Joe Cotellese

  • What online services exist to help identify and segment customers for a product?

    What online services exist to help companies understand, identify and segment their customers before the product is actually developed?

    One of the major difficulties we face as a small startup company is identifying our  target customers and understand who they are.

    Sure, getting out of the office, doing the footwork and talking to as many people we can find helps, and is the right thing to do.
    But it could be a real time saver if there were online services which could narrow our search, help us focus on specific groups and test our hypothesis.

    I would like to know if you are aware of any solutions like that.
    Thanks in advance!
    View Question on Quora
  • "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword. If you would take a man's life, you owe it to him to look into his eyes and hear his final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps the man does not deserve to die." - Ned Stark
  • “If one does not know to what port one is sailing, no wind is favorable." - Socrates
    💬

  • Stop Treating Your Users Like Children

    I spent about 15 minutes yesterday bulk deleting photos from Google+. Each time I clicked delete on a photo the computer so kindly asked me "Are you sure you want to do this?" I dutifully clicked "Yes", as I've done thousands of times over the last 20+ years.

    Then, it hit me. Why am I still doing this? It’s 2013.

    If my computer were a sentient being and asked me to confirm every time I took some slightly dangerous action I would respond with something very sarcastic. “No, I don’t really want to do this. I just love clicking buttons.” Actually, I don’t. It made me feel a little like this guy.

    Why do we continue to think that we know our users better than they do? Why are we treating our users like children that we must protect because they aren’t able to protect themselves?

    Actually, that’s really not what’s going on. I’ve designed enough product to know that we’re not all sitting around thinking “Poor users, they just don’t know any better.” I think there is a much simpler explanation.

    We are lazy.

    Why are we lazy? It’s just so much easier to specify that a developer throw up a confirmation box then think through the problem. The thing is, it really doesn’t need much thought at all. The pattern for dealing with safely managing destructive actions has existed for almost as long as the computer.

    It’s called Undo.

    Ah, the Undo. You have saved my butt more times than I can count. And that’s exactly what you are there for. You are like Lindsay Lohan’s personal assistant. Never seen but always there to clean up the mess she makes.

    Why doesn’t every application implement Undo? Well, building an Undo system isn’t easy. It’s actually kind of a pain and you must plan for it up front. Despite that, every destructive action should have an Undo function. Why?

    Because your users have conditioned themselves to just blindly click on dialog boxes without reading them. Especially if they need to click many of them in a single session. They may just end up doing this.

    Confirmation boxes are a way for the product team to wash their hands of any responsibility for the actions their users take.

    Undo however, puts the responsibility back in the hands of the computer, the software team and the product owners. It’s harder to implement but provides a much better experience for people like myself.

    Exceptional design, not designing for exceptions.

    In the example I mentioned at the beginning, I needed to bulk delete my files. I clicked, confirmed, clicked, confirmed until I deleted each file. That was normal usage. The exception is a click that accidentally deleted a file. Despite that, the developers thought that I would need hand holding because I would potentially shoot myself in the foot each time I deleted a file.

    Just let me delete the files! If I click on something by mistake I’m going to realize it. I can then just click the Undo button and poof, the file is back. It collapses 20 button clicks down to 10 + 1 undo. This is a much politer user experience.

    The Undo has been around a long time. If your application needs to do something destructive, consider implementing Undo before putting up a confirmation box. Doing so will go a long way toward treating your users like peers instead of children.

     

  • Never worry about your site going down again

    A few months ago my website was hacked. I didn’t realize this for a few weeks because I don’t check it very often. It occurred to me the other day that I could use Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts to keep an eye on my website. The alert system will notify me when something goes wrong.

    This technique is also good to notify you in case you forget to renew your domain name (which I’ve also done.)

    Here is how to set it up.

    Open up your analytics dashboard for the site you want to monitor. Click on Intelligence Alerts as shown in the screen shot below.

    Google Intelligence Alerts

    Then, setup your alert as follows.

    1. Choose the property or properties that you want to moni1. tor.
    2. Set the period to1. Day
    3. Set the alert to go to email or even better, your mobile.
    Then, set the Alert Conditions as follows.
    • This applies to “All traffic”
    • Alert me when visits “is less than” "1"
    When you are done, it should look like this screenshot.

    Google Analytics - Intelligence Alert

    Click Save alert and you’re ready to go.

    Do you have any cool Google Analytics tricks? Let me know in the comments.

  • Enlightenment

    “Before enlightenment; chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment; chop wood, carry water.”

  • Learning OS X?

    I dusted off an old website this weekend. Cleaned up some content and relaunched it. The site is LearningOSX.com. I started it a few years ago when I switched from a PC to a Mac, grew tired of posting content and let it sort of gather weeds.

    If you are a Mac geek and want to learn some of what I know about using the Mac, check it out.

     

  • Peter Senge on Product Vision

    “A vision is truly shared when you and I have a similar picture and are committed to one another having it, not just to each of us, individually, having it” - Peter Senge

  • Do product managers need to have more power inside Google?

    Do product managers need to have more power inside Google?

    No, I don't think so. We bring together a team of people who are really passionate about [a] subject. I think it's interesting: We still don't do very high-definition product specs. If you write a 70-page document that says this is the product you're supposed to build, you actually push the creativity out with process. The engineer who says, you know what, there's a feature here that you forgot that I would really like to add. You don't want to push that creativity out of the product. The consensus-driven approach where the team works together to build a vision around what they're building and still leaves enough room for each member of the team to participate creatively, is really inspiring and yields us some of the best outcomes we've had.
    via Inside Google's New-Product Process - Businessweek.

    I wonder if 7 years later that is still true?

  • How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work — Medium

    Great article on #productmanagement.

    • The myth of productivity: means you won’t complete the most important things because group parallelization will occur based on erroneous scoping and estimation.
    • The myth of productivity: means you will hemorrhage what precious output you have with reckless abandon into dozen of disconnected initiatives, pet projects, and low-priority tasks.
    • The myth of productivity: makes more external commitments than you can fulfill, introducing more urgency but no more value to your work, preventing new opportunities, and dooming medium-term projects to the murky unforgiving sea of “long term projects”.
    Dealing with the myths:
    • My rule of thumb is to take a list of to-dos, cut it in half, and double the time estimate. Most of the time, it’s eerily on-point. Hey, you can always add more in. This is always less expensive than taking things out.
    How the Productivity Myth is Killing Your Startup — about work — Medium.

  • The Secrets of What Makes a Product Go Viral

    Jonah Berger, an assistant professor of marketing at Wharton just wrote a book exploring the reasons why products go viral.

    The book, Contagious: Why Things Catch On, covers six key features that all viral products share.

    1. Products should have social currency and make their owners feel special

    2. Products should have triggers to keep people coming back. At MeetMe, we call this reengagement

    3. Your customers will evanglize your products if they have an emotional impact.

    4. Cool looking products with high visibility.

    5. A truly useful product is often recommended.

    6. A good story to tell.

    via The Secrets of What Makes a Product Go Viral | Entrepreneur.com.

    Also visit the companion website Virality Explained.

  • Voice and Tone of your site

    Really cool website talking about the Voice and Tone of Mailchimp’s website.

    Welcome | Voice and Tone.

  • Social products win with utility, not invites

    Really good essay on why, if you are building a product with a social layer, you should focus on providing utility for your members first and the social graph second.

    Social products win with utility, not invites Guest Post | @andrewchen.

    or as Bill Gates said back in 1996 - “Content is King!”

     

  • 26 Time Management Hacks

    There are a ton of great gems in here. One of my favorites -
    Yesterday's homeruns don't win today's games.
    What's your favorite?

  • Gratitude

    “Gratitude is a lens through which you view the past. Through this lens, you can choose to see all the events in your life as crucial for becoming the person you are, and the person you will be.” - Michael Ellsberg

  • Sweet and Spicy Tuna Salad Recipe

    If you are a fan of Sirachi this is a very good tuna salad recipe.

    Sweet and Spicy Tuna Salad
    Rated: rating
    		Prep Time: 5 Minutes Ready In: 5 Minutes
    Submitted By: AmericanInZurich Servings: 4
    "Serrano chile sauce provides some kick to this tuna salad."
    INGREDIENTS:
    1 (6 ounce) can water-packed tuna,
    drained
    1/2 cup mayonnaise (such as Hellman's
    ®)
    1/2 cup sweet pickle relish (such as
    Heinz®)
    1/8 teaspoon chile-garlic sauce (such as
    Sriracha®)
    DIRECTIONS:
    1. Stir the tuna, mayonnaise, relish, and chile-garlic sauce together in a bowl; serve.
    ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 2013 Allrecipes.com Printed from Allrecipes.com 3/30/2013

    Sweet and Spicy Tuna Salad Recipe - Allrecipes.com.

  • 4-Billion-Pixel Panorama From Curiosity Rover Brings Mars to Your Computer Screen | Wired Science | Wired.com

    I think I see a martian.


    Martian Landscape with Rover Deck - NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell in Out of this World

    4-Billion-Pixel Panorama From Curiosity Rover Brings Mars to Your Computer Screen | Wired Science | Wired.com.

  • Meograph: Four-dimensional storytelling

    Meograph looks like a cool tool to tell stories using multimedia content.

    Meograph: Four-dimensional storytelling.

  • OMG Excel you are driving me nuts today.

    I want to create a simple set of macros that I can pass around as an AddIn. When I run it as a Macro in my workbook it’s fine. It doesn’t work as an AddIn.

    The AddIn creates a menu item under the AddIns worksheet menu. When I try to call the function from the menu item, I see this error.

    “Cannot run the macro FOO. The macro may not be available in this workbook or all macros may be disabled.”

    All macros are enabled but I can’t figure out how to make the functions from the AddIn show up in either the Macros list or in the AddIn menu I created.

    More to come…

    Update March 26, 2013, 1:17 PM

    I’m making progress. It looks like there might be a name space collision between the AddIns default workbook “ThisWorkbook” and the active documents workbook name “ThisWorkbook.”

    I renamed the AddIn Workbook and references that when I called the AddIn function from the AddIn menu and I was able to call the method (AddInName.FOO).

  • Perry the Playdoughpus

    Perry the Playdoughpus by JoeCotellese
    Perry the Playdoughpus, a photo by JoeCotellese on Flickr.

    Fun with homemade playdough.

  • Fast boat, fast river | Lean Analytics Book

    Paul Graham has a simple definition of a startup: an organization designed to grow fast. Steve Blank adheres to a different one: an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.

    They’re both right, in a way. And that has important implications for entrepreneurs

    via Fast boat, fast river | Lean Analytics Book.

  • Universal Analytics - Google Analytics Game Changing Analytics Engine

    Google has a huge update coming to Analytics. This article describes some of the biggest changes and what they mean.

    Universal Analytics - Google Analytics Game Changing Analytics Engine.

  • The Power Of The Perfect Slice - MindTheProduct

    When introducing agile methodologies into an organization with legacy products, consider building the “Perfect Slice” a “a fully formed feature where all the ‘layers’ - from the database to the user interface – are properly executed, but where the scope is intentionally and sometimes drastically limited. It’s my belief that it’s often better to do a great job on a fraction of the functionality and completely leave the rest out, than it is to do an okay job on a longer feature list.”

    The Power Of The Perfect Slice - MindTheProduct.

  • Schneier on Security: Gait Analysis from Satellite

    By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk – a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a persons walking style is very hard to disguise.

    via Schneier on Security: Gait Analysis from Satellite.

  • HipstaPrint

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