I wrote the speech last night (on an iPad) at the local Starbucks.  After a number of twitter questions, youtube searches, and other research, I decided to adopt the high level framework from Steve Jobs 2005 Commencement speech at Stanford, replacing his stories with my own, and adding my own form of 8th grade humor.  I did stick with his “dots” lesson, but you can see I changed the lesson from it quite dramatically.

Overall, quite a few people seemed to enjoy the speech, as a number of the students, parents and faculty came up to me afterward.  It seems like the students liked the jokes at the beginning, while the parents liked the third story on painting behind the refrigerator.

While I ad-libbed a few jokes, the notes below are exactly what I brought up onto the podium with me.  Let me know what you think.

Ice Breaker:

• Last time I gave the 8th grade graduation speech here it was 1987
• Weighed 85 pounds
• I was 12 years old
• Had to stand on a milk crate to reach the microphone to give my speech

Who am I now?

• I have a wife, 3 beautiful boys, and two really fat dogs.
• I am an executive at one of the cooler technology companies in the Valley right now.
• It is part of my job to buy and play with every single new tech toy that comes onto the market.  Yes, it’s true. It’s my job to get the iPad the day it comes out.  Yes, I get paid for it.

(By the way, I appreciate you laughing at all my jokes.  If you don’t think they are funny, don’t be afraid to just laugh at me.  I’ll take it.)

Humorous Anecdote:

Wasn’t sure what to speak about.  Fortunately, they have this thing called the Internet now, and it’s pretty good.  I have over a thousand followers on Twitter, so i asked the for ideas.  I searched YouTube.  Poked around Facebook.  Even asked my younger cousins, who are in junior high now.

Not surprisingly, the ideas were spectacularly bad.

• Some people said I should include a lot of quotes from Family Guy. I did a search and found over 768 funny quotes from Family Guy.  I’m 99% sure that literally none of them are OK for me to say out loud here.
• Other people said I should ask the girls whether they are on Team Edward or Team Jacob.  I don’t really even want to know what that means.
• I got a suggestion to talk about video games.  Apparently, Splinter Cell: Conviction is just awesome.  While that’s probably true, I’m not sure what to tell you about games except that you should treasure these years – once you have kids, you pretty much have until the age of 7 and then they start beating you.
• Apparently, a lot of people think it would be funny if I gave a lot of advice to the boys in the class about girls.  Unfortunately, I still don’t understand high school girls, so not much help there.  Girls, in case you are curious about high school boys, all you need to know is that they really don’t mature much from here.  Don’t overthink it.

Anyway, since none of those ideas panned out, I decided I would cover three stories today and keep it relatively short.

I am going to tell you some things tonight that you are not going to believe.  But they are true.  Just three stories about:

1. Coins
2. Volleyball
3. Painting

First, Coins.

• There are a million little things that make you, you.  Don’t ignore them.  When I was little, i loved numbers.  I used to punch 2x2x2 into the calculator until it got too big for it to display.  Yes, I know that I am not normal.  I’ve always been a geek.   But who knew that knowing all the powers of 2 would be a uniquely valuable skill when it came to computers?
• Hobbies are good.  You’ll be surprised where they’ll take you.  I collected baseball cards and coins.  Yes, I’m a dork.  At the time, I had no idea that I’d end up at business school, and that I’d have a natural sense for markets and trading.  I also had no idea that 20 years later there would be a company named eBay, or that it would do $60 Billion in sales.  I also had no idea that I’d end up working for that company.
• Steve Jobs said a few years ago that a lot of life is about connecting the dots.
• The wonderful thing about high school is that you are still busy adding dots to your picture.
• You’ll spend your life connecting a lot of these dots, but it may not be for years or decades.
• Don’t let anyone discourage you right now from learning and investigating.  If you find something interesting, don’t let anyone tell you that it isn’t worthwhile or cool. Pursue your hobbies, and do them deeply.  You’ll be constantly surprised later at how your life connects the dots.

Lesson 1: Draw lots of dots.

Second,  Volleyball.

• In my senior year of high school here at Pinewood, I was a starter for the Varsity Volleyball team.  This was a big deal for me, largely because I wasn’t actually always good at Volleyball.
• In fact, when I first tried out for the team my sophomore year, I didn’t make it.  (The fact that I was 5’3″ at the time may have been a factor).  I made the team my junior year, but mostly as a substitute.  But I practiced.  2 hours a day.  Extra trips to the gym, practicing against the wall, etc.  I didn’t make starter until senior year.
• There are two types of skills in this world: ones where you’ll have natural talent and ability, and ones where you won’t.   Everyone is different, and I was pretty fortunate to be naturally talented in a bunch of areas.  But there are far more things out there that you won’t be naturally gifted at.
• Don’t limit yourself to the things you’re good at.  Everyone is afraid of looking foolish, and that keeps a lot of us from pursuing things that we’re interested in, but that we’re not immediately good at.   Don’t fall into that trap in high school.  If you are interested in something, don’t just try it.  Do it, and do it well.
• Pushing forward and mastering something that you’re not naturally great at gets you way more than just a skill.  It teaches you persistence and diligence.  More importantly, it gives you the confidence to learn and do anything.
• It also teaches you to not take your talents for granted, and how special it is when you *do* have a unique gift in area.

Lesson 2:  Don’t limit yourself.

Lastly, I promised to tell you about painting.

• I’ve always liked to work with my hands, and now that I have a house, I’m always doing something to it.  When you paint a room, like the kitchen, you always reach a difficult point – do you paint behind the refrigerator?
• After all
  • no one else will see it
  • you can fix it later
• But in the end, there are good reasons to paint behind the refrigerator.
  • first, you know it’s there
  • take pride in your work
  • act as if people are watching
• Character is what you do when no one is watching
• Important in high school, tremendously important in college & adult life
• Some of the worst things that important people have done in the past decades have been because they thought they could get away with cutting either legal or ethical corners when no one was watching.  Many of you will turn out to be important people someday, and like they say, practice makes perfect.

So if I leave you with anything

Lesson 3: Be the type of person who paints behind the refrigerator.

Congratulations to you all.  Thanks for having me here today.  Take care.

LinkedIn Blog: Find and Follow Your LinkedIn Connections on Twitter

Tweets on LinkedIn

You can install Tweets by going to the install page on LinkedIn.

There’s no need to run through all of the great new features – the LinkedIn blog post does a good job of that.   Here is some of the most notable press coverage:

• Mashable: LinkedIn Beefs Up Its Twitter Integration
  
• TechCrunch: LinkedIn Deepens Integration With Twitter; Becomes A Full-Fledged Client

The buzz was fantastic to see.  We pushed out the new application at 4PM PST, and by 4:10PM we were trending with over 20 tweets per minute about the application.  (This included a really nice shout out from Ryan Sarver at Twitter).

One of the most unique aspects of this launch was the added ability to see which of your LinkedIn connections are on Twitter, and which ones your are (or aren’t following).  For example, I personally discovered that I had over 334 LinkedIn connections with Twitter accounts, but was only following 120 of them.  With a few clicks, I was able to discover that key people, including several executives at LinkedIn, had Twitter accounts that I should be following.  Click click click.  Done.

The reason I really loved working on this project is that it captures one of the fundamental reasons the LinkedIn platform is so important.  We believe that every business application would be better if it was integrated with your professional reputation and relationships, and this feature is a great example of how Twitter can become more valuable when it’s integrated with your LinkedIn account.  Finding the right people to follow on Twitter can be difficult, and leveraging your LinkedIn network is a great way to find and follow professionally relevant Twitter accounts.

With the new Twitter list functionality, I can now keep tabs on the tweets of my LinkedIn connections on LinkedIn, on Twitter for iPhone, in Tweetdeck, Seesmic, Twitter.com or any Twitter client that supports lists.  Set it once and forget – LinkedIn keeps it up to date.

A special thank you to the team, in particular Alejandro Crosa, Sarah Alpern and Taylor Singletary.  Very exciting to see this feature live.

You’ll be even more impressed with what we have planned next. 

LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn for Blackberry: Anytime, Anywhere

You can download it at http://www.linkedin.com/blackberry

Twitter is on fire with the news right – I’m watching the stream of comments in realtime.  Great pieces on TechCrunch & Mashable already.  As usual, the team seems to find it amusing to use my profile in all the screenshots, so I guess that is some measure of fame.

The best part of this launch is that it’s just the beginning of our efforts on the Blackberry platform.  I’m very proud of the entire team for pulling together to make this first launch successful.  Special kudos to Chad Whitney on his first major launch and blog post – he even got a new profile photo for the occassion.  Chad joined my team in December 2009, and has already made a phenomenal impact on our mobile products.

I’ve been happy with the ReadyNAS, and performance has been fairly good since I upgraded the Gigabit switch that I use.  However, over the past two years, my storage needs have grown:

• iMac 27″: 2 TB drive for documents / applications / photos, 2 TB drive for iTunes, 2 TB for Time Machine
• Macbook: 250GB main drive

The ReadyNAS has 4 750GB drives, providing 2.25 TB of available storage.  At the time I deployed it, my backup needs were about 1 TB, so I could use the drive for backups and incremental updates.

The problem now is the iTunes drive.  It’s too large to backup effectively with Time Machine.  I’ve been using Carbon Copy Cloner to update a disk image of the drive on a weekly basis, but I’ve found that it’s extremely finicky and errors out in a number of situations.  Plus, at 1.6TB, the iTunes library will likely outgrow it’s 2TB home sometime in 2010.  (If you’ve ever purchased a TV season on iTunes, you’ll understand the storage needs).

In order to figure this out, I tried asking the question on Quora, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

• Twitter got me no answers whatsoever.  Very disappointing.
• Quora got me no answers for weeks, although one trickled in almost a month later.
• LinkedIn was the clear winner, and even I was surprised at the speed and quality of the responses.

So, I decided to make the big move to upgrade the system.  Looking at prices on NewEgg, I decided to opt for the Western Digital WD15EARS SATA 1.5TB drives.  Low power and 64MB of cache.  $109 each.  (Great price – selling the 750GB drives will likely pay for 25% of the upgrade).

Unfortunately, the drive wasn’t listed on the compatibility page on NetGear’s website.  Fortunately, a quick board question provided me with the info I needed – the drives will work, if I upgrade to the new beta firmware (4.1.7 T29).

So that’s what I’m doing tonight:

• Upgrade firmware
• One-by-one replace each 750GB drive with a 1.5TB and let it resync
• Once all four drives are replace and synched, reboot and let it reconfigure to the 4.5 TB logical size.

Once I get the ReadyNAS NV+ to 4.5 TB, I’m going to move my iTunes library to the ReadyNAS.  This way, it can scale easily to more than 2 TB, and I don’t have to worry about backup because of the RAID configuration.  (I have a clone of most of the library on a Mac Mini in the kitchen.)  I will then move the 2 TB drive that currently houses the iTunes library, and move it to the Airport Extreme hub so I can use it as a Time Machine drive for the MacBook.

I’m not sure this information is actually useful to anyone.  My guess is that someone, somewhere out there will want to know that you can, in fact, upgrade the Infrant ReadyNAS NV+ to more than 4TB, and that you can use the Western Digital DV15EARS 1.5TB drives with it.  And maybe, just maybe, someone out there is morbidly curious about the evolution of my network storage.

Or so I hope.  I’ll update this post if anything goes wrong.

More and more companies seem to be thinking of IT as a human resources benefit.

(If your eyes just rolled back in your head, stay with me for a second.  This is a big deal.)

Historically, IT has been positioned as one of two things in the enterprise:

1. Cost Center. In this model, IT technology and services are a required cost of doing business and being competitive, but don’t add any differentiation versus your competitors.  As a result, IT is managed by cost, and the goal is to provide “sufficient” productivity compared to other comparable companies at the lowest possible cost.  In this frame, every software purchase, every hardware purchase, every investment in training or personnel is evaluated based on price.
2. Productivity. In this model, IT technology and services are seen as productivity enhancements, and potential differentiators.  Here, investments are made based on an Return on Investment (ROI) justification, where the benefits can include saving time and/or people, or potentially boosting output or revenue.  In this frame, there is a heavy bias towards technology that allows people to get more things done, more quickly, and with fewer errors.

Both of these models tend to heavily favor technology that is cheap.  What they don’t favor is technology that is enjoyable to use.   This has led to many decades of enterprise technology that is sold to decision makers at the top of the organization, and rolled out to reluctant employees who bear the brunt of the cost savings and/or potential productivity gains.

I had never considered that there might be a third model until a blog post about IT at Google surfaced in 2006.  [Note: I hope someone can find this URL for me - I've tried with no luck tonight].  This post wrote about how Google set up stations on every floor, with surplus batteries and machines to make swapping out faulty equipment a breeze.  It talked about giving employees a choice of platform to work on.  Most importantly, it talked about thinking about IT as an HR benefit.

IT as an HR Benefit

When you think about benefits in a human resources context, there is a very different frame of reference.  In business school, students who take incentives classes learn about different forms of compensation and their impact on psychology.  In theory, benefits need to justify their existence in some way beyond straight cash compensation.  Sometimes benefits are required because competitors offer them.  Sometimes benefits are offered because it’s cheaper, due to taxes or bulk purchasing power, for the company to buy them than the employee.  Benefits can be long term, or reward certain types of behavior.  In some cases, benefits are offered because people actually appreciate them more than the equivalent of cash.

In most companies, while benefits are in the end a cost center, they are factored into the general budget and philosophy around compensation of employees.  As a result, more often than not, benefits tend to compete with each other.  Given a compensation budget, what percentage of dollars will be spent on salaries vs. bonus vs. benefits?  Would employees prefer a 401k match or transportation vouchers?  Charitable contribution matches or gym discounts?  Who benefits from each program, and how much?  Will the benefit help with recruiting new employees, or with employee satisfaction and retention?

When framed as an HR benefit, IT comes under a whole different light.  Consider:

• What percentage of your employees time is spent in front of a computer?
• What is the relative cost of newer, more enjoyable technology over the “base model”?
• How much would an employee appreciate dollars spent on IT technology vs. other benefits?
• How does your technology affect your internal corporate culture?

These are very different questions than the ones that tend to drive historical cost-driven IT decision making.

In this model, you might get everyone a 24″ flat panel monitor instead of a 20″ monitor.   Why?  Because as a benefit, this might only cost $50 per employee per year, and they would appreciate it far more than the dollars themselves.   And they would appreciate it for hours every single day.  In fact, they might want to stay at work longer to use it compared to the machine they have at home.

In this model, you might give everyone the choice of mobile device (Blackberry, iPhone, Android, etc).  Of course, it would cost more in software support and development, but allowing employees to use the device of their choice might be appreciated every single day.  It also might make them a little more reluctant to consider working in an environment where they are forced to use a less-preferred platform.

LinkedIn

At LinkedIn, our IT department provides a wide range of choices, which we actually advertise on job postings:

• Choice between Mac or Windows environment
• Choice between laptop or workstation
• Choice between two 24″ displays or a single 30″ display
• Choice between iPhone or Blackberry

Do these technologies boost productivity?  Absolutely.  Do these technologies cost more than a homogenous, lowest-cost environment?  Absolutely.

But when you look at this list, it’s hard not to see them as benefits.  I see new employees every day, almost giddy when they first get their first laptop and 30″ display, or a tower with 24GB of RAM.  I hear people with guests at lunch brag about how LinkedIn lets you have an iPhone or a Blackberry.

Many of these employees spend anywhere from 4 to 10 hours with this equipment every day – is it any wonder that they perceive these as benefits?

Thoughts for the Industry

The question I have is, how pervasive is this trend?   For most office workers, any computer offers sufficient speed and available software.  In the consumer market, with the resurgence of design-based thinking, we’re seeing more products and profits driven by quality of the experience rather than quantitative metrics or feature checklists.  Will it spread to the enterprise?   Will employees demand it?

Many great professionals that I know in IT long to provide better products and services to their fellow employees.  Maybe this is the opportunity for IT & HR professionals to work together to reframe the way we justify technology at work.

Silicon Alley Insider: What’s It Like Working for LinkedIn by Nicholas Carlson

It’s a short piece that covers the basics of working for a hyper-growth, late stage web 2.0 startup.  The piece begins with the following:

During a recent trip out to the Bay Area, we swung by the LinkedIn world headquarters.

We learned that LinkedIn may be the “serious” social network, but the people behind the site know how to have fun.

They wear gorilla suits to the office. They play frisbee golf around cubicles. Sometimes, they build robots modeled after each other.

Sounds like fun, right?  The article has a 24-slide series of photos to illustrate the trip.   The slide show is called:

LinkedIn is Made by Robots and Men in Gorilla Suits

It turns out that I am, in fact, the Man in the Gorilla Suit.

On Slide 17, you see a picture of the large stuffed gorilla that sits next to me at work:

I asked Kay, “what’s with the stuffed bear?” Her answer: “Get your facts right, it’s a stuffed gorilla. Sheesh.” It belongs to VP Adam Nash…

On the next slide, they provide the snapshot from the FAQ page on the company store, where I’m posing in gorilla suit, wearing a LinkedIn t-shirt:

…who is sometimes known to wear a gorilla suit around the office.

As my brother would say, “It’s funny because it’s true.”

It turns out that the Gorilla suit is just about my favorite Halloween costume.  Originally an eBay purchase in 2005, I wear it every year to the office.

So now you know.

Download LinkedIn for iPhone

I wrote a fairly lengthy piece on the official LinkedIn blog, so no need to replicate the full walk-through here.  In any case, check out this new home screen:

This application represents a huge achievement for the team.  It’s really a complete redesign and re-architecture of the entire stack supporting the application, based on an end-to-end design that was driven by user feedback and business metrics.

Building iPhone apps is a wonderful throwback in some ways to the days of client software, except with the advantage of over a decade and a half of web-based architectures.  There is a richness to client applications that the web still doesn’t replicate, and a complexity and depth to their design that is often under-appreciated.

Of course, the team had fun too.  The “Themes” feature, for example, was never part of the original plan.  It was originally a last minute easter egg that we included for fun in internal testing.  It proved so popular, however, we felt like we had to include it for everyone.

There are hundreds of things I love about this new application.  Even the way it presents a user’s profile is thoughtful, as LinkedIn is designed to allow you to put your best foot forward as a professional:

Of course, I wouldn’t be a product manager if I didn’t also have hundreds of things I’d like to see improved in the application.  It has been fun to watch the Twitter stream all day, as the feedback has been mostly positive.  Still, while this application represents a big leap forward for LinkedIn on the iPhone, it’s really just a beginning.  What’s most exciting about the architecture of this application is that it will let us rapidly innovate and improve the mobile experience through 2010 and beyond.

So here’s a quick shout out to the team – thank you for the hard work and effort in 2009 to produce an iPhone app we can be proud of.   I couldn’t be more excited for 2010, as we change the way people think of mobile business applications.

I normally don’t post most LinkedIn announcements here, but this one is too big to ignore.

On Monday, LinkedIn made faceted search available to all members.  This effort brought to fruition efforts that date back to 2007 to completely rearchitect and redesign the LinkedIn search experience based on the unique characteristics of people search.

Rather than try to describe the feature here, I’ll just point to the formal LinkedIn blog post by Esteban Kozak, and embed his great youtube video on the feature:

The news coverage has been flattering:

• Mashable: Facebook Could Learn a Thing or Two from LinkedIn’s Faceted Search

What’s most exciting to me, however, is that these are still very early days in the development of the LinkedIn search platform.  It took LinkedIn over five years to amass its first billion queries.  This year alone, LinkedIn will exceed that number by a wide margin.  People search requires unique investments in structured data, relationship information, search intelligence, and personalized relevance.  (If you’re curious, the Boolean Black Belt got a sneak peak at some upcoming features).

I just wanted to take a moment to say kudos to the entire search team for this tremendous achievement that cuts across all areas – product, design, research, web development, engineering, marketing & operations.

Twitter integration, Open developer program, Faceted Search.  What a great way to launch into the holidays.

Can’t wait for January

LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn Recommendations & The Reputation Economy

I spent a good bit of time on this post, and even took a half hour to discuss some of the fundamental driving concepts behind it with Reid Hoffman, to help stitch together my thoughts with some of the underlying premises behind LinkedIn.  I’m pretty happy with the result.

Here’s a quick snippet:

Whether or not we realize it, we all live and work in a networked world.  Reputations matter.  Relationships matter.  Information is bombarding us from a rapidly swelling variety of sources, with increasing frequency and variability in terms of quality.  Interestingly, people are managing this incredible increase in complexity with habits and business practices that date back decades, if not centuries.

They consider the source.  They consider the context.

Fortunately, in the 21st century, with the birth of the social web, we have tools at our disposal that are orders of magnitude more powerful than we have ever had as individuals or as a society.  To quote David Weinberger from his recent talk at PDF09, Transparency is the New Objectivity:

What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.

This change is, well, epochal.

David is talking about journalism, but his insights are at the heart of why LinkedIn is such a powerful concept.  On LinkedIn, the skills that you’ve spent your career obtaining, the experience that you’ve earned, the trusted relationships that you’ve formed – they are all made largely transparent.  Your professional reputation and relationships matter – and not just to you.  That value extends far beyond your profile itself – it carries over to every interaction, every message, and every piece of contributed content.

It’s always rewarding when you write a post like this to get positive feedback.  Here is a flattering quote from Neal Schaffer:

I think the most brilliant blog post to come out of reaction to Jeremiah’s is the one on the official LinkedIn Blog entitled “Recommendations and the Reputation Economy” and written by LinkedIn’s own Product Director Adam Nash.  He went further to talk about how transparency is the new objectivity and that not only are recommendations often mutual, but that requesting recommendations is absolutely normal.  In fact, he ends his post asking you to write three recommendations for people unsolicited.  Exactly!  That line could have been taken out of my upcoming book!

Normally I don’t flag every post I make to the corporate blog here on my personal site, but if you’re interested, do check out the piece.

LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn Widget for IBM Lotus Notes Now Available

Quote from Ed Brill, Director of Product for Lotus Notes at IBM:

This week, IBM and LinkedIn are announcing the availability of the LinkedIn plug-in for Lotus Notes.  This easy to use add-in dynamically displays LinkedIn profile, status, and other information in the Notes 8 sidebar.  The new plug-in is a great example of “contextual collaboration” — where users access relevant information without having to leave behind what they are already working on.

Special kudos to the LinkedIn LED Team, and to Elliot Shmukler for this big win.

In fact, the only thing I find a tad disappointing is the lack of a new Elliot blooper reel for this launch.  As a consolation, I’ll link to the old one from 2008 here.

The concept is borrowed from “The End of Eternity“, one of the classic science fiction novels from Isaac Asimov.  The book imagines a future with time travel, and the guidelines that govern its use:

There is a group of people (only males) who are called The Eternals. They live outside of ordinary time and space in a man-made construct called Eternity. The Eternals can move back and forth between Eternity and Earth, entering into any time period of Earth’s history. Their mission is to make Reality Changes, changes in the course of human history that will result in an improved Reality. They try to do this with the help of computers that can predict how even subtle changes will alter Reality. There is an art to finding the minimal intervention that will result in a desired Reality Change. There is a special change called “The Minimum Necessary Change“.

I’ve been surprised over the years how often I find myself using this concept, the “minimum necessary change”, to help frame potential solutions to problems.

In some ways, it’s a fairly obvious outcome of a scientific education.  Occam’s razor demands that, all things being equal, we bias towards the simplest explanation.  It’s not a far stretch to morph that concept into a bias towards the simplest solution to a given problem.

Seasoned product managers are also familiar with another, related concept, the “minimally viable product”.  The MVP, of course, is the minimal number of features necessary for a product to be successful at achieving it’s business & product goals.

Today, at LinkedIn, I was in a fairly intense meeting discussing potential solutions for a product that we’re trying to roll out in the next few weeks.  A fairly significant issue has arisen, and the team has been debating solutions.

It’s very easy for product managers and engineers to sometimes get caught up in “redesign fever”.  An unexpected issue or constraint arises that wasn’t expected.  Immediately, smart people will retrace their steps back to the beginning, and imagine a radical new design for their product that incorporates that new issue.  The problem is, there are always new issues.  There are always unexpected constraints.  Redesign fever can and will prevent products from converging, and prevent teams from shipping.

I’ve found that the best way to resolve these types of issues is to clearly define the problem, brainstorm potential solutions, and then way the pros/cons of each.  Not rocket science.

However, make sure as part of the exercise that the “Minimum Necessary Change” is one of the solutions that is part of the decision set.  It helps frame the costs (and benefits) of more elaborate solutions.  In fact, the intellectual pleasure of finding a simple, elegant solution to a complex problem can turn into a highlight for the entire project.

If you believe in fast iteration, in shipping product quickly and frequently to incorporate real user feedback into your designs, then more often than not you’ll find that the Minimum Necessary Change is your friend.

This advice takes the form of a simple classification framework for the features that you are considering for a product, whether it’s a single “large scale” launch, or a series of product features that are planned out on a roadmap.

Place your feature concepts in one of three buckets:

• Customer requests. These are features that your customers are actively requesting.  There is no mystery here.  Listen to your customers, and know which features they want to see the most.  You don’t necessarily want to implement every suggestion, but product professionals need to listen to direct requests carefully, with humility and deep consideration.  Nothing irritates customer more that to see you roll out new features that exclude the ones that they have already identified and requested actively.
• Metrics movers. These are features that will move your target business & product metrics significantly.  In most healthy product organizations, there are specific goals and strategies behind the decision to invest in a product or feature.  Engagement.  Growth.  Revenue.  Typically, very few features are actually metrics movers.  Know which ones they are ahead of time, because in the end, the judgment of whether your product or roadmap succeeded or failed will rest on the evaluation of the metrics.
• Customer delight. These are features that customers haven’t necessarily asked for, but literally delight them when they see them.  Typically these are features that require several ingredients: listening to customers to understand their pain points, leveraging a knowledge of technology to know what might be possible, and innovative design to come up with an unexpectedly elegant & delightful experience.

Don’t get me wrong – there are some features that can fall in more than one bucket, but it’s a rare feature that actually falls in all three.

I’ve found that categorizing features into these buckets forces product teams to be intellectually honest with why they are implementing a certain feature.  Is it because customers want it?  Or is it because the company wants it (to move metrics)?  Or is it just cool?

For large, monolithic releases of features, optimal success comes from packaging up items from each of these buckets.  The customer requests ensure that your customers see that the time that they are investing in your products is rewarded by a provider who listens and delivers.  Your metrics movers ensure that the business and strategy you are executing on will provide the resources to invest in future iterations.  And your customer delight features highlight your ability to leverage expertise in technology & design to deliver innovative capabilities.

Conversely, if you find yourself without one of these buckets represented, it likely represents a serious hole in either your channels for customer feedback, your product execution, or your innovation capabilities.  These holes will significantly impact both your short term and long term success in this area.

Most consumer internet companies don’t ship monolithic feature redesigns often – instead they release small iterations and additions frequently.  (At LinkedIn, we release every week.)  The logic above, however, can just as easily apply to a series of 1-2 week features executed over the course of a three month roadmap as a large monolithic release.

Take a moment and consider major product releases in the consumer space that you really respect as a product professional.  I think you’ll find that these releases have all three of these buckets well represented.  (iPhone 3.0 is not a bad recent example.)

Get ready for consultants, product managers, marketing executives, and knowledgeable technorati everywhere to be talking about the most important traffic driver since… SEO (Search Engine Optimization).

That’s right, 2009 is the year of TEO.  Twitter Event Optimization.

The logic is simple enough.  Twitter is growing by incredible rates, and it’s inherently a high activity, highly connected distribution model.  That means that pushing out events to Twitter can help drive traffic to your application or service.

When a user pushes out a link to your content, it magnifies distribution a large number of ways:

• The tweet/link is pushed to all of their followers (sometimes to multiple clients/locations)
• The tweet is sometimes retweeted (at a fractional rate) to a 2nd degree of followers
• The tweet shows up in countless Twitter searches for terms/keywords
• The tweet is indexed in Google for natural search
• The tweet, if hashtagged, comes up for anyone reviewing that particular topic.  (Topics on Twitter are often flagged with a # symbol.  Example: #swineflu)

One of the hardest problems that websites face is traffic generation, and I can see it in the eyes of marketing and media executives everyone.  They look at Twitter, and they see… engagement.  attention.  TRAFFIC.

And they want it.

Thus, TEO is born.  Like SEO before it, there will be a range of skillsets that will quickly be developed, and then sold to countless companies everywhere:

• Optimizing your website to get users to issue events to Twitter (manually or automatically)
• Optimizing the content of an event to promote click-through
• Optimizing the content of an event to trigger retweeting (RT)
• Optimizing the tracking of the links on Twitter for effectiveness (already happening)
• Optimizing the landing pages of your site, so that non-members who click through from Twitter get a good experience and “convert” to direct users.
• The list goes on…

I really haven’t seen this much collective energy around a new traffic source since Google really hit the scene in volume, and everyone realized that an alternative to paying for search advertising was to invest in optimizing your content for natural search.

It’s hard to argue that this will be good for the Twitter eco-system.  Google has fielded armies of engineers and incredibly advanced technology to help keep natural search effective.  One of the challenges Twitter will definitely face is keeping their stream relatively “clean” of manufactured content.  Whether that’s something that can be done by end users, or whether deep technology will be needed is yet to be determined.

In any case, I’m not sure if I am the first to coin the term… it’s hard to believe that with the huge buzz around Twitter that this one hasn’t been claimed already.  But, just in case you heard it here first, remember:

2009 is all about TEO

At LinkedIn, we work every day to help professionals leverage their two most important assets, their reputation and their relationships, to make them more productive.  Getting that first full time position can be hard, so we’ve put together a new mini-site for new graduates called the ’09 Grad Guide.

Check it out, we have a version for college grads and graduate students.

Please feel free to forward to friends and family who are graduating this year.  We’re hoping it will help the hundreds of thousands of new graudates this year find their first dream job, and begin their careers.

“Building a World Class Web 2.0 Product Organization”

While I posted this presentation to Slideshare and on my LinkedIn profile, it turns out I never actually posted it here on this blog.

Christina Wodtke, author of Elegant Hack and a Principal at LinkedIn, gave a talk this week on Product Management and borrowed a few of my slides.  As a result of that talk, I saw this blog post, about the definition of a product manager, come through my Google Alerts today.

For those of you who’ve worked with me, it’s a classic “Adam Nash slide“.  The tell-tale sign is the use of simple geometric shapes, typically in pastel colors.  (I’m not proud of my limited PowerPoint skills.  In fact, you could say I’m proud that I don’t have advanced PowerPoint skills.)

Anyway, I’m glad to see that the content was useful/interesting for both Christina and her audience.  It was also a great reminder to post the deck here too for anyone who is interested.

BTW The second edition of Christina’s book on information architecture is now available on Amazon.  You might want to check it out.

LinkedIn Blog: Nächste Haltestelle: Deutsch

Great work to Nico & the whole team on this next milestone for LinkedIn.  I’m really enjoying the launch video that the team put together:

I’ve been reading (thank you, Google Translate) some of the local coverage about the launch.  I have to admit, TechCrunch gets a special nod that I give to any blog post that references Fight Club well.

Truth be told, I think Kevin summarized our motivation best in the opening of his blog post:

With increasing international travel and interaction, we know how critical communication is to commerce. And while English is used in parts of the world, many of us would like the option to do business in our native language.

We’re excited about this launch because it represents the first step in our process of learning more directly from our German users what features and functionality they find most useful.  We continue to believe that leveraging your professional reputation and your professional network is the best way to make professionals more productive, worldwide.

Ten Ways to Find a Job Using LinkedIn

It’s a very timely post because I find that, even among my fairly young and tech-savvy friends, people still have trouble imagining how to best leverage their professional network online to help them with their job search.  Too often, people think of social networks as just an online roladex or messaging client.  They don’t realize that while there is great advantage in keeping up with your connections, the true transformative power is the ability to look past the people you know directly to explore options in your broader network.

Here is a quote from the article:

Searching for a job can suck if you constrain yourself to the typical tools such as online jobs boards, trade publications, CraigsList, and networking with only your close friends. In these kinds of times, you need to use all the weapons that you can, and one that many people don’t—or at least don’t use to the fullest extent, is LinkedIn.

I won’t paraphrase the entire article here – it’s worth reading directly. But it is worth noting the three steps that I highly recommend, regardless of whether you are looking for a job or not:

1. Be found. It’s almost criminal to leave your LinkedIn profile unfinished.  Think of it as search optimization, but not for a website – for you.  The more positions you list, education you cite, and skills you highlight, the more likely it is that the right people will find you.  It’s not hard – in fact, if you have a resume handy from your last job search, you can fill in a profile typically with a few minutes of cut & paste.   Most people are shocked to find out how many great opportunities find them once they fill out their professional profile.  Don’t let them have all fun.
2. Get your network online. Your network is one of your most valuable assets, but it does little good for you offline.  Upload your addressbook, invite the people you want to connect with, and get connected.  Most people don’t realize that having your network online means that you can now use it as a personalized search engine for both who and what you know.  That’s why, by the way, you only want to connect with people you actually know.  It’s no good finding out you are one degree away from the company of your dreams, if that connection doesn’t know you from Adam (pardon the expression).  Worse, that false connection can even “crowd out” a real connection to that company in the LinkedIn search engine.  Your relationships are the heart of social relevance – use them.
3. SEARCH! You’d think that after a decade of Google people would get this, but it’s amazing to watch the light go on once they search for something other than a name.  Interested in working for clean tech?  Try searching for it.  Search the company directory on LinkedIn.  Find companies in your favorite industry, in your favorite city.  Then search your network (“People Search”) for that company name.  If you’ve done steps 1 & 2, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what a small world it is.  If you are looking for a job, and you aren’t spending hours a day on LinkedIn, chances are it’s because you haven’t discovered the power of people search.

Hope this helps people out there who want to get started.  We’ll be posting more helpful tips on the LinkedIn blog as the weeks go by as well.  We’re all hoping that LinkedIn can be a real force for good in 2009, helping people find the right job in a very tough market.

Update (02/03/2009): This post was popular enough that we’ve actually created an updated version for the official LinkedIn blog.  Check it out.

So I have a new blog post up on the LinkedIn corporate blog:

LinkedIn Blog: Advanced Search Operators for the LinkedIn Pro

If you are curious, but not curious enough to click through, advanced search operators let you specify any query that you can configure with LinkedIn’s advanced search graphical user interface through just command-line tags.

Example:

If you want to find who in your network went to Stanford and currently works at Google, you can type:

school:Stanford AND ccompany:Google

This search will look for the keyword “Stanford” only in the school field of the LinkedIn profile, and look for “Google” only in the current company field.  Much more exact that looking for every profile that has “Stanford” and “Google” in it.

Thanks to the new search platform, millions of users are discovering the power of people search for the first time.  But there are also millions of power users who already use LinkedIn search to get their jobs done, and the team felt that giving them command-line-like power over the search experience would be appreciated by power users.

So enjoy.  Bringing power features like this to the LinkedIn platform is one of the joys of being on the team.

(Turns out, the reason she asked me to look at it was to translate the “Double U – Tee – H”.  I told her it was WTH or “What the Hell”.  There were several minutes of back and forth before she was convinced I was right.)

In any case, the article covers a basic cyber-mom question of what social networks she belongs to, and what each is for.  I thought the four snippets were great:

• MySpace is a socializing website for teens, young adults, stars and music
• Facebook is sort of the same only for young adults and tracking down your old school classmates and college friends without having to join Classmates.com for $29 plus a year.
• Linkedin is for professional adults and for networking with people in business and sometimes it’s helped people land really awesome jobs.
• Twitter – everyone is doing Twitter. Twitter is like text messaging meets the internet. It’s a way to text all your friends at once and have them text you back.

Of course, the primary theme of the article is one of social network fatigue. Apparently, this mom draws the line at these four.

Daily/Weekly use, in order of repeat visits (December 2008):

• Google Reader
• My Yahoo
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• WordPress.com (this blog)
• Facebook
• E*Trade
• Mint.com

Twitter is the biggest surprise for me.  I’ve been playing with it for months, but I’ve noticed my activity has been increasing measurably.  This past month, I’ve been checking it multiple times per day (thanks to TwitterFon for the iPhone).  Mint.com also has spiked up now that it has iPhone integration.

From Finance Geek:

A Google (GOOG) rock star defects: Dipchand “Deep” Nishar, who helped kickstart Google’s mobile business, is moving to LinkedIn.

WSJ: Mr. Nishar, 40, in January will become vice president of product strategy for the social-network that is focused on professionals. He will lead LinkedIn’s efforts to develop new products and services on top of its social-networking site. LinkedIn chairman Reid Hoffman, who had previously filled the senior product role, will remain at the company and shift his focus on broader strategy issues…

Mr. Nishar held a range of jobs at Google, including building the back-end infrastructure for Google’s monetization systems, starting its mobile initiatives and, more recently, overseeing product development for the Asia-Pacific region. He worked closely with Jonathan Rosenberg, Google’s senior vice president of product management, and was the recipient of a rare and lucrative accolade given to employees who have made extraordinary contributions to the company, known as the Google Founders Award.

The original Wall Street Journal article is here.  My favorite quote from Deep:

His departure comes as the recession has made a move from a mature company to a start-up more risky. But LinkedIn, which has 32 million registered users, is better positioned than many… “I don’t view LinkedIn as risky by any means,” said Mr. Nishar.

Very excited to have Deep join the team in 2009.  His LinkedIn profile is here for more detail on his professional achievements.

If you haven’t tried it, you should.  It’s fantastic.

Even more exciting to me, of course, is the fact that this new search engine, as great as the features are, is just scratching the surface of what we’ll be able to achieve in 2009 and beyond.  It’s no surprise to me that Search has driven a number of major innovations on the web in the past decade.  Over the years, the baton of technology leadership and innovation has been passed from natural search to paid search to product search, and I firmly believe that technology and customer demand points to people search as an area with the breadth and depth for incredible innovation in the next few years.

Search is a huge piece of the LinkedIn experience for millions of users for obvious reasons – so many of our professional tasks require us to “find the right person” based on expertise, based on geography, based on company, and most of all, based on relationship.  That’s the kicker.  People search, by its nature, must be socially relevant to the searcher.  Completely.  The same query can and should be ordered differently based on your unique profile and relationships, because that’s what matters in this context.

One of the hardest problems in Product Management, however, is how to upgrade and change a product that millions of people are using every day to get their jobs done.  It isn’t easy with consumer software, it isn’t easy with enterprise software, and it’s almost impossible in the 24×7 world of the consumer internet.  Even small incremental changes can be incredibly difficult, so where does that leave you when you have to make large, whole-scale change?

All the Web 1.0 companies have struggled with this, and I don’t think there is a single right answer to this question because every community and product is different to some extent.  But fundamentally, there are approaches that can help produce the best possible outcomes in these tough situations, and they all begin and end with how you communicate, interact and respond to your customers.

That’s why I had to share here this blog post I found tonight about the recent Search launch.

WebProNews: LinkedIn Looks to the Community For Improvement.  The Right Way to Implement Change.

While I am excited about the new search product features, and I am excited about the new technology and platform we’ve built, I’m even more excited in this case about how the team researched, built, tested, and launched this product.

I’m excited that Sarah, our Principal Designer on the new Search, wrote this blog post about the importance of the customer in our thinking and process.  I’m excited that Chris at WebProNews (among other blog posts I’ve seen) noticed that we cared.

It’s a truism on the consumer internet that if you’ve ironed out all the risks and uncertainty in product improvement, you are moving far too slow and with too little tangible feedback from your customers.  Usability testing, competitive research, site metrics, customer service, quality requirements, innovative engineering, and communication will not, by themselves, guarantee success every time.  They can’t because the inherent complexity and pace of change is too great (thankfully) on the consumer internet.

But I believe that, over time, these techniques properly utilized increase your odds of success, where success is defined by the utility and delight that you provide your customers.

I’ve had a number of proud moments at LinkedIn, but I just wanted to say here how proud I am of the user experience team at LinkedIn, and how proud I am of the teams that helped make the new search a reality.

I’m proud of what you’ve built, and more importantly, I’m proud of how you did it.

The Right Way to Implement Change.

I’m excited to say that LinkedIn launched its third language last night: French! You can find Jean-Luc’s blog post on the LinkedIn blog.

A nice intro video is now live on Youtube:

With the exception of Jean-Luc, of course, everyone’s French is… well let’s just say they get an “E” for effort.  Fortunately, our partners in France seem to think our new French site is très bon.

A very special thanks to Sunil Saha and Ace Yamaguchi who stepped up their efforts considerably in the last two months to make this launch a reality.

It took us over five years to launch our second language (Spanish, July 2008), but just four additional months to launch our third (French, November 2008).  Of course, we now support profiles in 41 languages already.

I’m extremely excited about the global opportunities for LinkedIn in 2009 and beyond as we build out the world’s largest global professional network.

Lots of great work for our new lead for International product.  Can’t wait for 2009.

LinkedIn and Reid Hoffman: Recession Ready

The online version is an extended version from the print magazine.  I think the only reason to read the print version is the unique and slightly intimidating picture of Reid across the center spread. 

Here is my favorite passage:

It was at the bleakest stage of the dot-com bust, in 2002, that Hoffman began to build his empire. He had been a key partner at PayPal, the online payment company ) bought that June for $1.5 billion. Flush with his share, he looked for next-generation investments—and found himself nearly alone. “The common wisdom was that the consumer Net was dead,” he recalls, and “that it was controlled by Yahoo, eBay, and Google. I thought it was just beginning.”

So he devised a strategy. He would start a company to run the business side of the social Net—LinkedIn—and he would participate in the consumer side as an investor. “The huge majority of things I have invested in are massively successful,” he says. Many of the investments, of course, are still locked up in companies, including Facebook and LinkedIn, which haven’t yet gone public. The return on Hoffman’s holdings hinges largely on how they navigate the coming downturn. Still, he continues trumpet the economics of Internet businesses. “This is the only time in human history when, for somewhere between $5 million and $30 million of capital investment, you can create a sustainable ecosystem for 10 million-plus people,” he says.

When discussing his career, Hoffman can sound positively utopian. He says, for example, that he left academia for business because he wanted more “scaled impact” in his quest to make the world “a much nobler place.” He regards LinkedIn as a system where the good are rewarded by the community for their deeds, while liars and cheaters are exposed.

I feel exceptionally lucky to work for Reid and to benefit from both his experience and his unique strategic insight.  When you remember the issues the PayPal team had to navigate, and the timeframe in which they did it, it’s an even more impressive story.  How many companies managed to IPO successfully in 2002?

Check out the full article if you haven’t already.  More to come.

As you can see from my profile, I’ve already added posts from this blog using the WordPress application (anything with the tag “LinkedIn”), selected books from Amazon, and a presentation I recently gave at the PDMA conference in Orlando using Slideshare.

The LinkedIn blog has all the details.  Also, as a bonus, there is a fairly nice launch video featuring Reid to announce the new platform.

For me, it’s especially gratifying to see these applications come to life.  It was just about this time last year that I gave an initial presentation with Elliot at Google on the concept of leveraging social applications for business and professional use.

My personal favorite is the Company Buzz application.  As a concept, this app began as an intern project this summer, and grew into a really compelling use of Twitter for business.  (At LinkedIn, we actually have an RSS feed of every Tweet with the keyword “LinkedIn” projected on a 50″ TV on the wall where the Product & Engineering teams sit.)

More to come… this launch is just the beginning.

LinkedIn Blog: LinkedIn Search: Finding Just Got Easier

As the largest global professional network, we’ve had the privilege of having millions of users enter over a billion professional search queries, and we’ve been working hard to build a much more robust professional people search engine. We interviewed lots of users and aggregated thousand of pieces of feedback. The end result is a completely redesigned search experience aimed at making it easier and faster to find the most relevant professionals that you’re looking for.

Esteban wrote a great blog post, so rather than replicate it here, I’ll just recommend that you click through and read about all of the new features.  We’re still in testing, so the product isn’t finalized, but it’s a top-to-bottom rearchitecture and redesign of the search engine, and I’m incredibly proud of the team.

So, check it out. There is a link in the upper right of every LinkedIn search results page to opt into the test.

Of course, if you want to cheat, clicking this link will automatically opt you in.

Let us know what you think.  I’ve been using the new search exclusively for four weeks now, and I have to say it is changing the way that I use LinkedIn.  Just the speed alone is worth the switch.

I’m happy to announce today that we’ve received strategic investments in LinkedIn totaling $22.7 million from market leaders in the enterprise software, investment banking and business information sectors; all of whom believe in the power of LinkedIn as a way to connect professionals and help them be effective. This round of funding includes world class strategic investors Goldman Sachs, The McGraw-Hill Companies, and SAP ventures; as well as a re-investment by Bessemer Venture Partners.

This financing is a follow-on of the Series D round of funding we announced in June of 2008, in which we raised $53 million. Led by Bain Capital Ventures LinkedIn’s Series D financing round has raised $75.7 million. You can find my thoughts on our Series D announcement here.

Can’t comment here publicly too much beyond the official statement, but TechCrunch has already picked up the news as well.  The reality is that it is a great advantage to have capital in a capital-starved environment, particularly when there are such large growth opportunities available in a new market.

This is one of those simple kudos posts that says “Congratulations” to the team.  The redesign of the page is purely front-end, but it makes the page much clearer, and highlights actions that many didn’t know that LinkedIn had.  The new profile meter is also much more helpful with suggesting additions you should make to your profile.

As usual, the running joke is to use my photo somehow in the blog post… multiple times.  Of course, since it’s my profile, this blog got a small mention too, under my “Websites”.

I’m extremely excited about the improvements we’re going to be adding to the core experience at LinkedIn this Fall.  This release tonight is just the tip of the iceberg.

Go check out your blue card!  And if you haven’t updated your profile in while, get to it.

Update (10/10/2008): Very flattering blog post about the new design from bub.blicio.us.

Ganzbot is a lot of fun… he is hooked up to Twitter, and to a custom queue application, so you can make him say almost anything.   I sit right across from him, so I’m blessed with hearing a lot of the best Ganzbot interactions.

Now featured, of course, on:

• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• Make

Now, if only we could teach Ganzbot to write modern Javascript…

This may not sound like a typical LinkedIn success story, but it’s an important one.  LinkedIn saved my wedding photos.

In all fairness, the great folks at ScanCafe actually saved my wedding photos.  I read about ScanCafe in a great piece in Money magazine earlier this year.  ScanCafe provides a service where you send them negatives, slides, or photographs, and they scan them and return them to you in digital form.  They even have very high end services, like photo restoration or professional-caliber TIFF file support for true enthusiasts like myself.

After reading about ScanCafe, I was intrigued.  Our lack of wedding photos is a tragic story, dating back seven years to a extremely poor choice of wedding photographer.  Without going into too much detail, let’s just say that my wife and I ended up thousands of dollars poorer, with no wedding album whatsoever.  However, as a ray of hope, we did eventually get the original negatives.

Scanning single-cut medium-format negatives is not for the faint of heart.  It can take 5-10 minutes per photo, and that’s without touch-up work.  We had 400 negatives.  ScanCafe seemed like our savior, with affordable rates and support for all sorts of negatives.  But could they be trusted with our only hope for wedding photos?  Our original negatives?

Fortunately, trust is exactly where LinkedIn shines.  I typed “ScanCafe” into the search box on linkedin.com, and was delighted to find out that an old colleague of mine actually works for the company.  I sent him a LinkedIn message, and within a week I had his assurances and help in submitting my order.

Last week, for the first time, ScanCafe posted the results on their online website for me to review.  It was truly an emotional moment.  Wonderful photos and memories captured and restored, and now, with digital images, the freedom to finally share and publish wedding albums.  As we speak, 81.4GB of high quality TIFF and JPG images are on their way to my house.

I don’t think I would have had the courage to send our precious negatives to anyone without a personal reference and assurance, and I never would have known I had such a close contact at the company without LinkedIn.

Here are Mike’s comments, direct from his Mozilla blog.

In my opinion, of course, this is a huge win for Facebook, as they get a top-notch engineering leader to join their team.  It’s bittersweet, of course, because I’m also a huge fan of Mozilla and the team over there.  I think Mike summed it up best in his post by expressing confidence in the ability of the Mozilla team to continue to innovate and deliver on their mission and vision.

If you are curious, here is Mike’s LinkedIn profile.  You can be sure I’ll be on his case for him to keep it up-to-date.