I was diggin’ through the notes crates, looking for something good to post about, when I ran across this oldie but goodie from Paul Buchheit of GMail fame:
“I don’t believe that’s true though. There is an optimistic way of understanding my first point, and that’s my second point: Even if you aren’t the smartest person around, and your product is kind of ugly and broken, you can still be very successful, if you just build the right product. YouTube and MySpace are both fine examples of this.”“
…“When Google acquired YouTube, many people inside the company were flabbergasted, “But they have no technology!?” They didn’t understand that you only need enough technology to make the product work.”
I’ve been trying to bring a more entrepreneurial mentality to work. Unfortunately, the tendency is towards trying to game the customer, rather than building “products” they want. Now we’re in science and technology applied research for the global security market, so product is somewhat ill-defined. But I know one thing, more slideware doesn’t cut it these days. Unfortunately, here’s the pervasive tendency within my org. 1) Think up some cool idea, 2) put it in PowerPoint, 3) shop it to program managers, 4) PROFIT (or not).
And I should really know what Buchheit is saying, given what I’ve seen recently, but it’s always a struggle. Enough technology, or data, or analysis, can make the product, our intellectual services, work.