Neville Kuyt's blog

I was brainstorming a new product with a client the other day. We had all sorts of amazing ideas, ranging from cool user-interface tweaks to (almost) entirely new business models. “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” was probably the most commonly uttered phrase.

And then we came back to ground. Brainstorming is fun – but we wanted to launch a product, and as quickly as possible. So we looked at what we could do by putting together existing services, frameworks and solutions, rather than building things from scratch. We agreed to settle on a common user interface framework, and to use content-as-a-service and commerce-as-a-service platforms; we will run the production site on Amazon Web Services, and we’ll use Gitlab to manage our code repositories and deployment pipelines. We think we can probably limit the amount of custom development to a couple of weeks – and most of that time will go to our secret sauce idea, rather than plumbing and housekeeping tasks.

It made me think of my first start-up, back in 1999 – an ecommerce site selling prints and frames. We hand-built an ecommerce engine, a pick/pack/dispatch module, a label printer for the warehouse, integration with our payment gateway, a basic CMS, and a product catalogue solution.

We had a designer invent our very own navigation metaphor, and our check-out journey was only loosely based on Amazon’s process. We built a custom “tooltip” solution when it became clear not everyone knew how to check out online. I spoke to some of the guys at LastMinute.com and learnt about how they used analytics to see what worked and it blew our minds!

We rented a rack at a hosting provider in West London, and I physically wired in our server (we could only afford the one, to begin with). It took about a month to set up our credit card processing facility – the bank didn’t really have much faith in start-up ecommerce companies taking payment online. We built the site with lots of hand-crafted code – no frameworks for us!

So much has changed. We could build that same solution today mostly by composing existing solutions, for a fraction of the cost. The platform that took 5 of us 6 months to build would probably take 2 people a few weeks at most. The capital required would follow a similar trend – from tens of thousands for hosting, servers etc. to hundreds.

For a similar project today, we’d use one of the many ecommerce platforms (I like Solidius, but we’d probably end up with Magento or Shopify), and use all of the established design artefacts – navigation structures, page layouts etc; our user journeys would be like every other ecommerce site (and that would be a good thing!), and we’d host on Amazon or similar. All of our energy would have gone to the unique, distinguishing features and content which defined our proposition.

On the other hand…it seemed so easy to launch back then. We built it, they came. We did some PR, a little SEO, and our site got traffic. I remember the go-live date, and somehow, from somewhere, the first visitor arrived. They left after a short while, but we got a dozen or so orders on the first day. It was like magic! Today, it’s much easier to build things – but much, much harder to get people to pay attention. Let alone visit your site…sure, we’ve got Facebook ads, and Twitter sponsored posts, and Google ads, and the banner ad is still going strong – but you’re competing against every other entity in the world for attention. In recent business modelling exercises, we found that while the cost of “building” propositions (the design and technical aspects) has dropped around 10-fold in the last 15 years, the cost of acquiring customers online has risen by at least 10-fold, and in some areas by much, much more.

I found an article online about re-setting your sleep patterns. 

I’ve tried this myself, repeatedly – it’s a great way to re-set. I still struggle with insomnia sometimes, and this routine is what I follow when it all gets out of whack. The thing I’d add is that I make sure I’m properly hydrated before going to sleep – typically by drinking a pint of water half an hour before I go to sleep.

I’m seeing the concept of “customer centric” business in more of my work. Focusing on your customer’s experience is obviously a good thing.

But…

I was chatting to a friend whose business is trying to become more customer centric. My friend is the lead for this project, and he’s encountering all the classic challenges – the data they have is in silos, different departments have a different interpretation of “customer centric” behaviour, and short-term sales targets don’t always support long-term customer focus. But his biggest frustration is the lack of velocity. His team is focused on a culture change – focusing the entire business on the customer requires a shift in perspective from the entire organisation. But they also need to deliver tangible change – new business processes, an update to the web platform (that’s how we got chatting), new reports for senior management etc. And this is where he’s stuck – his IT department has a 3 year planning horizon, and is currently scheduling new projects for a start in 2 years. This encourages every project to be huge – if you have to wait years to get your software, you want to make sure you get everything you might possibly need!

This, in turn, has made my friend very nervous about his project – if you get one attempt to change the business process (through a software project), you have to get everything right first time round. So, he’s investing in lots of research, and prototyping, and customer interviews, and KPI development. He sees this as a make-or-break event in his career, and he’s making sure he’s thought of everything before finalizing the software specification; he’s currently expecting the first release in around 3 years.

And that is a problem.

In 3 years, customers will have moved on. Our expectations are no longer shaped by TV, or how we’re treated in a chain restaurant, or the supermarket. Customer expectations are increasingly shaped by web-native experiences. Even though they may be ethically challenged, Amazon, AirBnB and Uber create expectations of  instant, seamless gratification (at a low price). It’s unlikely those experiences will remain frozen for the next 3 years – so designing a process based on today’s expectations is likely to lead to be outdated. And of course, we have no way of knowing what new things may emerge in the meantime – it took many large companies 3 to 5 years to make their websites work on mobile devices.

So, if you want to be “customer centric”, you need to accept that customer expectations are evolving faster than ever – and you need to be able to keep up.

About 5 years ago, people realized that they had better IT from Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn than they got from their own IT. Their home devices were much nicer to use, and much easier to live with, than their work laptop. They got free, unlimited email from Google, with amazing search while their IT department limited their mailbox.

This caused a bit of a corporate revolution, commonly known as “BYOD” or “bring your own device”. My girlfriend works for a local council (hardly a trailblazer), and doesn’t get a work laptop – instead, she gets a budget and some limits, and goes and buys her own laptop.

The same will happen with IoT.

At home I can tell Alexa to turn up the heat, or dim the lights, or play some music. I can see what the weather’s going to be when I leave home by looking at my alarm clock, and I know that the heating will come on when people are home, and stop when they leave.

At work, the HVAC works on a timer. The lights are on or off (mostly on) because I switch them on or off. If I’m cold, I put on a sweater. If I’m hot – well, HR have asked me not to disrobe anymore. If my colleagues decide to play pumping dance music, I have the option of wearing headphones, suffering, or physical violence.

My home is a more productive environment than the office when I have to get stuff done.

I was listening to a podcast the other day – Tim Ferris talking to Chris Young – and there was a great quote from Chris when he discussed the relationship he had with his father. At some stage, Chris’ father told him “Don’t worry what you’ll do when you leave education – your job hasn’t been invented yet.”.

I am the father of a bunch of teenagers, and they regularly tell me I’m too demanding/my expectations are too high/they are not sure what they want to do, and can I please leave their room? The thing Chris said on the podcast really rang true. I think I might be wrong in my expectations of my kids.

I’m getting on a bit, but when I was at secondary school, computer programming wasn’t part of the curriculum (though you could take extra classes in Hebrew, typing, and bookkeeping). When I went to university, we had access to a computer lab – it ran BBC Micros – and proudly touted access to janet – but the idea of a global network with access for all was pure science fiction. Oh, and TV in the UK was limited to 4 channels, in the Netherlands we got more channels but only because we got access to TV from Germany, the UK, France, Belgium and – for some reason – PBS. Ordering a book that wasn’t available in our local bookshop took about 2 weeks – if you happened to know the ISBN. Phone calls were expensive – international ones were extravagant. The adjective “social” was more commonly associated with “disease” than “media”.

So, no, the jobs I’ve done for the last 18 years wasn’t invented when I was at school; many of the technical skills I have used over the last 25 years (Web development, Visual Basic, PHP, Ruby, Java, DevOps, Agile development, ) weren’t invented when I was at school. Some of the others (SQL, C/C++, object orientation, software project management) were around, but not really commonly known. Some of the things I use every day to do my job – video conferencing, online chat with people around the world, shared knowledge and code repositories – would have sounded like the deluded ramblings of a mad man back in the 80s.

On the other hand…many of the skills and habits I picked up in my teens and early twenties continue to serve me well every day. I learnt to work hard when I worked as a waiter on a passenger ship. I learnt to write at university, and to write in a business sense at PA Consulting, early in my career. I learnt SQL in my first year out of university. I learnt to think about meta-processes and team work in a band. I learnt how to lead a team at school, organising a music festival. I learnt how business finance works in the first two years out of university – when I also learnt the basics of marketing, sales and presenting. I learnt how to pick up new skills in the first few years – I was a graduate trainee, doing 6 months in every department in the company.

I’m still trying to find the common thread here – all the things I learnt involved me being engaged and busy. I’m glad that I hadn’t yet found Civilization back in my teens…They involved exposure to new things, people and experiences outside my normal circle, and surprisingly little formal education.

Am I just a (late) baby boomer riding the technology wave? My father was born before world war 2, and trained as a merchant seaman. He learnt to navigate by the stars, using a sextant and watch. He learnt how to adjust magnetic compasses, and spent time training on tall ships. By the time he was 40, most of those skills were still in daily use, though modern navigation devices like chart plotters were coming onto the market. Many of those skills are still being taught at naval colleges today. My mother trained as a secretary – she could take shorthand, and type an ungodly number of words per minute.  Again – her job still existed by the time she reached 40, though the mechanical typewriter was being replaced with word processors.

My grandfathers were both born before world war I. They trained as craftsmen, and the basics of their trade didn’t change all that much during their working life – though one of my grandparents trained as an air mechanic in the Royal Flying Corps in world war I, and worked on aircraft design in WW II (he had a Hurricane prop in the garden shed) – by the time he died in the 1990s, much of his training in aircraft maintenance was obviously redundant. But his knowledge of the internal combustion engine didn’t go out of date.

So, yes – I think change is accelerating.

Last time I spoke to one of my teenagers, I tried to summarize it thus – as a teenager, your job is to work out what you like doing, and what you’re good at. If you have any extra time or energy, work out how to learn new skills, and communicate. Any educational achievements are a bonus.