The knowledge you get at school or college is a kind "onboarding" new members. But it doesn't make you read every single piece that was ever written. You get a summary of both events and outcome, and most importantly the current state.
That's also how Wikipedia works: Articles don't get longer and longer, you can also summarize and put stuff into perspective. That's why there is a way to delete stuff (with version control, of course).
Moreover, onboarding new people (or maintaining the collective memory) isn't the only form of communication that happens in a team. Maybe it's not even the most important.
What about coordination? On the smaller stuff, on the daily stuff, but also on the bigger picture?
I don't disagree with your assessment but note that in 'school' the subject is taught from a text book which is a distilled version of the knowledge. Those text books get periodically rewritten. In an engineering organization it would be difficult to justify the expense (although it might be worth it!) to hire a writer to distill all of the learning that happened and the history of that learning into a text that could be handed to new members to bring them up to speed. As a result it is simpler and more cost effective to have a mailing list archive that can be reviewed.
Now it you want to create a product/company out of that practice, then you would build a system that would let people reviewing messages be able to 'vote them up' based on their importance to the over all work product. That sort of 'auto curation' would then let you scan just the list with a 'curation threshold' and just read the important bits rather than everything in the list.
That might be a good compromise between a dedicated historian/textbook writer and a list which had all the data but it was inter spersed with the occasional "lets gets the group together for a movie / which movie" discussion.
When I look at, for example, technical updates from the Facebook Engineering teams, it's really a little textbook, a distilled version of the knowledge at that point in time.
Same if you bring new team members up to speed by talking to that person.
There is typically no single "historical" document that does the job. Old documents (e-mails, descriptions, comments, ...) tend to be outdated. New documents tend to be increments, so they don't really make sense if you don't know what is written in the old documents.
I expect that in the near future, automatic summaries based on NLP would be able to do all the heavy lifting, so the head of engineering (or whoever is in charge) will only edit the doc, not write it from scratch.
The problem they claim to address is real. However, the product not really addresses it. It's too close to email and existing messengers.
[ Problem ]
- Meetings have the potential to really keep a team together
- Teams are distributed throughout geography, time zones or daily life patterns
- So how to bring GOOD meetings online, and perhaps even make them asynchronous?
"Meetings" come in different flavors, for example
- Weekly or monthly meetings to look back, learn, and discuss how to move on
- Daily scrum / daily standup to get a shared view of the day
- Ad hoc meetings to address a smaller but immediate issue
- Water cooler meetings which allow for serendipity
...
So for meetings in person, the real challenge is to get everyone attending, even if there is lot of urgent / important work to do. On the flip side: Keep the signal / noise ratio of the meeting so everyone feels it's time well spent.
[ Solution ]
So my vision for a better tool would include:
- Separation of reading mode and writing mode. You should be able to write in the sense of offloading thoughts without the need / option to read through everyone else's notes at the same time
- Asynchronous default. Stuff you write should be considered a draft until intentionally "published" (exception: urgent stuff
/ water cooler stuff). That would allow revising bigger thoughts before a "meeting".
- Even asynchronous, virtual meetings should have schedules. So for "daily" meetings, there should be a function that makes sure that everyone reads and writes at least once a day. For "monthly" at least once a month, but without that becoming a continuous "monthly meeting", which wouldn't allow to really focus on it.
Elon Musk sells luxury cars to people who are aware of climate change and also love technology. He uses that money to build more and cheaper cars, moving towards mainstream, because existing car manufacturers didn't really move toward electric. Elon Musk solves a problem for his buyers. It's frustrating to see his name used in a sales pitch that is driven by a "Vitamins" approach rather than a "Painkiller" approach. Fighting climate change isn't optional.
Sales, then and now, 10-minutes exercise comparing two links. How we approach sales in innovation and startups has changed a lot recently, but not for everyone. Enter the "sell me this pen" as seen in "Wolf of Wallstreet". It's a sales classic. You inspire desire in your customer in your sales pitch, and quickly he wants to buy, at any price. I frequently talk to startups about sales, but coming from a product management perspective.
The closest thing to selling in strategic product management is "solution selling". As the name suggests, it's about identifying a problem the customer actually has, then understanding how big the problem is. So when talking to the sales people at startups, we talk about pricing, job-to-be-done, and unmet needs of the customers. What kind of product do you have, in the eyes of your customers? Is it a nice thing to have once the customer learns about its existence, a "Vitamin"? Or is it something the customer really needs, a solution to an existing problem, something the customer already needed before he learned that there is a solution to the problem, is it a "Painkiller"?
If your product is still a Vitamin, it will be hard to sell, you will see a lot customer churn, customers quitting soon, instead of staying for the long run, and no recommending of your product to other people in the industry. To transform your product from a Vitamin to a Painkiller, you need to understand your customer's pain point. That's very close to S-P-I, "situation", "problem", "implication" in the SPIN-selling system that we use in solution selling.
Do this little test: Read a very short description about Vitamin vs Painkiller, and then read through a sales pitch (which is described as "the best" by its author) and note which parts are addressing a need for a Painkiller, and which address the wish for a Vitamin.
When you compare those two, you will see that the "sell me this pen" pitch is based on a Vitamin product. Most pens are Vitamin products to most customers, no matter how brilliant your sales pitch is. You can't use sales skills to fix a lack of product management.
The examples given for "vitamin" and "painkiller" are poor, or at lease not describing differences in products, but in marketing strategy. Also, the idea that "vitamins" are poor product is betrayed by the success of many, many madly successful "vitamin" products, not least including literal vitamins.
The product-load-feature that is described in the entrepreneur.com article as a "vitamin" mere seems poorly marketed. Keeping your e-business platform up-to-date with your products is very much something that can raise revenue or lower costs (or, if not, it's not actually a product at all, vitamin or not). On the other example, the healthcare payments solution, why would you not expect the provider of the existing invoicing solution to "just" enable some sort of upfront payment to lower bed debts, if this is really a problem?
(Also, dismissing business ideas on the basis that someone else would already be doing it if it's actually a problem seems to be a great way to never be successful in business)
If you haven't read Paul Graham's essay on startup ideas, and why they should address problems that really exit, I suggest: http://paulgraham.com/startupideas.html
Some product like Skype, Facebook, Dropbox spread just by word of mouth. They address pain people really feel (for some, you might need to dig deeper what it is). Other products need national TV commercials and still have a hard time to sell what they have. Big difference.
These were outlawed when, after being marketed as improving male libido, someone drank 1400 of these and died. But he did not die before getting a horribly disfigured jaw that actually fell out before the eyes of the doctor. He was buried in a lead lined coffin, after an agonizing death.
I must say I am a bit worried about "poly-unsaturated fats", which I must say I'd be amazed if they weren't bad for you (they result in a great many secondary chemicals, and if just one of those is dangerous, ...), but I doubt they'll make anyone's jaw fall off before slowly and painfully killing them.
- CFO - the analysis is confusing accounting with corporate finance.
- CMO - role depends on industry and B2C vs B2B. For strong brands, CMO (if exists) is almost as strong as CEO. Otherwise this could be a strong sales role - and never try to mess with the guys who bring in the money.
- CIO vs. CTO - not all all tech business is IT, think aircrafts and power plants. Mobile networks are now mainly IP, but there is still radio transmission (CTO) vs. protection of credit card number (CIO)
- COO - role is actually undefined. It's a running mate for the CEO and complements whatever the CEO lacks
- CISO - confusing role, and introduced as band aid, not because there is a real need for a C-role. Frequently either reporting to the CIO (so not really C-level), or a different name for CIO (if CTO take care of all other digital stuff)
- CSO (Sales) - whether this is the same as CMO depends on the type of business. If there is a separate role, this person is most likely managing sales representatives and stores. So really no change.
I wonder what the long term impact is. Currently, they calculate the price for baggage knowing that not everyone uses the full allowance. So price reflects average utilization, rather than direct cost per piece. If that utilization goes up, do you think price will go up as well? If so, would that mean the opportunity disappears?
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The knowledge you get at school or college is a kind "onboarding" new members. But it doesn't make you read every single piece that was ever written. You get a summary of both events and outcome, and most importantly the current state.
That's also how Wikipedia works: Articles don't get longer and longer, you can also summarize and put stuff into perspective. That's why there is a way to delete stuff (with version control, of course).
Moreover, onboarding new people (or maintaining the collective memory) isn't the only form of communication that happens in a team. Maybe it's not even the most important.
What about coordination? On the smaller stuff, on the daily stuff, but also on the bigger picture?