Most articles about email focus on processing your inbox and prioritizing which emails to read in what order.  Just yesterday Google announced Google Priority Inbox as a way to solve this problem.

Smarter processing of email is not the entire answer to our email woes.  We all need to be more responsible with sending email. Please do your part and start today!

Here are some examples of irresponsible email sending behavior:

1. “Thanks”
Most people feel the need to reply with “Thanks”, not as a sincere Thank You for something that was done but as a way to acknowledge that they have received your email.

Solution: don’t reply with “Thanks” ever, especially to email threads with multiple recipients.  Try this for a week and it will help, trust me.

2. “Thoughts?”
So often I receive an email saying “Take a look at this company, thoughts?”  Even though this is one of my favorite things to do, I dread these emails and they typically end up at the bottom of my inbox.  Using “thoughts?” implies some eventual response is needed but has no clear definition around what is needed.

Solution: ask specific questions about the company such as “Could ACME’s product be used to solve XYZ problem we are having?” or use your Project Management systems to have this conversation.

3. Attachments without context
I receive many emails with MS Word or Excel files attached that contain content that should not be locked up in attachments.  Examples are meeting notes, agendas and simple spreadsheets.  These emails often do not contain any context around the content in the attachments which is annoying in general but also makes finding these emails using search very difficult.

Solution: even if you used MS Word to take notes, spend a few minutes to craft a responsible email that is easy to read or use software like Evernote that lets you take notes and email them as text.

Here are some tips I have gathered that will help you be a responsible email sender:

• Use “FYI” in the subject line – this implies you don’t need a response from the recipients, not even a quick “Thanks for sending this”.
• Use “cc” the way it was intended – if you put a recipient as a “cc” you should not expect a response from that person, you are simply copying them so they can optionally follow the conversation.  If you want a response from them or require they follow the conversation then include them in “to”.
• Use your Wiki, Intranet or whatever your company uses to discuss company wide ideas – when a discussion deserves thought and will last over several weeks.  This will help preserve the shelf life of the discussion and the contents won’t get buried in your email trash.
• Use your project management systems for all project data – everything related to a project or client should be in a system like Basecamp or Rally.  Granted, these systems communicate using email, however by posting data to those systems you ensure it is in the appropriate place and recipients of emails from those systems can use filters within their email client to sort and organize their email more efficiently.
• Use IM and the Watercooler to get quick questions answered – if someone is on IM or is getting a cup of coffee they are saying “it’s OK to interrupt me”. Use that as an opportunity to ask a quick question instead of sending an email that may not get answered until the next day.

Like many tools in the business world, email can be used for both good and evil.  Don’t be that guy that sends “Thanks for sending this” to 10 people on an email thread, be the responsible guy that lives in a world of Inbox Zero and helps others get there as well instead of adding to their never ending pile of email.

Related Articles:

How does Fred Wilson, VC Blogger, deal with email?

Empty your Inbox everyday, use Keyboard Shortcuts and other great tips from Michael Hyatt

Email Sucks. 5 Time Saving Tips (Kevin Rose)

Extreme Makeover: The Email Inbox Edition (Gina Trapani)

Related Posts from ktinboulder’s blog:

Being More Productive

How does NoSQL differ from SQL?

“Not only SQL”
NoSQL is a database movement which promotes non-relational data stores that do not need a fixed schema.
There are several primary storage techniques or “implementations” used by the NoSQL approach:

• Document store – MongoDB, CouchDB
• Eventually‐consistent key‐value store (“ColumnFamily”) – Cassandra
• Graph – Neo4j
• Key/value store on disk – Amazon’s SimpleDB
• Key/value cache in RAM – Redis, memcached

Taken from this Wikipedia article on NoSQL databases
An introduction to NoSQL on Hacker News
A 10 minute talk from Brian Aker bashing NoSQL

What is MapReduce?

MapReduce is a framework for processing huge datasets on certain kinds of distributable problems using a large number of computers (nodes), collectively referred to as a cluster.

“Map” step: The master node takes the input, chops it up into smaller sub-problems, and distributes those to worker nodes. A worker node may do this again in turn, leading to a multi-level tree structure. The worker node processes that smaller problem, and passes the answer back to its master node.

“Reduce” step: The master node then takes the answers to all the sub-problems and combines them in a way to get the output – the answer to the problem it was originally trying to solve.

“GROUP BY” in SQL is very similar to “Map Reduce” in NoSQL.

Taken from this Wikipedia article on MapReduce

What is a Graph db?

A graph database is a database that uses graph structures with nodes, edges and properties to represent and store information.

Example:

Node firstNode = graphDb.createNode();
Node secondNode = graphDb.createNode();
Relationship relationship = firstNode.createRelationshipTo( secondNode, MyRelationshipTypes.KNOWS );

firstNode.setProperty( “message”, “Hello, ” );
secondNode.setProperty( “message”, “world!” );
relationship.setProperty( “message”, “brave Neo4j ” );

We now have a graph that looks like this:
(firstNode )—KNOWS—>(secondNode)

A popular vendor is Neo4j
Taken from this Wikipedia article on Graph Databases

What is a Document db?

As opposed to relational databases, document-based databases do not store data in tables with uniform sized fields for each record. Instead, each record is stored as a document that has certain characteristics.   There is no real hierarchy of data; just a collection of documents which may contain virtually any kind of data. The documents may not necessarily be the same length, as some documents may contain details of fields that other documents do not need to store. In other words, you are not constrained by a database schema.

Example:

FirstName=”Bob”, Address=”5 Oak St.”, Hobby=”sailing”.

Another document could be:

FirstName=”Jonathan”, Address=”15 Wanamassa Point Road”, Children=(“Michael,10″, “Jennifer,8″, “Samantha,5″, “Elena,2″).

Notice that both documents have some similar information and some different – but unlike a relational database where each record would have the same set of fields and unused fields might be kept empty, there are no empty ‘fields’ in either document (record) in this case. This system allows information to be added any time without using storage space for “empty fields” as in relational databases.

A popular vendor is MongoDB.
MongoDB manages collections of JSON-like documents. This allows many applications to model data in a more natural way, as data can be nested in complex hierarchies and still be query-able and indexable.

{
“username” : “bob”,
“address” : {
“street” : “123 Main Street”,
“city” : “Springfield”,
“state” : “NY”
}
}

Another popular vendor is CouchDB (Apache) as it works well with Rails.
Taken from this Wikipedia article on Document-Oriented Databases

Shop guy: “Hey man, what brings you in today?”

Me: “Beautiful day, out for a walk and felt like spending a few minutes surrounded by bikes”

Shop guy: “Cool.  If you have any questions about what you see, don’t see something you were hoping to see, or have suggestions to help us make our shop better please let me know”

I was strolling away from him the same way I do every time I’m in a retail store and don’t really feeling like dealing with anyone.  When he asked me my opinion I immediately turned around and began talking to him.

“You guys should rent high end road and mountain bikes, I would spend a few hundred dollars a summer with you.  Do you have baby bike strollers?  I just broke my helmet and need a new one, any recommendations?”

Bike shops are everywhere in Denver.  Heck, within a mile of our office there are about 5 places I could spend $$$ on bikes and accessories.  I am now going to spend my money at Salvagetti because I love their attitude towards me, the Customer.

After my trip to Salvagetti I began thinking about the Agile gospel I read over and over about soliciting input from your Customers, Stakeholders, etc.  It’s true, getting ideas from Customers is super important in the world of software and services today.  Along with Customers giving you great ideas for products and features, they are also feeling good because their opinion is being heard, the same way I felt after leaving Salvagetti.

Keeping these ideas private adds no value, so here’s the list:

Commute store

As eco themes, transportation, bikes, buses and trains command more attention and revenue from state and local governments more people are thinking about how they commute.  I envision a retail store where people could shop for products they use in their daily commute.  The store would need a learning component to it showcases new ideas in commuting and have relationships with other local stores to sell products such as bikes.

Gear Layaway

I love sites like Mint.com and SmartyPig.com that promote new ways to manage your money and save.  Consumers get into credit card debt by purchasing big ticket items then paying a high interest rate.  Retails Shops often feel “it’s the Consumers responsibility to manage their money”.  It’s time everyone comes together to create a better option.

Comment on the conversation here:

and on the Startup Weekend website.

Relationship timeline

My wife and I talk alot about dates of meaningful moments in our past.  Although I remember what we did, I can never remember the actual dates.  Providing a way for couples to enter key dates, upload photos and share these dates on Facebook would be a cool web app.  A nice timeline view and a public presence of this application would be key.

Nanny log

A relatively new idea I’ve been thinking about.  We have a 14 mo old daughter and a great Nanny.  She logs her miles and expenses, needs to post her vacation time and around tax time, needs us to provide her with a W2 showing her weekly paychecks and other payments (overtime, etc).  When our daughter was a baby, our Nanny would also log daily activities and feeding schedules.  Today, we use a binder and Basecamp to communicate with eachother, seems like their could be a web app to handle this better.

One Level of Knowledge

Around the water cooler I am talking about sports, pop culture and other topics relevant to our company.  I would love to subscribe to a daily email about these topics.  Did the Rockies just trade their star player?  Did the Broncos decide on a new QB for the upcoming season.  I love being armed with one level of knowledge to participate in these 2 minute water cooler conversations.

If you like any of these ideas I’d love to hear your thoughts.

As I strive to improve my role as Product Owner on our Scrum Team (“Agile”), I thought it useful to create this list of things that a Product Owner should do.

1. Create a Product Roadmap to articulate Product Strategy “as we know it”
I recently had a great email conversation with Kevin Donaldson, VP of Product Management at Balihoo. Kevin outlines his view of a Product Roadmap:

“I create a Product Roadmap to articulate Product Strategy as we
believe it to be right now – it maps market events, architecture,
features to a market map (who benefits). As you know it isn’t meant to
be a project plan – it’s a view of the world that we update each quarter
to help show our product strategy and vision of where we are heading (at
least based on our current knowledge of the market).”

I think this is a great summary from Kevin. The Product Roadmap can be used to guide other parts of the Product Owner’s job. This is something that should be internally public, so post it to your company’s wiki or intranet.

2. Host recurring Product Council meetings
The Product Council is made up of key Stakeholders from Sales, Customer Support, Marketing, Technology and Corporate Strategy. Use this meeting to provide updates to the group (usually consists of execs who won’t read your Release/Iteration notes), prioritize themes or epic features to prepare for your next release and ask/answer questions about the products you own. The Product Council helps steer you in the right direction. During this meeting, continually refer to the Product Roadmap you’ve created.

3. Have a good Release Planning meeting with the Team
One of the hardest parts of being a Product Owner is elaborating User Stories ahead of time so you can make decisions about what should go into a Release. The Release Planning meeting is hosted by your team’s ScrumMaster but you do most of the talking. The team asks you hard questions about specifics that haven’t occurred to you yet. You will be slightly embarrassed as you realize certain Stories are not well elaborated and you are not as prepared as you thought. Come out of this meeting with Plan Estimates for every Story inside your epics or themes. Usually we have 5 or so “Children” Stories for each “Parent” Story (we use Parent Stories to capture epics/themes). I have yet to see the team 100% committed to what we discuss during Release Planning. This meeting seems to be about helping me fully vet out everything and rough out a Release Plan.

4. Publish your Release Commitments internally
Create a blog post, etc that describes in English the stuff you plan on building in the upcoming release. Group things by Product or Function and make it a very easy read. Who does this feature apply to, give a one sentence “business intent” or “benefit”. Be careful how you write this because you are really “committing” to this and everyone will refer to this post in the future to gauge your success. I have had killer releases where everyone was cranking and we didn’t deliver on things in the Release Commitments, usually because the thing became irrelevant something before we began. Anyway, it still felt like we did something wrong during the Release because we had published that we would complete that thing.

5. Have a good Iteration Planning meeting with the Team
Iteration Planning happens every 2 weeks on Tues for our team and is taken very seriously, this didn’t used to be the case. Tues is great because it gives the team Mon to get loose ends wrapped up. As a Product Owner, you need to be ready to talk specifics about each User Story you have slated for the upcoming Iteration. Besides talking about the Story and what it will do, be able to answer 3 questions 1) Why are we doing this? 2) How will this be tested? and 3) What is the definition of done? I know many will argue that 2) testing is the responsibility of the QA lead however, I have noticed that the Product Owner’s understanding of how everything fits together directly relates to their understanding of how a new something should be tested. What other parts of the app is this new thing going to impact? How will users be using this new thing?

Never come to Iteration Planning with an Iteration overloaded with Stories. You need to understand your Team’s velocity so everyone on the team can be realistic about what will get done in the next 2 weeks. At the end of Iteration Planning, you should have a well tasked, well understood workload for the team.

6. Publish your Iteration Notes at the beginning and end of each Iteration
Export your list of Stories and Defects committed to during Iteration Planning and upload to your company wiki, etc. I have found this doesn’t need to be a detailed blog post, just a communication to the company so certain people who are waiting on specific items can scan the list, ask you questions, etc. At the end of each Iteration, create a blog post similar to your Release Commitments called Iteration Notes that summarizes in English what you accomplished, how it will be rolled out, who it benefited, etc. I have seen people print out the Iteration Notes I publish and keep them at their desk as they respond to support questions or talk with a new prospect.

7. Attend Daily Standup
In a lot of the Agile literature I’ve read it seems the Product Owner is expected to checkin at Standup from time to time but not be there everyday. The best Iterations our team has is when everyone is totally engaged and attends Standup everyday, including me the Product Owner. Standup gives me a feel of how things are progressing, helps me answer questions and make decisions about Stories on the spot to keep the team cruising along, and is a motivation for making sure my Tasks are getting marked complete (usually I have a few tasks during an Iteration).

8. Host the Iteration Demo
Every Wednesday our company has a “Lunch n Learn” in which pizza or burritos are brought in and we all sit in the conference room to have lunch together. Every 2 weeks I have an Iteration Demo in which I pick relevant Stories and Defects to discuss from the previous Iteration. I have tried to host this meeting a variety of different ways and was never able to get a good attendance, a company lunch is a great way to get people in a room to listen to you for a few minutes. The questions I am asked about each Story, even ones I felt were well elaborated, often surprise me. People bring up a scenario that has happened in the past 2 weeks since we decided to build the Story that challenges it’s usefulness or changes how it needs to work. The Iteration Demo is the best way to validate what you are building is actually good. Be well prepared for this meeting, don’t use slides, have the software up on the projector or web conference for people to see you clicking around, and don’t rush through. The best questions usually come right as I am about to move on to discuss the next Story.

9. Control Product Rollout and Production Deployments
Each company is different, you may have a Product Marketing person that helps you announce new features, you may publish to a Customer facing Product Blog, you may do nothing, in any case you are still managing the rollout of features including what code is deployed to production and the timing of everything. I include a brief summary of how each feature will be rolled out in my Iteration Notes (see 6.) as we roll some features into some products and not others. Every Monday, the entire team has a Production Push meeting in which we review each SVN checkin to make sure it has been tested and is ready to go to production. Although the Developers and QA team members are the ones talking and our ScrumMaster leads this meeting, the Product Owner is making the final decision of what should be deployed.

Summary
This list above assumes the prerequisites for being a Product Owner are already happening: absorbing everything about your industry, engaged in everyday discussions about product ideas, using the software you build, using lots of software you don’t build and so on.

Are you doing all of these things as Product Owner?

See a list of related articles I’ve tagged Agile

My interest in team roles began after reading “I Sing the Body Electric: A Year with Microsoft on the Multimedia Frontier” by Fred Moody.  Moody spent a year with a team at Microsoft observing them building a children’s encyclopedia product code-named Sendak (Encarta Junior).  The team was a mess and the project was a stress filled 2 years of seemingly bad decisions and unhappiness.  I won’t ruin the ending but highly recommend this read.  This book highlights the Product Manager role and how they work with the team.

As I pondered the Product Owner role during my run this morning I came up with these flavors of the same thing:

Army of One

This is the person that calls themselves a Product Owner but is basically told what features to build, writes the code and is responsible for testing everything with no help.  This is typically seen when organizations “adopt Agile” but are still small without the cash to hire multiple developers and testers that round out the team.

Dev Team Project Manager

This is the person who works on a proper Scrum team, works with Stakeholders to define priority and is doing many things right to produce results.  They are really a Project Manager that is lucky to have a killer team, especially ones that have Designers on the team to elaborate the User Stories.  The team is humming along well under this person’s direction but they can probably be replaced without too much impact.  Companies usually pair this person with a Business Analyst or Product Marketing person.

The true Product Owner

This person possesses a deep technical knowledge of the Products they are working on, has a strategic mind with an understanding of their marketplace and can talk to Customers.  They are focused on one product or product family, come up with their own ideas as well as translate input from Stakeholders and are a thought leader in the space.

I was very inspired by this WWDC video featuring Werner Jainek of Cultured Code.  He speaks as a true Product Owner.  Listen to how he easily explains why Things for the iPhone is important by saying “tasks hit you while you’re walking in the city or in the store buying something”.  Then he discusses the iPhone SDK and it’s importance to the success of Things, and concludes with analysis of the marketplace for ToDo List software and the impact of the iTunes store as well as the price point they selected for the app.

Of course, each organization is in different phases of their life and has resource constraints, not everyone is the same.  What type of Product Owner are you?

______

Read Part 2, What does a Product Owner do?

Read articles I’ve tagged about Product Owner and Product Management

http://www.prnewswire.com/mnr/prnewswire/39408/

In 2002, Micha Hanson and I received a phone call from Dee Rambeau asking for some coding help. Dee and his business partner Jason Keller had a PR and software background and understood the opportunity for building easy to use tools to help the overworked PR professional. Micha and I were impressed by the idea. Jason moved from San Francisco to Denver, we teamed up with Rob Gwin and the first products were born.

Today’s announcement of the PRN acquisition is a great example of how a small company can be laser focused on building great products and the right strategic partnerships will develop. I’m so proud of our crew.

And the response:

Layaway
If an online retailer offered layaway I would use it.  The concept seems easy enough, enter your bank routing and account info along with the amount you would like to apply towards your purchase each month.  The retailer has a great interface for you to check on your progress and sends you email reminders each month, etc…for participating in the layaway you get a better deal from the retailer on the item.  (Layaway would make chipping away at the price of that new Mountain Bike a bit easier!)  By offering layaway the retailer would also be forging a relationship with the customer above and beyond a basic transaction.  The ease of paying bills online combined with chatter about being more responsible with personal credit creates a great environment for layaway to become reality.

Customer Service via Social Networks
@comcastcares is the twitter handle for Comcast’s customer service department.  Using twitter search tools they can monitor tweets about Comcast and respond immediately to customers.  This type of customer interaction is revolutionary.  The customer’s complaint and the Company’s response is out there for others to view.  This trend will no doubt continue as the idea of picking up a phone to call and complain about something fades.

Sustainability and Used Goods
As people care more about their impact on the environment related to consumerism they will look at 2 things: how the item is manufactured and should they buy new or used.  

Retailers like Apple and Patagonia are very transparent and offer information about their manufacturing processes which they use as a product differentiator.  Environmental impact will not be as important as product performance but it will carry weight with customers.

“Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” will continue as a trend causing consumers to look for used or second hand goods.  Retailers need to prepare a solution to customers not wanting to buy brand new items.  

Niche Advertising
Targeted niche advertising has, of course, been around forever.  Using Facebook ads, Lijit’s ad network and other highly targeted advertising channels is becoming mandatory.

Interactive Video
The best experience I’ve had with any sort of Interactive Video was watching Obama’s inauguration on Facebook.  A high quality video stream combined with my Friend’s activity displayed on the screen making for a unique, interesting viewing experience.  This concept can certainly apply to online retailing.  Imagine a ski gear website showing a live stream of the new, cool ski movie from Warren Miller on a Friday night.  Your friends from around the world are posting comments realtime as you watch the video and see product specs and information displaying inline with your Friend activity.   

Using the open source platform Asterisk and PHP we built an application that assembled a custom snow report from data provided by Snocountry.  Users could define the resorts and day/times they wanted to receive a call. 

In retrospect, we overcame many technical hurdles in areas that we were not experts in such as VOIP.  As we grew, scaling became our primary issue as call quality began to suffer.  Our vendors were also a challenge as they went out of business or dropped support for volume calling that our application required.  I learned a ton about customer service as users moved or changed phone numbers and we placed calls to people that did not subscribe.  Calling people at 5am in Iowa about 6 inches of new snow at Vail is not a good way to make friends.

All in all it was a great run.  PowderFone was the first startup that I solicited investments from family and friends.  I was not prepared for the guilt I felt telling them we had to shut down the company.

Thanks to the Interns that helped us year after year and to Doug and Micha for working so hard on the application and search engine optimization of the website.