Scrum: Achieving more with less

These days we found ourselves facing more and more complex and uncertain projects. How we deliver the results within tight budgets and short timeframe is always a challenge. I keep hearing the term - Scrum over and over again, but did not pay much attention to it until I  witnessed how it makes “impossible things” happen.

The first time when I heard about Scrum was from my previous VP of Marketing, David Armstrong at Ricoh, who mentioned the Pig and Chicken cartoon at a team building event. According to Jeff Sutherland, the “pigs” are the ones who are totally committed to the project and are responsible for its outcome. The “chickens” are the people who are informed of its progress: the stakeholders.

Source: agilesafari.com

It was interesting but I did not realize the value of Scrum at that time. Four years later, the Scrum methodology really impressed me when I saw the team at Sigma Software complete a major project in 6 months with less than 8 people. They were able to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of the predictive analytic model for a major local telecom operator. The model was marked as the best performing model by the operator during the PoC stage.

I was further thrilled at the International Project Management Day 2016 when Joe Justice had a keynote describing how Wikispeed involves a team of volunteers from across the globe to utilize the Scrum methodology, achieving extraordinary results in designing a high efficiency and high performance automobile.

Image: Joe Justice built a 100mpg car using Scrum methodology

Gone are the times of a big team, tedious and long meetings, delays, and over budget projects.

Image: Interesting facts - WhatsApp vs. Vodafone Group

Although Scrum has been widely used in software development, its philosophy of delivering a complete feature at a time is valuable to business people and entrepreneurs. For example, if you open a bakery, it’s more desirable to sell a cupcake as a start than a big cake without filling and icing. A cupcake is a viable product that can grow into a cake or a wedding cake. When I talked to high-tech startup entrepreneurs, some tend to focus on their fancy tech product - a big cake without filling and icing. They emphasize more on product viability and pay less attention to business viability. Bear in mind that your MVP has to demonstrate the real business value while solving a problem.  

Source: The cake model of product planning

You can find all kinds of training programs about Scrum. The Scrum Methodology website is a good reference site with numerous introduction videos and reference cards. If you want to understand Scrum systematically, Jeff Sutherland wrote a good book titled “Scrum: The art of doing twice the work in half the time.”

Why WeChat is so popular in China

It’s interesting to download the preferred communication tools when dealing with global clients such as Viber for Israel or WeChat for China. Almost every client from China prefers to use WeChat as the main communication tool.

WeChat had 762 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs) as of Q1 2016. It added nearly 200 million MAUs in the past year.

Infographic: Number of WeChat MAUs 2011 - 2016, source: Statista 2016

While the general perception of WeChat is an instant messaging (IM) service similar to WhatsApp, Tencent, the company that developed WeChat, has gone one step further to incorporate its own social media platform, similar to Facebook, in the app.

Why WeChat is so popular in China?

Simplicity

WeChat’s active users rely on it heavily for their daily life from information search, sharing, e-commerce, social media, personal finance to book a taxi, or reserve a table at a restaurant. It is so easy to use that my 73-year-old dad uses it on a daily basis.

Simplicity - Registration

The majority of people have a phone and a phone number.  It’s so convenient to register with WeChat. A phone number equals to your WeChat ID. For those people who do not want to disclose their phone number, they can customize their WeChat ID (-a combination of texts, numbers, and symbols.)

Simplicity - Communication

WeChat was one of the early predecessors that you don’t need to type, but simply click the “hold to talk” button and hold while you chat with your friends (voice chat). (see picture below)

Picture: WeChat hold to Talk function

WeChat has a large emoji bank. Besides the regular emoji bank that you can find on Facebook, it also has some very creative and animated images shown in the following picture. This makes the chat more fun.

Picture: WeChat Emoji Bank sample

WeChat Red Packet Marketing

WeChat also created an alternative platform to approach potential customers and maintain customer relationships. Some innovative ways of marketing are worth to share:

Chinese red packet is a monetary gift given during the festivals or special occasions such as weddings and graduation ceremonies. WeChat developed a function called WeChat Red Packet - the digital version of the Chinese red packet.

The WeChat red packet has been used at least in the following 3 ways by marketers and business owners:

1. Attract potential customers to sign up as a user or increase # of followers.

2. Encourage followers, group members to participate in a given marketing campaign.

3. An alternative way of advertising.

One good example of WeChat advertising is CCTV`s New Year’s gala WeChat red packet campaign. The gala is the largest live entertainment event on Chinese New Year’s Eve with an estimated audience of 700 million+ on average. According to People.cn, 5 companies sponsored the gala in 2015, 20 million yuan each ($4 million Canadian dollars). Each WeChat red packet contained 2 yuan, which means 10 million people received the red packet depending on how fast they follow the company’s WeChat. This campaign not only increased the television ratings of the gala, but also grew the # of new followers for those participating companies.

WeChat red packet is a revenue generation channel for content marketers as well. If people like your article, picture, and/or video, they can “打赏” or send you a red packet.

Picture: WeChat Red Packet sample

Closed-loop Ecosystem

WeChat knows how to influence customer’s behaviours and has created a closed-loop ecosystem that includes the whole business value chain from product search, payment, delivery status checking, and product reviews.

For businesses, once you link your bank account with WeChat Pay and create your WeChat account using a QR code, you can start promoting your products and selling them. No hassles to integrate with each bank’s gateway, maintenance and repairs, and storage space.

From a user standpoint, once you link your bank account with WeChat Pay and scan a brand’s QR code, you can login, search products, place an order, check delivery status, chat with other users and/or share your experience with the community.

WeChat utilizes the mobile camera and QR code to close the gap between online and offline campaigns. For example, if customers are checking a product in a store, they can scan the QR code and receive all the product information and promotion details and use WeChat Pay to complete the purchase on their mobile phone. Vice versa.

Tencent has opened WeChat's API to external application developers. People can use WeChat to book an appointment with a doctor, scan the QR code and buy the recommended medicines at a drug store.

WeChat Finance

WeChat allows its users to provide short-term lending to those in need through its lending platform called 微信好用钱. For example, if Jack has used up his salary in June and is short of $1,000 for the month, he can apply for a loan on WeChat and return it in a month at $1,060. The interest is $2 per day.

The processing fee is 2 yuan per loan ($0.4 Canadian dollars). The whole loan evaluation process is manual, no asset required. The process is streamlined and in some cases, the loan can be released same day. The maximum daily loan is up to $50,000 ($10,000 Canadian dollars.)

WeChat has also developed a personal finance platform called 微信理财通. It allows a minimum investment amount of 100 yuan, ($20) T+1.

You can view the 7-day annualized rate of return by clicking “Wealth” tab on WeChat. (see picture below)

Picture: Tencent 7-day annualized rate of return

WeChat has done a phenomenal job that the New York Times featured a video to introduce it.

Blockchain: Understanding the fundamental technology that will change our lives

When I attended the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Shanghai, I met several successful entrepreneurs who took advantage of disruptive technologies that have turned out to astounding business value. This made me curious about the fundamental technology that I heard many times - Blockchain. Imagine you can eliminate the middlemen without worrying about the trustworthiness of the other party in a business transaction. In my opinion, any new technology that can reduce costs and maximize business efficiency will stay.

The Byzantine Generals Problem

Blockchain was created by dealing with a type of problem called the Byzantine Generals Problem.

Byzantine Empire had a large territory. To protect its boundaries, several divisions of the Byzantine army had to camp outside an enemy city, each division commanded by its own general. The generals could communicate with one another only by messengers. After observing the enemy, they must decide upon a common plan of action. However, some of the generals might become traitors, trying to prevent the loyal generals from reaching an agreement. Therefore, the general must have an algorithm to guarantee that all loyal generals decide upon the same plan of action, and so a small number of traitors could not cause the loyal generals to adopt a bad plan.

Blockchain was created to deal with this type of problem: to build a reliable system able to cope with the failure of one or more of its components.

What is Blockchain

Blockchain can be viewed as an encrypted digital ledger that keeps a record of all transactions that take place across a peer-to-peer network. All information transferred via blockchain is encrypted, and every occurrence is recorded. This record cannot be altered. Moreover, all Blockchain use is decentralized, meaning there’s no need for any central certifying authority.

Source: Internet of Things World News #IoTSec16

The Main Characteristic of Blockchain - Decentralization

There are many ocean killers, i.e. great white sharks and killer whales. How do the weak sardines survive in the ocean?

Sardines have formed a group effect in the natural evolution. When facing a shark, they will gather together to form a group. The rule is simple: each sardine maintains the same distance and direction of the ones around it. When the predators attack them, the changes of the group will make the shark lose a single target and does not know who to capture. This group is indeed a decentralized system, which allows sardines to survive and constantly evolve in cruel nature.

One of the major characteristics of Blockchain is decentralization. In a system with many distributed nodes,  each node has a high degree of autonomy. Nodes can be freely connected to create a new connection unit at any time. Any one node can become the centre of a stage, but does not possess central control functions.

What does Blockchain Mean for the Internet of Things (IoT)

Christopher O’Connor, GM at IBM Internet of Things wrote a great article about this topic.

According to Chris, Blockchain is beginning to play a major part in the IoT by enhancing security, enabling inclusion of low-value devices to be increasingly viable and making managing a device easier for decades to come.

Source: Internet of Things World News #IoTSec16

Blockchain Use Case - IoT Security

IBM and Samsung formally unveiled ADEPT at CES 2015 in Las Vegas. The ADEPT concept, or Autonomous Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Telemetry, taps blockchains to provide the backbone of the system, utilizing a mix of proof-of-work and proof-of-stake to secure transactions.

IBM and Samsung envision networks of devices that are capable of autonomously maintaining themselves. For example, “using ADEPT, a Samsung W9000 washing machine can become a semi-autonomous device capable of managing its own consumables supply, performing self-service and maintenance, and even negotiating with other peer devices both in the home and outside to optimize its environment.”

Source: Internet of Things World News #IoTSec16

Blockchain Will Change Our Lives

We have seen that the Blockchain has been disrupting the financial industry such as Bitcoin. There is a great video about the real value of Bitcoin and crypto currency technology. Although there are some challenges of a decentralized blockchain, billions of connected smart things will need a ledger of everything.

Here are some examples of companies involved in the Blockchain and IoT businesses:

Slock is a Blockchain + IoT solutions company in Germany. Slock has worked with clients to build a fully decentralized, 100% free, and open source DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) framework - the future infrastructure of the service economy.

Visa has worked with Docusign to use Blockchain technology for car lease, rental and more. Each car is registered on the blockchain using a unique digital identity assigned to them. The cars digital identity is connected to Visa payment channel and to DocuSign platform. Whenever a customer wants to rent a car, he/she can enable the services by authenticating his preferences using his/her DocuSign electronic signature.

Source: "Blockchain: Reshape the economy and the world "

Special thanks to Mr. Xu, Mr. Liu, Mr. Duan, and Mr. Guo who generously shared their insights on this topic. I have no relationship with any of them, and no stake in sales of their book, or in promotion of companies mentioned in this article.

Marketing & technology marriage - My personal experience & thoughts

I have constantly been asked what’s the impact of disruptive technologies on marketers. This has been and will be an ongoing topic. Here are some of my experience and thoughts:

Source: Redpoint.net

Market research

I started my marketing career as a market research analyst. At that time, my roles included creating and designing survey questionnaires, interviewing people in-person or on the telephone to collect survey data, running various focus group meetings, and spending hours to analyze the results using SPSS. My boss and other decision makers usually had to wait for weeks/months for the expensive research reports, depending on the size of the survey. The results, unfortunately, might be biased because people would give false information as impacted by factors such as social proof while answering survey questions.

Social listening

The wide use of social media is a good supplement for surveys and allows decision makers to receive real-time unfiltered information directly on how customers are thinking towards the products, customer services, as well as those from the competitors.

Search trends

Cassandra Clare said that “You will know what kind of man he is not by the things he says, but by the things he does.”

In Marketing, I see more and more companies rely more on search data to understand what people really think in order to strategize better and realign marketing tactics. Google Trends is one of the tools to help marketers discover the hottest topics in a given region and time period.

Virtual Reality

Compared to surveys and panels, virtual reality gives marketers more valuable and accurate insights into customers’ thoughts about products like colour schemes and packaging.

Besides market research, virtual reality will be widely used in other aspects of marketing such as content marketing.

For example, Unicef ran a virtual reality fundraising campaign to allow people to be put in the shoes of a 12-year-old girl and experience the real situation in a refugee crisis, rather than reading a story or seeing pictures. As a result, 1 in 6 people donated, twice the normal rate.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-Based marketing has been a proven effective strategy. It is the application of the Pareto principle in Marketing -  20% of customers generate 80% of businesses. Instead of targeting a mass market, account-based marketing identifies the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by using marketing technology and data analytics tools. Then we engage with customers via their desired channels, whether it’s email, social media, events or webinars, etc. Once the best practice is in place, we learn from the results and start the process again to identify other potential customers/partners.

Source: MarketingProfs.com

To sum up, the impact of technology on marketing has been and will be immense. However, the major principles of marketing are timeless. Each company faces unique challenges and opportunities and therefore has its own way to make the marriage of marketing and technology successful.