Steve Blank Innovation and Entrepreneurship April 2009

SuperMac War Story 6: Building The Killer Team – Mission, Intent and Values

Posted on April 9, 2009 by steve blank

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

At the same time we were educating the press, we began to educate our own marketing department about what exactly we were supposed to be doing inside the company. During the first few weeks I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager she looked at me like I was the house idiot and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to set up our trade show booth?” The other departments in marketing gave the same answers; the product-marketing department said their job was to write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager said, “we’re here to write press releases and answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup/small company, update your resume.

Titles are not your job
When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows, or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best I could get was “why that’s our job.” It dawned on me that we had a department full of people who were confusing their titles with what contribution they were supposed to be making to the company. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – at least in any marketing department I was running.

Titles are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today
It wasn’t that we somehow had inherited dumb employees. What I was actually hearing was a failure of management. No one had sat the marketing department down and defined what our department Mission (with a capital “M”) was.

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at their last job, or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to actually make it happen. (And to this day I can’t remember if we even had a corporate mission statement.) What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What was missing in SuperMac marketing was anything in writing that gave the marketing staff daily guidance on what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “that’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

So what we needed to do was to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that SuperMac marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission
After a few months of talking to customers, talking to our channel and working with sales we defined the marketing Mission (our job) was to:
Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and market requirements documents.

This year, marketing need to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

Generate end user demand (to match our revenue goals)
Drive that demand into our sales channels
Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)
Educate our sales channel(s)
Help engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Working to the Mission
Having the mission in place meant that our marketing team could see that what mattered was not what their business card said, but how much closer did their work move our department to completing the mission. Period.

It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

Building the Team
My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that their job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department you owned the responsibility of awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations at SuperMac wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen activity.” It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. (The Potrero benchmark strategy was one component of this creating end user demand through PR.) We were constantly creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on end-user purchases.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to engineering.

Teaching Mission Intent – What’s Really Important
With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”

We introduced the notion of Mission intent. What is the company goal behind the mission. In our case it was to sell $25 million in graphics boards with 45% gross margin. The idea of intention is that if employees understand the thinking behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

But we recognized that there would be time marketing would screw up, making the mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example; our mission said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc, was so that the company could sell $25 million in graphics boards at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring then the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in graphics boards with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances it may change, but the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Core Values
Even after we had Mission and Intent down pat, one of the things that still drove me crazy was when we failed to deliver a project for sales on time or we missed a media deadline, everyone in my department had an excuse. (Since a large part of marketing was as a service organization to sales, our inability to deliver on time meant we weren’t holding up our end of the mission.) I realized that this was a broken part of our culture, but couldn’t figure out why. And one day it hit me that when deadlines slipped there were no consequences.

And with no consequences we acted as if schedules and commitments really didn’t matter. I heard a constant refrain of, “The channel sales brochure was late because the vendor got busy and they couldn’t meet the original deadline.” Or, “the January ad had to be moved into February because my graphic artist was sick but I didn’t tell you assuming it was OK.” Or, “we’re going to slip our product launch because the team thought they couldn’t get ready in time.” We had a culture that had no accountability, and no consequences – instead there were simply shrugged shoulders and a litany of excuses.

This had to change. I wanted a department that could be counted on delivering. One day I simply put up a sign on my door that said, “No excuses accepted.” And I let the department know what I meant was we were all going to be “accountable.”

What I didn’t mean was “deliver or else.” By accountable I meant, “we agreed on a delivery date, and between now and the delivery date it’s OK if you ask for help because you’re stuck, or something happened outside of your control. But do not walk into my office the day something was due and give me an excuse. It will cost you your job.” That kind of accountable.

And, “since I won’t accept those kind of excuses, you are no longer authorized to accept them from your staff or vendors either.” The goal wasn’t inflexible dates and deadlines, it was no surprises and collective problem solving. After that, we spent a lot more time working together to solve problems and remove obstacles in getting things done on-time.

Over time, accountability, execution, honesty and integrity became the cornerstones of our communication with each other, other departments and vendors.

We wouldn’t give excuses for failures, just facts and requests for help
We wouldn’t accept excuses for failures, just facts, and offer help
Relentless execution
Individual honesty and integrity

That was it. Four bullets. It defined our culture.

Why Do It
By the end of the first year our team had jelled. It was a department willing to exercise initiative, had the judgment to act wisely, and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the weeks little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories, that they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.

We all marveled in the moment.

What did I learn so far?

Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level

Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.

Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement

Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution

Agree on Core Values to define your culture

Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Entrepreneurs, Startups, Steve Blank, SuperMac | 12 Comments »

The “Good” Student

Posted on April 7, 2009 by steve blank

I saw an article in the New York Times about Google’s hiring practices that reminded me of the differences between great big successful technology companies and small scrappy startups.

I love Google.I think its one of the smartest companies out there. And it hires very smart people from the best schools. And if you meet their criteria of a “good student”, you ought to go to work there.Or Microsoft or IBM. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

Nothing makes me happier then to see my students getting great grades (and as they can tell you I make them very work hard for them.)

But what I remind them is that great grades and successful founders/technology entrepreneurs have at best a zero correlation (and anecdotal evidence suggests that the correlation may actually be negative.)

BTW, by the standards mentioned in the Times article, the following people would never have been interviewed or hired at Google.

College Dropouts – Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison

These guys realized that customers don’t ask for your transcript.

There’s a big difference between being an employee at a great technology company and having the guts to start one. You don’t get grades for having resiliency, curiosity, agility, resourcefulness, pattern recognition and tenacity.

You just get successful.

Filed under: Customer Development, Family/Career/Culture, Technology | Tagged: Customer Development, Early Stage Startup, Entrepreneurs, Steve Blank | 29 Comments »

Story Behind “The Secret History” Part III: The Most Important Company You Never Heard Of

Posted on April 6, 2009 by steve blank

This is Part III of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“.

1978. Two years out of the Air Force, serendipity (which would be my lifelong form of career planning) found me in Silicon Valley working for my first company: ESL. If you’re an entrepreneur, ESL is the most important company you’ve never heard of. If you are a practitioner of Customer Development, ESL was doing it before most us were born. If you think the Cold War turned out the right side up (i.e. Communism being a bad science experiment) ESL’s founder Bill Perry was moving the chess pieces. And no one who really knew could tell you.

Bill Perry’s public life as Secretary of Defense and his subsequent work in preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is public knowledge. But part of his life that that doesn’t even merit a Wikipedia entry is that Bill Perry used Silicon Valley to help end the cold war.

Fred Terman Sent Us

In 1953 the U.S. Army needed to build missile and proximity fuse jammers and Quick Reaction Capability (QRC) systems (translation: the other side just came up with something that’s killing us in a shooting war, get us a fix quick.) The Army offered Fred Terman, the Dean of Engineering at Stanford, a $5M contract to build an electronics countermeasures lab. When Terman said no, Sylvania, a tube company which built proximity fuse tubes in WWII, won the contract and set up its Electronic Defense Lab (EDL) in Mountain View California in the middle of an orchard. Terman became a consultant to the company.

In ten years Sylvania EDL grew to be one the largest companies in the valley − 1300 people were working on electronic countermeasures and electronic intelligence. By 1961 its customers now included our intelligence agencies. (BTW, when the customers were “three-letter” intelligence agencies, contractors used an oblique way of talking about who they were working for: they were all referred to as simply the “customer.”)

In 1964, Bill Perry, the head of the lab, frustrated with GTE’s management, quit (GTE, a phone company had bought Sylvania in 1959.) And in the tradition of great startups, on the way out Perry took 6 of his best managers with him.

At ESL Military Intelligence Was No Longer an Oxymoron

Perry not only took his best managers, but he also took his customers, and his desire to build a company culture that was the antithesis of working for a phone company. In building ESL Perry made a conscious choice to emulate Hewlett Packard (then considered the “gold standard” of a great technology company.) HP had an ethical culture, entrepreneurial spirit, and deep Stanford engineering department connections. One key difference: unlike HP, which had restricted stock ownership to the founders and top management, Perry made sure everyone at ESL had stock. There were no venture investors. The “customers’” contracts funded the company. Seven years later in 1971 ESL went public.

Not surprising with a CEO with a PhD in Math, at ESL the engineers ran the company, pursuing bleeding-edge designs in antennas, receivers and microwaves – at times hand in hand with Stanford’s engineering department. (Some of this stuff was so advanced that the rumors were that we got it from the alien spacecraft hidden at Wright-Patterson Air Force base.)

ESL was unique among the “we do microwaves” that the Valley specialized in before it was Silicon Valley. ESL was a systems company that used computers, and in the mid-1960’s using computers for electronic intelligence was considered revolutionary. ESL specialized in embedding minicomputers in electronic intelligence systems, turning a tedious manual process into one that looked like magic. The “customers” in Washington had never seen anything like it.

While those computer-based systems paid the bills, Perry’s even more profound insight would change the outcome of the Cold War. Up until ESL, radio and radar signals had always been received by analog receivers. ESL realized that by turning these radio waves into computer bits, ones and zeros, they could be processed in ways that had been considered theoretically impossible. ESL’s systems allowed signal extraction and correlation against targets the Soviet Union thought were undetectable and impenetrable. But this digital world required new theories, and new devices – two items provided by Silicon Valley in the form of Stanford’s engineering department and the emerging/booming semiconductor business.

ESL and “the Customer” – No Such Agency

ESL kept getting business and growing mostly through unsolicited bids. Because they were extremely good at what they did, most of the contracts they won were “sole source.” However, it didn’t hurt that Perry several allies at the “customer.” One of them, Bud Wheelon, had been a classmate of Perry’s at Stanford and they both had worked on the electronic intelligence collection problem, Perry at Sylvania EDL and Wheelon at the Space Technology Lab at Ramo Woolridge. In 1962 Wheelon left for a new job as the first director of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology where he was responsible for development of OXCART, the A-12 Spyplane, and three major satellite reconnaissance systems. These would be the heart of ESL’s business.

A-12 OXCART CIA Spyplane

ESL found other ways to stay very close to its customers. Forty years before Customer and Agile Development methodologies became popular, ESL had analysts from its “customer” sitting side-by-side with ESL engineers designing new equipment together. And in the 1960s ESL’s customers asked the company to analyze and interpret telemetry data even though this was a traditional function of the “customer.” In five years, ESL went from a plucky startup to the market leader in Sigint and telemetry intercepts. While it was a for-profit company, Perry believed ESL’s goal was to serve the national interest instead of just the stockholders. He identified with their customers, not shareholders. If there was a conflict between profits and doing the right thing, at ESL the goal was to “think of the country first.” Yet ESL was just act one for Bill Perry.

Yes We Can – Dumping Detente – Bill Perry and “the Revolution in Military Affairs”

After 20 years of an escalating arms race, the Nixon administration decided to take a new approach to dealing with the Soviet Union: Détente. Kissenger’s thinking was: history may be tilting to the Communists and we may not be able to win the struggle with the Soviet Union so let’s settle for parity. Yet while the U.S. had been engaged in the Vietnam War, and had agreed to parity in nuclear weapons, Soviet forces in Europe had built a 3 to 1 advantage in tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and soldiers, all under Détente.

In response the U.S. dumped Détente and embraced a new strategy to counter the Warsaw Pact by not matching them tank for tank or solider to solider. The new insight was that we could change the game completely and take advantage of a lead we had that was getting longer every day – by using our computer and chip technology to aggressively build a new generation of weapons that the Soviet Union could not.

At the heart of this idea was something called “precision strike,” what we would today call smart bombs or precision guided munitions. But this new strategy was more than making the bombs smarter. It involved building stealth aircraft to deliver these precision weapons unseen by any enemy radar, and designing intelligence and reconnaissance systems that would target for them. Smart weapons, smart sensors, and stealth. And the heart of all of this were microwaves, silicon chips, electronics and computers that only the U.S. could design and produce, and a good part of it was coming from Silicon Valley.

The Arms Factories that Won the Cold War Were Semiconductor Factories

Who was the government official pushing all of this? It was none other than Bill Perry, who had become the head of Research and Engineering for the Defense Department. From 1977 to 1981 Perry cranked up spending for research and development on a massive scale. The budget for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) doubled (with the Assault Breaker to turn U.S. asymmetric technology advances into weapons), and huge “smart weapons” defense programs like the F-117 stealth ground attack plane and the B-2 stealth bomber; precision guided munitions; JSTARS, a surveillance system; and the satellite Global Positioning System (GPS); MX missile; Trident submarine; and Tomahawk cruise missiles.

F-117 Nighthawk – 1st Stealth Ground Attack Plane

These changes in American defense policy spooked the Soviets. The Chief of Staff of the Red Army said that this “Offset Strategy” was revolutionizing contemporary warfare and posed a military threat that the Red Army could not match. “We cannot equal the quality of US arms for a generation or two. . . . We will never be able to catch up with you in modern arms until we have an economic revolution. And the question is whether we can have an economic revolution without a political revolution.”

The U.S. Cold War strategy had gone from a “let’s be friends” to a “yes we can win” strategy. By the mid 1980s Ronald Reagan was cranking U.S. defense spending even higher. Gorbachev, now the Soviet Premier, had to grapple with the spiraling cost of military systems that weren’t amortized by consumer purchases. Arms control with the U.S. and massive cuts in weapons and the military seemed like the only way out. And the rest is history.

Bill Perry was my first boss in Silicon Valley.
He put us on the path to use Silicon Valley as a weapon in the cold war.

My small part as a foot solider in this adventure is in the next post.

Part IV of the Secret History of Silicon Valley continues here.

Filed under: ESL, Secret History of Silicon Valley, Technology | Tagged: Bill Perry, Cold War, ESL, Signals Intelligence, Steve Blank | 15 Comments »

Startup Ethics: Albatross or Essential?

Posted on April 2, 2009 by steve blank

A comment left on the previous post made me realize that it was time to discuss a subject I was going to save for latter – ethics.

While the story about the Potereo benchmarks was about relentless execution, its glib description of designing the benchmarks could be read as we cheated. Given we consciously worked hard not to, here’s what we were thinking.

We decided to work with our engineering department to create the Potreo benchmarks because we really wanted to see how our boards performed with the four applications customers told us that they used; Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker. These were applications we had never seen or ran before when the boards were designed. As we ran our tests, our engineering team found ways to improve our graphic boards performance for these applications and they made revisions to the boards firmware (its operating instructions.) The goal was to make our boards run really fast on customer applications – the benchmarks just reflected that.

It would have been easy for marketing to skip all of this and just write a set of benchmarks that made us look good. It would have been possible to have our graphics boards recognize a benchmark and just speed that test up, but not really be faster in the real world. All these shortcuts were available to us. And we decided not to. And here’s why.

Even in the smallest of companies ethics matter. Culture matters. As a private company you can decide that winning at all costs is your culture. You can decide that coming in first at all costs is your culture. Unless your board of directors is looking over shoulder they may never know that’s what you’re doing and no one will tell you to stop.

Don’t confuse or rationalize “relentless and focused” with cheating.

Shortcuts are easy. But besides being morally wrong, in the end they come back to bite you big time. (Think about the baseball Steroid scandal, Tour de France doping scandal, housing bubble, etc.) When your employees see that it’s “an anything goes” culture you’ll find unethical behavior occurring that you will regret. And in a big company most of it is illegal and can have enormous consequences.

If you are a founder of a startup ethics begin with you. Think through if you want to win at any cost. (I avoid these entrepreneurs like the plague.)

A final note. I’m sure at Enron and Madoff there were plaques and posters about ethics. Just remember ethics and values are about what you practice when the going gets tough. It’s the decisions that you make that might cost you an order, a sale or a higher stock price. Do the right thing. It pays off in the end.

Filed under: Customer Development, SuperMac, Technology | Tagged: Startups, Steve Blank | 8 Comments »

SuperMac War Story 5: Strategy versus Relentless Tactical Execution — the Potrero Benchmarks

Posted on April 2, 2009 by steve blank

A few months into my tenure as the VP of Marketing, we now understood who our customers were. We had thought really hard about “market type” and decided to reposition the company from a technology provider to a solutions provider. Now we needed to put the tactical programs in place to make this repositioning strategy happen. 74HGZA3MZ6SV

Just as an aside, over my career I must have interviewed scores of business school graduates (some from the very fine universities where I now teach) who would say, “I want to do strategy.” Well yes, I understand that, but this is a startup, what else do you want to do? “I just want to do strategy.” Those were very short interviews. The “strategy” of learning who SuperMac’s customers were, what solutions they needed and what our repositioning would be was a three month effort.

The tactical execution took three years.

Note, if you want to do “strategy” (which is a fine endeavor) and nothing else, you have just defined your career as one in large corporation or in a consulting firm. Stay out of startups. Tactics mean tenacious and relentless execution measured in years.

Metrics – Mine is Bigger Than Yours

The first thing SuperMac needed to do was to change how our potential color desktop publishing customers viewed our products versus our competitors’ products. Over the years marketers have found that using numbers to compare yourself to other products works well. We’ve all seen ads that say, “Now 30% more” or “Marked down 50%” or “5 times faster.” As hokey as it is, when confronted with uncertainty or unknowns, human beings like to be reassured by comparative metrics. But hardware metrics typically focused on raw speed and performance. The key insight we had was that it wasn’t about raw speed − it was the speed of the applications that customers were using to get their work done.

Believe it or not, until that moment, there were no commonly agreed upon ways to measure the performance of graphics boards on real world applications.

So I was going to give our customers metrics neither they or anyone else had ever seen before.

First, by talking about solutions rather than hardware, we changed the way customers thought about graphics boards. Now we were going to change the metrics that customers and the press used to evaluate product performance.

Objects in Our Mirror are Larger than they Appear

Our first goal was to set up benchmarks to measure the performance of our own graphics boards on the real applications our customers used (Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator and PageMaker.) Then we were going to buy our competitors’ boards (think “secret shopper”) and compare them to ours.

Since no benchmarks existed, we enlisted our engineering department in a serious software development effort and wrote our own. And we made sure that instead of some artificial numbers, the benchmarks truly measured performance on these four key applications our customers told us were important. Then we ran the same benchmarks against our competitors’ boards. When we found a subset of the tests on which we did worse than our competition, we … hmm, somehow that never happened. The numbers were in. We won. Overwhelmingly. (What a surprise.) Any customer who used the four critical color publishing applications was going to be blown away by how much better the SuperMac boards were.

Finally, since no one would believe a set of benchmarks named after our company, we needed a façade of independence, so we named them after the street the company was headquartered on in Sunnyvale California – they became known as the Potrero Benchmarks.

Tell Me How to Find You

But having benchmarks in hand that showed us as the winner did us no good unless all our potential customers could see them. Our first thought was to spread the news ourselves, perhaps in a press release or a “white paper,” (remember this was pre-Internet.) But upon reflection I remembered that in our interviews with our existing customers they had told us how to get the news to them. That told us which publications they relied on for news about graphics boards: the three publications that mattered, MacWorld, MacUser and MacWeek became marketing’s highest priority. Inside the covers of these publications our customers had said that it was the product reviews that most influenced their buying decisions. That by itself was a sobering challenge since our company had never come in first in any of the previous 14 reviews of graphics products that had been written to date.

Now this is worth stopping and thinking about for a second. We figured out how to reach our customers (through these three publications) because they told us how to do so. We figured out what was the most important criteria they used to evaluate which board to buy – product reviews – again because they told us how to do so. These were two of the questions I had asked on purpose when we first did the initial customer surveys. Some of my staff had believed we were gathering extraneous customer data. “Hey, we can make these surveys shorter. We don’t need to know all this stuff.” Yes you do. You need to know the day-in-the-life of the customer. From top to bottom. If you’re constantly correlating data and searching for patterns, all intelligence if properly integrated will give you insight.

The Chase

Then we began an educational blitz of these three critical publications. We set up a series of meetings with the editor-in chiefs and the key writers who reviewed graphics products. We had one story to tell and surprisingly it wasn’t about our company or our product. It was an educational mission to tell the story of who our customers were (and by inference who all the graphics board customers were) and why the current reviews of these graphics boards weren’t adequately measuring what was important to this large market.

(Now as VP of Marketing, I could have sat back and let my PR agency handle the press. Theoretically, that’s why I hired them. But these meetings were life and death in our struggle for market share. You don’t delegate life and death. The head of the PR agency agreed that we would work together as a team. We both met often and went to all of the press meetings together.)

Why did we believe that these magazines would care? At the time desktop publishing was one of the mainstays of the Macintosh market, and therefore the readership of these magazines reflected the demographics of the Mac. For these magazines to find out that they didn’t truly understand what their customers cared about got their full attention.

I knew with a high probability before the meeting started what the end of the meeting would be like since there was no other way to go. My staff didn’t believe it when I told them it would happen this way, but in meetings with all three magazines they said, “Ok, you convinced us these four applications are critical for the color publishing market, but how can we measure the performance of these applications?”

The Trojan Horse

“Well…” I said hesitantly, “I’m not sure we should share this with you but we have a set of benchmarks that we use to measure performance….” You can imagine the rest of the conversation; my sounding reluctant to let our own tests outside our building, the magazines begging us to let them have them, and finally a deal gets struck where we let the benchmarks out to the test labs of these magazines under their own name “The Potrero Benchmark Suite” without attribution to us.

Our benchmark had just become the standard test suite for all magazine reviews that our potential customers would read. Our benchmarks, which were tuned for our boards, had just become the standard test suite for all our competitors’ graphics boards.

Relentless Execution

Once the education and benchmarks were in place, we then worked with each magazine writer as their product review deadline approached. We provided customer references and testimonials supporting the key features we were promoting. Focused on winning these reviews, I left nothing to chance. My rule was no magazine could review our boards without us present. The magazines’ rules were that no company could be in their labs when they reviewed the boards. So we would always wait to the last minute to provide our boards for testing and then “forget” to ship the cables to connect the board to a computer monitor. When the panicked manager of the magazine test lab would call under a last minute deadline, we would apologize profusely as we sent the cables over – with beer, pizza, and our product manager to help them through any testing “issues”.

My PR agency, my head of marketing communications and I set up a wall-sized chart (in my office where I had to close my eyes not to see it) of the editorial calendars of these publications. We listed the editors, writers, what they had previously had written, deadlines, what the competitive products were, how our benchmarks stacked up, what “upgrades” our boards needed from engineering to win, etc. This was upfront and center for anyone who walked into my office could see what I thought was important.

In parallel, we educated the rest of our own company how essential winning these product reviews were to our customer and our financial success. What used to be an exercise in teeth-pulling frustration to get help from our own manufacturing or engineering departments turned into a well-oiled process as everyone stopped what they were doing to help us win.

None of this was an accident. It was all part of a strategy. But its successful execution would take a focused set of tactics and a great group of marketers working with me. And I now had both.

From a company that never won a benchmark review with its graphics boards, we want on to win twenty-one of them in a row. It was two and a half years before our competitors even realized that the Potrero benchmarks and SuperMac having its building on Potrero Street had any connection.

By then it was too late.

Our market share was starting to climb.

And we were just getting started.

What did I learn so far?
• Strategy points you to the goal
• Relentless tactical execution gets you to the goal
• Keep the tactics simple and focused
• Tactical execution needs to be managed at the highest level – you can’t delegate success in a startup