Feature Request, Part II In Part I, I asked for time zone alerts on cell phones for off-hours and a mechanism for alerting people when they’re replying-to-all when they were bcc’d. Today, I ask for an iPhone (and I suppose Android) app: turn a photo of a whiteboard into a Word or PPT document!
Category
Business
Investment in the Email Ecosystem
Investment in the Email Ecosystem Last week, my colleague George Bilbrey posted about how (turns out – shocking!) email still isn’t dead yet. Not only is he right, but the whole premise of defending email from the attackers who call it “legacy” or “uninteresting” is backwards. The inbox is getting more and more interesting these days, not less. At Return Path, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of startup activitiy and investment (these two things can go together but don’t have to) in in front end of email in the past couple years. I’d point to three sub-trends of this theme of “the inbox getting more interesting.” First, major ISPs and mailbox operators are starting to experiment with more interesting applications…
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking
The Value (and Limitations) of Benchmarking I think I am starting to drive my team nuts a little bit. I have suggested, prodded, and executed a ton of external benchmarking projects this year, all of which have different leaders inside Return Path doing both systematic and ad hoc phone calls and meetings with peer companies and aspirational peer companies to understand how we compare to them in terms of specific metrics, practices, and structures. It’s some combination of the former management consultant in me rearing its head, and me just trying to make sure that we stay ahead of the curve as we rapidly scale our business this year. Why go through an exercise like this? One answer is that…
Agile Marketing, Part II
Agile Marketing, Part II I wrote about this years ago when I was temporarily running Marketing and was noting a lot of the similarities between running contemporary Product Development and Marketing efforts. Nick Van Weerdenburg just put up a great post called Why Marketing is Becoming Like Software Development which you should read if you run or work in, or work closely with, a marketing department.
Feature Requests
Feature Requests Here are two new features I’d like to see in life: Any time you hit “reply to all” when you are in the BCC line – a giant red alert should pop up and say “are you really sure you want to let all these people know that you were BCCd on this thread?” Any time you place a call to a cell phone that’s outside of the person’s normal time zone – a giant red alert should pop up and say “are you sure you want to call this person at 3 a.m. in Singapore?” before completing the call I’m not sure to whom these requests should be addressed, so I’ll just start with the open web.
Mental Maps
Mental Maps I recently went grocery shopping at a store I’d never been to before, Stew Leonard’s, and, no offense to Stew, I am unlikely to be a repeat customer. While there were some things about the store that were better than most grocery stores, the experience drove me nuts. Here’s why. The store is laid out completely differently from standard grocery stores. Most stores, even unusual ones like Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s, have a nearly identical layout. One side is produce, frozen foods in the middle, meats in the back, dairy around the other side, standard aisles have bread, baking stuff, cans, cereals, drinks and snacks, etc. Go shopping enough, and you can generally find your way around…
Book Short: Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity
Book Short: Multiplying Your Team’s Productivity No matter how frustrated a kids’ soccer coach gets, he never, ever runs onto the field in the middle of a game to step in and play. It’s not just against the rules, it isn’t his or her role. Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter by Liz Wiseman and Greg McKeown (book, Kindle) takes this concept and drives it home. The book was a great read, one of the better business books I’ve read in a long time. I read a preview of it via an article in a recent Harvard Business Review (walled garden alert – you can only get the first page of the article without buying it), then my…
OnlyOnce, Part II
OnlyOnce, Part II After more than six years, my blog starting looking like, well, a six-year old blog on an off-the-shelf template. Thanks to my friends at Slice of Lime, OnlyOnce has a new design as of today as well as some new navigation and other features like a tag cloud and Twitter feed (and a new platform, WordPress rather than Typepad). I know many people only read my posts via feed or email (those won’t change), but if you have a minute, feel free to take a look. The site also has its own URL now – https://onlyonceblog.wpengine.com. With my shiny new template, I may add some other features or areas of content over time, as well. There are…
Automated Love
Automated Love Return Path is launching a new mini feature sometime this week to our clients. Normally I wouldn’t blog about this — I think this is mini enough that we’re probably not even saying much about it publicly at the company. But it’s an interesting concept that I thought I’d riff on a little bit. I forget what we’re calling the program officially — probably something like “Client Status Emails” or “Performance Summary Alerts” — but a bunch of us have been calling it by the more colorful term “Automated Love” for a while now. The art of account management or client services for an on-demand software company is complex and has evolved significantly from the old days of…
Why I Love Our New Product
Why I Love Our New Product Return Path officially announced a new product today called Domain Assurance, which I blogged a little bit about here. It’s a very exciting product that will help reduce and ultimately eliminate phishing emails – spam’s even more evil cousin that leads to identity theft, malware, further propagation of spam through botnets, and all sorts of other goodies. The product is in beta now with a bunch of top ISPs and brands. Those are a lot of reasons to love our new product. But for me, there’s more. For starters, this is the first new product (entirely new product, not just a feature or extension) that we’ve launched in years. While we’ve made some…
Getting Good Inc., Part II
Getting Good Inc., Part II It was a nice honor to be noted as one of America’s fastest growing companies as an Inc. 500 company two years in a row in 2006 and 2007 (one of them here), but it is an even nicer honor to be noted as one of the Top 20 small/medium sized businesses to work for in America by Winning Workplaces and Inc. Magazine. In addition to the award, we were featured in this month’s issue of Inc. with a specific article about transparency, and important element of our corporate culture, on p72 and online here. Why a nicer honor? Simply put, because we pride ourselves on being a great place to work — and we…