At 08:27 AM 12/26/2007 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
On Dec 21, 2007, at 4:15 PM, Phillip J. Eby wrote:
At 12:26 PM 12/21/2007 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
I agree with the sentiment that we need to market Chandler in terms
of what people already 'know' they want or need a solution for. I'm
not sure it should start with calendaring.
Fair enough. It's simply the most obvious and fully-grown pony, as
far as I can tell. :)
Yes, I'm trying to change that perception :)
And I'm pointing out that it's not *my* perception you'll need to change. :)
For one, how do we differentiate ourselves from other web calendar
services? The offline functionality doesn't seem compelling enough on
its own.
Doesn't that depend on who the user is?
Just to clarify, I'm not saying that offline mode isn't incredibly
useful. It's just that in my mind, 'Shared calendaring, now offline
too!' feels like it lacks oomph as a pitch.
Actually, it's open source shared calendaring for small groups with
web interop and offline. No, it doesn't have much oomph, but the
oomph it has is far more *communicable*, because it's easier to go
viral. A person can relay that message to their friends, but the
"GTD alternative" message is difficult to communicate, even for
you! The average person won't have much of a chance.
I'm not sure I'm following. The pitch I'm referring to *is* the
problem we originally identified and designed Chandler to solve.
I understand that. The problem with that pitch is that it's a new
entry into an old and fragmented category (PIM), which inherently
means that the competition is based on a "value" proposition, i.e.
lower price and/or better features. And in the PIM category, we
mostly lose on features without being any better on price than some
alternatives with more features.
If you want to go after a PIM-ish market, we will have to define a
*new* category in which we are the leader. But the approach you're
proposing is that we compete (philosophically) with David Allen and
by extension, every tool that says "we do GTD".
And if we do that, we will lose in the marketplace, because the
product will not be perceived or believed as being superior, even if
it really were. (And I don't believe it is, for reasons I'll go into
later below.)
In many ways, the design
we have today is in response to the 'just build a filtered view'
approach to information management.
So what about it is better (as opposed to merely different)?
(Where better is defined in terms of ultimate impact on the person
using it.)
That, was the topic of my first email :) My claim is that if we can
figure out how to orient people
That can be done, but it costs a LOT of time and money.
so that they approach the product in
the right state of mind (e.g. don't expect it to be a PIM, email
client, traditional project manager)...it's an information / work /
task manager people can actually stick with.
So now you're saying "lightweight PIM", essentially, unless you want
to put some proof behind the "can actually stick with" part to create a USP.
If "can actually stick with" is the USP, then we'll need story/evidence as to:
* why people don't stick with other PIMs
* how Chandler avoids this problem
* examples of people who didn't stick with other PIMs, but did with Chandler
Of course, to do this, we need to define what "sticking" means -
using it for a month? three months? a year? - and collect some evidence.
I'm not saying this to discourage the idea - if we could *prove* that
USP, it'd be fantastic because it *would* be a new category. But
it's not enough to *say* it's a PIM people can stick with, we have to
have some explanation and evidence to back that up.
We need to start from the other end: who needs this, what is their
pain, and what *emotional* payoff will they get from the solution?
Yes. The pain is: I have too many bits and pieces of information to
keep track of all in my head, but I can't seem to stick with any of
the information-manager-type things I try, be it a paper-based list
system, excel, project managers, task lists, outliners, etc.
Again, if the USP is going to be that you'll stick with Chandler,
we'll need a compelling reason to *believe* that. Otherwise, from
the listener's perspective, it's just standard marketing fluff. Why
will they stick with Chandler, if they didn't stick with those other tools?
I think you'll find that what actually gets people to stick with an
approach is the *religion*, not the tool. Which is why, if we're not
targeting features to attract members of "established" religions
(such as GTD and F-C), we will likely have to create our *own*
religion. (Meaning someone will have to write our scriptures and
preach our gospels, thereby adding more work to the process.)
Now contrast starting our own, to leveraging partnership with the
existing "churches". A free GTD or F-C tool increases the value (via
the law of complements) of GTD training or F-C training -- the bread
and butter of those "churches". This means that we could get those
organizations to promote Chandler at essentially no cost to us, with
a host of other benefits accruing. (That is, they would have
financial motivation to collaborate with us.)
In contrast, creating our own religion means we have to do all that
stuff ourselves, or convince other people to.
The emotional pay-off is relief that I have a *trusted system* where
everything is, it's easy to keep up-to-date,
How is this different from me writing everything on 3x5 cards and
putting them in a card box? That's also a "trusted system where
everything is", and is "easy to keep up-to-date".
it's shared with others
so that organizing myself = organizing everyone else too,
Really? How does putting *your* tasks into the system "organize" anyone else?
AND it
doesn't feel like a lot of busy-work because it's actually helping me
get work done too, not just helping me keep track of the task
representations of work.
What work? Sending emails?
Yes, this is a path we could have gone down. But the reality is, we
didn't. Chandler wasn't designed to solve this problem. We partially
solve this problem, but our target has been the thing I tried to
describe in my initial email...It feels wrong to give up on that
problem before we've given it a proper chance.
To be honest, I don't think we've solved that problem, or even
adequately defined it. But even if we had, that's an orthogonal
problem to communicating or selling the solution.
To communicate, we have to have a message that gets people's
attention -- specifically, the people in the target audience, which
can't be defined as "everyone", because a message to everyone is a
message no-one specifically wants to hear. (Spam, in other words.)
To cut through the fog, it's necessary to have either a sufficiently
well-specified group that the target audience identifies with (e.g.
left-handed firemen), or a sufficiently clear benefit/USP that the
target audience will say, "yes, I want that" (e.g. pizza in 30
minutes or it's free).
So if we're not niching by identity, we need a USP, which has to be
concrete. For example, if we're going for, "the PIM you'll actually
use", we'll need to be specific about what that means and offer proof.
From our user interviews, I believe there is a significant
population of people who spend a lot of time *managing their stuff*,
but they aren't served well by bugzilla-like models for task/project
management because the things they need to deal with aren't really
concrete. They're things that people used to just keep track of in
their head, but the modern workplace is swarming with this kind of
amorphous 'stuff' coming at you from all different directions,
pertaining to a dozen different contexts and it's now impossible to
just rely on your head. In this way, we are trying to address the
same problem as GTD.
Except we are not actually *addressing* that problem, because
Chandler actively *discourages* turning "stuff" into action. This is
the place where it diametrically opposes the GTD philosophy, which
states that the only way to actually get things done is to convert
your "stuff" into actions that are concrete.
It's almost like saying, "Chandler: the NEW way to avoid actually
managing your work!" :)
Now, I don't know what you mean by "bugzilla-like", but I sure as
heck don't like bugzilla and wouldn't use it as a model for anything,
let alone group task management. In my last position, I designed and
implemented a "viral" group task manager that successfully took over
a 2400-person company, even in the face of management opposition,
displacing various purchased solutions whose costs ranged from
$100,000 up to $10,000,000. (These systems could probably be
described as Bugzilla-like, in the sense that they were also
abominations against humanity that should be cast into the nearest
lake of fire.)
So I know a little bit about group collaboration -- large as well as
small. Enough to know, anyway, that the success of a system will be
determined by what things it makes easy and what things it makes
hard. What it shows you, and how many steps it takes to see or do
something, will determine what people will actually do.
And based on that experience, my hypothesis is that people using
Chandler will not do anything significantly different from what they
already do (or don't), nor anything significantly different from what
they would do if they were using a paper calendar and a to-do
list. Because Chandler provides no cognitive support for doing anything else.
In other words, it doesn't make it any easier for you to turn "stuff"
into action, than to just keep putting off your "stuff", the same way
you already do.
The way I think of GTD is that we're solving the same problem GTD
solves for the individual.
I'm sorry, I don't know any nice way to put this. The only way I can
conceive of someone making this statement about Chandler is if they
have completely missed the point of GTD. Because Chandler totally
*ignores* the single biggest problem GTD sets out to solve: the
ill-defined (and therefore non-actionable) nature of work.
GTD solves this by defining a system of workflow whose purpose is to
*eradicate* "stuff" -- not keep it around!
And then we're also solving the GTD
problem for groups.
No more than for individuals, which is not at all.
Additionally, Chandler possesses a different set
of benefits/deficits than the tools David Allen had available to him:
Paper, Palm, Outlook, etc...
Actually, the only benefits/deficits that are relevant to any of the
"established" religions are those of the human brain. The only
things that the tools do, is change how easy it is to implement the
intended workarounds for brain shortcomings.
F-C emphasizes workarounds for strategy-level shortcomings of the
brain, while GTD emphasizes workarounds for tactical
shortcomings. OPA/RPM is somewhere in the middle.
None of these religions have anything to do with the specific tools
used to *implement* them; all have changed and refined their tools
over the years, while remaining largely invariant in terms of the
cognitive shortcomings they're designed to work around.
As a result, our take on GTD turns out to be substantively different
from GTD methodology as described by David Allen.
Definitely!
But the spirit of
GTD is very much in the product.
Then one of us has a deeply profound misunderstanding about either
GTD or Chandler, or both, because as far as I can tell, what you've
said (and what Chandler does) is diametrically opposed to GTD.
In other words, in the same way that cars eventually stopped looking
like horse carriages and were better off for it and synthesizers can
do way cooler things than reproduce 'real', analog instruments, we're
solving the same problem as GTD, but with different tools and
materials, so the house we build is just going to look different.
[silent sound of jaw dropping]
I think you have this backwards: Chandler is actually the horse
carriage in this analogy.
I fully acknowledge however, that trying to shed people of their
expectations around GTD and information managers is really, really
hard.
It's even harder if you don't understand what GTD is or why people
actually like it. Of course, I'm not saying that every GTD user
actually understands GTD, either! But GTD fans aren't going to pick
a tool that doesn't at least superficially mimic the totems of GTD,
cargo-cult style.
If you want to sell *against* GTD, then you need to have an appealing
alternative philosophy. For example, LifeBalance claims that their
approach improves on GTD by organizing your priorities and balancing
the amount of time you spend on different things. Whether this is
true or not, it at least *sounds* like it would be an improvement,
because it offers a believable explanation, backed by the product features.
At the same time, LifeBalance at least offers a strong implementation
of GTD-style contexts, and thus attracts GTD fans. (It also has good
support for projects in an almost-but-not-quite-GTD way.)
My point isn't that LifeBalance is "better" than Chandler or GTD,
just that it is designed in a way that lets it *sell* to people
interested in GTD -- or Franklin-Covey, for that matter.
Why? Because it focuses on automating the *tedious* parts of using a
personal organization system like GTD or F-C. In contrast, the only
part of Chandler that helps reduce an individual's tedium in applying
a personal organization system, is that you can use collections for
contexts. And even then, it's only a time saver over paper when the
action needs to live in *multiple* contexts. (Since on paper I can
just write the action down on the right 3x5 card to start with.)
I'm not aware, right off, of any other way in which Chandler is an
improvement over paper, for an individual who's trying to apply GTD,
F-C, RPM/OPA, or any other time/life management "philosophy" I've
encountered. (Or at least, an improvement that isn't also provided
by a significant number of other PIMs, and is thus reduced to a
required bullet point, from a marketing perspective.)
In contrast, successful PIMs nearly *always* offer at least one
"killer" feature that actually uses the computer to do something that
would be woefully impractical if you used paper. That is, they offer
"car" features instead of just "horseless carriage"
features. Chandler's few "car" features (recurrence, timezones, date
parsing, and putting the same item on multiple lists) are just
keeping up with the competition, not putting it ahead. (That is,
they are all features found in last year's "car" models.)
It's probably why my instinct is to avoid pitching Chandler
around GTD and PIMs. But as you point out, that leaves us in the no-
man's land of *products that nobody knows they want or need*.
Yep. We are in agreement about that at least, although we differ as to why.
We may end up pitching ourselves as low-maintenance group calendaring.
I like that turn of phrase, it's a good addition. "Low maintenance"
sums up the benefits for the IT/sysadmin audience that would be most
able/likely to viralize the message.
Regardless of what our pitch is, we still need a crystal clear
picture of what we *actually are* as opposed to *the thing we pitch*,
because there's *compromise for the sake of reaching a goal* and then
there's just going after whatever's available. I think we can
probably all agree on that one.
Actually, the big tension I see here is between "what we are" and
"what we'd like to be" or "what we set out to be".
Compared to that, the tension between "what we are" and "what we
pitch" is quite small, I think.
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