Source: Facebook

RUMINATIONS ON THE STATE OF THE PRODUCT AND THE STATE OF LIFE

(personal)(state of the product)(thoughts on strategy)

So, over the past week or two it’s become clear that the guys have fixed Oversing’s performance without doing a rewrite of the UI in Backbone. I’d thought it wasn’t possible. Next, Vitally will virtualize the remaining UI’s central panel. And Alexey will keep improving the back end (sometimes dramatically). And with the rate at which he is cutting milliseconds we will have exactly the performance we need, even for enterprise scale data sets. I am going to keep the UI rewrite in my pocket, but at this point I think we’ve all determined it isn’t needed.

The first project management reports are done. Kirill has chosen to add the sales report at Steven’s request. And so the reporting continues to evolve. I think as we work through the standard reports, we’ll have to revisit some functionality, but that’s just normal. There are quite a few reports we need, but most are variations on a theme. No one has incorporated the social factor into those metrics before, and so those reports will wait for last, and I will have to design them myself I suppose unless I can get Steven to do it.

Alexander has been incredibly impactful on the product already, and we were lucky to hire him. Oversing is non-trivial and tracking and reproducing bugs is equally difficult. But I see all these wonderful notices from Oversing as the bugs are opened, and both oversing and github all day long on the fixes are put into the source and published.

Kirill all but runs the development side of the house now, mostly without my intervention. So my little experiment, at his suggestion, is working out. The team is an extended family and self operating as long as the goals are clear. By the time we are ready to launch and turn into a real business, I will have the independent development team I was hoping for. (Gambling on maybe. 🙂 ) And my goal of having a team I don’t have to sit with will have been accomplished.

HONEST ASSESSMENT OF STATUS

-errors-

I have made a few design errors that we will need to fix.

1) messaging / mail outside of profile page. I don’t know at this point, why I made that leap but I should have stayed in the paradigm. I think that once I understood that oversing could eventually replace much of the current microsoft stack, that I got too fascinated with email interfaces, and lost sight of the value of the work oriented rather than message oriented paradigm.

2) workspace first or profile/messaging first. I think I made a mistake. The initial impression is blown by this decision. We should default to the profile/stream page first, then let the user pick his workspace. And then allow the user to select a profile option as to whether to show the workspace first. This will allow new users less ‘blank slate’ exposure when first using the app, but allows sophisticated users with lots of data to get immediately to work.

I have not spent enough time thinking through the reports that are needed for each object in the system, and I think that each object will require one or more reports. The system currently supports a god awful lot of object types. (Which is why its so powerful, and you can run your entire business on it). But each of those objects does require a some sort of reporting (it may overlap considerably), and some UI differences. I have tried to do this a number of times and discovered that the differences in properties are minimal if at all, but the differences in reporting I don’t think are as minimal as the differences in properties. I could be wrong but I need to go look at it. What is the report for a set of contracts for example? Or for a set of employee reviews? I just need to give that some thinking now that we’re far enough along.

-priority/strategy errors-

I think incorporating the email functionality is more important, and more necessary than I had assumed, and I think that is a big oversight, and something that I must fix – and that will be expensive to fix. It means integrating with email systems and supporting the data in email headers for routing mail. It may be true that we can put that off, but the more I think about it the more troubling it is. Mostly because of the impact it has on marketing and positioning. It saves the customer an absurd amount of money in Microsoft licensing fees if I pull it off. And that is an enormous incentive.

Otherwise I think the ongoing release of Sales, Recruiting, Career development, and other features sets as planned MAY BE ok. Even though I’d love to get them in their earlier. The reason is that the market for PM related products is saturated, and given that I worked so hard to make sure we were in the ERP/PSA category, I don’t want the product to get tagged in the tool category along with Jira and the like. Oversing is much more than that.

-completeness-

I think that once we are feature complete, that will mean that all the features are 75% complete. 🙂 Which is what we used to aim for at MSFT anyway – IMHO. So it will still take us a bit to take everything from feature complete, which is the designer and developer’s concept of feature complete, to expected functionality, which is the user’s conception of feature complete. 🙂

The application paradigm is simply ‘moving’. It’s a pleasure to work with. But going through the app today I found what seemed like a limitless examples of “we have to do x here for this to make sense”. It’s all little stuff. But there is a whole lot of little stuff.

For the app to perform its function, the karma system (the social rating system) and the subscription/follow/friend model has to be everywhere.

We will soon enter a period where the content becomes a critical work product. And Oversing is a content heavy application. In order for it to provide value right out of the box, we have to prime it with a great deal of content: the skills data alone is something we need to hire someone to compile – or perhaps many people to compile.

We need to prime all the business and corporate organizational models, all the workflows for those models, all the messages for those models, all the instructional help for those models, and all the sample data for those models.

For example, we currently have both English and Russian dictionaries, but we need german, french, spanish, Italian, and whatever else we can get in there from the developed world. There is no reason why the app will not tolerate right-to-left languages, but the UI doesn’t ‘flip’ to accommodate them – although, given that our UI template does, it shouldn’t be all that challenging at some point to accommodate third world languages. The Google translate functionality primes all of the text values for us, but human beings must still go through those translations and improve them.

But more importantly, the short videos that teach people how to use Oversing have to be pretty exhaustive. They must be delivered by a person not only who sounds intelligent and understandable, but that has intimate knowledge of the product, and maybe a different person for every role, just to make it less monotonous.

GOING TO MARKET

It’s not like once we build it people will come play baseball. We still have the Web site, license purchasing ability from inside and outside the application. Ecommerce functionality. Marketing and sales programs. Sigh. Analyst presentations and meetings. Jurisdictions and taxes. Copyrights, trademarks, patents. Helpdesk, help desk staff and databases. Policies. Licenses. Service org that can perform installs and configure enterprises. Or even convert and transfer data.

Building the product is the most controllable and predictable part of the problem. But adding the content, help and tutorials, product support, configuration and training services, selling and marketing, customer service, and financing to take a product to market is an act of logistics just as challenging if not more so than the development of the product itself.

Which leads me to the next issue: my time.

PERSONAL LIFE AND BUSINESS LEADERSHIP

My personal world has changed over the past 18 months. When we started I was recovering from a near death illness, my second bout of cancer, my decision to leave the company I’d founded, and my divorce. I was a basket case physically, emotionally, and mentally. But after a year and a half of good ukrainian food, good ukrainian people, and fully exiting the previous company and its endemic infighting, my health is considerably better, my mind and soul are considerably better, and my mind has returned to that thing I remember having once upon a time. 🙂

Furthermore, at that point, I merely thought my work in philosophy was to merely reform libertarianism as a means of assisting american conservatives. I did not realize where that project would end, nor the influence that such a work could have on the political sphere in this era of change, as well as upon intellectual history. And at this point I do understand it. And I am both inspired and frightened by it. Inspired to continue working, but frightened of missing the opportunity, now that I understand that the continental and cosmopolitan enlightenment, from which the modern war on the west emerged, is as damaging as the forcible adoption of christianity was – and for the same reasons.

I have succeeded I think, in articulating in analytical if not scientific terms, the content of western philosophy for the first time. And given that the other great civilizations have books of lies (myths) and we do not, this has been our civilization’s weakness.

So while I clearly prefer wealth over lack of it, and I clearly enjoy bringing oversing to market versus a life without commercial competition, I also prefer to advance my work in philosophy more so than I prefer to advance my commercial interests. Or rather, I am very cautious about the time commitment of each. The world might be a little better, and I might be a lot wealthier if oversing is successfully matured into my full vision for it. But the world will be much better, and profoundly better if I continue the current rate of production in philosophy – I have finished creating the language for the moral and ethical debate of various political system in rational and commensurable terms. So I am finally reaching a point of comprehensibility that before I could only suggest. And others are starting to adopt it as well. It works. And at my current productivity, I will literally be able to flood intellectual discourse, and if I get a few others working, seriously flood it, and make a difference. And with that difference construct the possibility of enacting change.

BUSINESS

That is profoundly interesting to me. My people are very talented and will be rewarded for their dedication. We will need to increase the size of the team significantly once we are feature complete – not necessarily so much on the tech side, but on the content and administrative side, because going to market requires all the content, and all the education and marketing materials for an application of this scale. There is no reason intelligent folk will need help installing and configuring Oversing for use in an enterprise. But there is every reason that those intelligent folk will need help training and rolling out oversing as an enterprise application – just as they would need help with rolling out exchange, office, MSDynamics, or for that matter, any ERP. So helpdesk, education/training, marketing, services and product management roles all need filling.

For the past fifteen years I have done fairly well combining work and theory, and I think if I have the right people I can continue it. But in practical terms, if I am to continue my work on philosophy, I cannot afford to really do any of those tasks OTHER than produce the strategy – which is something almost no one else can do – and guide the management team, which I don’t ‘think they’ll let anyone else do. 🙂

I do realize that Max understands the market and importance of this product better than anyone – probably me included. I do realize that the ‘soul’ of the product’s cultural transformation is Steven’s idea, as is the project management and customer service ethic. I do understand that the scope of the product and it’s revolutionary aspect is my idea and I think I may be the only one (although I think max and Kirill may see it too to varying degrees) who sees that Oversing is a very disruptive technology. Max sees it as disruptive in the PSA market. I think I see it disruptive in that oversing would dramatically influence the market value of a number of companies that lack a value proposition sufficient to increase their market capital. The scale at which I am able, even with a good investor, to take Oversing to market is not the same as an established player with access to capital markets and an established customer base that they wish to increase their value proposition for.

So I have a few people I would very much like to hire, and I simply cannot afford to.

I would much rather have these people run the organization, but my problem is that I don’t believe an investor, which I will need to take a product of this scale to market, is going to tolerate me as a chairman / strategist / Philosopher, and I wouldn’t either. But I really cannot afford to spend much time, given that 60 is only 6 years away, on anything other than my philosophical work. I am in my prime and I need to make use of it – torpedos be damned. I am too conscious of the observed decline in faculties of men I see reach 62/63. For the kind of work I do, if I solve the remaining structural (theoretical) problems, I can spend the rest of my life (whatever that may be) on application and advocacy, which do not require periods of such concentration and hard work, only familiarity with the subject matter. But I must make the best use of the next five or six years of my post-45 year old brain, and its inevitable demyelination. I do not work all that fast anyway.

I had hoped that by writing this down and thinking through it I would see an answer. At present I may just have to keep my feet in both pools until it impacts the business. But if at that point it impacts the business, my role will have to decrease to that of chairman or even board member, because while the product is certainly disruptive (or at least will be by version 3) the world needs the solution to the problem of truth, ethics, politics and economics a lot more than it needs another software product.

Curt Doolittle

Kiev, Ukraine

July 5, 2014

Slava Ukraine