News Organizations: We want insights not just people’s opinions

To the Commercial Appeal & other Memphis-area news organizations,

Now is your chance to rise above and help us Shelby County residents better understand some of the momentous choices we are about to make, but it will require moving beyond the traditional reporting and writing of the past to actual analysis & presentation of information.

Us residents of Bartlett, Germantown and Collierville are about to vote on creating new school districts but without having any of the tools required to really understand the impacts of our decisions. And your text-based reporting doesn’t really illustrate or explain what the impacts of the different scenarios really are.

If you and the rest of the news organizations really want to thrive in an interactive world, then it’s time to move beyond just writing and adopt new tools  - like GIS/ computerized mapping, which can give us readers the ability to visually see how different options will impact us.

Depending upon how the new municipal school boundaries are drawn, e.g. if they only include students within the municipality, you will have dramatic fluctuations school populations – either increasing or decreasing – and therefore the potential revenue and staff available at the school.

For example, we love Riverdale Elementary, our neighborhood school, but as far as I can tell the majority of the school kids actually come from the Cordova area outside of Germantown city limits. If a new municipal school district was too be launched then my assumption is all the kids from Cordova would be excluded and attendance   would plummet. Instead of overcrowding, we’d be faced with empty classrooms and firing teachers.

However, these are all guesstimates as I don’t have the tools to easily calculate the different scenarios. Instead, I get to read articles from different stakeholders sharing general opinions but without really getting insight into the cold hard numbers or what new boundary changes will mean to me.

It’s as if I turned on the TV news to find out the details of a dangerous storm heading our way so I could decide whether my family should take shelter in the closet or not – and instead of a meteorologist giving me detailed visual information about the storm track and intensity, reporters with no meteorological training were interviewing various “experts” about the storm.

“Yes, it’s going to be a dangerous storm,” exclaims expert one.

“Well it shouldn’t really be that bad unless you’re in the impacted areas,” explains expert two.

“There you have it, it will be a stormy night,” explains the reporter.

Meanwhile, what people like me, have come to expect is a trained expert using advanced analysis/visualization tools showing us the intensity and storm track so we can make potentially life or death decisions. (For those of you outside of tornado country, check out this clip of the play-by-play analysis of a severe storm to see what I mean.)

Because I have a GIS background, I could potentially conduct the analysis but that’s what I’m looking to you for as I have a full time job and kids. That’s why I subscribe, or don’t, to the Commercial Appeal or turn to other local news sources.

The reality is that if I want to buy a car, house or furniture, I’m going to look on Craig’s List, but when it comes to understanding what’s going on with my city, county and schools I look to news organizations, but you need to provide me the information I want and need in order for me to shell out my hard-earned money for a subscription.

The good news is that the technology has become much cheaper and easier to learn and use – so someone with some curiosity and basic spreadsheet skills can quickly move from just reporting to analysis.

And if you don’t have the skill sets internally, partner with the university or people like me who do. Whatever you do, don’t continue doing what you’ve been doing and expect different results – your business and your community need you  to do better.

Sincerely,

Kevin Mireles

Green Fried Rice & a Shamrock Piñata on St. Patrick’s Day or Why I love America!

It’s hard to believe it’s been sixteen years since that fateful St. Patrick’s Day party at my place in Santa Ana when I hooked up with my wife.

Since my roommate was Vietnamese and I’m an undercover Hispanic we celebrated this Irish holiday in a 100% American way with green fried rice, a Shamrock piñata, Guinness, Irish whiskey and a multicultural and multicolored group of friends.

Not everyone was as enthused about this cultural miscegenation. My roommate’s Irish-American boyfriend just kept muttering between swigs of Irish whisky, ”My grandfather must be turning over in his grave,” as we ate our fried rice and took turns whacking the pinata.

But that’s what I love about America. Where else can you celebrate an Irish Catholic holiday with an Asian and Mexican twist? Nowhere! And that’s why where others are dismayed at the sights and sounds of other countries in their own front yards, I see the strength and vitality that will be critical to our success in this global economy.

After all, I’m a cultural mutt. My kids are mutts. My dog’s a mutt. And that’s what makes America great – the mashups of people and cultures that create new versions of old traditions – especially food!

Lets face it the “traditional” American diet is pretty boring. I remember the days when even in LA my mom would have to drive cross town to get fresh raviolis and empanadas. And the concept of eating raw fish with rice and seaweed was virtually unheard of –  at least in my household. Instead, being a good Mexican-Argentine-American family we’d have much more traditional food, like bacon, eggs, waffles and beans or steak and beans or beans and empanadas…. you get the picture.

Back then, your choice of bread was white Wonder bread or if you wanted something with a little fiber  there was Roman Meal bread in the yellow and orange bag  - and that’s it. Now walk into a  supermarket in any major city and there’s tofu, tortillas, sushi and Sriracha  Sauce next to the Greek yogurt and Gruyere cheese.

Even beyond that, the dirty little secret of our information age is that it’s primarily powered by South Asian immigrants and others from around the globe with the talent, education and drive required to thrive in a code-driven economy.

And where would I be without this global society? Nowhere  as I’m a Paucho; the mix of an Argentinian Gaucho and a Mexican-American Pocho.

Worse yet, I’d never have met my French wife and learned about the joys of home-made whipped cream. Growing up I thought it just came out of a can and had no idea just how good it could be! Or how easy it is to make! I’d know nothing of tarts, the joys of cheese or the proper way to eat mussels – that’s with another mussel shell of course!

My kids wouldn’t be bilingual – now working toward trilinguality – and most of all I wouldn’t have my partner, the woman I love, the femme I fight with, the mother of my kids, who watches my back, tells me the things I don’t want to hear, holds me tight when I need a hug – my petite hummingbird who flits from task to task and declares on a daily basis, “I can’t understand why I’m so tired” despite waking at 5:30 a.m., rarely stopping, never sitting, helping cranky kids with homework, planting gardens, cleaning, installing kitchen tiles, cooking home-made meals, dashing to and fro for good deals and kids activities.

And I might not have her in my life if it weren’t for celebrating an Irish saint’s birthday nearly 1,700 years later here in America – home of the free, the brave and the mutts.

Why Grassroutes.us Represents the Future of Civic Engagement

Over the years I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make civic engagement easy & ubiquitous which is why when I saw Grassroutes.us instant feedback app I was both awed and bummed.

Awed because they nailed the key components to making finding & engaging your congressional representatives easy. Bummed because they beat me to it.

Today, if you read an article or go to a Website and are inspired to engage your representative, you then have to go somewhere else to figure out who your represetatives are and then find their contact information. And then you have to go to three different places, your two senators’ and congressman’s sites, to give your feedback. Grassroutes eliminates that. They’ve built a super simple app you can drop into your site so someone can read something, and then instantly engage right from your page. Their app uses your IP address to identify and display your rep with their Twitter, Facebook, email & phone info so instead of taking 5-10-15 minutes to engage, you can do it in 15 seconds.

And by making it a simple widget you can drop into your site with no programming required, every advocacy group in America will be able to not only tell their audience why they should get involved but provide the civic engagement tools required.

One of the lessons I’ve learned as the founder of MyRepresentatives.com, a site that enables you to easily find and engage all your elected officials in the Memphis area, is that any time you require people to go elsewhere that the probability of them doing that drops dramatically – so having something that can be easily embedded and used where people already are is critical.

Ultimately, this same basic functionality needs to be tied to a global database of all your elected officials so people can instantly engage their state and local officials as well. This is a significantly larger challenge, particularly at the local level because there is no single repository of local city, county and school board electoral districts. The census Tiger files provide state, county, city & school boundary information but don’t provide electoral district information within a county, city or school district. Here in Memphis we had to gather that information from multiple different sources which was quite challenging.

Regardless, my hat’s off to the Grassroutes team for creating a kick-ass offering. You can see just how easy it is to use by taking a few moments to contact your congressional representatives and tell them to vote for the DREAM Act.

The DREAM Act will help kids who through no fault are here illegally. As someone who has worked closely with many undocumented children, they view themselves as 100% American – just without papers – as this is the only country they’ve ever really known. And more importantly, it’s the country they love and want to contribute to. These DREAM Act will give them that chance so tell your representatives to vote for the DREAM Act.

The DREAM Act is a bipartisan legislation ‒ pioneered by Sen. Orin Hatch [R-UT] and Sen. Richard Durbin [D-IL] will give these kids a path to citizenship and enable the US to benefit from their talent. Under the provisions of the DREAM Act, qualifying undocumented youth would be eligible for a 6 year long conditional path to citizenship that requires completion of a college degree or two years of military service.

Contact your representatives and tell them to vote for the DREAM Act

Bad UX! Bad product management! Bad RIM! Or, why does my BlackBerry have a flashing light?

Want to know why the RIM management team should be fired and BlackBerry has gone from cool to crap?

The green flashing light!

Anyone who’s owned a BlackBerry knows what I’m talking about. In the top right corner there exists a mysterious flashing light – sometimes it’s green; sometimes it’s red. What it does and why it’s flashing no one knows and no one cares as far as I can tell.

Instead, it just irritates! At night if I want to use the alarm function or want to leave my phone next to my bed I have to cover it with a shirt or something else so it doesn’t bother me. I finally managed to figure out how to turn off the green light but now an orange one appears…. sigh

I’m sure I can find out how to turn that one off as well but my point here is: How many tens of millions of dollars has RIM wasted on a feature that adds limited to no value – or even negative value over the years?

Just because a feature may have made sense in version 1.0 doesn’t mean it makes sense in version 2.0! As a product manager you have to be ruthless about what features to include and which you exclude.

Products are just like art – whether music, writing or photography – what you exclude is just as important as what you include. There’s a classic scene from the Movie Amadeus where the king tells Mozart, “It was good there are just too many notes. Just cut a few and it will be perfect!”

Take that too heart! It will save you money from developing drivel that few people use and frustrates even more users.  Even better, it will focus your efforts on polishing the key pieces your customers really care about.

Just imagine all the wasted engineering and design efforts that have gone into enabling the flashing lights. I can just imagine being in design reviews where they’re trying to increase their screen size but can’t because of the flashing light.

RIM wake up! Eliminate the flashing light and focus your efforts on what we really want: Touch screens, bigger screens and more apps! Until then I’ll wish I had an Android or iPhone.

Am I right? Let me know what you think.

Why I hate the term product manager

Product managers are supposed to be the voice of the customer and the market, but in most companies that’s a lie. Why? Because a product manager by definition is first and foremost responsible for their product – which is inherently internally focused. As a result, when they look at the outside world it’s almost always through the lens of their specific product.

Instead of looking at how their product fits into the customers’ ecosystem, processes, etc… they look at how their customers fit into their product – and then can’t figure out why adoption rates are so low.

And since in larger organizations each PM typically looks at the world through their product silo, it’s difficult to figure out how each of the pieces fits together.

So what can organizations do?

Create market, customer, persona or process advocates

Organizations need customer or persona advocates that aren’t tied to a specific product but instead responsible for becoming the subject matter expert on the markets, customers, personas or processes served by the company.

In some companies the UX department handles this but oftentimes the UX group is more focused on the screen design usability without understanding the larger context.

By making individual PMs responsible for being customer advocates it should help force the product managers to be more customer centric and drive collaboration across the organization.

Map the customers’ customers journey

I’ve read a lot about customer journey mapping but for the most part it’s always been in the context of the customer’s journey with your company. For B2B companies, mapping the customers’ customers journey may be even more helpful as it forces you to understand what your customers’ processes are and how you potentially fit or don’t fit into their processes as your number one goal is to help your customers be more successful.

By mapping the customers’ customer journey you should be able to spot opportunities to develop new products or better position your existing products to meet your customers’ goals.

Tell me what you think.

Are Your Users Idiots or are You? Product Development & Design for a Lazy World

If you’ve ever wondered why people ask for features and never use them;  or how  to be a lazy and successful product developer – then here’s a presentation and  a few posts you may find valuable.

1. Product Adoption: Lessons on how to maximize product adoption and avoid common pitfalls My $100K MBA from the school of hard knocks
2. User Experience 101: How to create a great online experience While the article may be old, the basics of creating a great user experience haven’t changed.
3. My Top ten tips for developing successful products If you don’t know what a wuzzy is then this article is for you!

Enjoy! And let me know what you think.

Kev

30 Minutes a Day of tutoring Equals One Additional Year of School by 11th Grade

I was half way through second grade and I could barely read. I felt stupid, sad and outcast.

Fortunately, my dad just happened to be working on his PhD in education – specifically about new ways of teaching adult illiterates to read. So thanks to my mom badgering him he tested his concepts on me – and they worked!

Another  neighbor didn’t quite have the same luck. His house wasn’t stocked with books liked ours (but they did have Cable TV before everyone else in the neighborhood!).  He too struggled with reading but his parents weren’t able to help – needless to say he fell further and further behind and eventually dropped out of high school.

Now as a dad I see how important parental intervention is – and how much time my wife and I (especially my wife!) spend tutoring our kids in everything from English to Algebra.

Being a concerned geek, I decided to calculate what that additional hour or so a day of after-school education is worth just in terms of school  days – and the numbers are staggering!

If you spend just 30-minutes a day Monday through Friday helping your kids with school you will have provided your kids the equivalent of an entire additional year of class time by the time they graduate!

So why is this important? As a parent of  three children who are now all doing very well in school, I can see just how important our time and our educational background has been in our children’s’ success to date – and in other equally successful children’s education.

We, especially my wife, have spent a huge amount of time helping our kids study. Just as important as time, we have the educational background – my wife taught math and has a few masters degrees in science. We’re a trilingual household, etc… And this is all great for us and our kids as they are and will reap the rewards but what about all the children from the 80%  of Americans without a college degree?

As anyone who has ever watched “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” school is hard and once you leave school -many of the math and science concepts are quickly forgotten. I know I find myself having to review and relearn 9th grade Algebra in order to help my high schooler and I took a year of Calculus in college. (Thank god my wife taught math!)

But what if you don’t have the schooling to help your children with math and science or even English? Or the money to pay for tutoring? Platitudes about parental engagement won’t overcome the reality  that many parents can’t or won’t help.

So what’s the point? All the statistics show that the wealthier the parents the better the kids do in school, but I’ve never seen any statistics as to what the parents of the most successful kids do different than the rest. And more importantly, what do we need to be doing as a society in order to level out the playing field so all kids can be successful regardless of their parents educational background?

Given the fact that our nation’s success is based on educational attainment, we need a system that provides kids whose parents don’t have the education, time or desire the resources required to succeed in a global high-tech world.

Am I completely off base? Does this make sense? Let me know your thoughts.

Thanks!

Kev