Month: September 2005

Stanford Theater

If you are ever in the San Francisco bay area and want to do something fun and different I recommend going to see a movie at the Stanford Theater in downtown Palo Alto. The theater was first opened in 1935 and was purchased in 1987 by the David and Lucille Packard Foundation. They have totally renovated it. It is a beautiful theater complete with a pipe organ that rises in front of the screen and is played  between shows.

The theater only plays classic movies. On Sunday we  saw To be or Not to Be with Jack Benny and Carole Lombard and Midnight with Claudette Colbert and  Don Ameche. What fun. Both are entertaining, funny movies. The Stanford Theater is a wonderful place to see a movie.  The building and decorating alone make it worthwhile. It is a great experience.

An Interesting Blog

One of the Blogs I consistently find thought provoking and entertaining to read is Creating Passionate Users.She has two recent postings that certainly resonated with me.

The first includes a "little unofficial guide to creating passionate users for those working in Big Companies." I think I’ll print it out and post it on my wall at work.I found it inspiring. The posting especially works for me  because I work in a company that really does care about our users and it takes individuals to make that happen.

The second post is titled " The worst way to calm someone down."  I recently called  a credit card company that makes lots of money off college students. They give a student a credit card with a $500 limit. Then they make it very easy for the student to go over the credit limit by $10.  Finally they charge a $35 fee for going over the credit limit. Now don’t get me wrong I know that it is the student’s job to stay under their credit limit but it bugs me that this is  is so damn lucrative for this credit card company (CitiBank). One of the reasons these companies offer so many credit cards to students is that they can bilk them out of so much money.

When I called Citibank to complain  I experienced exactly what the Creating passionate Users blog describes. The person was maddeningly calm and uninterested. She made it very clear that our business was  totally unimportant to Citibank and that  she could care less. If she had mirrored my outrage just a little bit or even just acknowledged it I might not have been quite so inclined to stop doing business with CitiBank at all. She was totally in the right but boy oh boy did she make me angry. I walked away being absolutely clear that they could care less about my business. Oh well…..

Demonstrating PortfolioMinder

I got back last Sunday from the Financial Planning Association Conference in San Diego. We previewed PortfolioMinder
at the conference. It was a huge success! I am going to be the Customer Care Manager for  PortfolioMinder which is new software from Intuit for independent financial advisers. There was a phenomenal amount
of interest for PortfolioMinder at the show. I’ve never done so many demos in all my life. There were 5
of us demonstrating PortfolioMinder for three days and we were busy almost all the
time.

Here is a picture of the booth and the team doing demos.
Img_2242

It really is fun to work on the launch of a new product. There is so much to do. This week in addition to lots of other stuff I helped set up and run three research sessions. In each one we talked to an adviser about his or her software purchase process. We used WebEx to virtually watch over the adviser’s shoulder while he or she used our marketing web site. It is interesting how some people just look at the screen shots and hardly read any of the text and others read all the text especially the FAQs.

We also have done research sessions with advisers who are using PortfolioMinder to see what works and what doesn’t work for them when they use the product.  I haven’t been able to attend one of the product research sessions yet but I’m looking forward to attending some soon. Intuit is well Known for its follow me home method of studying the user experience. I can really see how easy it would be to not do user experience research because there just doesn’t seem to be time in the middle of developing and  launching a product, but I  can also see why having done the research will make a big difference in the end product we release.

Blogging Birthday

My anniversary of blogging was last week. My very first blog entry was September 16, 2004. It has really been a fun year. I’ve learned a lot. Here’s my list of some of the blog related things I’ve learned.

  1. I’ve learned that I like to write and I like  conversations. I’ve had many thought provoking and interesting conversations with some very interesting people that I wouldn’t have met or talked to  otherwise.
  2. I’ve learned that blogging inside a company that endorses blogging and encourages it is different and in many ways easier than blogging as an individual. They both  are fun and they both allow you to express yourself but blogging from within a corporate community of bloggers which includes the leaders of the company is a very nurturing experience.
  3. I’ve learned that blogging consistently takes discipline. I think it must be like the advice I have read to aspiring writers who want to improve. You have to write every day whether you feel like it or not. I obviously haven’t developed the discipline yet but I’m working on it.
  4. I’ve learned that one of the best ways to meet fellow bloggers and make new contacts and friends is to comment on other people’s blogs and link to them from mine. I’ve connected with or reconnected with people like Chuq, James, Jon, ThinGuy and Geoff.
  5. I’ve learned that you never know who is reading your Blog. A lot of of people including family, friends and coworkers read my blog. Of course I’ve also learned that a lot of people don’t read blogs.
  6. I’ve learned that reading blogs can be as big a time sync as writing a blog.
  7. I’ve learned that writing a blog can help you define who you are when you are looking for a job.
  8. I’ve learned a heck of a lot about the mechanics of blogging. I’ve learned tools like Typepad, Roller,  and Bloglines.

Here are my goals for my next blog year.

  1. Post better quality and more often. I posted something like 161 posts last year in my two blogs. Before the 50 I published in this blog I published about 111 entries in my Sun blog.  Some of the entries were better than others.  I hope to make even better written more interesting entries next year.
  2. Start the PortfolioMinder blog. PortfolioMinder is the new Intuit product for which I am the Customer Care Manager. It will be  a product blog with many authors so it will be interesting to see how we can make it really interesting, useful, thought provoking and well read. I’m looking forward to learning about how a product blog is different than a personal blog.
  3. Build the PortfolioMinder community. This is more than just a blog thing. I am really excited about helping to build a PortfolioMinder community. I’ve even got The Cluetrain Manifesto posted on the wall of my office.
  4. Become better educated about Intuit and write not just about PortfolioMinder but also about all the other cool things that Intuit is doing and about how impressed I am with the company.  I also need to develop a better sense of what it is OK to publish and what it is not OK to publish.
  5. Keep a good balance of postings on both work and non work subjects.
  6. Be interesting
  7. Continue to meet and engage with new bloggers.
  8. Have fun!

PortfolioMinder

I took a job at Intuit back in June and since then have been working on PortfolioMinder, new software for financial planners that Intuit is coming out with. Our Marketing web site just went live. We are introducing the product at the Financial Planning Association  annual meeting  in San Diego this week. I’m really looking forward to talking about he product to planners at the convention.  The web gives a very good overview of the PortfolioMInder Product.

I’m the customer care manager for PortfolioMinder. I am having a blast being involved in the launch of a new product. Many years ago I was the customer care manager for another brand new product. The company was called Ansa and the product was Paradox. I saw then and I really believe now that the customer care organization can have a big impact on the success of a product.

We’ll be starting the PortfolioMinder Blog and Forum soon. I am looking forward to the learning experience of seeing how a product focused blog works and how blogs and forums can interact. I think that maybe a forum can replace the comment part of blogging. We’ll see.