I think Phillip makes some great points, particularly about
simplifying the positioning statement and removing some stuff from
the marketing message. I worry that we are trying too hard to put too
much information into the initial description. Maybe I am saying that
I don't think the "pony" has to be in the tagline or elevator pitch
for instance. I know there is hesitation to call the product a
Calendar because it does MORE than that but in the end it might make
it easier to present the other unique features in a compelling way.
We can leave all the details for the "why should I care?" or "so
what?" message.
Recently, I demo'd the product for a couple of friends. Despite all
the work we did with branding and preview I still really struggled to
describe the product to others in a concise way. I seemed to babble
on. As soon as I start going into the bits about triage, getting
stuff out of your head, edit/update etc, people eyes start to glaze
over. It seems to be either too much detail or I haven't found a
compelling way to communicate this. Any reference to PIMs or Task
Managers just gets me into trouble ie: contacts etc.
Personally, when I demo to others, I find I go into way too much
detail. I wish I had a slick 2 minute demo I could just put in front
of people. If someone walks by my desk, I really need to be able to
show the top 5 things and leave them with an impression.
Sheila
On Dec 19, 2007, at 10:31 AM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 02:53 PM 12/18/2007 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
I - THE PROBLEM WITH TASK MANAGERS TODAY: STRUCTURE GETS IN THE WAY
To wrap their head around what they have to do, people always
start out by making a list/outline of all their projects and all
their tasks. This 'structure it in order to get a grip on it'
approach to task management has its deficits:
1. The structure itself locks out possibilities that don't fit
into that structure. Have something random you need to follow up
on that doesn't fit into your structure? Doesn't get written down.
That's trivial, petty, you think to yourself. Besides, I don't
know where I'd put it in this outline. I'll just keep track of it
in my head.
2. As soon as new information comes to light, your outline gets
out of date as you struggle to fit today's information into
yesterday's list.
3. Lists and outlines don't allow you to focus on *just the stuff
you need to attend to NOW*. Instead you see everything that's not-
done, and a lot of it is stuff you're only hypothesizing you'll
need to do.
4. Lists and outlines don't scale to hold and keep track of the
disconnected ideas and thoughts you have that eventually coalesce
into the 'work' you need to do. So even if you have a way to
manage your *tasks* (aka *list of stuff you need to do*), you
still have nowhere to store and manage all the stuff that
constitutes the *substance* of those tasks. In that sense, task
management seems like a lot of 'meta-work', busywork that doesn't
actually help you manage the work you're actually doing.
5. Lists and outlines presume that you do things in a given order.
First I will do this, then I will do that. In reality, we noodle
on lots of things, all the time, at the *same* time. Coming up
with ideas and questions, remembering one more thing to add to
that list, spouting fully formed introductory paragraphs to the
dreaded year-end summary, scheduling a meeting, coming up with an
agenda for that meeting, writing meeting notes for last week's
meeting...
My initial reaction to this list is that these things are at best
only relevant to paper-based organizing, and even there only to *ad
hoc* paper-based systems, because all of the formal paper-based
systems I know of (such as GTD, OPA (or whatever Tony Robbins is
calling it this year), and Franklin-Covey) do not have these
defects. I'm also not aware of any PIMs of consequence in the past
decade or two that don't have ways of doing the same things. And
quite a few modern PIMs support having a structured outline *and* a
to-do list filtered by context+time.
Now, it's not necessarily the case that this would remove the above
from being part of the marketing picture. It's not necessary that
a tool be the first to implement an innovation, it just has to be
first to *tell the story* to the given customer.
But it seems like there would be a fairly narrow number of people
who would not know about any paper *or* electronic organizational
systems, and they are far less likely to be early adopters of a new
tool. They would have to be *sold* on Chandler by someone else,
because there is little chance of them hearing about it. (If
they've managed not to hear of GTD or Franklin-Covey, *and* haven't
been exposed to any PIM's, the odds of them accidentally hearing
about Chandler seem fairly slim).
To market to the early adopters who would promote Chandler to those
people by word of mouth, we need to either: 1) emphasize the
positive *differences* between Chandler and other PIMs, or 2)
successfully position Chandler as the leader of its own, *new*
category.
And I think that the latter approach has a better chance of
succeeding, because Chandler doesn't do that well as a pure PIM,
when compared to PIMs that were written 10-15 years ago, from both
a features and ease-of-use standpoint.
One category that Chandler could define and *own* right now would
be "lightweight team+personal calendar". We could in fact strip
some features *out* of Chandler, and *still* lead this category.
In fact, it could be a *plus* to strip any features that detract
from leading that category or confuse the mission/position in our
minds or the customers'. Simplifying the terminology and stripping
out any too-"innovative" concepts that require users to think or
read a manual, would be a big plus. Meanwhile, most of the other
features you mentioned in your email (cross-platform, connectivity,
email, etc.) can all be positioned in terms of how they support the
"lightweight team+personal calendar" mission -- and nothing else.
This would let us define a niche that Chandler could *dominate* --
and product that defines the niche can *own* the niche. (It's
actually a lot easier to get a lot of users if you can more
precisely identify the users in question.)
By comparison, the "PIM" category in some sense no longer exists;
as commercial products, there are only niche PIMs now. Contact
managers for salespeople, calendars for enterprises, bug and issue
trackers, team project trackers, GTD-specific and quasi-GTD
PIMs... these are all things that used to be done by programs in
the "PIM" category, which was too general for the market. The
things that used to be PIMs have now become a niche that might be
called "customizable PIMs" or "power-user PIMs".
And Chandler isn't a viable competitor (IMO) in any of those
niches. It doesn't do contacts, it doesn't do Exchange, it doesn't
do bug tracking or project tracking, it's opposed to GTD philosophy
in some key ways (i.e., the whole idea of GTD is to *process* your
"stuff", not to keep it as "stuff" indefinitely), and it's not a
very customizable power-user PIM.
While other PIM's have had comparable team support (e.g. Ecco),
they are not positioned at the "lightweight team+personal calendar"
niche. And a more narrowly-focused application has the positional
advantage that people will prefer something that *only* does what
they need, on the assumption that a specialist will be better
within its niche, than a more general-purpose tool will. (i.e.
they'd rather use a chisel than abuse a screwdriver, if both are
available.)
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