When was the last time you tried to find a great UX/product person for your team? It’s kind of challenging. This is why lool Ventures & The Junction are hosting LEANUXMACHINE 2011: THE HACKATHON this weekend.

As part of the day I’ll be introducing the process of product creation and product management, which means I’ll need a slide that goes something like this:

1. You research the market.
2. You understand the pains and needs.
3. You reflect your conclusions in the Marketing requirement document.
4. The product manager translates the MRD into the PRD (Product Requirement doc) that includes the wireframes.
5. And then – and only then – are they, the designers, called upon to make something beautiful and usable out of the product manager’s dreams.

I’m supposed to share what product management is but I can’t!

The simple truth is that this is not how I create products myself…

Talk Your Walk:

I have no formal education qualifying me for my job. I’ve studied Arts. When I graduated I owned a picture framing gallery until one day I decided to close it and become a designer. I got a computer, installed Photoshop 3, taught myself design and started working as a web designer at the late 90s.

When the bubble burst the company I was working for at the time shrunk from 60 people to 20 and  I was gradually left as the only design/product person.

No one taught me what’s a spec, what’s an A/B test or what’s market research. We just had to create products and those – in their turn – had to be sold in millions or a lot of people would go home. So we created those products. Not all of them were great products, but most of them sold, the company survived and I became a product person.

The problem was (some would say still is :-) that I never followed the “right” process of product management. It seems I was creating products in a semi chaotic processes I can best describe as ADHPMD -Attention Deficit Hyperactive Product Management Disorder.

I would open an empty photoshop canvas having no idea what was about to happen. I would follow some kind of initial feeling, usually something vague. Then I would draft and draft until it hurt and a product would start to emerge. Only then would I dive into the specs and product definitions. For me design always came first.

Don’t get me wrong. Process IS important. You can’t build products/companies without it and our industry will be a mess without the great product people that can think and follow it as is. 

I’m just saying that there is more than one process and perhaps we should open ourselves to other options and try to expand the pool, and type, of people we assign the product posts. It looks like we typecast the product person and we’re now expecting certain patterns from those people. Is there an option that we’re missing out on other perspectives too?

• How is it that 99% of people in product departments come from R&D or marketing backgrounds?
• Why aren’t we growing some of our product teams from within the creative departments?
• Why are we worshiping ”process” and avoid talking about the part of randomness, (chaos shouldn’t have used this term :) and pure luck in the process of product creation?

You are what you is:

So this is what I would like to tell those design student when I meet them.

“My name is Avi and I’m a ‘Product Person’. I’m not a product manager (I suck at management), I’m not a UX designer (too complicated), I’m not from product marketing, I’m a product person. I create products. I envision them, I design them, I spec them, I make them happen & when they’re ready I go and sell my dreams hoping people will use them.

You guys are design students. When you graduate the people in our industry will try to tag you. They will tell you that you have a preordained roll in this world. You are to design product that other people planed, manage and will market for you. They will tell you that there is a “right” process for creating products. That you guys, with your right-side brains, are not born for this analytical process of product management. Don’t believe them. There is no right way to create a product, and there is no one role for you in it.

You CAN think of yourself as a ‘Designer’, But you can also call yourself as a ‘Product Person’ and engulf yourselves in all aspects of product creation: from marketing, to design to development. You can start creating products today, YOUR products. Most of them will fail (mind you) but some of them will make a difference in people lives.”

“Data driven culture”, “Data driven design”, “MoneyBall”, “KPIs”…
We all need data. We can’t run our businesses without it. I’m just wondering how much of it do we really need?

The problem with data is its tendency to inflate. It starts with a simple Google Analytics/Mixpanel set of events and before you know it you’re spending $1000 of your investor’s money on buying a 42″ screen to display your amazing “data driven” charts to everyone that visits your office.

When I read Moneyball what struck me most wasn’t the data driven decision making. As I read the book the words kept desolving until I was left with a single word… “Walks“. Understanding that walks, maybe the least sexy piece of data out there, is THE most important piece of data in Baseball is what made Billy Beane special to me.  It was his ability to see the single stat in the heart of it all that impressed me the most…. “Walks, Walks, Walks”. If you didn’t learn to walk you had no place in Billy’s team.

What’s your SPI?

When we set to build MyFamilio we took a bit of drastic approach to analytics. We decided our SPI (Single Performance Indicator) for the time being is “moments shared” and we looked for a way that would reflect to us how well we’re doing.

What if a bell rings every time a family moment was shared on MyFamilio? If we suck then there will be no bells ringing. If we’re doing OK then the bells WILL ring. But only when they ring so often it make our lives unbearable will we know that we’ve succeeded. In which case we’ll need to find a new KPI to fight over.

And this is exactly what we did. Instead of displaying our Mixpanel charts on LCDs we tied our SPI  to an app and this app “rings a bell” whenever someone shares a moment with their family on MyFamilio.

If you choose your SPI bravely you’re about to be incredibly depressed. There is nothing more depressing than the silence that follows when people don’t use your service and the bells stop ringing. I’ve never found a more effective way of telling you “You’re not there yet… Go on what are you waiting for? Make those people happy”

We call this approach Singlytics. It changed the way we look at analytics. The question is… Can you handle it? :)

Ask Boxee about Google/Apple TV,  Ask Wibiya about Meebo Bar/Facebook Bar, ask SohoOS about Zoho, Ask Followbase about  SalesForce and you’ll get a logical explanation about how their product differentiates itself and how they’re going to win.

Now ask the same question again but this time cover your ears, don’t listen to their answer and instead concentrate on the CEO’s eyes… The eyes always tell the truth. You’ll see that despite the logical explanation they’re giving you they don’t really understand why you even asked the question at the first place. Deep deep inside they don’t feel they’re any smaller or inferior to the giants they’re up against and if you ever saw a Chihuahua standing firm and barking on a Pitbull you’ll know what I’m talking about.

It’s because they’re suffering from the David & Goliath syndrome!

The Origins of  the David & Goliath Syndrome

If you want to understand the origin of the David & Goliath Syndrome you’ll need to get a feeling of the kind of place those entrepreneurs, who now lead most Israeli start-ups, grew up in. You’ll need to take a little trip down the time tunnel to Israel of the late 60s and early 70s…

For the first 30 years of Israel’s existence we were not so different from a modern age Sparta. A small nation, surrounded by enemies and breeding children to grow up as soldiers willing to die for their country. Israel was full of people who survived the Holocaust. You were either a child of a survivor or knew one. Every child grew up knowing that the alternative to a strong and surviving Israel was the death camps and the motto was “Never Again!”.

Just like in Sparta we had our elite worrier class, the ones who grew up in the Kibbutz. They were separated from their parents at birth (though their parents lived with them in the same Kibbutz) to grow up in children houses, crying at night for strangers instead for their moms, living in a collective where the individual was a tool serving the greater good of the whole. These were the ideal conditions for breeding the toughest, bravest soldiers and indeed most of those kids ended up in the best units of our army.

But the origins of the David & Goliath Syndrome reach way beyond the borders of the Kibbutz. Every child in Israel of the 70s grew up hearing two mantras over and over again:

• “It’s Good to die for our country” – Attributed to Josef Trumpeldor who supposedly said that at his death bed after being shot in the battle to defend Tel-Hai.
• “A few against many” – This was drilled to us from day one. We are few and the enemy are many. We survive not because of our numbers but because we’re smarter and better. We’re David and they’re Goliath.

Don’t mistake my tone for cynicism or criticism. We had no other choice and there’s no way we could have survived as a nation without the sacrifice of the people who fought to defend it.

But growing up in this kind of atmosphere comes with side effects and one of them is the David & Goliath Syndrome: An inability to realize you’re way way beyond your league and to really face the fact that your competition can wipe you out with a flip of a virtual button.

So next time Israeli entrepreneurs sit in your office and you’re thinking “Who are those arrogant bastards sitting here telling me they’re the next Google”  know that this is not arrogance nor stupidity (maybe just a bit of Chutzpah). They really believe it. They can’t help it. They’re suffering from the David & Goliath Syndrome and their strategy is a one line bullet: “We’re better”.

10 minutes into their pitch you may be thinking “Why would I invest in those guys, they clearly don’t realize who their up against”, but you know what? These crazy people are exactly the kind of people that will keep fighting against all odds, the kind of people you want with you in the start up trenches. The only kind I ever want to work with.

It looks like people are not sure what Facebook Deals means for companies like Foursquare.

It will be very interesting to see what this means for smaller location services like Foursquare, which has been ramping up these types of deals in recent months. Will it be a case of all ships rising or everyone going over to Facebook?

My guess is that it will all boil down to a sticker… One sticker to lure them all, one sticker to find them, one sticker to bring them into the store and bind them

2010 was the “Like” year. Companies/businesses lost all touch with reality, and high on Likes, completely surrendered their brand to Facebook.

How many times, in the last year, have you watched a TV ad, read a magazine ad or a billboard and seen the Facebook Logo? Facebook has done what no other brand (online or offline) has been able to do in history. They got thousands of companies to display the Facebook logo, for free, next to their logo on every prime ad real-estate you can imagine.

If you try to reflect on the actual ads you’ve seen this past year you’ll see exactly how strong the Facebook brand has become.

A year ago you would have seen ads saying “Join us on Facebook” and displaying the full Facebook logo. Then, instead of using the full “Facebook” logo they started using the smaller version with the letter “f”. Nowadays companies simply add the “f” logo to their ad. That’s it. No “Join Us”, no Facebook logo, just an “f”!

2010 was the “Like” year. 2011 will be the “f” year. The year when Facebook will cross the boundaries and extend their presence from hunderds of millions of people and brands online to millions of business in the real world.

If you’re still not sure how Facebook Deals is going to affect companies like Foursquare ask yourself: Which sticker are people more likely to recognize as they pass by a store? Which sticker will get them to check for local deals?

A couple of weeks ago I was waiting, with a group of friends, for our flight back home to Israel. They were all playing with their iPads as I pulled out my Kindle. I can’t even start to describe the outburst of laughter and ridicule that followed as they were holding the THING.

It started when they tried to touch the screen and nothing happened and went on with the Kindle’s primitive looking page flips and ended up with them, almost lying on the floor, laughing at the description of how I need a flashlight to read at night.

I took it as a man :) And then I asked one of them “Do you read on your iPad?”. “Sure” he said “I read thousands of articles since I have the iPad”. “No” I insisted “Do you read as in reading a book”, “Oh” he said and immediately opened his iPad to show me how beautifully pages flip when you read on iBooks “I’m already at chapter number 3 of this book”.

You know what? They were right. My Kindle is pathetically lame. Using the five click navigation instead of simply touching the screen it annoying, the keyboard is ridiculous and don’t even get me started on the so called “browser”. The funny thing though is that while my friend read the first 3 chapters of his book (in the 3 months he has an iPad) I read thousands of pages worth of books in the 3 weeks I have my Kindle.

Reading articles will fill your brain, reading books will fill your soul.
From the amazing Gandalf to the unforgettable Druss. From Middle Earth to 12th century Kingsbridge. For every person I’ve met in life I’ve met 10 amazing characters in the books I’ve read. For every place I’ve visited in our world I’ve traveled to 100 amazing other worlds those gifted writers created for me. The people and places I’ve met in my books are as real, for me, as the rest of you guys and I can’t imagine my life without them.

In a world where content is consumed in chunks of 140 characters and 60 seconds videos, in a world of push email and Blackberries, being able to lean back and loose yourself in a book for 5 hours is a priceless gift.

It’s true, my Kindle IS lame but for me it’s simply a book, nothing more. A 10.2 oz book that gets me reading more than ever before… and for that I love it.

The Instafaces experiment started on a whim. I asked @yanivg: “What if we went to Union Square, put a cardboard on the pavement with a pair of feet drawn on it, and whenever a person steps on it we’ll shoot their portrait?”… “hmmm, sounds cool” said Yaniv.

The next day, at lunch break, I went down to Staples and got a piece of cardboard, some sticky letters and a marker. I came back to the office and gladly enough Yaniv agreed to be the first “user” of Instafaces (bootstrapped with $18.69 :-) ).

We gave some thought about how to provoke the reaction we wanted, and Yaniv came with the brilliant addition of using a tripod. This creates a situation where the photographer is static and people from the crowed need to stop their flow and stand on the Instafaces mat for a 5 seconds magical moment with the photographer.

We set off for Union Square and set up our Instafaces mat near the Subway exit, and Yaniv started stopping people, pointing to the mat, and guiding them to stand on it so that he can shoot their portrait. What followed was truly amazing. Initially it took us about 5 minutes per shot and people hesitated (it’s in the human nature to think that everything has a hidden motive) but gradually people started coming.

The first question they all had was “What is this for?”, so we decided to A/B test (a product manager is a product manager:-) and drew the Facebook “F” logo on the mat so people will understand these photos are going to be uploaded to Facebook. It’s amazing how powerful the Facebook logo and brand have become. Adding the Facebook logo increased conversion by a 100% and we we’re shooting a portrait every 2.5 minutes or so.

What we decided to do next was much more dramatic for conversion. We simply took the Instafaces mat and put it in the middle of the sidewalk, effectively blocking the traffic and making people go around us. At this point we were taking a portrait every 30-60 seconds (compared to the 5 minutes it took us at the beginning). I had to stop when a cop came to me and told me I was blocking the traffic. I was so overwhelmed with Adrenaline that I actually asked him if he would agree to have his portrait taken before I leave, very, very stupid move in the US, but luckily I encountered a nice cop who replied with a simple “no”.

One minute later, when it all ended, I stood there in Union Square and my whole body was shaking. It was only then that I realized what a rush my body was experiencing from this amazing, unmediated, random encounter with hundreds of people, including the many that said “no please” because that was an important part of it too.

WOW, I’m sure this is not the last time I’m going to do this. I do have some “Product” insights, both about the Instaface mat itself and about the “interface” between the photographer and the people. The most important being that we must have a card with the URL of the Instafaces Facebook page the photographer can give to the people so they can see their pictures and spread the love, starting with you.

Like many horror stories, this one started with a stupid commitment I took on myself.

@yanivg challanged me, and I took an oath – I will not be visiting Twitter until we finally deliver Facebook Connect on AOL Answers. Oh, I was sure it will take us max 1-2 weeks – no big deal.

However, priorities changed and it ended up taking 3 months.

I did try Tweetpasana in the past, not tweeting for a month or so at a time. However, this time it was the real thing. I cut myself completely from Twitter, not even looking at it to see what others tweet.

We’ve met the challange, and I can tweet again! Yay!

Except…

The funny thing is that I find it hard to tweet now. My self-forced Twitter exile ended almost a month ago but I tweeted only once. You see, tweeting suddenly feels almost like shouting. It’s noisy. It actually feels like the first tweets I ever did back at 2007.

There were additional consequences. I noticed that I have an urge to unfollow every person I don’t care about on a personal level from my stream. After being away for 3 months from my stream, when I finally visited it again, it felt like “What are all those strangers doing here”. I’m tired of all those links and “valuable” tweets and I actually miss the days when Twitter was a window to people’s lives, as in a way to know what @idancohen was cooking for dinner.

Oh, I’m sure I missed a lot of “valuable” links and important industry news – but I think it was worth it.

I’m not going to tell you my life is changed, but I will recommend you consider trying this.
Why?  Because we’re the same people who spend our lives creating those social ecosystems and one of the most important things to keep (in any profession) is perspective and, as it is, the only way to have a proper perspective is to take a step back and look at things from afar.

Creating new products is a delicate balance between the future and the present. If you want to really push the envelope with a product you need to see beyond the current market, but if you look too far you’re giving people nothing to hang on as they transform from their current reality to the future your company is creating.

What fills that gap between future and present is good old storytelling. Any entrepreneur is, first of foremost, a great storyteller. For the entrepreneur storytelling is like a ferry enabling investors to cross that river that separates the present and the future and just like any ferry boarding the entrepreneur’s ferry will cost you, a sack of gold given for a promise of riches.

The Problem with stories though is that at some point you may start believing them yourself. When you’ve heard/told the story for too many times, you may stop questioning its validity or worse, stop asking what were the facts the story was span around.

Reality Check
Innovation and startups couldn’t exist without a touch of storytelling. What’s important is that you remember to conduct a reality check from time to time.  Make sure that your story, just like any great story, has a beginning, middle and end and at every stage of the story ask yourself if the facts indicate there is enough truth in your story.

It’s OK to change your story. It’s actually even OK to completely dump it and write a new story from scratch if you feel your product’s story has evolved from an inspiring piece of fictions to a piece of fantasy. It’s better you have the guts to face your investors/customers and tell them you want to share a new story with them than keep telling the same story hoping that if you tell is over and over again it will become a reality.

Never believe your own story blindly because once you do you’re in danger of finding yourself in a Never Ending Story.

What Facebook did, when they released Open Graph may have been too drastic. Instead of “taking the stairs” and guiding people from a semi private experience to a public experience, step by step, Facebook “took the elevator” and pressed the PUBLIC NOW button.

When people came out the elevator door, and saw the public reality, they where frightened. Messy integrations like the Yelp one did no good to relieve their fears and the public outcry started building up.

Personally I think that, despite the current outcry, 2 years from now, Facebook’s vision of “a web where social (public) is default” would be realized. The web will evolve from an opt-in to an opt-out experience.  An experience where, by default, you’re loged in to you favorite social network.

But until that day comes, and people get comfortable with being public, the current situation presents a great opportunity for Twitter.

Twitter has one major asset right now. 100 million people that understand the true meaning of PUBLIC. Those people are not scared when their status messages are publicly displayed for all to see and are perfectly OK with their “friends” list being public. They feel this way because they’ve been public on Twitter from day one. They’d been “imprinted” with public.

When you look at Twitter’s product roadmap in the last 2 years it looks as if they’ve been doing all they can to keep their product almost unusable. They’ve deprived people from the most basic features you’d expect in a social netwrok. I wonder what would happen if Twitter lost their product inhibitions and finally made Twitter the social network it can be?

The beauty is that they don’t need to sacrifice their core product and their simplicity. The experience you see when you land on twitter.com doesn’t need to change at all. The only thing Twitter needs to do is enrich the publishing options and take control over the second click, on what we see once we click links/images/videos etc.

So Twitter. These are some of the the features I would like to see. The features that may get people to use Twitter, instead of Facebook, as their main communication platform:

• Photo upload + Image galleries
• Comments + Discussion view
• Events
• Extended Tweets (AKA Facebook notes)

@twitter, you say you want to be the pulse of the planet? Well, my friends ARE part of this planet. You guys have a chance, a window of opportunity, to take 100 million people, and turn us to the best ever ambasdors of the “public web”, a web Mark dreams of, the web you already own.

All we’re asking for in return is the most basic features needed to express ourselves, engage in real conversation and keep in touch with our friends.