One Charming Party is in full swing. Right now we’re focused on creating new products. One of the product concepts is a download-able party plan that helps parents throw amazing birthday and other themed parties for their kiddos. It’s crazy how much time and effort we’re putting into developing this product. Thankfully, we have a great group of creative types around us to support us throughout the process. We’re not quite sure why they’re willing to put so much effort into making the product fantastic, because the money isn’t good and the hours are terrible. The only explanation is that they must have caught the vision of the project and now they’re hooked.
The point of this post and others to follow is to help others avoid some of the mistakes that we’ve made during the launch of One Charming Party. Today’s topic has to do with the making of a product. The download-able information bundle concept is something that you see a lot of folks doing these days, but not something that we had ever done before. I think that it probably goes without saying that building something from scratch for the first time involves a pretty steep learning curve, and the Party Plan build has been no exception. Below, I write concerning a couple such opportunities for continued education.
Topic 1 – Batching
During the period of time when we were starting to explore the idea of the download-able party plans, I was also reading a book that described the concept of batching. The idea with batching is that you ‘batch’ similar work together to increase efficiency. This sounded like a fantastic idea–after all, it’s much more interesting to launch a whole set of party plans rather than just a single offering. It was also likely that there would at least a few services and activities that would be common between the parties. There were several party ideas ready to go so we decided to go for it.
Three and half months into the build process and maybe 25%-30% through the batch of parties it’s starting to seem as though a slower, steadier approach to building up the product line may have been more practical. In retrospect it may have also been smarter to start with one party as a prototype and then, once we got through the whole process with one complete product, review our lessons learned refine our strategies and process, and then do the big push. It’s much easier to deal with the inconvenience of poor planning and execution of one party than with ten. With all of the mistakes I’m not sure that batching is really saving us all that much time or money. Following the advise to prototype your product first will certainly save you time and money in the end.
Topic 2 – One Small Puzzle Piece
Another interesting thing about product creation that’s been discovered and one that has been a particular source of frustration to me is that product creation is only a small piece of the entrepreneurial puzzle. The creation of the party plans has consumed much of the time and money (and will continue to do so) leaving little left for anything else. From the start it felt unnatural to be trying to market or launch a product without actually having said product in hand. That being said, it’s starting to make sense now why so many start-ups sell vapor products (e.g. a product idea sold as if it already exists). At some point prior to product completion, attention will have to be given to other aspects of the business plan. Otherwise there will be a fantastic product sitting on the shelf gathering dust waiting for the rest of the business to catch up with it. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you have to have a complete product prior to testing the market and focusing on other aspects of your business.
The objective for creating One Charming Party has always been to create additional sources of revenue. However, any business venture is a bit of an experiment and experiments are always learning experiences. Define your objective and then devise a strategy to help you attain your objective. Take your knocks and pings along the way. Make sure that your taking notes and understand that whatever you learn this time around can be used the next time and the time after that again.
Tags: OCP
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Saturday, January 30th, 2010
It’s important that you take time, with some regularity, to step back and observe what’s really going on in your organization or business. Look around and see what’s going well and what’s not. What could you change to increase the efficiency or effectiveness of the team of people that you lead? This is part of what I call business development and it’s critical to you being able to step beyond where you are today and move forward to where your vision is taking you tomorrow.
In the Hunt
If you’re always in the moment then you’re focus is always on the the “now” and many times that’s a distraction or a diversion from where you envision yourself to be in the future. I call this being “in the hunt.” I’m a technician at heart; I’m a doer. I am happiest when I’m getting lots of stuff done. To me, it’s kind of like being in the process of hunting, tracking, or chasing something down. It’s exciting to me. My natural tendency is to react to things. You have a problem, I have a solution. There’s a fire, let me put it out. And on and on the list goes. These types of people are great people to have working for you in your organization. We like problem solvers and doers. But, they’re not necessarily the type of people that you want shaping and forging where your business is headed.
The point is, if you’re head is always down, working on whatever the problem of the day is (and believe me, there are problems every day), you never take the time to stand up, look around, and identify what the cause of the problem was in the first place. And though you may be able to make it past all of the problems that come your way in a day, you may never get beyond the problems of the days to come. This will seriously hinder your ability to make progress.
If you’re a leader within your organization (i.e. maybe you own your own business or you’re managing a team of people), your job is not fighting the fires or in the trenches fighting side-by-side with your troops. Your job is figuring out why there’s a fire in the first place and fixing that, or why you’re fighting someone else at all when you should be working together for the greater good.
Business Development
If you are a technician or a doer like me, this next little bit will likely sound like a really good idea and will make perfect sense, but will be excruciatingly painful for you to implement in your day-to-day lives. I’ll make some suggestions in this section of the article that will hopefully give you some tools for implementing the practice of business development slowly into your regular routines.
I’m a software engineer by trade. The work that I’m trained to do is software development. If you’ve ever been involved with a software development team, the process of software development is broken up into phases. Each of these phases together comprise the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) . I believe that these same formal practices that are used by software development teams to successfully deliver software can be applied to the problem of business development. The practices that together make up the SDLC are listed below.
- Analysis: Understanding the problem or requirements and determining a solution or plan.
- Design: What the solution will look like and how it will fit into the overall architecture.
- Implementation: Sitting down and doing the work to implement the solution as it has been defined by the analysis and design steps above.
- Testing: Determine whether the newly implemented functionality meets the requirements and doesn’t break any of the existing functionality.
- Documentation: It’s critical that newly created processes or features are documented so that the value that they add can be fully realized.
- Maintenance and Support: Keeping the code and documentation clean and up to date and keeping the customers happy.
One final phase that is sometimes built into more formal and advanced SDLCs and that I would sneak in somewhere between testing and maintenance/support is the practice of gathering metrics.
- Metrics Gathering: Measures how effectively the goals of the organization were attained.
The practice of business development requires that you take yourself out of the hunt long enough that you can really look at or analyze a situation, come up with a practical design that will produce more advantageous results in the future, implement the new process or procedures within your organization, define tests to determine whether the new process is operating acceptably, define and capture metrics that will help you indicate the new procedures efficacy, and then finally document the new procedure for communication and training purposes. The maintenance and support of the new procedure is the process of putting your weight behind it as a leader and ensuring that the people on your team understand why things are changing.
It sounds like a lot of work, I know. But the truth of the matter is that if you’re not doing something each day to increase your business’s or team’s ability to operate more effectively and efficiently then, at best, you’re standing still and making no progress toward your vision of what you want your business or organization to be. If you take the time regularly in your day to really look at what’s going on around you in your business or organization, you’ll see more and more opportunities for improvements that, if acted upon as I’ve suggested, will accelerate your journey down the path to realizing your vision of what you want your business to be. And, if you’re working for someone else and applying these principles for them, the people around you will quickly realize the value that you add to the organization, which will surely ensure your ascension to the upper echelons within the organization.
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