Monthly Archives: August 2010

How to Scope a Product

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I wrote about the demise of Google Wave earlier this week. MG Siegler over at TechCrunch wrote yesterday that Google didn’t give it enough time, and mishandled the launch.

Google definitely mishandled the launch. They made a big announcement but then trickled the product out slowly, wasting most of the initial enthusiasm. In our work we try to go the other way – to get a few key influencers in an organization excited about what we’re doing and let them evangelize their colleagues. That way when the big announcement happens there are already people using the system and ready to support the new arrivals.

I disagree with Siegler’s statement that Wave didn’t solve a problem, though. He wrote that it doesn’t matter, since Twitter doesn’t solve one either. I think it does matter – because Wave did solve a problem. It just wasn’t as big a problem as “the way we communicate doesn’t work.” Google Wave was an excellent email replacement for a certain subset of emails – messages where a small number of people collaborate back and forth on understanding a problem and forming a strategy. This is a critical problem for small and medium sized organizations. And I suspect that if Google was to go back and look at their internal use of Wave they’d see the use case. I wrote about this in my first post, so I won’t re-hash the mechanics here.

So my lesson from this – beyond not trusting Google beta products to be available for my use over the long term – is that when you launch something big you have to launch it small. When I talk about product development at conferences I like to use the example of Flickr. Flickr, today, is big – it’s changed the way that we deal with images. But the original problem was small – sharing pictures online, easily, with friends. Searching billions of images for creative commons licensed pictures to spice up a PowerPoint presentation came later. Hindsight is 20-20, but Google should have found more small, real, value-from-day-one problems that Wave could solve without requiring everyone in the world to adopt it at once. Once I figured out it was useful, I was able to drag my team along by fiat, and we all started evangelizing it to others via our separate projects. Everybody almost won.

The End of Google Wave

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Google killed Wave on August 4th. I wrote a bit this morning about Google Wave and knowledge worker collaboration over on the Beacon 16 blog, so if you want to know more or less what I’m talking about, check that one out.

What I liked about Wave from the healthcare perspective was the way it managed conversations. I could easily see the platform extended to care planning and coordination, and I had some fairly specific ideas along those lines. They may still see the light of day in the context of some our other projects – the idea of replacing chains of email with something that was just as easy to use but created an automatic running summary of the conclusions drawn by the group (and which made it easy to reconstruct the discussion behind that reasoning) was extremely compelling.

New Job, New Blog, Same Team

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The last few months have been quiet on the blog for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is that I’ve been getting ready to leave my position at Children’s Hospital Boston, where for the last three years I’ve been Director of the Informatics Solutions Group. There were a couple of reasons for us to move on – the biggest being that the scope of interesting projects outside Children’s is so tremendous right now. And we’ve got a couple cooking, including one that’s not quite ready for a blog-announcement yet (but it will get there).

The other project is Beacon 16 Software, a new consultancy focused exclusively on design, development and implementation of advanced Healthcare Information Technology projects, along with several members of the ISG team who should be familiar from this blog. We’ve already done work for some of the major Boston hospitals, and this week – our first outside CHB – we’ve started a project to implement the remaining Meaningful Use functionality for a major hospital. We’re also working with startups to develop products and demonstrations in both clinical IT and life sciences. And I’m not above asking my blog readers for work – if you’re looking for a group that knows this industry up and down and has a great track record building cutting edge software, give us a call. We’re even remarkably affordable.

We have a new Blog on the Beacon 16 site as well. The focus will be Healthcare IT and software development. If you liked this one I think you’ll like that one. We’re re-running a few of this blog’s greatest hits, and the first new post is up now, talking about how to make product users into product champions.

I’ll also be keeping this blog going, although I’m going to pull the focus back a bit (probably no more posts on JSF and software engineering – we were getting our audiences mixed up). Instead I’ll be focusing on aspects of HIT development and healthcare policy that don’t belong on the Beacon 16 blog, and probably recount some stories of what it’s taking to build a small company. It may very well be interesting, so stick around.