Andy Gluck Reviews PortfolioMinder

I have talked to a lot of financial advisors lately and many of them say that product reviews influence their decision making process when they are shopping for software. The names of one or two reviewers  come up consistently when I ask advisors to whom they pay attention. Andy Gluck Is a  name that I hear mentioned consistently.

Recently Gluck wrote  a column for the Investment Advisor magazine and website about Intuit and PortfolioMinder. The column was mainly about Intuit and what it means for Intuit to be entering the financial planning software market. Gluck said  Intuit’s entry into this market could be "a pivotal development in the evolution of the independent advisor segment of the financial services industry". I would definitely agree with that assessment. I only have four months of experience at Intuit, all of it working on PortfolioMinder, but I am convinced that Intuit is in this for the long haul.

I am still reading the book The Innovator’s Solution by Christensen and Raynor.  By reading it one can really see how the PortfolioMinder product fits into Intuit’s strategy for  disruptive innovation and  customer driven innovation. This is where Gluck gets it wrong about PortfolioMinder. He said that his panel of  "advisors who attended the Web demo—mostly sophisticated advisors who
have attended demos of several other PMS applications with me in the
past—reacted. It is stunning to see how simplistic the system is "

If you read The Innovators Solution or listen to what Intuit says about PortfolioMinder you will see that Intuit is not making the mistake of trying to compete with the high cost end full featured, expensive solutions that alredy exist. PortfolioMinder instead is designed as a relatively low priced entry level  solution that is targetted at customers who don’t want or can’t afford the complex expensive solutions that are available today. PortfolioMinder essentially competes against non consumption not against existing well entrenched products.

We have a ways to go before PortfolioMinder is ready for release but I’ve talked to a lot of advisors in the past few weeks and I believe we will find a ready market among the advisors who don’t have a solution today. Gluck missed the point when he picked his panel of reviewers for PortfolioMInder but he got it rightr when he said that "If Intuit— ….. —can fulfill its mission in this little corner of the
world, independent advisors will be better off." I also believe that PortfoliomInder will help Intuit’s Quicken group become a growth engine for the compnay. I am excited to be a part of it.

Library Thing

Last February my hard disk crashed and I lost all the data I had on it. Since then I more and more keep all my data on the net. There is almost no data on my hard disk anymore.  I use Plaxo for my address book I use a web mail client even though I prefer the Thunderbird user interface and I use Flickr. One of the things I lost when I lost my hard disk was a catalog of  my home library that I had been creating. I never got around to starting to re-enter all the data i lost. So today when I read  12 frogs  I was thrilled to discover that a web based library cataloging application has been created. I have just started to play with it but Library Thing seems VERY cool and I am very excited. 

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.
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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.