Learning from products named after kitchen appliances.

By Andrew Cross, Ph.D , with significant input and suggestions from Steve Bowie . All opinions expressed are those of the authors and not of their employers.

Embarking on a life of crime.

The best stories always have a moral. And the best morals always have a story, and this story begins with my life of crime.

It all began during the final years of my Ph.D. In the evenings, I began working on a set of plugins for 3D applications. The very first one simulated depth-of-field rendering; subsequent projects simulated lens flares and more advanced lighting effects.

Of course, this was in the very early days of the internet. There was no such thing as an “app store” back then, or any convenient online platform one could use to sell such things. Undaunted, I created one of these new-fangled things called “web pages,” and just made my tools freely available by download. In an accompanying file called a “readme,” I politely hinted that anyone who appreciated the tools was welcome to send $10 by mail – never really expecting that it might ever yield anything meaningful.

Much to my surprise, one cold day was warmed considerably when an envelope with a $10 bill enclosed arrived in my mailbox. Adding to my shock, another like it arrived a few days later … then another, and another, and so on. I was well on my path to being the first dot-com billionaire!

Some appreciative users sent cheques while others just stuffed cash in random currencies from around the world into an envelope. And each Saturday morning, I went to the bank to deposit the week’s proceeds. This strange guy who appeared every Saturday morning to deposit wads of small denomination bills from all around the world must have made for some interesting breakroom chats at the Royal Bank of Scotland. The bank tellers were always very polite … doubtless in the thrall of the dark criminal that came by each week.

Phase 2.

This early success inspired me to tackle the next step in my strategy – a much more ambitious project to develop a video compositing system that could rival the complex high-end systems which inevitably, back then, ran on super-expensive Silicon Graphics workstations. As I started building my system, I had a million ideas about cool things to add; and I added them all! It could do particle effects, and animation, and offered advanced color tools; at some point it even allowed you to build 3D scenes and provided built-in ray tracing.

My ambition was to surpass the state-of-the-art systems of the day. This was very much in line with the mindset existing in the high-end production market at that time: You need to fashion incredibly complex products with enormous feature lists that will enable any artist to do anything they might ever imagine. There was a problem with this thinking, however. An unwritten yet inevitable downside resulting from this mindset (which persists even today) is that the products ended up so complex that no mortal would ever be able to use them effectively.

A few years later, having finished my studies it was time to look for a real job that paid the bills. Rather than preparing a pretty resume listing all my studies and hobbies, I determined to take my compositing system to all the biggest companies in the market and offer it to them in return for a job. I hoped that this would lead to me being paid to complete the massive undertaking I had already begun and supply the resources I needed to do so. By pure luck (itself an amazing story), I met the amazing owner of a small company in Texas where I went to work. There, it was my good fortune to learn more than I had ever imagined possible about how to run a company with a purpose – that being to make products that mean something to people – and that the approach to building a product that tries to grow by solving everyone’s problems rarely works.

All the things that people want in the box.

Orthodoxy suggests that to succeed, companies must listen to the market, canvas their customers, and research both the competition and of course the product’s technical requirements. If you’ve done that, you’re all set to write a 90-page Marketing Requirements Document that answers every conceivable question. Your managers love this, and your investors expect it. Surely no proposal so authoritatively supported by endless quotes of authoritative-sounding data sources could ever fail, and your document’s eye-popping charts and tables back up this proud assertion.

My post-graduate lesson began the first time that I attended the National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas. NAB, held each April, is the largest tradeshow in the video market. Every major vendor in the broadcast industry comes to show off their new, shiny products. And naturally, all the major broadcasters are there too, offering a target-rich environment of important customers eager to talk about their needs, and what we vendors should do to address them. As a young software engineer attending for the very first time, it was completely overwhelming but very exciting.

One important impression from that very first show still stands out to me all these years later. All the big-name broadcast interests approached us – a tiny little underdog company from Texas that made a product named after a Toaster. And what did they want? Without exception, they urged us to look at the truly big players in the market and make our products look and work like theirs.

I distinctly remember one of the largest names in film production telling me (a novice software engineer barely qualified to even talk to him) that if we would just build our product with the same features and workflow as our larger competitors, he could easily migrate his productions to our more affordable products – because he would be able to hire operators already familiar with how they worked. Similarly, the head of one of the largest TV networks insisted that our integrated live production systems should work like everyone else’s because that was just the way his TV stations worked, and he would never change them.

The message was crystal clear. These huge customers, who really could make us successful, needed products that looked and worked like those already on the market. They had established ways of working and, to compete, we had to give them what they were already used to. You might say that they wanted us to think inside the box that defined the current market.

And so, since we did want to succeed, we set out to build what would become the first integrated live video production system hosted on a computer. Game on! Our goal was to craft nothing less than a product that would do almost everything they had asked for. We were going to fill that box.

A tree falls in the forest, but no one hears.

From that point on, our product started to evolve and expand dramatically. Within a year or two, it allowed you to connect lots of cameras (using diverse connections and video formats), performed advanced video effects (and included the tools to create these), provided on-screen monitoring, media playback and recording, luma and chroma keying, virtual sets, and tools to create video titles and features to display them. We even built a sophisticated NLE (non-linear editing system) that some still swear by today, and almost as an afterthought, tossed in advanced tools like waveform/vectorscope monitors and proc amps. Oh, and – lest we forget – we also wanted it all to be really easy to use; so, this ‘feature’ was tacked onto the end of the endless list of things we needed to implement.

We then braced ourselves for the massive firework displays, parades, awards, and worldwide celebrations that would celebrate our astounding achievement in launching our revolutionary product. Every one of those huge TV stations and important producers would just obviously start using our new product which did everything they had asked for, and that they could ever imagine.

And so, version 1.0 entered the annals of history. To this day, I have no idea how we got so far with a very small (and amazing) team in just about two years. In that seminal version, we had delivered more than I’d ever imagined possible. We had provided pretty much everything a TV station needed to produce a show but, by implementing it all in software running on a computer, we made it much more affordable.

Our sales team and channel partners couldn’t wait to show the world. We were certain we had done everything right: we listened to the customers, and we made the product they had told us they needed. And a certain young software engineer, justifiably proud of his team, thought ‘Mission accomplished!’ To showcase it all, we even produced a really cool video (aptly named “Revolution!”) extolling our wonderful system’s countless merits.

Sadly, though, the revolution didn’t quite kick off the brave new world as hoped. Our amazing system did attract a near-fanatical following who ‘got it’; but the broader broadcast market felt it still needed a few additional capabilities. It ran on a computer; so obviously it needed to be more robust; how can you trust a system built for computer games to run a TV station? Other customers needed more video inputs. Still, others did not like our video codecs and wanted more file-capture options. One set of customers wanted better 3D transitions, while others just couldn’t live without more overlay channels.

Undeterred, our plucky little band of software developers went back to work – to better fulfill our original mission. Version 2.0 shipped a little over a year later. Surely the (slightly overdue, but totally deserved) parades celebrating our triumphant disruption of the broadcast continuum were at hand. And yet (heavy sigh), the fanfare was still a little more subdued than we’d hoped. Apparently, in the minds of the really big potential customers (whose minds, inconveniently, commanded their wallets), we had still missed a few key requirements. Enter version 3.0.

Hold the pyrotechnics. To the surprise of absolutely none of you by now, I was soon leading the software engineering team working on version 4. There was (you guessed it!) a long list of things that we still needed to add. Still bent on changing the world, our obvious next step was to burn through our new to-do list. Then, one memorable day, my boss approached me with a truly terrible idea.?

Bad(?) ideas.

The disastrous idea was to take everything we had built, remove most of it, and repackage it with a tightly locked-down configuration. How insane is that? Strip out many of the features and all the flexibility and target a narrower market. That’s just nuts – but wait, there’s more! Even worse, we’d sell this version of the product for three times as much as its far more feature-rich predecessor.

None of this made any sense to me. Who in their right mind would buy a new product which does far less than the previous one, yet costs far more? But the boss is the boss, and he had changed the mission for our product – which, being honest, was informal in those days anyway – but that change in direction taught me more than we would have ever expected.

The adjustment seemed subtle, but it had a massive impact. Where previously we had targeted “broadcasters” (who had proven themselves insatiable), our new focus was to enable “people”– not broadcasters, not technicians, not the Illuminati, not even nerds … just people, to make broadcast-quality video. This minuscule change forced us to dramatically reconsider the product itself.

Somewhat in shock, I took the new plan to the team. As best I could, I explained that we were going to eliminate almost all the configurability and half the features that we had provided. Instead, we would design and build a system tailored to a more specific need – which was for a much broader set of customers than before yet necessitated much narrower product requirements. We would limit the feature set to functions that we decided were essential, and we would ship it in a single, pre-defined configuration that users could not change. I told you it was a terrible idea.

Just under a year later, NAB rolls around again. Having been to a few of these events by now, I was considerably less nervous. No longer a fresh graduate in over my head, I understood how the industry worked. I had met most of our customers and resellers and knew a lot of the big broadcasters quite well too. I had spent the past few years of my life trying to build products that satisfied feature requests from every one of them.

Even so, after the traditional ‘all-nighter’ spent readying our demos for the show, I boarded my flight to Vegas without sleep and with significant trepidation. With every fiber of my being, I knew that our new feature-reduced product that cost more was not what these customers wanted.

I stayed in Vegas for about 4 days, then returned to my hotel room to pack and head to the airport. This time we had won more awards than we ever won at a single show. There was far more interest in this new product than anything we’d ever shown previously. As I left my room, I called my boss and apologized for being so wrong. I’d come to the realization that my entire prior experience with customers had taught me the wrong lesson.

Not only did this product succeed but, in retrospect, this experience taught me lessons that have guided my efforts on every product I have worked on since. Whereas the earlier product was a multi-tool tool a skilled user could accomplish just about anything with, the new system’s requirements were carefully curated to fulfill a much clearer mission. Consequently, it almost wrote its own easily articulated product story. This approach changed the company beyond all recognition, established our beachhead on a brand new and about-to-burgeon market, and the product involved remains a market leader more than a decade later. It also changed my mind about how to develop products that matter to customers.

Bad ideas that teach you good things.

Our company had just discovered the hard way that a well-chosen mission and clear focus on whom we are solving a problem for – and why – is far more important than a huge compendium of features will ever be. With that mission statement clearly articulating who and what our product was for, we could set product requirements decisively. Although this new system did less than the Toaster (in all its permutations), the things it did, it did very well – and the reduced complexity made it authentically (drumroll, please) ‘Easy to Use’! In turn, this gave us a very simple story to tell about it. And the best stories – the ones that people want to be part of – not only have morals, but they are also always simple.

In retrospect and to be completely candid, that first release had a lot of flaws and limitations. Yet, being strongly on mission, its essential message shone so brightly that it eclipsed all those shortcomings (which didn’t matter all that much anyway, because it was so innovative that it had no competitor).

Whenever we begin to consider a product’s requirements, we face virtually infinite choices. Every user wants to tell you about a unique set of essential features which, all too often, are just that – unique, and important to that one person. As a leader in any company, your job each day is to choose which paths will lead to success, which features your engineers should implement, where your marketing and sales team should focus, how much effort you dedicate to supporting your products, and a million more details – and every single alternative has some value.

The challenge is not which paths to take, but rather developing the clarity of purpose that compels you to discard all those paths you should not take. This sounds easy and obvious to say but so very hard in practice because we want to do what others ask.

A well-crafted mission works in the same way. Given finite time and resources, things that are not vital to the mission must be set aside, which forces you to make important choices. Having a great mission that you know will change your customers’ lives, and you have something to judge every product decision against, an essential benchmark for every individual in any role in the company. Any idea that is raised – however seductive – can be evaluated as to whether it contributes to the mission or is, in reality, just a distraction. This is equally true whether the strategies you form to accomplish your mission involve a $10 plugin, a series of stepping stones to grander long-term goals, or multiple missions in different divisions that still all contribute to an overarching global intention.

To underline one more benefit of this approach: Every product I have ever worked on lists ease of use somewhere in its marketing claims. Sadly this has largely become a throwaway line. We all agree that every feature added to a product needs to be easy to use; but it must be completely flexible, too – and only the bravest will contemplate sacrificing an important feature for the sake of simplicity. Really understanding (and adhering to) the mission brings Occam’s razor-like clarity to product decisions, without which ease-of-use claims are usually just meaningless boilerplate.

We took a product that did everything, took most of the features out - and charged more. But in doing so gained purpose and clarity that have guided every product I had worked on since then. All decisions become easy if you know exactly what you are doing and why it will improve the lives of your customers. Once you do that you will find that not only are you listening to your customers, but they also are now listening to you.