Lean Solutions
| In the book Lean Solutions James Womack and Daniel Jones start out by noting that they themselves are customers with problems to solve, and they are quite annoyed with the amount of hassle that is involved in being a consumer these days. From their vantage point as customers, they have this message for those of us who provide them with goods and services:[1]
Let's take a look at a company that seems to have gotten this message several years ago.
In 1999 Google joined the crowded field of search engines with the lofty goal of making the world's information accessible to everyone. The company decided that in order to do this, it needed to focus on two things: 1) provide more relevant search results than anyone else, and 2) provide a truly engaging user experience. The strategy worked. In the last issue of 1999, PC Magazine awarded Google a technical excellence award in Web applications. As PC Magazine said, "It doesn't take many visits to Google to get hooked. And who can avoid getting hooked on a search engine that consistently returns good results?"[3] The award drew attention to Google and started its meteoric climb to the top of the search engine industry.
Google's corporate philosophy, published on its Web site, begins with these four points:[4]
In its early days, Google resisted strong pressure to compromise on the user experiencepop-up and banner ads, all the rage at the time, were strictly banned because users found them annoying. Google has always been fanatical about speed. Any noticeable delay in responding to a search request would waste users' time. While most of their competitors were creating portals, Google kept its home page extremely simple: one logo, 30 small words, and a single search box with a couple of buttons. Google didn't want to distract users with extra features. Finally, Google was really, really good at finding relevant search results, and it got better over time. The founders had developed a unique way of ranking search resultsthey tallied the number of "votes" for a page, that is, the number and importance of references to the page. The page with the most votes won. As time went on, Google continually refined its ability to have people vote on pages and ranked them accordingly. Google applies the same four principles in its product development process:
Consider Google's approach to adding maps to its repertoire of capabilities. In March 2004 Google launched a beta version of Google Local, a tool to restrict a search to a geographic area. In October of the same year, Google acquired the company Keyhole, giving it access to detailed, worldwide, satellite imagery. In February 2005 Google added mapping capability to Google Local. In April 2005 it added satellite imagery just six months after acquiring Keyhole. Two months later, Google Earth was launched, packaging satellite images, maps, and local searches in an innovative and engaging desktop interface that imitates a globe and streams data from the Internet. Google focuses on its strategic vision: Organize the world's information, and make it universally accessible and useful. To support that vision, Google develops both internal tools and Web-based products that involve a mix of sophisticated algorithms, complex hardware, and well-designed software. Products and tools are developed quickly and incrementally by small teams that include product management, design, engineering, testing, launch, and continuing engineering. Teams are encouraged to release products before they are fully refined in order to get feedback from users. Google's software has a reputation for elegant design and high quality, and it invariably delights users. By all measures, Google is a very successful organization (as of this writing), and more importantly, its products have changed the way the world works. Google continually introduces new products despite the fact that it doesn't have a long-term product map and it expects technical staff to spend 20 percent of their time on their own projects. The company decides what products to work on much the same way it ranks search results: priority is based on the interest of development teams and number of users attracted to the product. We believe that Google has been successful because it gives users exactly the information they want, when and where they want it, with no hassle, and no wasted time or annoying ads. Google is easy enough for a small child to use. And it solves the whole problemchecks spelling, translates languages, converts units, contains a dictionary, calculator, and mapsthe very definition of a "lean solution." From Concept to CashLet's take a walk through the product development timeline of Google's first offering and see how it worked. ConceptIn 1996, Larry Page and Sergey Brin joined forces to address a problem they sharedsearching the Internet. They were graduate students in computer science at Stanford University, doing research into data mining, so they decided to try some data mining on the Internet. Two years later they published the paper that laid out in quite a bit of detail the product concept behind Google.[8]
Coming up with a brilliant product concept is the start of innovation. This can be a long process of research, or it can be a stroke of insight. Companies can create conditions for innovation, but there is no magic formula for coming up with great insights. However, a flash of insight is hardly enough: "Innovation is 5 percent inspiration and 95 percent perspiration."[9] The problem in most companies is that people with inspiration do not have the time or charter to pursue it. Companies that routinely turn inspiration into innovation create time and space for people and teams with good ideas to incubate those ideas and turn them into a product concept.
FeasibilityGoogle, like Dell, started up in a dorm room. When the first Google interface was brought up on the Stanford University Web site, the data mining PCs were in Page's room. Just like Michael Dell, Page and Brin soon left school to start a business. The worst that could happen was that they would have to go back and complete their degrees. Google was founded in late 1998, but for almost a year the new company's product was labeled "beta," while Page and Brin explored the feasibility of the product. Google began to get media attention, traffic grew, and Page and Brin secured a round of financing. Finally the beta label was removed and the research project turned into the foundation of a real product. The feasibility stage of product development is important, because it provides space for experimentation. Note that the feasibility stage is not a paper study. Concepts are fine, but there is nothing quite like checking things out in the real world.
This is also the time for systems design, a critically important discipline that many companies seem to do without. What are the major features of the business process, the key modules of the hardware? What interfaces will the system have, and how will they interact? How will the software architecture support the product? What are the key constraints of the system, and how will they be addressed? An excellent systems design is the foundation of an excellent product. It should neither be done by amateurs nor by arms-length experts. Rather, it should be done by seasoned designers who know the systems design will evolve as the product emerges and who know how to make sure that evolution is taken into account so it can proceed smoothly. PilotGoogle started with a page rank system based on Web references. As soon as it went live, the scientists started collecting data on everything they could think of: which results were used and which were not, what kind of phrases were used to find particular results, what kind of misspellings were the most common, how fast results were returned, how fast people responded, and so on. Google continuously tuned its ranking system and hardware and software architecture based on this extensive data analysis. It developed tools to facilitate the development of applications capable of accessing its vast data structures. It developed many trial applications and put them in Google Labs so users could vote with their attention and improve them with their feedback. And it experimented widely to discover a way to bring in advertising revenue that users would find useful instead of distracting. No one expects fully formed products to emerge from the feasibility stage of product development. All that feasibility proves is that the product "could" work. At that point the real learning of product development begins. Good product development is composed of discovery cycles of trial and learning that increasingly refine the design of the product. The objective is not to complete the product but to get it to a point where a set of capabilities can be tested in a pilot. Through a series of increasingly complete pilots the product emerges. The pilot stage of software development is more likely to involve actual release to customers than the equivalent stage in hardware development, although as we will see in Chapter 8, the Polaris submarine produced a series of working submarines, starting three years into a nine-year program. Even if a hardware pilot is not released to customers, it's a good idea to plan hardware pilots that integrate embedded software as early in the development program as possible. Releasing software to customers during the pilot stage is almost always beneficial, as long as the systems design was done well during the feasibility stage. Of course, early release is not always practical. Embedded software, for example, can't really be released before the hardware. Games cannot be released in a partially done state, even to reviewers, because first impressions are almost everything in the game world, and shelf life is very short. But in most situations, we would be strongly biased in favor of evaluating software with alpha and beta releases. In particular, in legacy conversion projects you never know how your software will work until it is running on the real (usually messy) database with real users, at least in a mirrored environment. CashGoogle eventually started making a lot of moneymoney generated by the value it provides to its advertisers and users. Google had to experiment and learn for a good while before it figured out how to take the hassle out of advertising and make ads as relevant as search results. Google is not without competition, and to keep the cash flowing, it will have to continue to provide extraordinary value to its users. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 89