The New Normal Prediction #3: Business Travel is going to be down 40% long term. One of the biggest changes over time will be a huge decrease or change in business travel. During this pandemic, business travel completely stopped. Employees who used to travel to HQ now met on video. Sales calls were done using Zoom. For the most part, people found the remote calls
The New Normal Prediction #2: 20-30% of people in white-collar jobs will work from home at least 2 days a week. Pre-covid approximately 4% of white-collar workers worked from home. It was not seen by most workers as “acceptable”. Employers did not think employees could be efficient while working from home. Now during our lockdown, 50% of white-collar workers are working from home 100% of the time. Companies have quickly built
The New Normal Prediction #1: We are not going back to close to pre-Covid normal until at least May/June 2021 (not 2020!). The current equilibrium of physical separation, reduction in large gatherings, human interactions, and indoor activity is not going to go away soon. As of right now (end of May 2020) states have put in varying levels of restrictions from the most severe lockdown rules (currently SF Bay Area, California) to
The New Normal The New Normal - A New Blog Series I have not blogged in a while, but given the recent changes in the world, I am starting up a new series called The New Normal. My goal is to start to get my head around how our current situation is going to change the world in the next 3-5
Product Management Why you should stop using the word "Disrupt" The word “disrupt” is everywhere these days. In Silicon Valley today you can’t spend more than 5 minutes in a coffee shop without hearing someone describe how their company is going to “disrupt the <fill in the blank> industry.” Entrepreneurs and business school students are taught case
Product Strategy Max Revenue [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/CliffLooking.jpeg] [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/wildernessculture-rei1440project-welltravelled-awesomeearth.jpg] Let’s say you are a CEO of a rapidly growing startup (or a VC deciding whether to invest in a rapidly growing startup). All the numbers look up and
17 The Limits To Viral Marketing [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/wildernessculture-rei1440project-welltravelled-awesomeearth.jpg] For the last few years virality has been in vogue. Talk to almost any consumer or small-business-based startup and they’ll tell you that their marketing plan is to figure out how to grow by word of mouth, become viral
Apple Watch Observations and 5 Predictions for the Apple Watch [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/watch3.jpeg] [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/watch2.jpeg] [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/watch3.jpeg]I’ve now owned an Apple Watch for around 4 months. I bought it because a) I wanted to live
Product Management Creating vs. Disrupting The word “disrupt” is everywhere these days. In Silicon Valley today you can’t spend more than 5 minutes in a coffee shop without hearing someone describe how their company is going to “disrupt industry <fill in the blank>.” Entrepreneurs and business school students are repeatedly taught case
Keeping It Simple Do You Believe in Magic? [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/sparkles.jpg] [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/sparkles.jpeg] I have been helping a few startups try to reach product-market-fit and have encountered a common theme: everyone is too tactical. Discussions quickly digress into incremental benefits and features. Attend
Product Management Win, Play and Lose No matter what product you are building, you can’t be the best at everything. Spread your resources across all areas equally and you will be average at them all. So how do you figure out where to focus? One technique we used at Shop It To Me [http://www.
Misc Shop It To Me In Forbes and Hacker News Two fun news pieces for Shop It To Me today! 1) Forbes just posted a great Q&A about myself and Shop It To Me [http://www.shopittome.com]as part of their designer spotlight [http://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesstylefile/2014/05/29/designer-spotlight-shop-it-to-me-delivers-a-way-to-shop-smarter/] series. Check it out!
Misc It's Time To Get Emotional At Shop It To Me [http://www.shopittome.com] we are customer-driven so wethink about product [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/2013/06/04/building-an-indispensable-product/] a lot. We’ve noticed that too many Internet companies today think about their product almost exclusively in terms of a functional experience. What need are
Misc Building An Indispensable Product At Shop It To Me [http://www.shopittome.com/], we believe a key way companies disrupt a market and have long term loyalty is by building not just a great product or a insanely fun product, but an indispensable product. Look at some of the services today with the most
Keeping It Simple Technical Debt -- when to deal with it? One of the key themes In the upcoming presidential election is what should we do with the US fiscal debt. Some argue we should stop everything to pay it down right now; others think we should put our resources into improving the economy and then pay it down later when
Product Management Smart Tips for better customer feedback My latest post, 6 Smart Tips for Better Customer feedback [http://www.inc.com/charlie-graham/customer-feedback-tricks.html], is now on the Inc.com website! Three of the tips are: 1. Keep customer support in-house and staffed by smart people. 2. Initiate customer conversations yourself. 3. Test constantly. To read more
Misc What our customers say vs what they mean My latest article on what customers say vs what they mean and what you should do about itwas just posted at Inc.com [http://www.inc.com/charlie-graham/what-customers-say-what-customers-mean.html ] ! Here’s a snippet… You know this meme: You hear one thing, but it probably means something else entirely. (Like
Misc How to build a culture of experimentation As you have probably noticed from my blog — at Shop It To Me, we are big fans of experimentation. I believe to succeed you can’t just treat experimentation with lip-service. It needs to be ingrained in your culture. For those of you who want to start experimenting in your
eCommerce Loyalty for Shopping Sites At Shop It To Me [http://www.shopittome.com], we interview people all of the time about their shopping habits, and with the exception of maybe Amazon, there currently really is no one major player among pure shopping search sites. When someone wants to search for an item or shop
Keeping It Simple First Impressions At Shop It To Me, we are constantly experimenting. It’s one of our core values. In fact, as of this morning, we have 24 different A/B experiments running on different parts of our site. Each week we probably add anywhere from 1-5 new experiments to our testing pool
eCommerce Personalization does not have to be “Creepy” On Sunday, The New York Times ran an article [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/24/technology/e-tailer-customization-whats-convenient-and-whats-just-plain-creepy.html?pagewanted=all] arguing that retailers’ personalization attempts are backfiring because they are becoming too personalized. The piece quoted several retailers who had tested sophisticated personalization tools with poor results. They concluded
Misc Why you should be user-testing...now. If you are developing a new product, chances are you want to wait to show it to anyone to critique until you have it mostly in place. Why? You have a great vision as to where the product is going and you want them to see the final realized product
Misc Business Lessons from my 10-month Old Just in time for Father’s day, I wrote a new article for Inc.com called “Business Lessons from my 10-month old”. Enjoy! http://www.inc.com/charlie-graham/business-lessons-10-month-old.html [http://www.inc.com/charlie-graham/business-lessons-10-month-old.html?nav=linkedin]
eCommerce Blue Oceans In my previous post [http://www.iamcharliegraham.com/2012/06/05/focus-what-is-your-product-going-to-be-awesome-at/] I talked about how having a focus is super important to a product’s success. The question comes, what to focus on? Here’s one angle. I have been a big fan of Kim & Mauborgne’s Blue
eCommerce Focus: What is your product going to be awesome at? One of the most important things to do when you are building a product of any size is to focus. Pick the few things you are going to be amazing at and the many things you will not be. It’s hard, but it’s the only way to succeed.
