Unitasking For Fun and Profit

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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published on Seattle 2.0, and imported to GeekWire as part of our acquisition of Seattle 2.0 and its archival content. For more background, see this post.

By David Aronchick

Multitasking is dead. Long live unitasking. The only problem is that it hasn’t caught on enough. Where people are now embracing hiding their IM clients, putting their Blackberries in a drawer, and wiping off their desktops, who’s doing this for your company? If you can’t find them, the answer is probably nobody.
One of the most crucial elements to implementing this new strategy at your place of work is the ability to set ONE clear, simple goal that can both motivate and provide direction from the highest level to the lowest, across disciplines, and both externally and internally. It’s not hard to do – but it is harder than just throwing a thousand goals on the board, so it rarely gets done.
 
Back when I worked at MS, I held a number of jobs that gave me the fortunate opportunity to see how different organizations set goals and direct their considerable resources. The vast majority of groups followed a completely logical process –
  • Post mortem on the current product – what works, what doesn’t, what can we improve
  • Explore the customer requirements around the new features
  • Build out a set of features which address each of the customer requirements
  • Build as much as you can against a date that balances upgrade needs and required dev time
  • Launch, market and sell those features
  • Repeat

While useful, there’s plenty of room for improvement. Ultimately, this results in a series of features, very few of which are tied together into a unified improved experience for the end user. Things have gotten better; but trying to communicate that to your users is definitely not as easy as it should be. Worse, it probably took you much longer than it should have to get to where you are, because at some point all these disparate features had to be merged together – with so many moving parts, it’s like launching a thousand products at once.

 
There was ONE goal I remember that I absolutely loved; interestingly, it came out of one of the biggest groups with the largest teams – Office. The product goal was:

The next version of Office must run off a 1 GB USB key

There’s an incredible elegance to this. With one sentence the requirements are clear, yet still flexible enough to allow smart people to implement it in smart ways. Some examples:

  • Office has an upper limit of the amount of disk space it may take up
  • Settings must now be able to be stored “offline”
  • All libraries need local copies that can be used in a backup situation
  • Installations may be on a drive that can disappear at any time or be unreliable
  • Marketing and sales can get started immediately, even before the product has launched
And so on. It’s breathless in its simplicity and power. Even better, it allows for unitasking – anything that did not fit with this goal could be discarded. You can even print it out on a sheet of 8.5×11 and paste it all over your bulletin boards.
 
Unfortunately, as is the case with a lot of great goals at large companies, I never saw this in any of the marketing documents, so I’ll have to assume that somewhere along the lines to shipping, somebody either decided this was too hard, or wasn’t compelling for the 6 bajillion corporate purchasing agents who decide to upgrade from one version of office to another. But it does highlight how powerful and simple a goal can be.
 
The original iPod had a similar beautiful goal:
 Holds 1,000 songs in your pocket.
Again, it forced some very fundamental decisions (how big is a pocket? what codecs do we use? how do we sync with a device that small?) – but it gives a single target for everyone to hit. Anything not on track with that must be ignored.
 
 The problem is that when people decide to set goals for their own teams, organizations, companies, etc., they feel they need to answer all the questions right there in the statement, and that just takes away the chance to do something really powerful. Can I be simple too? Of course! Just identify:
  1. What’s MOST important to you as a company (revenue, market share, competition, etc)
  2. What’s MOST important enough to your customers to get excited (shiny new features, stability, etc)
  3. What’s ONE THING is going to appear on the press release
Remember, you only get one. Down to one for each? Great. Draw a Venn Diagram with those three in each circle.
 
 
See that space in the middle? That’s your goal. Presto, you’re set. Let’s try some examples:
 
Bad: Grow sales in Indonesia by 50%
  • Fine internal goal, but it doesn’t speak to customer needs, and who outside your company is going to care if you do it?
Good:  Become the number one provider for Point of Sales in Southeast Asia
  • Great! You’ve identified a target, focused on the people who need your solution, and given an end point to when you can declare success.
Bad: Reduce I/O wait times for servers by 75%
  • Very measurable, which is awesome. But, again, it misses on being customer focused, and is not broad enough.
Good: Improve the time it takes to see the thumbnail view of the picture gallery on our site by 75%
  • Perfect! Focuses on what the customer actually sees, is (ideally) one of the top scenarios, and can be addressed however the team thinks it would be best to get after it.
Bad: “From the marketers of Nicorette” (this is no joke, I saw this on a product display in Costco)
  • Really? No one cares that you marketed another product; this placement is just to get the stupid name “Nicorette” on the billboard. Terrible.
Good:  “More people exchange messages daily over our dating site than anyone else on the Web!”
  • Exactly what the customers want to hear: it’s social, it’s popular and there are lots of other people out there for me to chat with (see Network Effects).

Obviously, 90% of success here comes from understanding your customers, and being able to ask the right questions, but the value in distilling down what to focus on is worth 100x every second you spend keeping it simple.

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