Hey, happy Monday,
Have you noticed that one thing has disappeared from our days?
The coffee machine. Or at any rate that break from work, during work, in which you could meet colleagues and not treat them as colleagues, you could not talk about work, or maybe you could actually work.
Perhaps, you might even be back in the office and have access to the machine again, but I am sure there is not the same movement as before.
What replaced it?
If nothing, why?
For the first time in our careers we spent more time at home than in the office.
Clients and colleagues entered our kitchen from the webcam and became for all intents and purposes new virtual (not so much) and distributed roommates.
Since yesterday then summer has arrived, and so I thought as I read this article, if it is now normal to work from home, what is stopping us from working where we want to?
The important thing is that it does not become work everywhere and all the time!
It is not enough to have the computer with you, but to adopt a new set of rules.
You could read this book which is a milestone on the subject but before the entire culture of your work group changes you might decide to adopt some new principles.
Here are mine, feel free to take inspiration:
- Asynchronous communication. Interrupt your own and others’ day only for really important things.
- Synchronize on the of goals, not tasks.
- Continuous and automatic and constant check-ins to transfer the feeling of progress.
Want a guide to acquiring the new rhythm as a team? In January I wrote one in which I suggested you schedule three short meetings (now calls), one for each P in the framework of STRTGY i.e. People, Processes and Products. You can read it In Note No.3.
It works, only if.
In the note No.16 I was telling you about 3 low-risk methods to innovate and that consistently confirm their effectiveness. Let’s start with those again.
I was telling you about Facebook and the way they work with carbon paper. They had just launched a Zoom clone called Rooms that is now already on your phone without you having decided to install it and a Pinterest one called Hobbi that nobody has heard of yet.
Google at that time also launched Tangi, which is supposed to compete with TikTok but for do-it-yourselfers. And today it launches a new one called Keen which seems definitely done better and is a remix of a bookmark organizer and Google Keep with the addition of artificial intelligence.
The reason Facebook and Google can afford it (and so can you probably) is because in terms of distribution they will have no friction in making the new products not only accessible but even integrated into their core services.
Although it is not a recipe for sure success, see the Google+ flop, it is a competitive advantage that may seem unfair and that they exploit constantly.
For example–where did you first see the commercial for Stories, the Snapchat clone? Nowhere! When you read the news it was already in the Instagram app.
You may not know that in the Google alphabet, companies with the letter A include. Area120 which describes itself as an experimental program to help small teams build new products in an entrepreneurial environment. They build, launch and refine ideas that otherwise would not see the light of day. It really sounds like the description of the perfect R&D department! This is where Keen was born!
Google whose mission is to organize all the world’s information does so by starting with organizing your information.
Your every behavior is meticulously classified and reorganized to map out new behavioral habits that are used on the one hand to serve you perfectly aligned lifestyle advertisements, and on the other hand to become an integral part of your life.
If you visit this link from Chrome as a logged-in Google user, you will be able to discover Collections, you will already find a lot about you in it! Collections is a product launched in stealth mode in 2018, relaunched again this January ( Techcruch) who does the same thing as Keen.
You may not have known about it, but if you own an Android phone (stock or AndroidOne) and swipe right from the home you can access the news section that does nothing but show you interesting articles by relating your browsing, to your interests and location.
If one of these products gets traction, it will be easy to scale up and neutralize the competition!
Another area in which this phenomenon occurs systematically and predictably is in personal banking and payment solutions.
It started with Apple copying Paypal with Apple Pay on the same job-to-be-done, that of paying without giving your card to anyone. Then Google with Google Pay while Facebook is still working on it.
Then Apple launches its card, and behind Google with Google Card, but also Samsung with Samsung Money and Huawei with Huawei Card.
It might work for you, too, but…
This way of innovation works not necessarily because the copied solution works better than the original, but only because it can spread quickly and cheaply. No competitor can beat the cost of access to the channel as much as the channel owners themselves.
You, too, could adopt this way of doing innovation, essentially giving outsourced R&D to your competitors but only do it if you are sure you can bear the cost of entering a market already populated with solutions similar to the one you are offering.
The cheaper alternative is to learn to listen and one’s customers, who with their problems, their unmet needs, their desires, are the true innovators of every business.
In the next note I will leave you with my notes on how to listen to them and translate them into concrete actions to prioritize the activities to focus on in the Q3 that is about to begin. Be sure to open it!
Good work!
Make yourself heard.
