#love how everyone in the game has such like research and science and gathering intel vibe. everyone in this game is a fucking nerd.

[wardensantoineandevka]

on a scale of Warden Antoine to Johanna Hezenkoss, how many problems is that mad scientist in The Veilguard causing?

[repmywind02199]

How to decide what product to build

How to decide what product to build

Techniques for defining a product and building and managing a team.

Design is a process of making dreams come true.

THE UNIVERSAL TRAVELER

LET’S PLAY A GAME. (I’m imagining the computer voice from the movie WarGames. GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN...SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Alas, I digress.)1

How many people do you think are on the following product or feature teams?

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto

Twitter

Instagram

Spotify

Hint: the number is definitely smaller than you think.

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto: 3 and 5, respectively2

Twitter: 5–73

Instagram: 13 when acquired for $1 billion by Facebook4

Spotify: 85

We also know that the team that created the first iPhone prototypes was “shockingly small.”6 Even Jony Ive’s design studio at Apple—the group responsible for the industrial design of every product, as well as projects like iOS 7—is only 19 people.7 And we can surmise that this group is broken up into smaller teams to work on their own individual projects.

Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team.”8 In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. Initially conceived to create “a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink,” there’s some surprising science that explains why teams of this size are less prone to be overconfident, communicate poorly, and take longer to get stuff done. In actuality, that probably caps this team at or around six people.

Enter the work of the late Richard Hackman, a professor at Harvard University who studied organizational psychology. He discovered that “The larger a group, the more process problems members encounter in carrying out their collective work...worse, the vulnerability of a group to such difficulties increases sharply as size increases.”9

Hackman defined “process problems” as the links—or, communication avenues—among the members in a team. As the number of members grows, the number of links grows exponentially. Using the formula n*(n–1)/2—where n is group size—Hackman found that the links among a group get hefty very quickly (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. The larger a group gets, the more “process problems” a group faces. This requires increased communication and can slow down decision making. (Source: Messick and Kramer, The Psychology of Leadership.)

Even though math wasn’t my favorite subject in school, let’s go through a few team size scenarios. Let’s start with Bezos’s recommended team size of six—assuming that two pizzas are appropriate for six people (although, I’ve been known to put away a whole pizza on my own from time to time):

Bezos’s preferred team size of 6 people has only 15 links to manage.

Increase that number to 10, and you already have 45 links to manage.

If you expand to the size of where I work every day, Tinder—70 people—the number of links grows to 2,415.

But managing more communication links isn’t the only problem groups face when they increase in size.

Larger teams get overconfident. They believe they can get things done quicker, and have a tendency “to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows.” In 2010, organizational behavior researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UCLA conducted a number of field studies confirming these findings.10 In one of their experiments, they observed teams tasked with building LEGO kits. Teams with two people took 36 minutes to complete the kit, while four-person teams took over 44 percent longer.

But the four-person teams believed that they could complete the LEGO set faster than the two-person team.

That’s why the notion of the two-pizza team is so powerful. It’s a simple concept that’s easily understood by anybody within your organization, and can be used to combat the “let’s throw more bodies at the problem” mentality that some organizations might be used to using.

OK, so we’ve figured out how big your team should be. But who should be invited to the party?

Everybody loves to be in product meetings. Especially when you’re in the deciding phase of deciding what to build.

Even Steve Jobs loved being in the room during this phase. “He told me once,” said Glenn Reid, former director of engineering for consumer applications at Apple, “that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design.”11

Treat this process like you’re the bouncer at Berghain nightclub in Berlin.12 (Hint: it’s practically impossible to get in if you don’t speak German. And even then, Sven the bouncer, “a post-apocalyptic bearded version of Wagner,” enforces an obscure dress code that nobody can seem to crack.)

So, who’s in the room together? How much do they know about the pains you’ve found? And how do you frame the discussion?

At this point, you should have everyone who’s going to be involved in the creation of the product on the team. An example of this could include:

The product designer or product manager (depending on how your organization is set up, and if you’ll be working with someone else who will be designing the product).

The engineer(s) with whom you’ll be working to build the product—typically frontend and backend.

A representative from the team that will be launching and promoting the product; this could be someone from marketing or public relations to create a feedback loop between what will be promised to your customers and what your product is actually capable of doing.

While at KISSMetrics, Hiten Shah structured these teams with

...a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Sometimes it’s multiple designers, multiple engineers, and sometimes it’s an engineering manager.

At times it can even be, sometimes, someone from marketing, if that makes sense, or even someone from sales. I mean, we have tried different methods. I’d say for different things, small things, big product releases, a whole product, it’s going to be different and for the stage of the company it’s going to be different.

Party Like It’s 1991

Regis McKenna had something to say about this process. When he saw how fast technology was changing society in 1991, he realized—like our friend Neil McElroy at Proctor & Gamble—that a new role would need to be formalized. This person would be “an integrator, both internally—synthesizing technological capability with market needs—and externally—bringing the customer into the company as a participant in the development and adaptation of goods and services.”13

If your eyes glazed over reading that, well, you should read it again. Because McKenna was responsible for launching some of the hallmarks of the computer age: the first microprocessor at Intel, Apple’s first PC, and The Byte Shop, the world’s first retail computer store. Oh, and one more thing: he was the guy behind the “startup in a garage” legend first made famous with Apple’s early days.

So, did you read it again? Did anything seem familiar?

Hey, he’s describing you!

You’re the product designer. The integrator. You’re the customer’s champion, their expert, their advocate.

This process requires you to lead your team through the research; to propose product ideas to eliminate your customer’s pain or find their joy effectively.

That, of course, means that everybody involved in building the product must be intimately familiar with the research that’s been conducted on your audience.

Take the opportunity as an “integrator” to build on your strengths as a team: what innovative technologies and design can you apply to the problem at hand? Even better, what can you and your team uniquely build for this audience?

I thought Josh Elman (Greylock Partners, Zazzle, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) had a great insight on this part of the product creation process:

The first thing is you have to trust your team. I think that sounds obvious, but it’s much harder in practice. I think a lot of structures and processes are built on the fact that there isn’t innate trust...next, get your team’s help in how to solve the problem. The team knows what they can build. The team knows how it can be developed. The designers know what kinds of things are designable and natural in the product and what kinds of things are not. All of this matters.

Don’t forget the Pain Matrix (Figure 1-2). What are the observations you made that fit into the upper-right quadrant where there is the most acute, frequent pain? How can you build your customers’ dream product? What are the pains that you’re uniquely capable of solving?

Figure 1-2. The Pain Matrix, a simple tool I created for myself. It’s intended to make sifting through and making sense of the research you’ve gathered much simpler.

The Pain Matrix is the perfect piece of collateral for when you’re hashing out what to build. This document becomes a communication device, an advocate for your customers. Everybody can see it and you can back it up with your data. Bonus points for direct quotes from your research.

“The thing to focus on is that yes, 100 percent of your users are humans,” Diogenes Brito, a product designer most recently at startup Slack, reminds us. “While technology is changing really, really rapidly, human motivations basically haven’t at all. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s still the same. Designing around that, the closer you are to the base level of what humans desire, the more timeless it’ll be.”

To reiterate: don’t lose sight of the actual, observed, tangible pains and joys that you’ve researched. Resist the temptation to delve into hopes and dreams. Just throwing an “MVP” out into the wild to “validate” something you spend time building is a waste of time, money, and talent.

You’re better than that.

Now, all you have to do is keep everybody focused.

Keeping Everybody Focused

There’s always a big problem when the club-like euphoria from a product meeting starts to turn focus into chaos. How do you keep everybody on task and debating healthily?

I highly recommend a whiteboard for idea collection and harvesting. This serves three practical purposes:

It’s difficult to remember what was said. You don’t want good ideas getting lost simply because there were too many thrown around the room.

It allows you to be visual. Not all ideas can be verbally explained; a low-fidelity medium allows anybody to sketch the central core of the idea without unnecessary detail. This allows your team to get ideas out of their head on an equal playing field.

It lets you take advantage of the natural tendency for the group to forget which idea was contributed by whom. This naturally allows the best ideas to float to the top and the worst ones to sink to the bottom. It’s hugely beneficial, especially if the group has a lot of ideas. The key here is to avoid attaching names to ideas, so you can avoid hurt egos and the so-called not invented here syndrome. Called the Cauldron, this was a technique used by Apple—sometimes even with Steve Jobs in the room. According to Glenn Reid, the former director of engineering at Apple, the Cauldron “let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas. If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which—it just didn’t matter.”14

There’s also the benefit of timed techniques, like one used at online publishing startup Medium. With the right group of people in the room, the problem that needs to be solved is defined and “you have two minutes to write down as many ideas as possible [to solve it],” director of product design and operations Jason Stirman told me. “Then you have five minutes to put the ideas on a whiteboard and explain them. Then you have another two minutes to add to ideas...the end result is you just get as many ideas as possible. So we do that a lot here. We brainstorm a lot.”

The “Working Backwards” Approach

There’s another technique used by Amazon that’s particularly powerful. Known as the “Working Backwards” approach, this technique calls upon the product owner to literally write a future press release for the product—as well as fake customer quotes, frequently asked questions, and a story that describes the customer’s experience using the product.

In your case, this could be a future blog post that you’d put out about your product or feature instead of a press release.

What’s particularly unique about this technique is that this document involves every part of your organization that’s required to make the product successful—not just product and engineering, but marketing, sales, support, and every other part of your company. In other words, it forces you to think about all of the aspects that can inform your product.

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes the rationale behind the process:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the FAQ) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.15

According to Vogels, there are four documents included in Working Backwards:

The press release

What the product does, and why it exists

The “frequently asked questions” document

Questions someone might have after reading the press release

A definition of the customer experience

A story of what the customer sees and feels when they use the product, as well as relevant mockups to aid the narrative

The user manual

What the customer would reference if they needed to learn how to use the product

This all might seem like a lot of frivolous upfront work, but the method’s been used at Amazon for over a decade. And if you use it in conjunction with the Sales Safari method outlined in Chapter 2, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more customer-centric approach to building products. That way, you’ll be working on ideas that have their foundation in what real people need, as opposed to coming up with ideas that you try to plug into an amorphous audience.

At the center of Working Backwards lies the press release. A document that should be no longer than a page and a half, it’s the guiding light and the touchstone of the product and something that can be referred to over the course of development.

“My rule of thumb is that if the press release is hard to write, then the product is probably going to suck,” writes Ian McAllister, a director at Amazon. “Keep working at it until the outline for each paragraph flows.”16

Amazon’s view is that a press release can be iterated upon at a much lower cost than the actual product. That’s because the document shines a harsh light on your answer to your customer’s pain. Solutions that aren’t compelling or are too lukewarm are easily identified. Nuke them and start over. All you’re working with at the moment is words.

“If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built),” McAllister writes. “Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the..

https://ift.tt/2JgQQtM

[doorrepcal33169]

How to decide what product to build

Techniques for defining a product and building and managing a team.

Design is a process of making dreams come true.

THE UNIVERSAL TRAVELER

LET’S PLAY A GAME. (I’m imagining the computer voice from the movie WarGames. GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN...SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Alas, I digress.)1

How many people do you think are on the following product or feature teams?

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto

Twitter

Instagram

Spotify

Hint: the number is definitely smaller than you think.

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto: 3 and 5, respectively2

Twitter: 5–73

Instagram: 13 when acquired for $1 billion by Facebook4

Spotify: 85

We also know that the team that created the first iPhone prototypes was “shockingly small.”6 Even Jony Ive’s design studio at Apple—the group responsible for the industrial design of every product, as well as projects like iOS 7—is only 19 people.7 And we can surmise that this group is broken up into smaller teams to work on their own individual projects.

Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team.”8 In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. Initially conceived to create “a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink,” there’s some surprising science that explains why teams of this size are less prone to be overconfident, communicate poorly, and take longer to get stuff done. In actuality, that probably caps this team at or around six people.

Enter the work of the late Richard Hackman, a professor at Harvard University who studied organizational psychology. He discovered that “The larger a group, the more process problems members encounter in carrying out their collective work...worse, the vulnerability of a group to such difficulties increases sharply as size increases.”9

Hackman defined “process problems” as the links—or, communication avenues—among the members in a team. As the number of members grows, the number of links grows exponentially. Using the formula n*(n–1)/2—where n is group size—Hackman found that the links among a group get hefty very quickly (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. The larger a group gets, the more “process problems” a group faces. This requires increased communication and can slow down decision making. (Source: Messick and Kramer, The Psychology of Leadership.)

Even though math wasn’t my favorite subject in school, let’s go through a few team size scenarios. Let’s start with Bezos’s recommended team size of six—assuming that two pizzas are appropriate for six people (although, I’ve been known to put away a whole pizza on my own from time to time):

Bezos’s preferred team size of 6 people has only 15 links to manage.

Increase that number to 10, and you already have 45 links to manage.

If you expand to the size of where I work every day, Tinder—70 people—the number of links grows to 2,415.

But managing more communication links isn’t the only problem groups face when they increase in size.

Larger teams get overconfident. They believe they can get things done quicker, and have a tendency “to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows.” In 2010, organizational behavior researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UCLA conducted a number of field studies confirming these findings.10 In one of their experiments, they observed teams tasked with building LEGO kits. Teams with two people took 36 minutes to complete the kit, while four-person teams took over 44 percent longer.

But the four-person teams believed that they could complete the LEGO set faster than the two-person team.

That’s why the notion of the two-pizza team is so powerful. It’s a simple concept that’s easily understood by anybody within your organization, and can be used to combat the “let’s throw more bodies at the problem” mentality that some organizations might be used to using.

OK, so we’ve figured out how big your team should be. But who should be invited to the party?

Everybody loves to be in product meetings. Especially when you’re in the deciding phase of deciding what to build.

Even Steve Jobs loved being in the room during this phase. “He told me once,” said Glenn Reid, former director of engineering for consumer applications at Apple, “that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design.”11

Treat this process like you’re the bouncer at Berghain nightclub in Berlin.12 (Hint: it’s practically impossible to get in if you don’t speak German. And even then, Sven the bouncer, “a post-apocalyptic bearded version of Wagner,” enforces an obscure dress code that nobody can seem to crack.)

So, who’s in the room together? How much do they know about the pains you’ve found? And how do you frame the discussion?

At this point, you should have everyone who’s going to be involved in the creation of the product on the team. An example of this could include:

The product designer or product manager (depending on how your organization is set up, and if you’ll be working with someone else who will be designing the product).

The engineer(s) with whom you’ll be working to build the product—typically frontend and backend.

A representative from the team that will be launching and promoting the product; this could be someone from marketing or public relations to create a feedback loop between what will be promised to your customers and what your product is actually capable of doing.

While at KISSMetrics, Hiten Shah structured these teams with

...a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Sometimes it’s multiple designers, multiple engineers, and sometimes it’s an engineering manager.

At times it can even be, sometimes, someone from marketing, if that makes sense, or even someone from sales. I mean, we have tried different methods. I’d say for different things, small things, big product releases, a whole product, it’s going to be different and for the stage of the company it’s going to be different.

Party Like It’s 1991

Regis McKenna had something to say about this process. When he saw how fast technology was changing society in 1991, he realized—like our friend Neil McElroy at Proctor & Gamble—that a new role would need to be formalized. This person would be “an integrator, both internally—synthesizing technological capability with market needs—and externally—bringing the customer into the company as a participant in the development and adaptation of goods and services.”13

If your eyes glazed over reading that, well, you should read it again. Because McKenna was responsible for launching some of the hallmarks of the computer age: the first microprocessor at Intel, Apple’s first PC, and The Byte Shop, the world’s first retail computer store. Oh, and one more thing: he was the guy behind the “startup in a garage” legend first made famous with Apple’s early days.

So, did you read it again? Did anything seem familiar?

Hey, he’s describing you!

You’re the product designer. The integrator. You’re the customer’s champion, their expert, their advocate.

This process requires you to lead your team through the research; to propose product ideas to eliminate your customer’s pain or find their joy effectively.

That, of course, means that everybody involved in building the product must be intimately familiar with the research that’s been conducted on your audience.

Take the opportunity as an “integrator” to build on your strengths as a team: what innovative technologies and design can you apply to the problem at hand? Even better, what can you and your team uniquely build for this audience?

I thought Josh Elman (Greylock Partners, Zazzle, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) had a great insight on this part of the product creation process:

The first thing is you have to trust your team. I think that sounds obvious, but it’s much harder in practice. I think a lot of structures and processes are built on the fact that there isn’t innate trust...next, get your team’s help in how to solve the problem. The team knows what they can build. The team knows how it can be developed. The designers know what kinds of things are designable and natural in the product and what kinds of things are not. All of this matters.

Don’t forget the Pain Matrix (Figure 1-2). What are the observations you made that fit into the upper-right quadrant where there is the most acute, frequent pain? How can you build your customers’ dream product? What are the pains that you’re uniquely capable of solving?

Figure 1-2. The Pain Matrix, a simple tool I created for myself. It’s intended to make sifting through and making sense of the research you’ve gathered much simpler.

The Pain Matrix is the perfect piece of collateral for when you’re hashing out what to build. This document becomes a communication device, an advocate for your customers. Everybody can see it and you can back it up with your data. Bonus points for direct quotes from your research.

“The thing to focus on is that yes, 100 percent of your users are humans,” Diogenes Brito, a product designer most recently at startup Slack, reminds us. “While technology is changing really, really rapidly, human motivations basically haven’t at all. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s still the same. Designing around that, the closer you are to the base level of what humans desire, the more timeless it’ll be.”

To reiterate: don’t lose sight of the actual, observed, tangible pains and joys that you’ve researched. Resist the temptation to delve into hopes and dreams. Just throwing an “MVP” out into the wild to “validate” something you spend time building is a waste of time, money, and talent.

You’re better than that.

Now, all you have to do is keep everybody focused.

Keeping Everybody Focused

There’s always a big problem when the club-like euphoria from a product meeting starts to turn focus into chaos. How do you keep everybody on task and debating healthily?

I highly recommend a whiteboard for idea collection and harvesting. This serves three practical purposes:

It’s difficult to remember what was said. You don’t want good ideas getting lost simply because there were too many thrown around the room.

It allows you to be visual. Not all ideas can be verbally explained; a low-fidelity medium allows anybody to sketch the central core of the idea without unnecessary detail. This allows your team to get ideas out of their head on an equal playing field.

It lets you take advantage of the natural tendency for the group to forget which idea was contributed by whom. This naturally allows the best ideas to float to the top and the worst ones to sink to the bottom. It’s hugely beneficial, especially if the group has a lot of ideas. The key here is to avoid attaching names to ideas, so you can avoid hurt egos and the so-called not invented here syndrome. Called the Cauldron, this was a technique used by Apple—sometimes even with Steve Jobs in the room. According to Glenn Reid, the former director of engineering at Apple, the Cauldron “let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas. If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which—it just didn’t matter.”14

There’s also the benefit of timed techniques, like one used at online publishing startup Medium. With the right group of people in the room, the problem that needs to be solved is defined and “you have two minutes to write down as many ideas as possible [to solve it],” director of product design and operations Jason Stirman told me. “Then you have five minutes to put the ideas on a whiteboard and explain them. Then you have another two minutes to add to ideas...the end result is you just get as many ideas as possible. So we do that a lot here. We brainstorm a lot.”

The “Working Backwards” Approach

There’s another technique used by Amazon that’s particularly powerful. Known as the “Working Backwards” approach, this technique calls upon the product owner to literally write a future press release for the product—as well as fake customer quotes, frequently asked questions, and a story that describes the customer’s experience using the product.

In your case, this could be a future blog post that you’d put out about your product or feature instead of a press release.

What’s particularly unique about this technique is that this document involves every part of your organization that’s required to make the product successful—not just product and engineering, but marketing, sales, support, and every other part of your company. In other words, it forces you to think about all of the aspects that can inform your product.

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes the rationale behind the process:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the FAQ) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.15

According to Vogels, there are four documents included in Working Backwards:

The press release

What the product does, and why it exists

The “frequently asked questions” document

Questions someone might have after reading the press release

A definition of the customer experience

A story of what the customer sees and feels when they use the product, as well as relevant mockups to aid the narrative

The user manual

What the customer would reference if they needed to learn how to use the product

This all might seem like a lot of frivolous upfront work, but the method’s been used at Amazon for over a decade. And if you use it in conjunction with the Sales Safari method outlined in Chapter 2, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more customer-centric approach to building products. That way, you’ll be working on ideas that have their foundation in what real people need, as opposed to coming up with ideas that you try to plug into an amorphous audience.

At the center of Working Backwards lies the press release. A document that should be no longer than a page and a half, it’s the guiding light and the touchstone of the product and something that can be referred to over the course of development.

“My rule of thumb is that if the press release is hard to write, then the product is probably going to suck,” writes Ian McAllister, a director at Amazon. “Keep working at it until the outline for each paragraph flows.”16

Amazon’s view is that a press release can be iterated upon at a much lower cost than the actual product. That’s because the document shines a harsh light on your answer to your customer’s pain. Solutions that aren’t compelling or are too lukewarm are easily identified. Nuke them and start over. All you’re working with at the moment is words.

“If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built),” McAllister writes. “Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the..

from FEED 10 TECHNOLOGY https://ift.tt/2JgQQtM

[csemntwinl3x0a1]

How to decide what product to build

How to decide what product to build

Techniques for defining a product and building and managing a team.

Design is a process of making dreams come true.

THE UNIVERSAL TRAVELER

LET’S PLAY A GAME. (I’m imagining the computer voice from the movie WarGames. GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN...SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Alas, I digress.)1

How many people do you think are on the following product or feature teams?

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto

Twitter

Instagram

Spotify

Hint: the number is definitely smaller than you think.

Apple’s iMovie and iPhoto: 3 and 5, respectively2

Twitter: 5–73

Instagram: 13 when acquired for $1 billion by Facebook4

Spotify: 85

We also know that the team that created the first iPhone prototypes was “shockingly small.”6 Even Jony Ive’s design studio at Apple—the group responsible for the industrial design of every product, as well as projects like iOS 7—is only 19 people.7 And we can surmise that this group is broken up into smaller teams to work on their own individual projects.

Figuring out what product you’re going to build is an exercise in working through the research you’ve gathered, empathizing with your audience, and deciding on what you can uniquely create that’ll solve the problems you’ve found. But it’s also an exercise in deciding how big the team is and who’s on it.

Jeff Bezos of Amazon famously coined a term for teams of this size: the “two-pizza team.”8 In other words, if the number of people on a team can’t be fed by two pizzas, then it’s too big. Initially conceived to create “a decentralized, even disorganized company where independent ideas would prevail over groupthink,” there’s some surprising science that explains why teams of this size are less prone to be overconfident, communicate poorly, and take longer to get stuff done. In actuality, that probably caps this team at or around six people.

Enter the work of the late Richard Hackman, a professor at Harvard University who studied organizational psychology. He discovered that “The larger a group, the more process problems members encounter in carrying out their collective work...worse, the vulnerability of a group to such difficulties increases sharply as size increases.”9

Hackman defined “process problems” as the links—or, communication avenues—among the members in a team. As the number of members grows, the number of links grows exponentially. Using the formula n*(n–1)/2—where n is group size—Hackman found that the links among a group get hefty very quickly (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. The larger a group gets, the more “process problems” a group faces. This requires increased communication and can slow down decision making. (Source: Messick and Kramer, The Psychology of Leadership.)

Even though math wasn’t my favorite subject in school, let’s go through a few team size scenarios. Let’s start with Bezos’s recommended team size of six—assuming that two pizzas are appropriate for six people (although, I’ve been known to put away a whole pizza on my own from time to time):

Bezos’s preferred team size of 6 people has only 15 links to manage.

Increase that number to 10, and you already have 45 links to manage.

If you expand to the size of where I work every day, Tinder—70 people—the number of links grows to 2,415.

But managing more communication links isn’t the only problem groups face when they increase in size.

Larger teams get overconfident. They believe they can get things done quicker, and have a tendency “to increasingly underestimate task completion time as team size grows.” In 2010, organizational behavior researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and UCLA conducted a number of field studies confirming these findings.10 In one of their experiments, they observed teams tasked with building LEGO kits. Teams with two people took 36 minutes to complete the kit, while four-person teams took over 44 percent longer.

But the four-person teams believed that they could complete the LEGO set faster than the two-person team.

That’s why the notion of the two-pizza team is so powerful. It’s a simple concept that’s easily understood by anybody within your organization, and can be used to combat the “let’s throw more bodies at the problem” mentality that some organizations might be used to using.

OK, so we’ve figured out how big your team should be. But who should be invited to the party?

Everybody loves to be in product meetings. Especially when you’re in the deciding phase of deciding what to build.

Even Steve Jobs loved being in the room during this phase. “He told me once,” said Glenn Reid, former director of engineering for consumer applications at Apple, “that part of the reason he wanted to be CEO was so that nobody could tell him that he wasn’t allowed to participate in the nitty-gritty of product design.”11

Treat this process like you’re the bouncer at Berghain nightclub in Berlin.12 (Hint: it’s practically impossible to get in if you don’t speak German. And even then, Sven the bouncer, “a post-apocalyptic bearded version of Wagner,” enforces an obscure dress code that nobody can seem to crack.)

So, who’s in the room together? How much do they know about the pains you’ve found? And how do you frame the discussion?

At this point, you should have everyone who’s going to be involved in the creation of the product on the team. An example of this could include:

The product designer or product manager (depending on how your organization is set up, and if you’ll be working with someone else who will be designing the product).

The engineer(s) with whom you’ll be working to build the product—typically frontend and backend.

A representative from the team that will be launching and promoting the product; this could be someone from marketing or public relations to create a feedback loop between what will be promised to your customers and what your product is actually capable of doing.

While at KISSMetrics, Hiten Shah structured these teams with

...a product manager, a designer, and an engineer. Sometimes it’s multiple designers, multiple engineers, and sometimes it’s an engineering manager.

At times it can even be, sometimes, someone from marketing, if that makes sense, or even someone from sales. I mean, we have tried different methods. I’d say for different things, small things, big product releases, a whole product, it’s going to be different and for the stage of the company it’s going to be different.

Party Like It’s 1991

Regis McKenna had something to say about this process. When he saw how fast technology was changing society in 1991, he realized—like our friend Neil McElroy at Proctor & Gamble—that a new role would need to be formalized. This person would be “an integrator, both internally—synthesizing technological capability with market needs—and externally—bringing the customer into the company as a participant in the development and adaptation of goods and services.”13

If your eyes glazed over reading that, well, you should read it again. Because McKenna was responsible for launching some of the hallmarks of the computer age: the first microprocessor at Intel, Apple’s first PC, and The Byte Shop, the world’s first retail computer store. Oh, and one more thing: he was the guy behind the “startup in a garage” legend first made famous with Apple’s early days.

So, did you read it again? Did anything seem familiar?

Hey, he’s describing you!

You’re the product designer. The integrator. You’re the customer’s champion, their expert, their advocate.

This process requires you to lead your team through the research; to propose product ideas to eliminate your customer’s pain or find their joy effectively.

That, of course, means that everybody involved in building the product must be intimately familiar with the research that’s been conducted on your audience.

Take the opportunity as an “integrator” to build on your strengths as a team: what innovative technologies and design can you apply to the problem at hand? Even better, what can you and your team uniquely build for this audience?

I thought Josh Elman (Greylock Partners, Zazzle, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) had a great insight on this part of the product creation process:

The first thing is you have to trust your team. I think that sounds obvious, but it’s much harder in practice. I think a lot of structures and processes are built on the fact that there isn’t innate trust...next, get your team’s help in how to solve the problem. The team knows what they can build. The team knows how it can be developed. The designers know what kinds of things are designable and natural in the product and what kinds of things are not. All of this matters.

Don’t forget the Pain Matrix (Figure 1-2). What are the observations you made that fit into the upper-right quadrant where there is the most acute, frequent pain? How can you build your customers’ dream product? What are the pains that you’re uniquely capable of solving?

Figure 1-2. The Pain Matrix, a simple tool I created for myself. It’s intended to make sifting through and making sense of the research you’ve gathered much simpler.

The Pain Matrix is the perfect piece of collateral for when you’re hashing out what to build. This document becomes a communication device, an advocate for your customers. Everybody can see it and you can back it up with your data. Bonus points for direct quotes from your research.

“The thing to focus on is that yes, 100 percent of your users are humans,” Diogenes Brito, a product designer most recently at startup Slack, reminds us. “While technology is changing really, really rapidly, human motivations basically haven’t at all. Like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, that’s still the same. Designing around that, the closer you are to the base level of what humans desire, the more timeless it’ll be.”

To reiterate: don’t lose sight of the actual, observed, tangible pains and joys that you’ve researched. Resist the temptation to delve into hopes and dreams. Just throwing an “MVP” out into the wild to “validate” something you spend time building is a waste of time, money, and talent.

You’re better than that.

Now, all you have to do is keep everybody focused.

Keeping Everybody Focused

There’s always a big problem when the club-like euphoria from a product meeting starts to turn focus into chaos. How do you keep everybody on task and debating healthily?

I highly recommend a whiteboard for idea collection and harvesting. This serves three practical purposes:

It’s difficult to remember what was said. You don’t want good ideas getting lost simply because there were too many thrown around the room.

It allows you to be visual. Not all ideas can be verbally explained; a low-fidelity medium allows anybody to sketch the central core of the idea without unnecessary detail. This allows your team to get ideas out of their head on an equal playing field.

It lets you take advantage of the natural tendency for the group to forget which idea was contributed by whom. This naturally allows the best ideas to float to the top and the worst ones to sink to the bottom. It’s hugely beneficial, especially if the group has a lot of ideas. The key here is to avoid attaching names to ideas, so you can avoid hurt egos and the so-called not invented here syndrome. Called the Cauldron, this was a technique used by Apple—sometimes even with Steve Jobs in the room. According to Glenn Reid, the former director of engineering at Apple, the Cauldron “let us make a great soup, a great potion, without worrying about who had what idea. This was critically important, in retrospect, to decouple the CEO from the ideas. If an idea was good, we’d all eventually agree on it, and if it was bad, it just kind of sank to the bottom of the pot. We didn’t really remember whose ideas were which—it just didn’t matter.”14

There’s also the benefit of timed techniques, like one used at online publishing startup Medium. With the right group of people in the room, the problem that needs to be solved is defined and “you have two minutes to write down as many ideas as possible [to solve it],” director of product design and operations Jason Stirman told me. “Then you have five minutes to put the ideas on a whiteboard and explain them. Then you have another two minutes to add to ideas...the end result is you just get as many ideas as possible. So we do that a lot here. We brainstorm a lot.”

The “Working Backwards” Approach

There’s another technique used by Amazon that’s particularly powerful. Known as the “Working Backwards” approach, this technique calls upon the product owner to literally write a future press release for the product—as well as fake customer quotes, frequently asked questions, and a story that describes the customer’s experience using the product.

In your case, this could be a future blog post that you’d put out about your product or feature instead of a press release.

What’s particularly unique about this technique is that this document involves every part of your organization that’s required to make the product successful—not just product and engineering, but marketing, sales, support, and every other part of your company. In other words, it forces you to think about all of the aspects that can inform your product.

Werner Vogels, Amazon’s CTO, describes the rationale behind the process:

The product definition process works backwards in the following way: we start by writing the documents we’ll need at launch (the press release and the FAQ) and then work towards documents that are closer to the implementation.

The Working Backwards product definition process is all about fleshing out the concept and achieving clarity of thought about what we will ultimately go off and build.15

According to Vogels, there are four documents included in Working Backwards:

The press release

What the product does, and why it exists

The “frequently asked questions” document

Questions someone might have after reading the press release

A definition of the customer experience

A story of what the customer sees and feels when they use the product, as well as relevant mockups to aid the narrative

The user manual

What the customer would reference if they needed to learn how to use the product

This all might seem like a lot of frivolous upfront work, but the method’s been used at Amazon for over a decade. And if you use it in conjunction with the Sales Safari method outlined in Chapter 2, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more customer-centric approach to building products. That way, you’ll be working on ideas that have their foundation in what real people need, as opposed to coming up with ideas that you try to plug into an amorphous audience.

At the center of Working Backwards lies the press release. A document that should be no longer than a page and a half, it’s the guiding light and the touchstone of the product and something that can be referred to over the course of development.

“My rule of thumb is that if the press release is hard to write, then the product is probably going to suck,” writes Ian McAllister, a director at Amazon. “Keep working at it until the outline for each paragraph flows.”16

Amazon’s view is that a press release can be iterated upon at a much lower cost than the actual product. That’s because the document shines a harsh light on your answer to your customer’s pain. Solutions that aren’t compelling or are too lukewarm are easily identified. Nuke them and start over. All you’re working with at the moment is words.

“If the benefits listed don’t sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then perhaps they’re not (and shouldn’t be built),” McAllister writes. “Instead, the product manager should keep iterating on the..

https://ift.tt/2JgQQtM

[ericbarkman]

Chrono Hustle #36 Welcome to Earth 2

     “Good morning,” Harkon Smith said as a few of his top people sat around the table in the briefing room.  “So, based on the intel Agent Summers gathered, we believe that it is indeed Rupert Teleros that contacted us.  He wants to meet with me, so that is what will happen.”      “Even it if is him, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” Melinda Summers said.  “We still don’t know for certain why he is leading the Temporal Development Division, and are just assuming he has good intentions based on his reputation.”      “Which is why you’ll be in charge of security for this mission,” Harkon said.  “Your job is to make sure there is an exit strategy if things go wrong, and to keep it viable.  We have a few more days to prepare.”      “Yes, sir,” Melinda said.      “Meanwhile, Mr. Tesla has discovered that the building where Agent Nichols disappeared contains a wormhole to another dimension,” Harkon said.      “That is my theory anyway,” Nikola Tesla said.  “We sent a probe through, and we’re still waiting for it to return.”      “When it returns, I want you to analyze the information, and if it’s safe on the other side, Agent Masterson will lead a team through to find and recover Agent Nichols.”      “Right,” Jack Masterson said.      “Agent Bishop will come with me as my bodyguard,” Harkon said.  “Everyone else is open to be part of either Summers’ or Masterson’s teams.”      “Understood, sir,” Mary Bishop said.      Dorian Winters was on duty in the time door room, when everyone started filtering out of the meeting room.      “Hey Dorian,” Philip Wilson said as he came out.  “We still on for lunch?”      “Yeah, my shift ends in an hour,” Dorian said.  “Unless something comes up.”      “There’s some missions happening, but not today.  So even if we’re selected we should still be good.”      “So, we are in a relationship, right?” Abigail Esau asked.  “We’re girlfriends?”      “Yeah, we are,” Mary said.  “But I’d prefer we keep it a secret for now.”      “Okay?”      “I’m just…this whole lesbian thing is pretty new to me, and I don’t know if I’m ready to tell everyone about it.”      “Yeah, no, I don’t want to pressure you into anything, but I think they’ll be okay with it.”      “I mean, Jack and Melinda and Harkon will all be fine with it,” Mary said.  “They’re from times where it’s normal, but what about Philip and Dorian?  Or Mr. Tesla?”      “I don’t think Tesla will care,” Abigail said.  “Like, I doubt he’ll even take notice.”      “Maybe not, but still, can we keep it secret, for now at least?”      “Of course.”      “Who are you thinking of using for your team?” Jack asked as he walked down the hall with Melinda.      “Probably Philip and Dorian,” Melinda said.  “Maybe a few others.  Too many people could draw attention though, so I want to keep the group as small as I can.  You?”      “I mean, I’ll probably bring ERK-147 through, assuming it’s sensors will work on the other side,” Jack said.  “And the ghost of my temporal duplicate would be a good option as well.  Maybe a few redshirts as well, just to fill out the group.”      “Redshirts?”      “Never mind, Star Trek reference.  You should consider Deanna as well, since the meeting is in Ancient Greece, and she used to live there.”      “Where is she anyway?” Melinda asked.  “I haven’t seen her in a while.”      “Doing stuff in the 1940s.  She is somewhat important to history, so she kind of needs to keep up with her own life in addition to working with us.”      “Yeah, but you two already made it up to 2016 from the 1940s.”      “Yeah, but you know, it’s complicated.  We were doing a lot of stuff as it was.”      “I suppose.”      The ghost of the temporal duplicate of Jack Masterson floated down into the gym through the ceiling.  There were a few people in there, most of whom had a momentary look of surprise before going back to what they were doing.  One person though, Ohm, did not even look away from his punching bag.      “Hey, Ohm,” ghost Jack said as he floated over to him.      “Hello other Jack,” Ohm said as he continued his workout.  “Can I help you with anything?”      “Probably not, I just need someone to bounce ideas off of.”      “And I’m that person?”      “I need someone smart, but not someone who will interrupt my thought process.  Someone who will ask questions, rather than attempting to supply answers.”      “And you think that’s me?”      “You’re already doing it.”      “Asking questions, yes.  But you said someone smart.  Would you not prefer someone who is not literally a neanderthal?”      “I’ve seen your reading material.  You’re learning at an amazing rate.  I’m quite impressed.”      “Really?”      “Yep.”      “Okay, I suppose I can help you.”      “Oh, hey, Agent Wilson,” Abigail said as she tried to catch up to him in the hallway.  “Did you hear back from your friends yet?”      “Hmm?” Philip asked.  “Oh yes, I did a little while ago, while you were away on your mission.”      “And?  What has Deanna been up to?”      “Mostly just buying old artifacts, apparently.  I can give you a list, although I don’t suppose it’s really that strange of a thing for her to be doing.”      “Thanks, I’d appreciate the list.”      “Okay, so Imhotep’s dream is a vast open world, like a video game,” ghost Jack said.      “What’s a video game?” Ohm asked.      “It’s a game you play on a screen, like a TV or computer.  Open world games are a popular type, because there’s a lot to explore and do.  The only problem is, Imhotep is nowhere to be found.”      “Shouldn’t he be found in his own dream?”      “Yes, he should, it would be like if you went to play a video game, and the main character wasn’t there.  But then who’s playing the game?”      “You?”      “Except the world is created by his brain, so he still has to be there, I think.”      “How do you know it’s created by his brain?”      “Because, what else would create it?  It’s a dream in his brain.  Granted I’m a ghost, so I’m a mind without a brain, so who knows.”      “Hey you,” Mary said as she entered Abigail’s room.  “What’re you reading there?”      “Hmm?” Abigail asked as she looked up from the computer pad she was holding.  “Oh, just some researching I’m doing.  Which I’ll probably have plenty of time for, as I’m assuming Melinda won’t be picking me for her mission team.”      “Probably not, although Jack might pick you for his.”      “True, I’m sure he could use a few redshirts.”      “Redshirts?”      “Star Trek reference.  In the original Star Trek a few of the main characters would go on a mission, along with a bunch of background characters.  The background characters tended to be security officers, or occasionally engineers, both of which wore redshirts.”      “Oh, okay, although I’d hardly say you’re a background character.”      “I also hopefully won’t die.  That’s what tended to happen to redshirts.  You know, to show that the mission was dangerous, but without killing off anyone important.”      “Well, you’re very important to me, so you’d better not die,” Mary said.      “Yeah, this is all assuming I get asked to go on the mission anyway,” Abigail said.      “Good news,” Nikola said as Jack entered his lab.      “The probe has returned?” Jack asked.      “Indeed, and it seems that everything on the other side is perfectly habitable, and seems to be similar to our own Earth,” Nikola said.      “So, it is another Earth?”      “Based on the findings from the probe, I believe so.”      “Excellent, I’ve always wanted to visit another Earth.”      “Yes, I can help with that,” Deanna said after Melinda had explained the mission to her.  “What is the plan for getting through the time door though?  The time door in that era is controlled by the TRD.”      “Can you make us invisible, so we can go through when Harkon and Mary do, but unnoticed?” Melinda asked.      “I should be able to manage that.”      “That’s what we’ll be doing then.  We’ll go in invisible, and set up shop.  We’ll have to survey the area, and figure out where to place each of us.”      “Who will all be going?” Deanna asked.      “You, me, Philip, and Dorian.”      “Not Jack?”      “He has his own mission.”      “Hey Jack,” Jack said as he joined ghost Jack and Ohm in the cafeteria.  “Hey Ohm.  What’s up?”      “Just trying to figure out what’s going on with Imhotep,” ghost Jack said.      “Oh yeah?  How’s that going?” Jack asked.      “Not well,” Ohm said.      “Well, we might be making progress, but it’s hard to say for certain, since this is not exactly well understood science.  What’s up with you?”      “Prepping for a mission to another dimension.  An Earth 2, if you will,” Jack said.  “I’d like you two to join it.”      “I’m in,” ghost Jack said.  “Always wanted to go to another Earth.”      “Yeah, I know, we used to be the same person, until that whole timeline split thing,” Jack said.  “Ohm, are you in?”      “Yes, it will be nice to go on another mission,” Ohm said.  “It gets boring around here.”      “Melinda talk to you yet?” Dorian asked as he entered Philip’s room.      “Yeah, we’ll be joining her on the mission,” Philip said as he looked up from the book he was reading.  “Her and Deanna.”      “Something worrying about that?”      “Not per se, just that, you remember when Colonel Teleros came by a couple weeks ago?”      “Yeah, what about it?”      “He was letting me know what Deanna was up to.”      “Oh, something suspicious?”      “I don’t know.  I mean, most things involving her are at least somewhat suspicious, but I don’t know.”      “Yeah, sometimes it’s hard to know who to trust,” Dorian said.      Abigail and Mary were making out in Abigail’s room, when the door chime rang.      “Quick, where can I hide?” Mary asked as she looked around.      “Umm, uh, the closet?” Abigail suggested.  “Yeah, you can hide in the closet.”      “Right,” Mary said as she ran over to it, and went in and closed the door behind her.      “Come in,” Abigail said, as she straightened out her clothes.      The door opened, and Jack entered the room.  “Hey, Abigail,” he said.      “Hey Jack, what’s up?” she asked.      “Oh, just putting together my team for the incursion into another universe.  Would you be interested?”      “Yeah, yeah, that sounds fun, really fun.  I’d love that.”      Jack raised an eyebrow.  “You seem unusually energetic.  Are you hiding something?”      “What, no, I’m not hiding anything.”      “Right, anyway, we’ll be heading out tomorrow, so yeah.”      “Okay, cool.”      “Yeah, I’ll talk to you later,” Jack said as he left.      Abigail waited until he had been gone half a minute.  “You can come out of the closet now, Mary,” she said.  “In the literal sense I mean.”      “Any change in their condition?” ghost Jack asked as he entered the medlab.      “No changes,” Doctor Jeri Quill said.  “Sesla and Imhotep are still in their comas, as is Merlin.  And no changes in any of their vitals.  Will you be checking out Imhotep’s dreams again?”      “Not today,” ghost Jack said.  “I’ll be heading out on a mission tomorrow, so just checking in before that.”      “How are your preparations going?” Harkon asked as Melinda entered his office.      “As well as they can,” Melinda said.  “Since we can’t go there ahead of time without rousing suspicion, at the minimum.”      “Yeah, but meeting in an area that we control would require us to let them through, and could lead to an invasion of one of our bases.”      “I agree, sir.  I’ve been going over information on the meeting area with Deanna, since she lived there when she was a couple thousand years younger.”      “A prudent course of action.  Will she also be joining you on the mission?”      “Yes, is that a problem?”      “I don’t know,” Harkon said.  “Joshua Teleros came by the base a while ago, while you were investigating Rupert Teleros, in fact.”      “Oh?”      “He came to talk with Agent Wilson.  I don’t know any details, but my gut says that it was about Deanna.”      “Oh?”      “I could be wrong, it could be a personal matter, but the situation with Deanna is rather complicated, so it’s best to be careful with her anyway.”      “Of course, sir.”      “This is your whole team?” Nikola asked.      “This is my whole team,” Jack said as he looked around the room.  Ghost Jack, Ohm, Abigail, ERK-147, Jeth Simpson, and Yvette Telooth were all there, and ready to go.      “And if ERK-147’s sensors don’t work in the other dimension?” Nikola asked.      “If that happens, we’ll send him back with the probe immediately,” Jack said.      “Okay, everyone into position,” Nikola said.  “The wormhole will be opening momentarily.”      “Is everyone ready?” Harkon asked.      “I’m ready,” Mary said.      “I believe we are ready,” Melinda said.  “Deanna?”      “Of course,” Deanna said, and she turned invisible along with Melinda, Philip, and Dorian.      “Then, let’s go,” Harkon said.      Jack and his team came out of the wormhole, into a forested area.      “No building here, let alone a city,” Abigail said.      “Which could mean any number of things,” Jack said.      “We are at the same geographic coordinates on this Earth as we were on our own,” ERK-147.      “So, your sensors are working here,” Jack said.  “That’s good.”      “So then, we’re assuming there was just never a city here in this universe?” ghost Jack asked.      “Seems likely,” Abigail said.      “Are we picking up any radio transmissions?” Jack asked.      “We are,” ERK-147.  “There is definitely Human civilization in this dimension, and it seems to be at a similar level of development as our own in this era, based on the conversations I’m listening in on.”      “Are you picking up any signs of Nichols?” Jack asked.      “No, I regret to say that I am not,” ERK-147 said.      “Then it’s time we started exploring,” Jack said.  “Telooth, you’re with me.  Simpson, you’re with the other me.  ERK-147, Ohm, and Abigail, you’re team three.  Let’s go.”      Mary went through the time door, with Harkon right behind her.  On the other side, there were a number of people, who Mary assumed to be TDD agents.  The time door was in a different location that the previous time that she had been in Ancient Greece.  Unlike the temple it had been in, this was clearly a base set up by the TDD.      “Welcome,” one of the agents said.  “Director Teleros is upstairs.  He’s waiting for you.”      “You’re not checking us for weapons?” Harkon asked.      “Director Teleros told us to let you keep your weapons,” the agent said.      “Right,” Harkon said.      “So, ERK-147, are your sensors picking up anything you think is worth investigating?” Abigail asked as they moved away from the wormhole area.      “I don’t know,” ERK-147 said.  “Although I am picking up some wolves nearby that we should make sure to avoid.”      “Good call.  So, do people call you anything for short?”      “Most people refer to me as 147.  Jack refers to me as ERK.”      “Do you have a preference?”      “Not really, I am fine with either.  147 is a more specific identifier, but as I am the only ERK unit around, it hardly matters.”      “What about gender pronouns?”      “I have no gender, so mostly people just use the word ‘it’ for me, although Mr. Tesla tends to refer to me by male pronouns, for some reason.”      “But do you have a preference?”      “Not really.  I understand it is important for Humans, and I respect that, but I am not Human.”      Mary entered the office, with Harkon coming in right after.  There was a desk with two chairs in front of it, and one behind.  The one behind was facing away, but as soon as they entered, it spun around to reveal a man, who Mary recognized as Rupert Teleros from the pictures they had of him.      “Harkon Smith, and Mary Bishop, how nice to finally meet you,” Rupert said.  “Please sit, we have much to discuss.”      Mary glanced at Harkon, who nodded, and she sat down, as did he.      “I must say, I was somewhat surprised to hear from you,” Harkon said.  “You are not the person I’d have expected to be running the Temporal Development Division.”      “An understandable reaction,” Rupert said.  “I only joined up with them a few years ago, and only recently became the director.”      “How recently?” Harkon asked.      “After you and your people went on the run,” Rupert said.  “And I want you back.”      “I worked for the TRD, not the TDD,” Harkon said.  “We’re supposed to be fixing the timeline, not changing it.”      “We’re working on the same thing, but from another direction,” Rupert said.  “No doubt you are aware of the Palore, by now.  We are trying to figure out ways to fight them.”      “By doing what, exactly?” Harkon asked.  “What is the experiment you were running in the 2340s?”      “We managed to make a fairly significant alteration, which had only minimal impact on history.  The people who were under your command when you were at the TRD weren’t even able to realize there were any changes in the 3000s.”      “And how did you manage that?” Harkon asked.      “Cause and effect,” Rupert said.  “We figure out what effects are caused by our changes, and figure out how to counterbalance them.  It’s already what you do to fix the timeline, but we’re applying it on a larger scale.  It’s the only effective way to fight an enemy who’s time travel capabilities have become intertwined with their very history.”      “So, Telooth, how long have you been working with us, anyway?” Jack asked.  “I think this is the first mission we’ve been on together.”      “A month,” Yvette said.  “I was recruited from 2348.”      “Ah yeah, it’s nice having our outpost in that era,” Jack said.      “So, if you know so little about me, why did you bring me along?”      “I heard you have good tracking skills.  That true?”      “It is, but unfortunately it doesn’t seem like anyone else has been around here for at least a few days.”      “That’s unfortunate, especially since my knowledge powers don’t seem to be working here.”      “Oh?”      “Yeah, not sure why though.”      “What does that even mean?” Harkon asked.  “Time travel capabilities intertwined with their history?”      “Because, once they invented time travel, they just went back and gave it to their past selves,” Rupert said.  “They’ve shared so much between themselves in different eras, and created so many alternate timelines as a result that it’s impossible to figure out what their original timeline was even like.  We can’t hope to untangle that, the best we can hope for is stopping them from continuing to rewrite the timeline.”      “You’re fighting fire with fire,” Mary said.      “It’s the only way,” Rupert said.  “If there was another option, that’s what I’d be doing.”      “And what exactly do you want from us?” Harkon asked.      “The TDD is mostly made up of scientists.  That’s why we’ve had to resort to using TRD agents for missions.”      “So, you want your own operations team,” Harkon said.  “And you want us to be it.”      “Yes,” Rupert said.  “Feel free to go back, discuss it with your people.  Let me know when you come to a decision.”      “We’re free to leave?” Harkon asked.      “Yes, and you don’t even need the exit strategy that Agent Summers’ team has figured out,” Rupert said.      “I am picking up some Human life signs, at the edge of my sensor range,” ERK-147 said.      “How many?” Abigail asked.      “Twelve, so far,” ERK-147.  “But there could be more outside of my sensor range.”      “Well, it’s something.  Let the others know while we head in that direction.”      “Huh, wait, knowledge powers just kicked in,” Jack said.      “Oh?” Yvette asked.      “Yeah, but only to let me know why they don’t work here.  This universe has different magic rules than our own.  So my knowledge powers still work on myself, since I’m still from our universe, but it can’t extend beyond myself.”      “Those are the people?” ghost Jack asked as he and Jeth joined Abigail, Ohm and ERK-147 at the edge of the tree line.  “Looks like a Native American tribe.”      “Yes, but not one that I am aware of,” ERK-147.  “The tattoos look to be culturally significant, but I do not have any records of those sorts of tattoos.”      “How aware are you of Native American tribes?” ghost Jack asked.      “I’ve downloaded most of the information available on them in the 2340s, in order to better prepare for missions in the 1870s.”      “This is an alternate universe,” Abigail said.  “There’s nothing to say that the same tribes would exist here as in our own.”      “He wants us to join the TDD?” Melinda asked Harkon as they went into his office after getting back.  It was the two of them and Mary.  Harkon had just finished explaining the situation to Melinda.      “That’s the long and short of it,” Harkon said.  “Did you or your team notice anything suspicious while there?”      “No, nothing,” Melinda said.  “This could still be a trap, but so far everything seems aboveboard.”      “Nothing has been aboveboard about the TDD so far though,” Mary said.  “They are the reason my father was killed.  Even if that was before this Rupert Teleros was put in charge, it’s not like that just erases what they did.”      “I’m curious about what, if anything, the Clockmaker knows about this,” Melinda said.  “Because if he knows about Teleros being in charge, and still doesn’t trust them, that would certainly say a lot.”      “Assuming we can trust him,” Harkon said.  “There’s still so much we don’t know about the Clockmaker, and his agenda.”      “The Clockmaker has been a lot more trustworthy than the TDD,” Mary said.  “He was right about Merlin, and ghost Jack.”      “He told us the truth and it benefited both himself and us,” Harkon said.  “The only other encounter we had with him was when he abducted Jack to learn information that he needed, and then dropped him off in another time.”      “Which did allow Jack to gain valuable allies, learn important information, and return at the right time to save us all from death,” Melinda said.  “My gut says that at least some of that was intentional on the Clockmaker’s part.”      “Perhaps,” Harkon said.  “But either way, it’s not like we can just call him up and ask for his opinion.”      “Is Agent Nichols amongst this tribe?” Jack asked as he and Yvette joined the rest of the group.      “I don’t believe so,” ERK-147 said.  “Although I think he was previously.”      “Oh?” Jack asked.      “I’ve been analyzing my sensor readings, and I believe I can tell the difference between stuff from this universe and our own.  Stuff from this universe is slightly…fuzzier would be an adequate term.”      “Okay, go on.”      “There is Human excreta near to the camp, and some of it is from our universe, or at least from a person from our universe.”      “So, we can track him with his shit?” ghost Jack asked.      “We can determine he was likely here from it, but it could take a long time to locate the next place he used,” ERK-147 said.      Imhotep looked around himself, and saw the same thing he had been seeing for… he could not even remember how long it had been anymore.  But he was surrounded by sand in all directions.  That’s all there was, sand, and sky, and that’s all there had been.      He had figured out early on that this must be a dream of some sort, there was no way he would still be alive otherwise, since there was nothing to eat or drink.  But even that fact was starting to slip from his mind.  He was losing his grip on reality.      “Good work out there,” Harkon said to Jack.  “And you made the right call coming back to base.”      “It’s going to take a long time to track down Agent Nichols,” Jack said.  “I figured we’d have to prepare for a more comprehensive search.”      “Indeed,” Harkon said.  “You’ve learned at least a bit about what things are like on that Earth, at least nearby to the wormhole.  Next up, we’ll need to make contact with the locals, and who knows how that will go.  So we’ll need to figure out the right approach, and the right team for that.” To be continued…