Lois Wang

#knowyourChina #bewareofyelling on igniteSeattle 

When it comes to gift, we all know people like different things. We spend time thinking about what to get for our friends. But when it comes to praise, we say “everybody loves compliments”. We don’t really think about what kind of complements our friends and colleagues might enjoy more. Shall we?

My mentor Todd has a nice theory about this. People have different values. We complement people by telling them they demonstrate a certain quality. So, if you add 2 and 2 together, it’s obvious certain complements will work better on a friend if you happen to praise him for a quality he values. In Todd’s words, “you’re paying him in his currency.”

Makes sense, right? But how do you figure out someone’s “currency”? Exclusive tip for club members only – look for what they say when then praise you. (Note, this trick has an expiration date. Once everyone has figured out the “currency” theory. This approach will no longer be effective.)

Why will that help me figure out someone’s “currency”? Naturally we evaluate people against our own value. As a result, we pay them in our own “currency” – I pay attention to fashion, so I compliment Stephen on his clothing choices. Emily places a lot of value on information being documented, so she thanked me for sending out notes about the meeting we just had. We’re paying each other with our own currency. That’s the tell-tale of what we crave.

So once you figured out the other side’s currency, how do you use it? I was in a meeting with the SQL team the other day. They are our partner team. I’m trying to get them approve a reliability improvement request from us. They, tight of resource, is trying to get my team to implement a work-around to absorb the reliability issue. It’s pretty obvious the right solution for the company is to have SQL fix the reliability issue, but still, I’m dancing around with my words trying to not sound like “I don’t want to do thrown-away work. Your team should suck it up because you frickin’ own this.” While I was struggling with my wording, a well-seasoned SharePoint PM said it beautifully to SQL, “Look, you guys are the platform team. We rely on the platform team to provide reliable features for the application layer. We have to extract ourselves away from the platform, to some extent, otherwise the application layer will not be focusing on the right thing.”

“Platform” – that’s the word that sealed the deal. The all-mighty your highness of importance. That’s their currency. We pay them. They deliver.  

Jason Cohen wrote an interesting post on how to request advice from internet celebrity. The gist is short, dove-tailed to the person you’re talking to, and having a clear call for action.     

This applies to day-to-day work as well. But it’s a deity balance. Some people are not comfortable of being direct, others, like me, are too bullish.

This is my on-going quest to reach that balance.  

Step 1: asking questions instead of making statements

That was first year as a PM. This is my feature. My way or high way. I was passionate and stubborn. The feedback I got was “she doesn’t listen well”. It’s true - when I was the only one talking in a discussion, there’s nothing left to hear. A small tactic worked wonder here, ask questions (sure, not rhetorical questions). It forced me to stop talking and let others to express their opinions. 

Step 2: asking questions one at a time

When I asked 5 questions in a row, I thought I was showing a train of thought going deeper in my precision questioning, in fact, I just lost my audience. The feedback I got was “she’s impatient.” It’s true - people can tell I was expressing my critical thinking and there’s some logic there, they just can’t grasp it. Why? Because I don’t give them time to think. Asking questions is good, but one at a time.

Step 3: explain why I’m asking this question

This is what I’m currently working on right now. This is what usually happens, I have my head in threshes for several days investigating a product decision, and things don’t add up. So, I pop my head in someone’s office asking a very specific question which I believe is critical to my investigation. First, it’s out-of-nowhere, what’s worse is, some times it’s a good question and that person feels they ought to have a good answer but they don’t. The human instinct jumps in, they started defending themselves why they don’t have the answer, which is not helpful for the conversation at all. I bet you if I don’t fix this habit, I’m going to get the feedback “she’s sharp, but she’s hard to work with.” The advice I got is to explain why I’m asking the question - how it will affect my work on what day. I will report back if the tactic works.

And I’m sure there will be step 4 and onward. Hey, it’s fun!

“Selling to the consumer is about selling positive emotions. Selling to the enterprise is about suppressing negative emotions.”

@RomanStanek wrote an awesome article on Tech Crunch about selling enterprise software. It is so true that enterprise IT has to be the one that’s skeptical. They need to worry what happens if the software failed because their jobs are on the line. No matter how you spin the upside, as long as you don’t have a good answer to “what if it fails”, no deal. 

But will it change? My friend @Osakasteve has a prediction - 10 years from today, the enterprise IT position will be manned by a generation that grew up with iPhones and other consumer electronics. They won’t understand, nor will they follow, the Enterprise IT doctrine. The consumerization of IT is happening. People who consumed hardware and software products on their own time, wanted the same positive, powerful experiences on the job. 

In the midst of transitioning an enterprise product to a consumer product, I always wonder maybe we should just re-brand and build another product. Consumers value entertainment, enterprises value reliability. Consumers value individuality, enterprises value consistency. On the face value, it’s bifurcated. But every time I look closer, it’s not like they totally disregard the other’s value, they want it too, they just prioritize it slightly lower. 

It boils down to we need to build both sets of features but pick smart defaults based on user target. One example would be if it’s an enterprise product, file publishing will be defaulted to read-only because enterprises are paranoid of privacy. But in the consumer world, it’s defaulted to read/write. Whoever wants to make it read-only can go do an extra step to make it so, because in the 80/20 test, they are the minority. 

My friend M recently quit his job where he was a star player and joined another company. One exact month later, he came back. He was grateful that he got his original position back. 

I swept this whole episode under the rug called “you didn’t give the new company enough time”.

Now I’m one month in my new gig. I was frustrated. I pitched some good ideas and folks showed quite a bit of doubt. The team have very different ways of driving consensus and it’s not working, so I tried to persuade them to add structure on the ambiguous problems. Guess what, they don’t even agree that we need a new way.

I start to question myself whether it was a good move - from a rock star on my previous team to nobody on the new team. Am I going to pull an M?

But it suddenly dawn on me that I was doing it wrong - I was kidding myself that I can just hit the ground running in the new team. I’m comparing my 1st month experience on a new product to my last year’s experience working on a project I lived and breathed for 5 years. There, folks listened to me because I’ve built up enough instinct in 5 years to make right judgement  Here on the new product, my limited exposure to the product makes me think I’m pitching right ideas. They might not be good ideas.

Knowing that I’m comparing things on different stages calmed me down. It doesn’t mean I need to shut up. It means I need to be more open minded to be wrong. That is the right expectation for the next few months. 

Todd always asks whether I want my way or my time. So far it has always been rhetorical – of course I want it my way, so be patient and work it through, because it will take time. 

It is true when people going through life transitions, we reflect a lot and gain profound life meanings. Joining a new team, I almost forgot how much it takes to build up a reputation. It was non-trivial. So why am I kidding myself that I can do it with a snap of fingers? I’m confident I can do it better/faster than before, but it’s not going to be overnight. 

We all said we like challenges because it gets us out of our comfort zones so it helps us to realize our true potentials. Right, now the challenge is here, get off the high horse. I’ve stepped out of the comfort zone already, so don’t look back, start doing, start building, start making friends. Forget about entitlement. Those are just baggage. If folks found my ideas naïve, that’s probably because they are. Doesn’t mean I’m not good at my job any more, it’s just because I don’t have all the history of this product, I don’t know all the lessons they have learned. So, don’t be stubborn, don’t feel beaten down, be open-minded and adjust. Even if I’m right with my idea, then they don’t know all the lessons I’ve learned in other projects so I arrived on this point. It takes time and effort – my time and my effort.

So today’s reflection: step out of your comfort zone to realize your true potential. Now do what you said you’ll do.  

Lots of western companies are very successful in China – P&G, Apple, KFC, to name a few. The thing they share in common is that they sell goods, tangible product that you can hold in your hand, rather than just a service. Software falls into the service category. Interestingly, most western software companies haven’t made much money in China yet. Is that simply because software doesn’t sell in China? Not really. Local player Tencent reaped in $500MM in a quarter this year, so you might ask why aren’t Amazon, Microsoft, Google or Facebook making money in China yet. 

For one, some of them are blocked in China. For those are in business, is profit the only measurement for success? I don’t think so. China is a different market: 1/6 of the world’s population with its own culture and language, rampant piracy issues and one-of-a-kind business-government relationship. It’s a whole new game a western company hasn’t played before. It deserves everyone to take a step back and redefine what success looks like in China. 

Nokia started investing in China as early as the 90s for telecom infrastructure. They helped China to build the network coverage all over the country, including the rural areas. You can imagine the rural area investment didn’t yield any return in the early years because people there couldn’t afford mobile phones yet, but it will pay off in the long run now that Nokia built a solid partnership with China Telecom, the biggest operator in China. Success, in this case, is measured in long-term partnership rather than near-term profit.   

Another great example is Google (before it pulled out from China). Chinese netizens favored local search Baidu.com over Google because one well-known feature from Baidu – they are superb in finding and letting you download pirate version of pop music. Rather than fighting piracy head-on like most software companies would do, Google “embraced” it. Not in the sense that it gave up its principle and offered piracy search results, it developed a feature that allowed live streaming of pop music while striking a deal with the label companies in China.

And guess what, this caught on in the western world too – Spotify, Last.FM, now even Xbox on Windows8 offers free music streaming. But China had it first. It won’t be the case if Google measured success in their ability to prevent piracy.

If we want to be successful in China, we need to first know what success means in China. Step one, get unblocked. 

Most China studies done by western companies focus on collecting data and then pattern-matching to what we have seen in developed countries. I love data, but I don’t agree with the assumption that China is the western world but 20 years behind. We’re different. Here are three reasons. 

• China has 5000 years of history.

5000 years of history bred a rich and unique culture. The history and culture impact how people think. We don’t think the same as westerners think. For example, Chinese people are crazy about luxury brands, but not for individual expression or the premium service that comes with the actual product. A research done by Fudan University in China showed that this behavior is rooted in the Confucius teaching that “thou shall respect your family and ancestors.”

When a Chinese person carrying a Louis Vuitton walking in China, he/she is upholding the family name. The bag is telling everyone else, “My family is doing great. We can afford this!”

If you understand this consumer psychology, you can market a luxury brand in China accordingly. You will put the brand logo front and center on the product. You probably don’t need to invest too much in services after sale because that’s not why Chinese people are paying a premium for. 

• Changes in China are happening with unprecedented speed.

Look at this set of pictures of Shanghai. The spot in Shanghai in 1990 was a green pasture, nothing on it. 2010, it’s a concrete forest.

Now imagine yourself witnessing the change from a kid, to a teen, to an adult, what do you feel? That’s exactly what my generation in China went through. Now tell me it doesn’t have an impact on my view of the world.

Change is the norm for us. It’s always 90 miles an hour for us on the road of economic growth. The interesting effect it has on Chinese people is how we expect to see results immediately. If buildings can be done in a year, so should the return of my investment. 

• China has unique political policies

I’m not here to talk about political scoops that you don’t know. I’ll point out some consumer behaviors that’re a result of political policies. For example, Chinese people place a huge value on education in China. The amount of money spent on education is dis-proportionally high of the dispensable income. iPad is selling like a hot cake in China as an educational device for kids. We go out of our way to give the kids the best. Why? There’s only one kid thanks to the one-child policy. So you got the parents and two sets of grand-parents focusing on one single kid, the apple of their eyes. Of course they are going to pour money all over him/her.

To recap, Chinese users are different. The culture impact, the rapid economic development and the political climate all contribute to the different way we think. Sure, it’s converging to the western world. You can choose to sit it out till it becomes America or you can invest now and grow with it. I will definitely choose the latter, which will help build a long-term strategic relationship with 1.3 billion people. And guess what, no matter when the convergence happens, it will not be exactly the same as the western world anyways. 

China will always have its accent. 

StarServices wants to run on Asgard but it has other higher priority in this release. We’re a component on StarServices and we need to take on the Asgard dependency. StarServices wasn’t too thrilled that means they will need to start managing the integration with Asgard from the operational aspect, such as monitoring and incident management. There’s no doubt we’re going to add a lot more work on them. It’s also a fact that the Asgard platform is yet to be validated to support large scale services such as StarServices Online. 

But we need to take on the dependency. We can’t bare the operational cost of running our own SQL farm. We went to the StarServices data center team and said, look, you want to move core StarServices to Asgard as well, but you’re not confident about the platform yet. So, why don’t you let us be the Ginny-pig to validate the platform this release. We will flesh out issues and push feature requests to the Asgard team. Moreover, we’ll make sure the design we come up with will work for both our service and core StarServices as well – because we don’t want our data center team to manage two different integration models with Asgard. 

That’s how I convinced the data center team to support us taking on Asgard  That also rallied my engineering team – it fired them up even more because I just expanded their scope. The project is not just about our product any more, it’s also the prep work to put StarServices onto Asgard  There’re millions of users on StarServices. We are going to make a huge impact (saving) for the company. 

So we designed our architecture diagram with this design principle – the Asgard integration needs to work both for our databases and StarServices core databases. It imposed a lot of constraints – we could have more flexibility if we optimized for our own product. But we know it won’t be the right thing to do for the long run – if we optimize for the our product, then once StarServices DBs move to Asgard as well, there will be two different integration models between StarServices data center and Asgard  That will result in lots of confusion for the operation team who runs and maintains the services.   

To have a unified integration model was a good principle – it helped the team to focus on the long term goal and make the right decisions. Every time when we get torn between wanting to get away with less work and doing the right thing, we always pick the right thing. Also, it won so much respect and support for us from our partner teams, including Asgard and StarServices data center team. We couldn’t have pulled off the project without their support. 

Pick a good principle and stick with it.   

I remember seeing a comic strip about each big company in America has its own unique dysfunctional cross-division relationship. The Microsoft one is that each division points a gun at each other. The funny thing is when I was a junior PM, I felt there was so much truth in it. Every time I ran into issues in a cross-division collaboration, I blame the guns. “They don’t care about us”, I complained. The fact is by saying that, I condemned them. Now whatever they do I will interpret is as “they don’t care”, and I will condemn them some more until we can’t co-operate any more. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I have a different perspective now after 5 years in Office. the first thing I do when I run into a snafu is to always remind myself the partner team are smart people too. If they don’t see what I see as important, it’s not because they’re idiots, it’s probably because I wasn’t communicating effectively. I need to explain more back-ground to them to help them understand my requirement. Or maybe they have something that’s of higher priority. If they haven’t told me, it’s because I wasn’t inviting. If they said something and I felt that didn’t sound important at all, that means I don’t understand what they’re saying yet. Keep inquiring information until we understand each other. 

Second, once we understand each other and still don’t have an agreement, it’s usually mis-alignment of priorities. We all want to do a good job, but sometimes we don’t see the big picture. We dig our heels because our priority is more important. It’s tied to our product, our team, or even more selfishly, our performance review. The thing is, none of these speak to the partner team. They are worried about their product, their team, and their reviews. At this point, we need to figure out what’s the collective good. Usually I go for the customer perspective and what’s best for the company as a whole. And if it means the best thing for Microsoft is for me to not get this feature till next release cycle, so be it. It doesn’t mean I will just give up, it means I’ll stop pushing at this partner but go figure out alternatives. If there’s no alternatives, let’s change the discussion, ask my partner how we can help them to deliver the feature faster. 

Third, make it fun. I always want to make our partner status meeting fun. I’ve done all sorts of things, donuts, cupcakes, singing telegrams when one partner meeting happened on the Valentine’s Day. When I make my partner teams laugh, I get to enjoy it too. Most importantly, good things happen when you make people feel special. It always pay back.     

It really is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We turn the world into what we believe it is. If that’s case, I choose to believe it’s a beautiful place. 

I know Kung-fu

I recently read Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational. It’s pretty much saying if you understand what people are thinking, you can sell them anything.

Today, I’m gonna be your Dan Ariely for the Chinese consumers. I will take you on a journey to find out what Chinese people are thinking. Then, we gonna create the killer product they gonna beg you to take their money.

Why am I qualified to be your Dan Ariely? I grew up in Shanghai and came here 5 years ago. In the last 5 years, I have been repeating the answers to the same questions over and over again: Yes, it’s tragic I don’t play ping-pong; I don’t like dog meat; and I can’t solve that Sudoku for you, ask that Japanese girl. Look, I’m Chinese. How much more qualified can you ask for?  

Fact number 1: the Chinese are impressed by stealing ideas rather than embarrassed by it.

I guess I can’t talk about China without talking about bootlegs.

Exhibit 1: bootleg Android kicking Apple’s butt. Don’t you love the innovative pirates?

And then you have this:

I guess that means all Chinese people are artistic pirates, like this…

OK, so we’re going to sell them Jack Sparrow wigs. 

In one of Rands’ post, he talked about how he always warms up 1:1 conversations with his reports with small chats about weekends, hobbies, and other fluff. I was like, but those are super obvious. If I’m the recipient, I know it’s the cliche that’s going on. I can see through it!

Rands went on saying, yes, it’s usually fluff. But trust me, if you don’t do it and go directly to the intense work topics, it will be worse.

Oh, OK… I wonder how many other things I avoid doing just because I think they are cliches, but they could actually be best practices. So my pursuit of “fresh and unique” prevents me from following best practices?

Fix it.

Before you dismiss this post, consider I might have a point. 

We have all been there - dismissing someone’s opinion because 30 seconds in, we already decided that’s stupid. Look, how many of us had snarly comments on the $1B deal of FB buying Instagram. $1B for a few image filters, seriously? Right? 

However, in the recent Tech Crunch interview of Zuckerberg. He said about how he collaborated with Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, when it was still an app on the Facebook platform. Instagram was interesting because it had a lot of vision around open graph. It suddenly clicked in my head - I remember one of the FB talks I went to and how much they believed in the open graph concept. So, it could be that Kevin gave Zuck a lot of ideas on how to put together the open graph. Then the $1B price tag could totally be reasonable. 

That’s merely my speculation. My point is - when we thought about an idea being ludicrous, we are only seeing one explanation of why it happened. We thought we’re smarty-pants. The fact is, we are not smart enough to even come up with another explanation! So, keep an open mind. Seek for an explanation before we dismiss that seemingly stupid idea.  

As a Chinese, I was raised knowing “guanxi” is very important. Turns out, it’s universal. 

I know the difference in running a good and a bad cross-division collaboration - whether you build a personal relationship with the folks on the other side of the table. If you invested the time to make friends, it always pay off, especially when unexpected challenges happen (they always happen), both of you feel there’s a safety net of the personal relation there, you can go through this by working together.

I wish I could say this is not cliche. It is. I was just not following it until recently. I can’t tell you how much easier it has made my life. 

So how does one go build a relationship with their cross-division counter-parts?

Benjamin Frankly in his autobiography mentioned that he had a difficult colleague in Pennsylvania Assembly. The way he won him over was by asking if he might borrow a certain scarce book from the Assemblyman’s private collection. The Assemblyman obliged. Franklin thanked him and from then on, they became best friends. He literally created an opportunity to make it personal encounter with the other guy.

There’re tons of opportunities lying around we can seize to build a good relationship: to schedule the meeting in their office instead of mine, to get a fruit basket if they are on sick leave, to bring cookies to partner meetings (or hiring a funny singing telegram when my partner meeting happens to land on the Valentines day). All in all, these are simple gestures to indicate I respect my partner team and I care about them. Of course I do - I am in this project together with them!

I know it will always come back. 

“I have stolen all of these moves from all these great players. I just try to do them proud, the guys who came before, because I learned so much from them. It’s all in the name of the game. It’s a lot bigger than me.” 

- Kobe Bryant

Thank you Austin Kleon for pointing this out in the Steal Like an Artist book. Now I totally gonna go and pull a Todd to blue-ocean the marketplace idea as if that’s mine. I’m gonna talk about it like I mean it. It’s all in the name of the game. It’s a lot bigger than me. 

While we were walking out of the Mexican restaurant outside of West Hollywood, Dan nudged me and said, “that guy in the corner looks like Wash.”

Why yes! He did look like the pilot in Firefly. Now was the time my ego and my id started arguing. One wanted to go take a picture with Wash, the other said don’t interrupt his lunch, “you don’t even know the actor’s name!”

Well, I have the Ryan Test. Let me picture what Ryan would do.

Ryan is the best people person I’ve ever met. Everybody likes him. The part I envy most is how comfortable he strikes a conversation with perfect strangers, while I’m usually a “late-boomer” in making friends because I’m too self-conscious. I want to be a happy person like Ryan - always care-free and sunshiny, rather than always sulking on whether I’m going to make a fool of myself. 

So, back to Wash and the Ryan Test, would Ryan go take a picture with him? Yes. He would walk over with a huge grin on his face, extending his right hand way out, “how’s going man? Wash, right? Loved your show!” It was so vivid in my head. And I did it. (Sure, not as smooth as Ryan but what the heck, I did it.)

That indeed was Alan Tudyk. He was very nice and we took a picture with him. Now all my friends are jealous because the picture is on Facebook. I’m happy.

I like my Ryan Test. It’s a tool I can use to push myself do a particular thing that I’m not comfortable with - to start a conversation. One day, it will be natural with me. 

We’ve all been there – set off a plan to do more than we can. There’s nothing wrong with it unless it’s dis-proportionally ambitious. Some of us can pull a hero to squeeze everything in. Some of us scramble and be miserable. But the cool kids in town has started a new trend – to cut corners.

“Cut corners” not in an irresponsibly half-assing way, but in the live-to-fight-another-day kind of agile development way. For example, a web startup launches its service as a paid monthly subscription, without the billing code implemented. How can they? Because it’s a monthly charge and they have a month after release to implement billing.

This is not an argument about progressively choose what feature to implement – we should definitely do that, I don’t think I can repeat this concept better than Mr. Jobs’focus is about saying no talk. This is an example that points out, even for work items that’s definitely on your critical path, like billing to a paid service, we can still step back and re-think when is it absolutely need to be done? Take another look of the deadline – it’s not necessarily the launch date. If you are under time crunch, you can move out work items that can be done later and focus on the absolutely must for now.

…and live to fight another day.

A year after the tech giant announced that they gonna create a new browser that’s orders of magnitudes faster, there was the new browser. It was orders of magnitudes faster. And along side of it were the competitors’ answers to the challenge – equally fast browsers. “Bring the industry forward – that is exactly what we wanted.” said the tech giant.

Here’s the myriad of responses you got from people reading the story above:

The Mind-Blown Mike, a college kid who’s a tech enthusiastic:“Wow! This is what they wanted! They are doing the great and good! So awesome!”

The See-It-Through Sidney, a smart-ass software product managers, 5 years industry experience: “BS! It’s a bit naïve to believe this is what they ‘wanted’, isn’t it? Sure, they are smart visionaries, they knew from the first day it will bring the industry forward because they simply CANNOT stop their competitors to improve. It’s fair to say that’s what they ‘expected’, surely not what they ‘wanted’. What a spin.”

The I-Can-See-From-Their-Level Issac, an industry veteran, during a mentoring session with his young grass-hoppers: “This is indeed how the tech giant sees it. For people at that level, we see things differently. The goal is no longer as short-sighted as to reap in profit, but to change the world.”

…and this goes on and on, looping back and forth until we reach the tech giant.

Our point of view loops around with the experience and knowledge we gather. Hopefully it spirals upwards. Like hiking a mountain, we switch our view of the top from left to right constantly. So my observation leads me to this: 

• If I find my thoughts coincide with some industry thought leader, it doesn’t necessarily mean I am as visionary. I could be folds below, just happen to be on the same side.
• If I didn’t find myself disagree with my previous point of view, I’m stuck.
• If I suck at hiking, I shall hit the gym.