Lessons from LiveFromYou
Posted on Thursday, April 9th, 2009 at 16:33.
GoTV Networks terminated me and about 20% of its employees today. I was a front end developer on a product called LiveFromYou. GoTV gave me many opportunities to refine and strengthen my programming skills. It was my first experience out of college working on a long term consumer product.
During my 15 months, I observed fundamental problems in approach and process that I had never encountered doing freelance interactive design agency projects. Here are some of them:
Playing it safe means you’re probably not risking enough to become innovative. Apple takes risks by regularly challenging user interaction conventions and expectations. Sometimes it works, like the iPod. Sometimes it doesn’t, like the G4 Cube.
When something is new and different, a focus group isn’t going to be able to give you quantifiable opinions. And really, their opinions don’t matter. The early adopters who discover and embrace your product matter and they’ll sell your product better than you can if you listen to them.
There’s still lots of money being #2
is a pretty shitty motivator.
Start with a basic offering and grow it organically, not a colossal end goal that’s undefinable. “Release early. Release often.” You’ll be better in touch with your users’ desires. People like getting in early. You can be the first to market and build loyalty even if you don’t have much to offer just yet.
Know your monetization model and let everyone in on it. As a lowly developer, for some reason, this really bothered me.
Play to your strengths. You can’t be all things to all people. Someone is already doing something you’re doing better. Know when to cooperate instead of compete.
Unless the CEO can make a cartoon effect noise (e.g. boing, swoosh, pow) when playing with the UI, it’s not good enough. Just kidding!
All look like good lessons to me! Including the last one. (Not kidding. Very true for a lot of dot com style CEOs!)
Being one of the chosen fallen comrades of GoTV, I would like to chime in here as well.
Focus! Focus! Focus!
Your team needs to be on the same page with 1 defining leader who also works with the team. You can’t put your hand in too many cookie jars. Your liable to getting a sugar rush. Find a product that you know will sell, and exert all your energy to make that product the best thing you know how to make. When your satisfied with the outcome, then move to another project.
Monarchy is old school!
Listen to the lowly developer at the bottom of the food chain. We may not be high in the ranking, but we are getting our hands dirty everyday. We understand the technology, and understand our audience. Managers seem to make all the decisions without asking the people who really have experience in this area. Modern business mantra is “You need to be a Team Player”, but do we really work as a team?
Use your talent!
Too often we focus on just getting the job done. So the janitor must do the gardening, the secretary must do the accounting, and the CEO ends up washing the toilets. Put the talent in the right place. If your gift, like Jeremiah, is developing amazing user experiences on the web, then don’t have him fixing minor technological bugs, don’t put your database engineer on an Android Application Project, and don’t put your Web Developer on a full blown internal reporting system. You want quality not just to get it done.
Thanks for letting me rant.
Johnathan