As I finish my second to last week as an employee of Flock, I have been reflecting on what I consider Flock’s greatest challenges in this tricky browser space. I think the three are:
- Be their most critical customers
- Improve customer and community relationships
- Be predictable
The Flock team needs to be their most critical customers. To do that, most member of the Flock team need to be using most features, most days. If someone is not, they are working on the wrong product.
If the Flock team is not building Flock for their own use, it is likely they will build the wrong product and not find the worst problems it has.
Improve customer and community relationships. These relationships are not something that one or two team members can do or a marketing department or a support team. Everyone in the organization needs to see their role in the relationships and get involved.
If every member of the team is not publicly collaborating every week with their customers and their communities there is a big problem.
Fix the problems today’s Flock customers have. Although early in the goals of the product, it is important not lose focus on the people already using Flock regardless how they may fit into the target market.
Be predictable in the product Flock is going to be in six months and the path being taken to get there. The communities designing, developing, documenting, testing, translating, supporting, marketing and reporting Flock can’t help you if you are not.
Update 2006-09-12: retiring term “user”, replacing with “customers”
technorati tags:flock, flock.com, flockbrowser, challenges
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I’m sorry to see you leave, and even more so when I read this post. You hit every nail right square on the head, especially that last one. If the Flock team doesn’t achieve the first few, then the last one is impossible. This product has changed so many times in the last year!
It’s hard to get excited about what’s coming next when the product doesn’t seem to have a six month game plan, let alone a twelve month vision. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an exciting ride along the way, but it’s hard to get motivated about testing code when whole completed featuresets change overnight or get dropped without warning.
If the team isn’t using it along the way, and if the team doesn’t communicate with the end users, then the product won’t be predictable no matter how good the vision is.
You’re a wise fella, alright. Not because you’re leaving Flock – Flock seems cool – but just in the content of this post itself. Your new company is lucky already!
This stuff worries me too. Number three’s the biggest liability at this point, I fear. Number two will come with (more) time and as number three stabilizes. Number one requires some stability from the other two, I think, unintuitive though that sounds.
Lloyd, as usual, you’ve made some excellent points. My observation here over the last couple of months is that we’ve become better at #1, slightly better at #2 (but we’re going to struggle without you) and, well, #3 is really hard. Flock is still in its infancy as a company and as a product. Also, a product like this has never been designed before. As much as I’d like to have a 6 month plan the reality is that there is alot of “2 steps forward one step back” as we figure out what product features will best serve the community.
Lloyd, best of luck to you. It has been a pleasure to work with you over the past couple of months.
Mike
Hi Mike,
Thank you for the comment. It has also been a great pleasure working with you.
Although Flock has had many successes in the last couple of months, I disagree with your assessment in each of these three areas, and would be interested in how you quantify those successes in #1 and #2.
Flock’s success becomes much less likely if it continues to go it alone (or only with privileged partners). It starts with communicating the path Flock will take over a release cycle, and then filling in the details as Flock develops them. No one expects the Flock team to have all the answers, and only by putting it out there will Flock take the best foot forward.
Although I think Flock may be successful without #3, it is not a process I want to be a part of as a community member. It would be too frustrating.
I’ll toss in my more detailed two cents re 1 and 2.
I can’t really think of a meaningful way to quantify being one’s most critical user. I do think we’ve tried to take steps to accept and integrate feedback, though that’s been largely within a closed loop (usability sessions with focus groups) rather than from a broader community perspective. Arguably, forming and listening to focus groups is one way of being a self-critical user. Lloyd, how would you propose quantifying how good or poor a job we’re doing at being self-critical? Does the bulk of our crew not use Flock as its primary browser? I do, and I suspect most of the executive crew at least does. If not, I agree that there’s a problem, though short of logging browser use internally, I don’t see a real way to quantify it.
I agree with your assessment about community. When I was trying to foster community in an official capacity, one of my biggest hopes was that I could browbeat the developers into engaging more. I had only very limited success. I learned during that time that community building is hard. I was trying to come up with initiatives and to build the infrastructure for them at the same time, and it was too much to take on, and our community didn’t take off. I think I did manage to engage on a pretty personal level with much of our active (irc/forum/list) community. My feeling of late is that I don’t really know what’s going on in terms of community. I know there are buttons that can be put on web sites now. And I know that messages occasionally appear in myspace or facebook and that there are plans for building better community rumbling under the surface. But I can imagine that those who aren’t active on myspace or facebook might wonder where what Flock ever had of community has gone. And even the myspace and facebook postings are rare and of limited use (“hey, use a button”). I don’t get the feeling there’s much of a personal connection between Flock and its community these days, and I think such a connection is critical to encouraging people to trust us and like us. As I noted before, community is a lot harder than it seems to maintain and foster, and I think we’re still trying to figure out where it fits into our vision. As during my reign as community shepherd, I think good intentions abound now with respect to community, but it’s just a hard nut to crack, and perhaps one we’ve been in only a limited position (see your point #3) to take on in earnest (as I proposed in my first comment). Whatever the case, I do hope we get this right, and sooner rather than later. If you have time and inclination sometime soon, I’d certainly be receptive to a more detailed analysis of some of the particular things you think we can do better w/r/t community.
Daryl on #1. I meant to write qualify not quantify as I think the you are correct it is not reasonable to quantify.
I don’t think most team members “use most features, most days”, otherwise a number of the bugs in the product would be considered unacceptable by the team and been resolved by now. This also relates to #2 and the Flock team is too detached from addressing their customer’s current problems for #1 to be true. Developers are developers and we like to focus on building the next thing.
I also think that with #1 it would have meant fewer, but better features in Flock today.
Flock can be incredibly successful if it applies web service (Web 2.0) responsiveness to desktop application service. This reminds me of an old podcast where Roland Tanglao said something like, Flock needed to develop in Flickr time. I see Microsoft, Apple and many others in the desktop space developing and deploying applications in a faster, more iterative manner.
At least four of the people that worked to address #1 have left: Bart, Messina, Vera, and myself. And Eli Goldberg has left and he has an amazing ability at finding user experience problems in features regardless of whether he uses them
Jesse is very passionate about this and makes a lot of personal sacrifices to work on it, but it is a whole team affair. If the team is not passionate about the features, they are working on the wrong product. There are other team members that are pretty good about it to, but not exceptional, and to have the greatest chance of successful, the whole team needs to be exceptional like you Daryl.
Bah, you flatter me. I appreciate your continued engagement and followups and will be thinking hard over the next few days about some of the things you bring up.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about community over the last 6 months. As you guys well know, community ambassadorship only sounds easy. The most difficult part is keeping those personal connections that Daryl talked about. As people come and go and as the size of the community grows, it naturally becomes harder to have close relationships with each person. I think we should alleviate that by training more community leaders to be ambassadors to new folks.
There has been progress on getting the rest of the company involved, but we’re not done yet. Developers at Flock have started to get more involved in community activities: we’ve had devs at tech conferences, more blogging, and attending meetups in the Bay Area. But with our sprint to 1.0 and the natural tendency of developers to want to write code (what is with that?), improvement has been incremental. I’m all ears for ideas about how we can get the developers more involved so that we’re ready to grow a bigger dev community when 1.0 launches.
To try and close the gap between community wisdom and company wisdom we’ve been using the community more and more for feedback, and will continue to do so even more. Asking questions and doing surveys have been the most valuable activities we’ve engaged the community in yet.
I think the problem right now is that there has been no step by step plan for how to participate in the Flock community, no “how to be a Flockstar” guide if you will. We need to give new folks an easy way to help grow the community; both getting more out of it and giving more back. I’m formulating my ideas on this right now, so please bear with me while I plan a bit.