The Chris Motes Blog

English Captions In Bangalore, India

  Hilarious 
  Originally uploaded by cmotes

On a recent trip to India, I was most thankful that the television programming had English captions.

Your Guide To The Internet

Take a look!

(Thanks Marc Andreessen)

Note To Music Industry: Watch Facebook And Learn

Recent announcements by Amazon (international roll-out of Amazon MP3 store) and Last.fm (listen to full-length tracks up to 3x before subscribing) are great moves for consumers.

And then there's Qtrax. 25 million songs, support from all the big record labels, and it's free!

I've tried to use QTrax today but can't:

Based on what I've read, here are a few observations:

1. The music is DRM'd, so the tracks wont work unless you play them in a proprietary player. YAMP (Yet Another Music Player). And...
2. QTrax says their music will be playable on an iPod at some point, but it's not there yet. Until that anouncement transforms into a feature, there's no iPod support.
3. It seems that the inputs into the P2P system are controlled by the labels, not by consumers. I must have bad info here - what's the point of P2P if the input streams are controlled? Seems that the music labels will have to seed the initial DRM'd music into the system... then QTrax offloads the bandwidth costs to consumers.
   
4. If this is P2P, does that mean that I have to wait for people who have the tracks I want to be online?
5. Will controlled input mean that I wont be able to find the super obscure long tail songs that me and only like 5 other people in the world are interested in?
6. Am I the only one that thinks that 25 million songs sounds ridiculously high? How many unique songs are in the QTrax index right now, at this very second? 25 million? Or are there 25 million potential songs in the index, but only [some number way less than 25M] actual and that 25M # is just an attention getter?

I wont be a total downer on QTrax before even trying it. The ad-supported model tells me that the record labels are starting to see the light. It just took them a ridiculously long time to start figuring it out. I'll be glad to take a look once it works on an iPod. And by the way QTrax - I'm unlikely to click on a banner ad, but I'll gladly pay for the music.

To the point: All of my questions above point to potential restrictions in QTrax's product.

Why play reindeer games with users?

Especially when Facebook is not. Facebook  just announced new client libraries that let users put Facebook apps on their own websites. Facebook has a degree of control over the apps, but they've opened up the distribution of those apps. This is kind of like being able to play Facebook on whatever music player you want. This is a great move. 

The music industry and their supporting cast should take note.

How to get that bug count down

From Seth Levine's blog:

"From my partner, Chris Wand , describing a program one of his companies put in place over the holiday to encourage employees to clear a bunch of outstanding bugs in their backlog:Anyone that wanted to fix a bug during their holiday break could earn $50/$75/$100 (depending on the severity of the bug) for each known bug they fixed (the catch was that QA had to approve the fix). The person that fixed the most bugs also earned an additional bonus (I think it was $500). They managed to clear about 100 bugs off their list… It was so successful, they’re thinking of implementing it at other times (i.e. over a long weekend, etc.—of course making sure that they don’t set it up so people are working on the bug fixes during normal working hours). "

How To Hire Product Managers

Here's a list of attributes that I use to evaluate product people in an interview, and in performance reviews.

I'm also avoiding all the standard flub like "team player".

Here's the list:

Empathy: Can this person do a Vulcan mind-meld into someone's head and figure out what they're thinking? Empathy helps you zero in on what matters to a consumer that will use your product, a salesperson that has to sell it, an engineer that has to build it, and so on. In an interview, I usually ask my empathy questions by getting the person to talk about a user they've built products for. If they can't make that user sound like a living breathing human being, someone they really know... this product person might be building stuff that doesn't fill the right need.

Intuition: Can this person read the tea leaves to know the answer to a question without having to test, research, poll, calculate, pontificate, etc.? No one knows everything. But great product people have an internal crystal ball that they'll use to predict an outcome. Good intuition also helps a product person predict what will go wrong - very valuable in making sure use cases are covered. Intuition is hard to get to in an interview... but strategy / consulting-ish kind of questions seem best at surfacing it. Example: "Would you enter this market and why/why not?" kind of questions.

"Spock": Can this person produce beautiful, simple solutions to complex problems with logical, rational thought processes? Spock can. Spock can make fact-based arguments ("I think it therefore it must be true" perspective is grounds for immediate disqualification). Spock is about knowing what the important levers are. A Spock can produce usable insights from big nasty datasets. You can get to a person's Spock rating with questions on something you know the person isn't familiar with. Example: a product person who hasn't worked much with email marketing products should be able to list out the basic levers without much problem: number of subscribers, delivery frequency, open rate and CTR.

Mojo: Does this person have an aura of confidence, humility and smarts? Great product people are confident but not arrogant, assertive but not arrogant, and smart but not elitist. They're mature in their thinking. They make direct eye contact. They've stood in front of the room of important people, taken the hard questions, and answered them.  They ask "why?" when the rest of the room wants to but doesn't. They're comfortable stating that the emperor has no clothes on. Their autopilot is off. When there is a problem, they are the one that people look to for answers. You can gauge presence in an interview by pressing the person on a point where your opinions differ.

Drive: Can this person find a way to make things happen? Great product people don't rationalize failure - they recognize failure and then intercept it. Great product people don't explain away bad product launches by saying that QA didn't catch this bug or that bug. Instead, they reviewed the test cases, did plenty of testing alongside QA and went through the test case results line by line. Great people don't explain away scope misses by saying that engineering didn't build what was in the PRD. Instead, they walked engineering through the entire PRD and tested the product in the development environment to make sure it was doing what it should. I try to get a sense for this trait by looking for examples of the person playing out of position ("the QA person got sick the week of the release, so I stayed up all night and did the QA myself").

Curiosity: Great product people like to try new things and understand how things work. They like to comment on why a business model is good or bad, or how the design of an elevator could be improved. They have suggestions for the latest Apple product. They have a natural curiosity to learn and explore. You can gauge curiosity by the questions that the person asks you. No matter what company, some smart person who doesn't work there but is considering it should have questions about how you do business.

Trust: Absolutely most important quality. If you can't trust someone, don't hire them. Ever. Every non-trustworthy person in your org is sucking away productivity from good people. Beware the schemers and those who'll spend their time in closed-door conversations trying to jockey their position. In an interview, look for transparency as a good first signal of trust.

In my experience, great product people score really well on these attributes.

The Need For Speed: Fast Websites Rule

In mid 2005 I was a young Yahoo! PM with a slow website on my hands. People at Yahoo! told me to talk to this guy Steve Souders about how to get really fast. Me and the dev team did, and with his help we trimmed a ton of response time off our site by following Steve's 15 rules for faster-loading websites (I think there were only 12 rules then). Steve is a great guy and everyone involved in the design or management of websites should read his rules.

For those of you who rationalize your slow page performance with ads that make you money, you're talking to the hand. Faster ads are going to make you even more money.

Also check out YSlow for FireBug - it's a cool tool for seeing how your site stacks up against the 15 rules.

Book: Collapse, How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed

I picked up this book in Fort Meyers, FL this past December while visiting my in-laws. The author, Jared Diamond, writes that the root causes of societal collapses points back to some combo of these five factors:

1. Human environmental impacts, such as deforestation
2. Climate change
3. Attacks by neighboring enemies
4. Loss of support from neighboring friendly societies
5. How a society anticipates and reacts to these problems

I'm about halfway through it now and it is excellent. He tells stories about a bunch of societies that have collapsed, then goes into root causes and ties it all back into these five factors above. So far we've covered Easter Island (fascinating!), Pitcairn and Henderson Islands, the Anasazi of New Mexico, the Maya in Mexico and I'm in the middle of Nordic Greenland. This is a great read!

Collapse on Amazon

The Most Important Step In Landing A Plane: The Cross Check

"Flight attendants prepare doors and cross check"

What the hell is a cross check? What are the consequences of not doing a cross check? If the pilot forgets to signal to the flight attendants to do the cross check, does everyone just stand around and hang out?

I'm guessing that it's a glance out the window to make sure that the gate is actually there. If so, kinda sad that they have to be reminded. "Aw man, remember that time I opened the door and let people off and there was no gate there? Everyone just fell off the plane. It sucked."

HP's "All-In-One But Not A Printer" Officejet at the Wynn Hotel

I'm staying at the Wynn this weekend in Las Vegas. First visit to the hotel. Lisa and I are going to see the Beatles Love show at the Mirage tonight. I bought tickets for it and had them delivered to me via email. I've got to print the tickets... fortunately there is a printer in my room. Here it is:

As you can see from the label, it's an all-in-one which means it has at least a printer and a fax. I looked in the back for a cable to plug it into my computer... and it's not there. Looked in all the drawers, all around. No cable. Just an empty port.

So I called down to the front desk:

Me: "Hi is there a cable missing here for this printer?"
Front Desk: "No, it's not a printer, just a fax."
Me: "Oh OK, my mistake. I was confused by the "all-in-one" lettering on the front.:
Front Desk: "Yes, sorry, it's only a fax."
Me: "Does it do anything else besides fax?"
Front Desk: "No"
Me: "OK, so it's an all-in-one fax?"
Front Desk: "Yes, that's right"
Me: "Perfect! Thanks. How would you suggest I print something from my email then?"
Front Desk: "Use our Business Center. $1 a minute for internet access. 15 minute minimum".

No need to argue with the messenger here. But this is ridiculous. I'm paying a pretty decent nightly rate here. I'm likely to drop $200 on the BlackJack tables tonight. I spent $500+ on airlines tickets, $350 on dinner last night, another $150 tonight at least, about $400 for the massages we'll get in a few, and I just paid $11 for 24 hours of internet access and $8 for some potato chips that were billed to my room when I took them off of their mission impossible weight sensors that now replace my room fridge.

All of this money going out of my pocket and into the Las Vegas economy, and this all-in-one fax which has paper in it waiting to print out an incoming fax can't be used as a regular printer because you want me to go down to the business center and pay $15 to print out my tickets? Come on Steve Wynn! What are you thinking?

It's not that $15 is too much - it's that you tried to bill me for something that should have been included free in my room and then you made me walk 15 minutes each way down to the business center to accomplish this simple task. When your customers leave your hotel, you want them to think about what a great experience the hotel was. You don't want them talking about printing difficulties and unecessary charges.

Top Traffic Movers

Compete's Top Movers In Traffic For 2007

Porn, Communication & Community are the big movers.

I didn't know what redtube was until i clicked on it. Now I know. Waiting for email from big brother.