For telcos to succeed in the new digital world they have to be 100% focused and can’t afford to succumb to the common distractions that push many firms off course. “We get distracted so easily. When you’re in digital services, you can’t get distracted,” says Nicholas Wodtke, VP of content and services at Samsung.
What are distractions? He points to the board meeting that has to happen, the budget they expect you to do, an assessment of the market, how many people are ramping up into these services. Those are all distractions.
He says when you’re building a digital product, you need to be “razor focused on that product -- everything else is noise. The companies that succeed are the companies that only focus on their product. They are Steve Jobs, probably one of the best examples out there. [He was] absolutely committed to product development. Not talking about budget meetings and this and that.”
Wodtke also calls for fewer meetings. “If you are truly committed to developing the digital space, just cut the meetings in half. It’s going to be a reward to everyone. Everyone’s going to be like; ‘Oh my God, I’ve got more space, I’ve got more think time, I’ve got more dream time’ -- time to think, time to really process. Not like ‘Oh my God, I’m so important, I’ve got my meeting schedule stacked all day’. That's a bunch of BS. People with the most meetings aren’t the most important. Cut the meetings down. Give your teams freedom to really advance and create.”
Emails are another big distraction, he says. “I’ve seen it again and again. ‘I’ve got 250 emails. Oh, I got 400. I’m bigger than you.’ It is a total distraction, and you won’t develop good digital products.”
He says if you’re truly committed to digital products, cut down on emails. “Force people in your team to do less emailing. I’ve done that in my teams, and I tell you productivity rises. You get in in the morning and you’ve got 20 emails, and they’re really well though out. And the rest you do verbally. I understand some people go “Oh gosh, this doesn't work’. With 15 years in the business of digital services, these are the tools that help me.”
Turning to the actual products and services being developed, he stresses the need for fewer features. The people developing products always insist that adding more is better. “I love talking to the tech guys, they’re like ‘You won’t believe this feature’ and they stack up all these features. That is a recipe for disaster.
“That’s called feature creep. It is completely dehumanizing software. Humans are single-taskers, if you can believe it. We actually do really well when we focus on one task. And we want our software to be the same way.”
He noted that the first smartphone only had one button, which was genius. “I would argue that the best software is [made by] taking things out, You get the CTO of your group to come in and say ‘here’s a list of everything I’m taking out.’ Not everything I’m adding. That is genius and that makes good digital products.”
The need to iterate is obvious. Wodtke says firms should quickly iterate and learn fast. “Try to get your cycles down to three or six months.”
When developing new products and services, he says it’s vital to measure success, but most companies select the KPIs after an initiative is launched, which gives them the flexibility to interpret data the way they want.
“When the data comes in, lo and behold the data tells us it actually was quite successful. When you do that, [the KPIs are] basically reinforcing what you want to believe.”
He argues this is really dangerous and it’s not going to help you in the long run. “I guarantee it. You will fail, but it will take a longer time to fail. You’ll convince your boss, you’ll be more distracted, you’ll have more emails, you’ll have more meetings about why it’s successful. But you won’t capture the core problem.”
He recommends defining in advance how to determine success before you collect the data. “Write that down on a piece of paper, put it into your drawer and lock it up. Then when the data comes in, take the paper out and compare the two.”
He calls this validating the learning.
Wodtke spoke at the TM Forum Management World Asia event earlier this year.
This is part one of a two-part article.