[Design] Chandler as a Managed Workspace

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 01:45 PM 1/8/2008 -0800, Mimi Yin wrote:
>Hi Phillip,
>
>I think we are talking past each other. When I speak of finding the
>'pony' in the product, I'm not talking about how we market Chandler,
>I'm talking about getting a grip on what our core value is.

If we are speaking in the present tense (i.e., regarding what we 
actually *have*), then I don't see how these differ.

Our core value is not what we think the product is or should be in 
the future, but only what we can convince someone *else* is worth 
their time to even investigate.

Starting at *our* idea of what the product's value is, is looking 
through the wrong end of the telescope -- and is, frankly, why we are 
where we are today.

It is not, in a word, *customer-focused*.  (Okay, that's two words.)


>  These 2 things: articulating the pony and figuring out how to market the
>product are 2 sides of the same coin. But I think it would be a
>useful exercise to try and isolate 1 (core value) in a vacuum. IOW,
>I'm drawing an artificial boundary for the sake of discussion.

I know, and it's not helping, because it's 1) artificial, and 2) an 
abstraction.  We desperately need some concreteness, because our time 
frame for 1.0 does not have much room for abstraction.


>We also need to answer the 'how we market ourselves' question, but
>without having a crisp understanding of our core value, it will be
>difficult to market ourselves

Actually, the reverse is true.  Understanding the customer is what 
makes it easier to market.


>  and be sure that we aren't 'selling out' so to speak.

In the absence of ethical issues, the phrase "selling out" is 
misleading.  In fact, it's egotism.  I'm no stranger to this myself, 
actually; three years ago I wrote this after interviewing at OSAF:

   http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/im-just-not-evil-enough.html

Very little of my work at OSAF has *not* involved something that 
could be called "selling out" on my part, from my previous point of 
view: compromising my vision for what the product could have been, 
both in the user-facing and technical aspects of its design.

Fortunately, I've grown enough in those years to recognize that 
another name for "selling out" is just giving people what they are 
currently able to recognize wanting, and always providing an 
opportunity to offer them more.

Meeting people halfway, in other words.

That having been said, I recognize the irony in me perhaps not 
meeting you as close to halfway as possible in this discussion.  So 
nobody's immune to the need for continued growth.  :)

I'll try harder in this message, therefore, to focus on specific, 
actionable questions, and less on theory and concept.


>But that's not Chandler's current core value. What we're better at
>right now (and generally speaking, what software is better at doing)
>is enabling people to *do* the various tasks that other task
>management systems help you define/keep track of:
>+ Collaborating with others via sharing
>+ Broadcasting information via email
>+ Defining timeframes by adding items to the calendar or assigning
>ticker alarms
>+ Brainstorming ideas and maintaining lists in the Notes field

Okay, so let's get *concrete*.  HOW is Chandler better at these 
things, specifically?  How would we script a three-minute demo that 
visibly showed Chandler as being superior to the alternatives in 
these areas?  What feature additions or changes would be needed to 
make the demo compelling?


>Mostly Chandler provides you with somewhere you can dump, manage and
>work out ideas / thoughts /
>concerns / issues. IOW, it's *not* just a place to manage lists of
>tasks.

One of the alternatives to be compared against is doing the same 
thing with a desk calendar and a pencil.  I am running a handful of 
projects right now with a couple of three-ring binders, notepads, and 
pencils, and I don't see where Chandler would improve anything for me.

Yes, these are things I'm doing as an individual, so I'm not in the 
"group" category.  But an important part of why any groupware 
succeeds or fails is who does work to benefit whom.  If one person 
has to do more work or even change the way they work, in order for 
the benefit to accrue mainly to some other person or group, the 
installation is much more likely to fail.

Also, in the case of small groups, where adoption is organic rather 
than decreed from on high, it's less likely that one member of a 
group will use -- and therefore recommend -- a product that isn't 
useful to them personally.

Now, I'm also outside the target audience in another way: I'm not a 
heavy calendar user at all.  I have a few OSAF meetings, I give a few 
talks each month, I listen to a few talks, and I travel maybe five 
times a year.  Sometimes I have a handful of appointments where I 
coach people.  Paper works for this stuff just fine.

What I'm trying to point out with all of this, though, is that it 
seems to me your concept of the "core value" of Chandler is seriously 
off when measured against the product we have today.  If you're not a 
heavier calendar user than I am, and need to co-ordinate schedules 
with a group, I honestly don't see why anybody would download or use 
Chandler *today*.

That's why I'm arguing for a more specific focus: identifying the 
people for whom Chandler actually *does* provide an advantage that 
can be communicated and proven -- *today*.  Then, we will have a 
chance to get some of those people to use the product...  tomorrow.  :)


>But if I were to try and put into words what we've accomplished thus
>far, I would say that we have the basic pieces / infrastructure to
>provide a managed workspace to knowledge workers. For some set of
>people, what we have today is enough to be useful and usable. The
>challenge ahead of us, is to broaden that group of people.

On the contrary, our challenge is to *more narrowly specify* that 
existing group, so that we can communicate a message that resonates with them.

"Managed workspace" is a nice shorthand...  for something we don't 
actually have.  It's not "managed", for one thing, and it's not a 
very good workspace.  I can't draw in it, take pictures or record 
sounds, can I?

And so long as we don't have a well-defined user and use cases, we're 
going to go back and forth over this -- you saying it's good, and me 
saying it's not.

This is NOT because one of us is right, and one of us is wrong.

It's because we aren't specifying *who* it's good for, and who it's 
not good for.

It's not good for me, because it doesn't do anything for me I can't 
do more easily with paper.  (Or if it does, nobody has shown me HOW as yet.)

It's clearly good for somebody with a lot of calendar contents 
(especially recurrence), who has to handle time zones, and collaboration.

There are probably other people who could use it too -- but merely 
asserting that such people exist is not a profitable use of our time.

We must identify *who* those people are, because if we don't know, we 
can't communicate a message that makes them say, "that's 
me!  Chandler must be what I should use!"

"Managed workspace", "source of truth", and all this other stuff 
doesn't help that, because they are vague and abstract.

Who are the *specific* people who find Chandler useful?  Can we get a 
list of actual *names* of people who use it, and like it?  Can we get 
*them* involved in this discussion?

This will be immensely more useful than an abstract discussion about 
what the program *ought* to be, since we are essentially no longer in 
a position to have such discussions -- or if we have them, we will 
not be able to afford to *implement* anything afterward.  :)


>Now this is just a description of how Chandler can be useful to people.

What I'm having trouble understanding is how this relates to what 
Chandler *actually* does today (as opposed to having "basic pieces" 
for), or what we can implement in the next, say, 2-3 months.  (I'm 
taking it as given that that's what we'll be going to market with.)


>What kinds of users will actually come and use the product and for
>what reasons is a different question.

Indeed.  And that is the precisely the conversation we should be having.


>To me, it takes more time to have a task representation of:
>Brainstorm ideas for meeting...and then hunt through your email to
>see what ideas you sent out to others, then find their replies to see
>what ideas they added and then finally cut and paste it all back into
>the meeting event on your calendar, which you also have to find.
>
>In Chandler, all these things can be accessed from the 1 meeting item.

How is that, exactly?  Can you show it in a demo?  I also don't 
understand why you still won't be "hunting through your email", 
unless there was only one email to start with.