• Story of transformation from user experience design to product design
• Retrospective of what worked and didn’t work
• Wanted to transform from a services company to a licensed product
• Great user experience team, great development lead, great development team
• Idea: we could bring web 2.0 design to Microsoft Sharepoint
• You could go to one spot, see all your sharepoint sites, docs, etc.
• Sat on top of sharepoint
• Everything designed to be very simple to use, straightforward, very easy
• Mint.com
• Founder had used Microsoft Money and Quicken, found them to be very tiring to use. A lot of work to enter all transactions.
• Mint is a thin user experience layer on top of Yodalee. 
• Had:
• Engaging experience
• Clever solution to common problem
• Amazing Timing (right at recession, people needed tools to manage money)
• Way to make money
• Flickr
• Relative to competitors, was a step above everyone else
• Interesting social features was novel
• Flickr became popular just as digital cameras were booming
• Before flickr, people were sending an email with 25 photos attached.
• Pro account had unlimited storage
• Had:
• Engaging experience
• Clever solution
• Timing was right
• Way to make money (pro accounts)
• Slideshare (bit of counter example)
• People tweet about how hard uploading, annotating, and sharing presentations is with Slideshare
• It meets most of the criteria (engaging experience, clever solution, etc), but the experience isn’t quite there from an engaging experience
• However, Slideshare reaches over 28 million monthly people. It’s a top site, ranked  in the top 400 sites in the US.
• Getting Starting…
• “What if we built BaseCamp on Sharepoint?”
• This turns out as a terrible way to start an idea
• Will: I don’t believe this.
• Sharepoint is a billion dollar product today.
• Sharepoint ecosystem is a $13B system.
• Market that we were entering was massive.
• And we know that companies out there were having problems using Sharepoint. You could have hundreds or thousands of sites in a network. Companies wouldn’t know what was out there. People would spend 60% of their time giving people permissions. Another company was spending hundreds of thousands on training for Sharepoint.
• You know something is wrong when a person who uses Facebook for two hours a night needs a two day training session to use Sharepoint.
• Product: kiiro
• Make a product that focuses on getting your work done, instead of endless tuning of Sharepoint.
• Make a central dashboard, so you could see everything relevant across multiple sharepoints.
• UI Design stripped everything away… very clean.
• First idea was to have a two way sync between Microsoft Project and Sharepoint.
• This wasn’t so good. 
• Project health metrics and so forth made for a very good demo, but doesn’t match how people actually do project management, which is much more messy.
• Then decide to focus on social stuff… an activity timeline of what you and your coworkers are doing.
• Took twice as long to build on top of Sharepoint as opposed to a regular web application like Django. Regular web apps have easier databases, security, etc.
• We wanted to make this thing a black box. Organizations have trouble with people continually customizing sharepoint. We took most of that way. 
• We wanted to have a very purpose focused interfaced.
• Market Response
• Not particularly good. 
• Products like Mint, Flickr –> the buyer is the user.
• Even if they don’t pay money, they make a decision to invest their time
• The person who is evaluating the product is different than the person who will use the product
• Enterprise market
• The buyer is not a user.
• What benefits does the buyer get?
• They want hard benefits like increased revenue, decreased cost
• And soft benefits like increased effectiveness and efficiency
• e.g. we can save 10 minutes a day x 2000 employees x $57/personhour = $xM savings
• Not really true, because if people have 10 extra minutes a day, they will just go on Facebook…
• Problems…
• It was hard to make the business case for the product
• The Buyer, the Business Owner, IT, and the User all different…
• The marketplace is complex: independent software vendors, system integrators, buyers
• Finally did a market analysis of which companies would be a good match for their product. About 24,000 companies were a good match. 
• But the next problem was diffusion: the companies were spread across industries and markets.
• Next problem… system integrators.
• Companies with complex sharepoint needs go to a system integrator, not directly to 
• 1:3:5 Rule
• For every dollar an independent software vendor makes…
• Microsoft makes 3 dollars in licensing fees…
• system integrators want 5 dollars to integrate the software
• And system integrators don’t encourage companies to go directly to an independent software vendor: “oh, you don’t want that software, we could build that for you…”
• 2:1 Rule: Marketing vs design and development
• You need to spend twice as much on marketing vs. design and development
• And which means that about 10% is left for UX design
• Conversion…
• If you have a $5K product, and $500,000 in costs, then you need to sell it to 100 companies.
• If you have a 1% conversion rate, you need to pitch it to 10,000 companies to sell it to 100 companies.
• Because the product was strongly differentiated… it allowed them to more easily get companies into the funnel.
• But because the product limited customization, many companies, once they learned about the limitations, wouldn’t use it.
• And one of the biggest potential customers would be system integrators (who would resell it)…
• Except that because it was a black box and limited customization, the system integrators wouldn’t really use it. (their specialty is customization…)
• Kiiro Had:
• Engaging Experience
• X Did not have Clever Solution
• X Bad Timing: in the trough between SP 2007 and SP 2010
• Way to Make Money
• Market Opportunity (good)
• X Market Fit was bad…
• On the scale of fidelity and functionality:
• I would spend as much time with low fidelity and low functionality as long as possible researching and learning.
• When I was ready, I would go for maximum fidelity: Mock-Ups (and then add functionality)
• As opposed to going for maximum functionality: Working Product (and then improve design)
• Going beyond… New Version of kiiro
• Highly customizable
• Better Sharepoint Integration
• Targeted to System Integrators
• And created a new tool… Parachute
• Backs up Basecamp Files
• Complete HTML Export
• Low Cost
• Releasing something out there in the world is thrilling. User interaction design is fun, and it pays the bills, but releasing product is exciting.