately the business of advertising is to distract. Instead they picked subscription because they want their users to find their product helps their productivity enough that they want to pay for it.

And Sushmita Subramanian, director of product design at Luminosity talked about how their vision is to get people exercising their brain over a long period of time and so they picked a subscription model.

In order to get the right kind of user and encourage repeat visits, Sushmita also described how Luminosity have deliberately gone against the conventional wisdom of trying wherever possible to remove friction from your product, and instead add ‘good’ friction at the right moment.

4. Adding friction

Sushmita explained that by adding friction during their sign up process, Luminosity had seen a small negative impact on acquisition but they had found that they had acquired more valuable customers, which ultimately delivers on their vision and supports their subscription business model.

To explain, she focused on the onboarding process. She said that the temptation is to show people your best bits as quickly as possible. They had done this at Luminosity by immediately getting their users to engage in a brain training game. But focusing on your best bits, doesn’t necessarily mean they will come back tomorrow.

Now they make their users input their goals, sign up, do a ‘fit test’, give them an overview of brain training… and then let them do a game. This led to them having more engaged customers that came back.

Here’s her advice on when to add friction.

Education: when you need to add steps that give context to the product to help increase the number of valuable customers. Do people know enough in order to take action? Luminosity tell people the value of their games and it makes them commit more.

Personalisation: encourage people to invest in the product to improve their future experiences. Letting them personalise also teaches you a lot about how people use your product.

Reflection: people enjoy answering questions that helps them reflect on what they did, they feel reward from reflection and disclosure.

Adding friction at the right moment also means that you can reduce friction in other places. They don’t like to interrupt the core training experience and the personalised information they gather upfront enables them to make this a frictionless experience.

Katie Dill, Head of Experience Design at AirBnB also talked to me about the value of adding friction to the process of creating profiles and adding ID verification. It means they end up with more committed users and you can remove friction at the crucial decision making point where somebody is deciding whether they are happy staying in your home.

The important point is to understand when is the right moment to add friction and being empathetic to what your users are trying to do.

5. Using empathy

I saw a number of sessions where empathy driven design was a theme. There was a great talk from Jon Kolko, founder of the Austin Centre for Design and VP of Product Innovation at MyEdu, who’ve recently been acquired by Blackboard.

He described the job of product management as three things:

establish a vision

drive consensus

ship the product

In terms of establishing the vision, he talked about the benefits of taking a design led approach (rather than engineering or marketing led). A design orientated approach focuses on people, behaviour and empathy. Jon is very much an advocate of driving product design using behavioural insights. It’s all about ethnographic research. Or, to put it another way, hanging out with your audience.

Also advocating the benefits of ethnographic research were Intel’s anthropologist Genevieve Bell and Professor Mimi Ito of the University of California Irvine. Much of what they and Jon had to say echoed one another.

Here’s my main takeaways:

When engaging in ethnographic research, establish a master and apprentice relationship with your subjects. Make them feel like they’re the experts. The first question is key to this, let them tell a good story about themselves. One they’ve told before that makes them feel comfortable.

Listen with care. People will often talk about ideals, rather than the reality. Some of the most important things are what they don’t say. Try and make sense of what their utterances really mean. Put the utterances all over the wall, group them, identify anomalies. Try to get everyone involved to spend some doing this over a couple of weeks.

Don’t be afraid to make the inferential leap to get to get to the behavioural insight. An insight is a provocative statement about human behaviour framed as a universal truth. This is the ‘innovation risk’. Then you can tell a story about the insight and how you’re going to improve the problem.

What human’s care about changes really slowly. Build up a steady drumbeat of cumalitive institutional knowledge that you can’t ignore.

You need to put together quantitative and qualitative, match the what with the why. You might know X% of people do Y. Ethnographic research is about help establish why they do it. Quantitative data is only as good as the qualitative story you wrap around it.

I asked what Mimi thought were the unchanging things about human behaviour that we should consider when designing online education. Her answer? “Affinity and belonging. How do you make people feel connected to others in the environment you create?”

Biz Stone also talked about empathy. His new social network, Super, is about providing a tool that allows it’s users to create shareable visual comic strip-like items, that it’s easy for others to find empathy with. Like Twitter, it’s about creative constraint.

He also noted that it’s good for telling jokes and that being fun is very important. If you make something fun, then more people will use it. And if more people use it, it’s more likely to become important. He concluded: “If you want to destroy despotic regimes, then you probably also need to support fart jokes.”

6. Unbundling

The notion of ‘unbundling’ established industries was another theme that was an undercurrent in a number of sessions but was explicitly talked about by Brad Hargreaves, co-founder of General Assembly and Jared Hecht, CEO of Fundera. Both have unbundled parts of existing larger industries: Fundera provide small business loans and General Assembly vocational courses for digital skills.

The pair agreed that industries ripe for unbundling are ones where there is:

a lack of customer experience that people now expect

a lack of competition

burdensome regulation

...which is why education and banking are prime candidates.

Consumers now demand much more cleaner and appealing experiences. People expect the quality of web design they get from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify... It’s hard of established institutions to do this as they typically aren’t ‘web natives’ and suffer from institutional lethargy. Banks keep opening branches because that’s what they’ve always done. Startups can win because they don’t need to deal with integration and siloed IT teams and they can approach the a specific problem with a fresh perspective.

Typically, this might mean an unbundling of things like content. In the world of education, the content is now often seen as free and the value in a degree comes from the overall experience, your ability to see it through and, crucially, the selection process.

Regulation becomes an interesting question when industries become unbundled. Brad and Jared’s opinion is that some form of regulation is needed as without regulation there is a strong possibility for bad apples to damage an emerging product category’s reputation. They also agreed that self policing based on commonly agreed principles was probably the best route forward.

The discussion turned to the question of ‘rebundling’. Once an industry has become unbundled, with new players taking out chunks of it, then the interface between the elements becomes crucial. And there is the opportunity to rebundle in new ways. For example, many forward thinking small businesses are now using services like ZenPayroll (for payroll), Square (for card payments) and Funding Circle (small business loans) for their banking services. But each of these services is independent. How might they be integrated together?

This also has big implications for data and privacy. What are the digital standards for accreditation of learning? Traditionally this is done by accrediting councils and it’s very difficult for institutions to gain or lose accreditation. But who are the new clearinghouses that provides the glue between smaller, digital educational experiences? You don’t worry that an accrediting council is going to be acquired with your data.

7. The changing nature of work

Jared and Brad also questioned whose endorsement really matters? Increasingly this is becoming about employers, as education becomes more about relevant skills and getting a job. For example GA now has accreditation from some of their courses by PayPal.

A number of sessions I attended were preoccupied about how the nature of work, jobs and employment is changing. Clearly this was discussed looking through the prism of the tech industry but there was a general sense that that technology was driving change in almost every sector.

Facts giving context to these discussions include that in the US, one in three people are self employed, entrepreneurialism is increasing and new ways of earning that are being enabled by digital services are growing. Alongside this, the cost of tuition has risen twice as fast as healthcare and the millennial generation are beginning to question the value of degrees, although 80% still believe it will help you get a job. And that these trends are increasingly global.

A few recurring themes:

the need for continuing learning and learning new skills and that employers will be driving education more

what you can do is becoming more important than what you have done: CVs (or resumes) are moving more towards transferable skills, evidence of them and social endorsement of them

agreeing ‘tours of duty’ with employees, rather than a job for life: what are you going to do in your time here?

the need to teach ‘agility’: education develop students abilities to keep learning, be adaptable and even create a job rather simply ‘get a job’

Digital was seen as both the catalyst and one of the key ways to support people, with online life long learn and the ability to gain, develop and showcase new skills being crucial.

What else everyone was talking about...

And here's a seven other recurring themes that seemed to be on everyone's lips.

Diversity: women in tech and diversity in general came up in pretty much every major session. It's clearly now on the collective mind of the industry. Square got a round of applause when it was mentioned 70% of their exec are women. Biz Stone said he wanted to hire more women at Super as they're typically more empathetic than men. Lots of talk but not many suggestions on how practically to address it.

Millennials: the generation born between 1980 and 2000 was mentioned in a large number of sessions. How they approach the world differently as they grew up with the Internet and what this means for their attitudes and expectations. For example, 50% are likely to consider somewhere other than a bank for a mortgage. Also mentioned was that age often trumps nationality. The Millennial Index research was referenced.

Wearables: not many people wearing them, but lots of people talking about them, perhaps spurred on by the imminent arrival of the Apple watch. I chatted to several people working on things where wearables could potentially revolutionise health, insurance and other things...

The sharing economy: the effects of services like AirBnB, Uber and other empowering ways to make services more efficient and provide the means for people to earn money in new and interesting ways came up time and again.

The half of the world not yet connected: Facebook, Google and others (perhaps with more open and less self-serving intentions) are clearly working on ingenious ways to get the rest of humanity online. The low hanging fruit of simple solutions have been exhausted so there's much talk of balloons (GoogleX), drones (Facebook) and peer-to-peer mobile networks (Open Garden). Its clearly going to be an interesting space to watch. More on Facebook's plans at Internet.org

Meerkat: the live video sharing platform was blocked by Twitter during SxSW and everybody seemed to be talking about it - it's massive growth and Twitter's reasons for restricting the service's access to their API.

Mobile: mentioned repeatedly as 'old news' but lots of companies are still getting to grips with responsive sites and apps. General theme was if your desktop and mobile usage graphs haven't crossed yet then they will soon and if you're not investing in mobile, you're as good as dead...

#Product Management #sxsw #sxsw2015

1 note · View note

mattwaltoncouk · 10 years

Text

Albums of the year 2014

My run down of the best of this year’s long players.

Listen to the Albums of the year 2014 playlist

Lazaretto - Jack White (Third Man Records/XL Recordings)

Jack White’s second solo album embraces a complexity that he rejected earlier in his career in a way that is refreshingly new but still distinctively White to it’s core. It’s a dense, rich meal of honky tonk piano, lap steel landscapes, bantering banjos and cartwheeling fiddles, teamed with White’s trademark yowling vocal, this time often to be found dueting. Bluesy, rip-roaring fun. Also, check out this great video on YouTube.

Playlist track: Lazaretto

This Is All Yours - alt-J (Infectious)

The second album from Leed’s alt-J is a playful adventure through pop hooks that wilfully avoid the mainstream. A very worthy, if not a straight-forward follow up to their Mercury Prize winning debut. There’s even an unexpected tribute to Bill Withers’ Lovely Day near the end.

Playlist track: Left Hand Free

American Interior - Gruff Rhys (Turnstile) The fourth solo outing from the ex-Super Furries frontman sees him in typically creative mood as he follows a distant eighteenth century relative, John Evans, to the United States in search of a tribe of a lost native Americans that, apparently, spoke Welsh. Needless to say, the adventures of his relative turned out to be ultimately fruitless but the resulting album (and film, book, app and Powerpoint Presentation) documenting them is one of Gruff’s best: witty, original and, at times, poignant. Playlist track: American Interior

Everyday Robots - Damon Albarn (Parlophone) The first proper solo album from the musical chameleon that is Damon Albarn is a beautifully tender and creative collection of delicately wonky sounds, unconventional yet nagging hooks and careworn vocals observing modern life in a sharply poetic way. He’s definitely mastered sad-yet-life-affirming. Somebody recently observed to me that more people appreciate Albarn than like him, but given a little effort, I think this collection, as well as being rewarding, is extremely likeable. Playlist track: Lonely Press Play

Present Tense - Wild Beasts (Domino) The fourth and possibly the best yet from Preston’s wonderful Wild Beasts. Present Tense is as joyously idiosyncratic as ever but it feels knowingly contemporary: some of the spiky edges have been smoothed but in a very good way. And as ever, I love the contrasting vocals of Hayden Thorpe’s athletic crooning and Tom Fleming’s heartfelt baritone. Perhaps the album of the year and certainly cements them as one of my favourite bands ever. Awesome. Playlist track: Mecca

Future Islands - Singles (4AD) I saw this lot at Primavera and it was impossible not to be charmed by frontman Samuel T Herring’s unusual blend of cossack dancing and belly flops. His unignorable stage antics are also present in his vocal performances, gruff asides and little yelps punctuate in a way that suggests he’s really digging it. Funk pop with soul. Playlist track: Seasons (Waiting on You)

After the Disco - Broken Bells (Columbia) The second LP from Danger Mouse and The Shin’s James Mercer. More great songwriting and dizzlingly good production that reminds you as a producer, why Danger Mouse is held in the regard he is. Well crafted melodies and pop hooks teamed with a perfectly mixed rich audio palette. Playlist track: Holding on for Life

Royal Blood - Royal Blood (Impirical Galatic) The ballsy debut from Brightonian duo Royal Blood properly rocks, giving the likes of Queens of the Stone Age, Muse, The Black Keys and even, perhaps their fan, Jimmy Page a run for their money. Raaar! Their debut is an armoury of big guitar riffs and brutal drum artillery deployed with plenty of panache and enough moments of sophisticated light and dark to provide a hugely enjoyable aural ride. Playlist track: Figure It Out

Are We There - Sharon Van Etten (Jagjaguwar) Hot on the heels of her last album, the bruised and beautiful Tramp that I liked a lot, Are We There is equally confessional, documenting the volatility of relationships. Sometimes defiant, sometimes resigned, sometimes celebrating the everyday, it’s always affecting and touching. Playlist track: Taking Chances

Love Letters - Metronomy (Because Music) Psychadelic off-beat pop, from Devon, all kiddy-keyboards and tinny drum machines, that romps through 60s kitsch and Motown. It’s sleazy and romantic at the same time. Homemade yet deftly produced. And generally quite a lot of fun. Playlist track: Love Letters

Nikki Nack - Tune-Yards (4AD) I’ve seen the very talented Merrill Garbus and Tune-Yards live twice this year and both times they have provoked an enormous grin and an inability not to dance. Tribal beats and inventive loops jostle with lyrics delivered in a way that oozes playful activism. A unique and extremely colourful album. Terrific. Playlist track: Hey Life

Burn Your Fire For No Witness - Angel Olsen (Jagjaguwar) A fabulous collection of grungy punk folk, not a million miles from her label-mate Sharon Van Etten in its tales of anti-romance but with a little more upbeat swagger. There’s some great lo-fi production here too, reverby and buzzy at times, close miked, finger-on-string-squeaks at others. Definitely one of the year’s best. Playlist track: Unfucktheworld

July - Marissa Nadler (Bella Union) Apparently this is the sixth album from Marissa Nadler but it’s the first one that has properly made me sit up and take notice. She’s really good. Lovely delicate finger-picked folk Americana, with beautiful layers of tangled reverb-drenched vocals, intimate yet big at the same time. Playlist track: Firecrackers

The Take Off And Landing Of Everything - Elbow (Polydor) If you’re yet to be beguiled by Elbow’s northern charms, then its unlikely that The Take Off and Landing of Everything, the sixth album from Guy Garvey and gang will win you over. This album is by no means a departure. But if you’re a signed up fan as I am, then I reckon you’ll really enjoy revelling in its gorgeous warmth and soaring arrangements, this time influenced by Guy’s recent break up with “Mrs Badger” and new found love affair with New York. Playlist track: Charge

Caribou - Our Love (City Slang) I first came across Dan Snaith when he went by the name of Manitoba and was ploughing a folktronica furrow in a similar field to Fourtet. With his latest long player, he’s closer to Jon Hopkins in visceral electronic energy, that’s moved from the field and into the nightclub. What all of them share is the ability to inject oodles of human warmth into electronic music. Our Love oozes emotion and humanity. Playlist track: Can’t Do Without You

Stay Gold - First Aid Kit (Columbia) I’ve still got a soft spot for this pair, despite the fact I’m typically a little averse to country and that they’ve now embraced the big time, resigning to Columbia Records and are getting airplay on Radio 2. Perhaps it’s the melancholic Swedish darkness that infects some nice balladry and the fact it’s delivered with massive swaths of charm and lovely harmonies that only blood relatives can achieve. Charming. Playlist track: My Silver Lining

Lost In The Dream - War on Drugs (Secretfly Canadian) Reverently retro, this album reminds me a little of Bon Iver’s last LP in the way it affectionately echoes giants of the 1980s (in this case Springsteen, Dire Straits, Dylan) but still sounds fresh with a raw edge of troubled heartbreak. As well as big anthemic moments and whoops, it’s a record that recognises a good grove and takes the time to enjoy it, as well as embrace the more intimate moments. This seems to have topped many album of the year lists. Not sure its the best of the year but it’s a thoroughly enjoyable grower of an album. Playlist track: Under the Pressure Bonus tracks 4AD Session - Daughter (4AD) Six tracks lifted from last year’s fantastic If You Leave recorded live at Air Studios with a ten piece orchestra ensemble. More intimate, raw and beautiful than ever, if you enjoyed the album, this EP is well worth seeking out, as are the gloriously shot videos to accompany it. Playlist track: Youth John Grant and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra - John Grant (Bella Union) A few months ago, Iceland-based American singer-songwriter John Grant was joined by the BBC Phil to give a special one off performance adding bigger, grander, glorious velvet red curtain strings to his entertaining yet arresting songwriting. The arrangements by Fiona Brice bring a fresh new grandeur to his songs, in what is clearly a special performance. Playlist track: GMF

Enjoyed this? Check out my albums of 2013.

#music #albums of the year

1 note · View note