Why Engineers (Usually) Aren’t To Blame For Missed Product Deadlines

Picture this: Your company is about to miss a second product deadline that you’ve committed to publicly. You’ve told the press that you are launching Feature X tomorrow and QA knows it’s not ready. What do you do if you are the CEO? Marketing Manager? VP of Engineering? Whose fault is this and how can you course correct?

Many people’s first response is to blame the Engineers. After all, they didn’t deliver on time. It must be their fault. But this is usually an oversimplification of the product development process. There are best practices for managing a product crisis, and almost none of them involve screaming at engineering.

Ideally you never want to be put in this situation. But examining this hypothetical example of missed public deadlines can be instructive for executives and professionals in a variety of fields.

The first question to ask when staring down the barrel of a (second) public shaming is, “How did we get here?” There are many ways this scenario could have happened.

This kind of problem usually occurs when a company builds something new. Maybe it is a first-run product or a new set of features. Maybe there is a new third party API. Whatever the product or feature is, it typically contains a lot of unknown variables and hidden horrors that push out expected deadlines.

There are also institutional issues that contribute to missed product milestones. Problems can occur when business or financial motives arbitrarily set product deadlines without getting sign off from the “boots on the ground” in engineering.

A good rule of thumb for setting product development deadlines is to have the engineering team 90% confident that they can meet proposed milestones. Not the head of engineering (at least not without the confidence of all his team leads). Not the CEO. Managers can’t will something into existence if it requires code, no matter how persuasive they are. Make sure that all the people who own the product have committed to the date and encourage them to send honest feedback up the food chain.

Of course, the best possible scenario is never missing a public deadline in the first place. Here, then, are our guiding principles for managing missed public deadlines.

1. If you miss a publicly announced deadline, don’t set a second deadline publicly.

2. If there are variables in the project that are out of your control (such as third parties) don’t set a new deadline publicly.

3. Only announce a ship date after the product is ready to ship and all the bugs are worked out.

4. If marketing (or any other department, for that matter) changes product features, engineering needs to adjust the ship date. If this date is publicly available, you must communicate the changes to the public.

5. If you work in Marketing/ Communications/ PR/ Social Media, be realistic. Don’t be hopeful, optimistic, pessimistic, angry or ashamed. Be real. No one cares how you feel about your missed deadline. Stick to the facts.

6. Don’t blame others for your own missed milestone– it’s petty.

7. Clearly explain why the deadline was missed. Open the kimono and tell what happened (in diplomatic terms), what your initial expectations were and why you were wrong.

8. The moment an organization knows a product will be late it must begin the process of communicating that information to the press and public. The sooner the better.

An analogy here is to think of going on a hot date. If you have a date with an attractive person at 8:00 pm, and you know that you are running late, when would be a good time to tell that person that you won’t make it on time? Should you tell them as soon as you know, or at 7:59 pm? It all depends if you want another date.

9. CEOs should investigate the process and find out where it broke down. In addition to issuing personal apologies the CEO should be prepared to fire inept senior managers.

In general, keep your product road map a secret. Ask yourself why you are announcing something before it is ready? It can’t be to drive sales, because the product is not on sale. Is it for pre-orders? There is almost no upside to releasing dates to the press and public. There are, however, many downsides.

Apple does this incredibly well. If Apple told the media that iPad 2 would ship on XX day with YY features, that would only cut into the original iPad’s sales. So they never announce a product until they know that it is ready to ship. To conclude, there are many things executives can do when a public deadline is missed, but the most important one is to not give a revised deadline that people will not have faith in.

Stage Two Announces Ultimate Blogger Lounge

Stage Two is pleased to announce an exciting new venture – The Ultimate Blogger Lounge.

The UBL is an exclusive San Francisco media lounge opening in early 2011 that is a permanent refuge for tech journalists, credentialed press, analysts, bloggers, podcasters and social media gurus.

The inspiration for the Ultimate Blogger Lounge comes from the Bloghaus, a blogging suite that debuted at CES in 2007. Sponsored by Seagate and hosted by PodTech, Bloghaus billed itself as:

A place for bloggers, podcasters, video bloggers, and other online media creators to meet, have some food, relax, and share the day’s news at the Consumer Electronics Show.

We observed firsthand how bloggers and journalists at the CES Bloghaus utilized and appreciated the dedicated workspace. They took advantage of the free Internet, complimentary refreshments and comfortable surroundings to work, play and connect. From the beginning it was clear that a dedicated media lounge could attract attention, sponsors and journalists.

The CES Bloghaus

The tech event culture of San Francisco demands a permanent location for media members to interact with new consumer electronics and each other. To share best practices and horror stories. To have a beer, hold a meeting or file a story.

San Francisco is the cultural hub of the tech world and thousands of journalists attend media functions, conferences and social meetups here every year. San Francisco is where innovation happens. Just as new media personalities flocked to the Bloghaus at CES, we are confident that working press will utilize the UBL’s state of the art features on a daily basis.

We are excited to have early support from many notable industry leaders. Currently Robert Scoble, Brian Solis, Chris Heuer, Ben Parr and Jim Louderback are all UBL Advisory Board members. Stage Two executives Marie Domingo and Jeremy Toeman are also involved in guiding the launch of this high tech space.We look forward to working with these leading minds as we build the Ultimate Blogger Lounge.

Finally, a note on why we are doing this.

Stage Two is intimately linked with Bay Area tech press. We started the UBL to give something back to the bloggers, reporters and socialcasters who spend their lives sharing new technologies with others. We know how hard it is to work in this space. Our friends and family members do it every day. Journalists increasingly face diminishing resources and increasing demands in their profession. They file stories from coffee houses or from their cars; they stay plugged in 24/7 because they care about the technology industry and they care keeping the public informed. Stage Two wants to increase the resources available to journalists and bloggers and foster a sense of community within the press corps while doing so.

We believe that the UBL is an opportunity to give the press a facility with premium working conditions – very high speed Internet, private conference rooms, teleconference facilities, refreshments, etc. This is also an opportunity for leading tech companies to connect with leading journalists and social influencers. We are thrilled to announce the Ultimate Blogger Lounge.

You can follow the digital press club @sfubl and request press credentials by emailing credentials@ultimatebloggerlounge.com

Stage Two Is Supplementing Its Staff (we're hiring)

We are looking to add an Account Supervisor with at least six years of media-relations experience to be responsible for the overall management of account teams on day-to-day activities for multiple accounts. The Account Supervisor is the primary contact for strategic initiatives and is responsible for overseeing the management of all account activities, including (but not limited to): media relations and social media, launch campaigns, media tours, special events, trade shows, speaking engagements etc. The Account Supervisor will oversee monthly activity reports and ultimately, performance will be judged based on the success of outlined goals and metrics agreed to with each specific client.

The ideal candidate will know both traditional press and bloggers in the consumer electronics and consumer Web space – gadget junkies, please apply. This is an exciting industry, and represents a chance to get involved with exhilarating projects and exciting brands in the consumer tech space! We are industry-insiders, wizened tech masters and pop-culture junkies who know how to maintain a proper work/life balance – whether it’s ending the day early to catch the hottest blockbuster, or drinking scotch with a client at one of our many local watering holes.

Qualifications:

• Able to work within dynamic start-up environment
• Can manage and prioritize the needs of multiple client relationships simultaneously
• Extremely strong organizational and communications skills
• Good understanding of consumer technology (video, mobile, etc) with a genuine interest in new trends in tech, media, and culture
• Active social networking (you tweet, you blog, you generally have too many methods to communicate with your peeps, and of course, you know that people don’t say “peeps” any more)
• Confident and articulate, yet brilliantly creative
• Brownie points to gamers, bloggers, pop culture geeks (extra credit given for the subtle use of Arrested Development quotes)

Responsibilities:

• Supervise activities and keep direction and focus of PR programs on track
• Manage and mentor junior account team members
• Supervise creation of PR programs, press related materials, press kits, pitch letters, briefing documents and other materials as necessary for client programs
• Serve as client contact for high-level strategic counsel
• Report all client activity and summaries to the partners and oversee content, accuracy and timeliness of reports and develop mechanisms for client reporting on a weekly basis
• Oversee workload and manage account teams appropriately
• Attend weekly manager’s meeting with executive staff
• Participate in new business presentations

Our office is in North Beach, close to several MUNI stops, great restaurants/bars, and fine entertainment establishments. If you’re interested, email us:

1. A resume (preferably link to an online one)
2. A short bio
3. Why you think this is a perfect fit for you
4. Which of our clients excites you the most, and why

Any emails without all 4 of the above will be ignored, and probably marked as spam (this includes the salary question).  Feel free to let us know if you have any questions. Otherwise, we look forward to hearing from you.

Client News: Involver brings micro-lending to Facebook and MySpace

Today Involver announced they introduced over 100,000 people on Facebook and MySpace to micro-lending with Kiva.org, and thousands are sharing the message within their personal network.

Involver is using its video campaign platform to bring important, world changing content to hundreds of thousands of people on social networks. Working with organizations like Save Darfur and Kiva.org, Involver is delivering important messages to an audience that is largely unfamiliar with these causes.

Kiva chose the Involver video campaign platform to tap into Facebook and MySpace, attracting a new audience to their person-to-person micro-lending website. Kiva understands the power of connecting people for a common cause, and hopes to empower members of social networks to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world.

Congratulations go out to Involver on another successful campaign!

Client Update: LOUD3R Crushes First Month Goal, Doubles Expectations

We’re talking out of the ball park folks – over 200,000 unique visitors in the first month! To put this in perspective, it took 1 year and a $100M purchase by Microsoft for Powerset, a fellow semantic web startup, to reach 200K unique visitors. Lowell Goss, founder and CEO,  understanding the challenge of growing an individual website organically, built LOUD3R as a network of sites, each dedicated to a specific niche topic. LOUD3R is preparing to add 9 new properties in the near future, which will continue to increase traffic, and take the total number of sites in the network from 25 to 34, with plenty of room to grow – they own over 500 3R branded URLs.

For those of you in the audience unfamiliar with LOUD3R, it’s a semantic publishing platform that controls a newtork of websites, each dedicated to a different topic (motorcycles, mixed martial arts, gadgets, etc.) The LOUD3R content discovery engine searches the web to find and rank the best news, editorial, photo, video and other content related to a particular topic, while filtering out spam, splogs, repeats, and dead links. LOUD3R’s publishing platform requires minimal configuration and maintenance, making it possible to rapidly launch sites at low cost. The platform is capable of unsupervised learning, and automatically improves over time through user feedback across the LOUD3R sites.

Check out the LOUD3R Network to find news about topics important to you.

Client News: Involver Launches Video Campaign Platform

Another new Stage Two client has taken the wrapper off their product. Involver has announced the pilot program for their Video Marketing Platform with campaigns for Serena Software and Kiva.org. Involver’s platform is an end-to-end solution for marketers who want to manage video campaigns on Facebook and other social networks. Involver lets you build, publish, manage, change, update, and track video campaigns with a turnkey offering specifically designed to increase engagement, promote sharing, and speed viral distribution.

Involver’s unique vision is to provide more than just “video with a buy button”, creating a tool for marketers that does more than deliver millions of impressions with no way to capture the audience. The platform uses a rich set of video plug-ins to allow the campaign owner to capture email, offer quizes or surveys, even take orders or donations – all within the framework of the video, never forcing the viewer to browse to a new Web page.

Serena Software has garnered a lot of attention with their “Just Bleep It” video campaign, which saw nearly 1.2M views on YouTube. They moved to Involver to publish the second phase of the campaign on Facebook, using the Involver platform to provide a rich social experience and the means to convert viewers into leads. Kiva.org launched their campaign to tap into Facebook, and other social networks to attract a new audience to their person-to-person micro-lending website.

The launch of Involver’s pilot program is already receiving a good deal of attention, with articles from Kristen Nicole at Mashable, Eric Eldon at VentureBeat and Michelle Lentz at Bub.blicio.us (we’ll update this list throughout the day) – already pushing the news to Techmeme.

New Involver Articles:
Crowdsourcing.com
Ad Lab
ReadWriteWeb

Involver is off and running!

Now hiring: Press and Blogger Relations Manager

Tried traditional PR and feel like you are missing out on something? Agency blog doesn’t even have an RSS feed or allow commenting? Want to be more involved in the future of new media relations? Then look no further.

Things are continuing to “hip and hop” here at Stage Two Consulting, and we need to bolster the team with some fresh talent.  We are looking to add an Account Manager with at least two years of experience (read: prefer three, but no more than six and please, nobody right out of college unless you want to test your skills as an intern) who has seen the light and wants to get into influencer marketing.

This is an exciting industry, and this is a chance to get involved with exhilarating projects and learn a lot in the process! We are industry-insiders, wizened tech masters and pop-culture junkies who know how to maintain a proper work/life balance – whether it’s ending the day early to catch a Giants game, or drinking scotch with a client on our rooftop patio.

Qualifications:

• Able to work within dynamic start-up environment
• Fast learner and self-starting with impeccable organizational skills
• Managed a client relationship, bonus for multiple, simultaneous clients
• Extremely strong communications skills, especially written
• Good understanding of consumer technology (video, mobile, etc) with a genuine interest in new trends in tech, media, and culture
• Decent grasp of new media, including bloggers and social networks (you throw sheep, you tweet, you generally have too many methods to communicate with your peeps, and of course, you know that people don’t say “peeps” any more)
• Confident and articulate, yet brilliantly creative
• Brownie points to gamers, bloggers, pop culture geeks (extra bonus points if you can RickRoll JT)

Responsibilities:

• See above, and…
• Coordinating media lists and event logistics
• Monitoring client and industry press
• Conceive, develop, and implement influencer-marketing strategies for clients
• Build relationships with key bloggers, industry influencers, press/media, analysts, and potential marketing partners
• Outreach and traditional PR for new stories, company launches, product launches, etc.
• Our office is in North Beach, close to several MUNI stops, great restaurants/bars, and fine entertainment establishments.
• Compensation is determined on your level of experience and/or moxie.

If you’re interested, email us:
1. a resume
2. a short bio
3. your salary requirements
4. why you think this is a perfect fit for you
5. your favorite blog? Be honest – we don’t mind that you to can’t wait for the Survivor blog to fire up when the new season starts!

Any emails without all 5 of the above will be ignored, and probably marked as spam.  Feel free to let us know if you have any questions. Otherwise, we look forward to hearing from you. If you read nothing else (you won’t get the job, but…) be sure to at least read this.

Client News: LOUD3R Speaking at Under the Radar

Tomorrow, Lowell Goss, CEO of LOUD3R, a new client here at Stage Two, is speaking at the Under the Radar Conference. LOUD3R offers a network of enthusiast-oriented Websites to help millions of people find great information about topics they love. It is difficult to find quality Web content for topics that aren’t mainstream – whether it’s just trying to find good sites, or sifting through junk (spam, splogs and dupes) on RSS feeds.

To solve this problem, LOUD3R is launching a network of sites created by a semantic content engine that gathers, ranks and publishes the best content (news, editorial, photos, video) for a given topic, while filtering out all the junk.

It’s an exciting time for the LOUD3R team as they begin wrapping up beta and prepare to launch the network later this month. We are currently setting up interviews and briefings to learn more about LOUD3R, so if you would like to speak with Lowell for a more in depth look at the powerful tools behind the network, give us a call, email, tweet, comment or whistle – whatever works for you.