Rethink Mobile: Mobile Strategy for Product Designers

R E T H I N K M O B I L E
M O B I L E F I R S T S T R AT E G Y F O R P R O D U C T D E S I G N E R S
J O N A T H A N S TA R K
Welcome! Thanks for coming. I'm Jonathan Stark, and this is talk is entitled "Rethink Mobile:
Mobile First Strategy for Product Designers".

Jonathan Stark

Mobile Strategy Consultant

http://jonathanstark.com
W H AT Y O U ' L L L E A R N T O D AY
• Significance of mobile
• How disruption works
• How to do mobile right
• Why so many companies do
mobile wrong
• How to get buy-in
• How to think beyond the app
• How to think beyond the phone
• The 3 facets of mobile first
solutions
BTW - These slides will be available after the talk.
60 Second Speaker Bio

I'm sure a bunch of you have never heard of me before, so here's the 60 second bio:

I'm a mobile software consultant based in lovely Providence, RI.
I make my living helping executives reinvent their business for mobile. Past clients include big
companies like CVS, Staples, and Intel, but also startup business like Brightcove, Nuance, and
StickyAlbums.
I teach mobile training classes both online and in person, I speak at public and private events
all over the world, I co-host a podcast about how tech is changing the way we interact with the
world, and I've written three books on mobile and web; one of which was a best selling
technology title and has been translated into seven languages.

In 2011, while doing mobile payments research for a fast casual restaurant brand, I posted a
picture of my Starbucks card online and invited the Internet to have a coﬀee on me. One
morning I woke up and it was on the front page of CNN.com. Five days later, almost $20k had
gone through the card and I was getting interviewed live on MSNBC and other news show.
K, so that's enough about me. Let's talk about you!

How many people are an army of one?

How many people are at an agency?

How many people are at a big co?

How many designers?

How many developers?

How many team leads?

How many project managers?

How many product managers?

How many people think mobile is vital to your business (or your client's business?
Great, thanks for your input. Super helpful. It seems like you all get that mobile is a big deal.
But I wonder if we're all on the same page about just how big...

B I G G E S T T E C H E V E R
M O B I L E I S
Mobile Is The Most Adopted Technology Ever

Set your Wayback machines for 2005. Back in 2005, the iPhone was still 2 years away,
Blackberry and Nokia ruled mobile, and Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google. At that time, he said:
– E R I C S C H M I D T, C E O G O O G L E
“Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three
times more of them, growing at twice the speed, and they
increasingly have internet access. Mobile is going to be
the next big internet phenomenon.”
"Mobile phones are cheaper than PCs, there are three times more of them, growing at twice the
speed, and they increasingly have internet access. Mobile is going to be the next big internet
phenomenon."

-- Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google in 2005

Schmidt was right, but I think he undersold the signiﬁcance of mobile but a long shot. Mobile is
not just "the next big internet phenomenon; it's the biggest thing to happen to the human race
since the printing press. In fact, I contend that it's bigger than the printing press. In my opinion,
mobile - which in this context I mean to be the combination of ubiquitous connectivity, cloud
computing, and aﬀordable smartphones - is as transformative on cultural as was the alphabet.
More on that in a minute...
iPhone announced in early 2007.

iPhone went on sale on June 29, 2007

The App Store opened on July 10, 2008
Here's a visual representation of the shift that took place from 2005 to 2013. There are now
more active mobile phone connections on the planet than there are human beings alive,
counting literally everyone from babies to great grandparents. This makes mobile the most
wide reaching technology of all time, and by a wide margin.

– T O M I A H O N E N , C O M M U N I T I E S D O M I N AT E B R A N D S
“No tech ever, has even come close. Not television sets, not
Playstations, not PCs, not Walkmans, not radios, not cars, not
motorcycles, not even bicycles; not credit cards, not even bank
accounts; not the reach of electricity or landline telephones or even
running water; not wristwatches, not toothbrushes, not even pens
and pencils have been as widely used as mobile is today.”
"This is unprecedented in the human history of technology. No tech ever, has even come close.
Not television sets, not Playstations, not PCs, not Walkmans, not radios, not cars, not
motorcycles, not even bicycles; not credit cards, not even bank accounts; not the reach of
electricity or landline telephones or even running water; not wristwatches, not toothbrushes,
not even pens and pencils, have been as widely used as mobile is today."

-- Tomi Ahonen, Communities Dominate Brands in 2012
D I S R U P T I N G E V E RY T H I N G
M O B I L E I S
The convergence of ubiquitous connectivity, cloud computing, and aﬀordable smartphones is
disrupting every aspect of society. Now that most everybody has a connected supercomputer
in their pocket, companies and in some cases entire industries are being reinvented,
invalidated, or carved into pieces by upstarts.
ENTERTAINMENT
Started with iTunes, YouTube, and ustream, now Amazon, Pandora, and social media in
general.

COMMERCE
e-commerce, show-rooming, mobile payments

eBay mobile sales in 2011: $5B




http://www.pymnts.com/in-depth/2015/the-mobile-e-commerce-share-shift/#.VPXxYxbF8l4
POLITICS
2012 US Presidential campaign, Occupy Wall Street, Ferguson Riots
HEALTHCARE
HealthKit, ResearchKit on iOS.

EDUCATION
youtube, khan academy, duolingo

http://techcrunch.com/2012/05/09/move-over-harvard-and-mit-stanford-has-the-real-
revolution-in-education/
D E M AT E R I A L I Z AT I O N
Much of this disruption stems from a trend dubbed "dematerialization". Dematerialization is not
strictly a mobile trend - it started in the 90s with the increasing popularity of the Web - but
mobile is a major accelerant.

What is dematerialization? Our increasing level of connectivity has given rise to a wave of
digital goods. The world is being transformed from a physical representation to a digital
representation. This results in digital vs physical competition that ranges for direct to indirect to
orthogonal.

[EVERQUEST STORY]

http://www.ericsson.com/res/docs/2012/discussion_paper_changing_the_game_e.pdf
This is a record store, kids :)

[TOM SAWYER STORY]

Examples of direct competition:

* Reference libs and encyclopedias

* Physical books and magazines

* Albums, tapes, and CDs

* College lectures (sage on stage)

Examples of indirect competition:

* Business class air travel (Indirect competition: telepresence software, online collaboration
tools)

* Oﬃce furniture (Indirect competition: telecommuting)

Even big companies are vulnerable to this digital disruption. Companies were part of the US
retail landscape for a decade or more.

Borders...
Tower Records...

Blockbuster...
– B L O C K B U S T E R A N A LY S T R E P O R T, 1 9 9 9
“Investor concern over the threat of
new technologies is overstated.”
Ouch.
Malls in general... (Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Overstock, etc)

https://www.google.com/search?q=Rolling+Acres+Mall:+Akron,+Ohio
+images&espv=2&biw=1436&bih=805&tbm=isch&source=lnms&sa=X&ei=EU31VMaSH8GHNv
Szg7AH&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAg

Traditional taxis... (Uber, Lyft, etc)
And perhaps most spectacularly, newspapers. Consider what happened to newspapers. The
industry wasn't slaughtered by some new kind of digital internet newspaper; it was
systematically dismantled by a range of smaller players, each focused on taking over one
single aspect.

Craigslist
Craigslist ate into classiﬁed ads...

Google
Google ate into display ads...
Twitter
Twitter ate into breaking news...
Blogs
Blogs ate into long-form articles...

N E W S PA P E R E X E C S
W E R E B L I N D S I D E D
• No one will read the morning news
on their computer!
• Craigslist?! They're a puny startup!
They'll never be as big as we are!
• Bloggers?! That's not journalism!
They're a bunch of amateurs!
No one will read the morning news on their computer!
Maybe, but they will read it on their phone.

Craigslist?! They're a puny startup! They'll never be as big as we are!
Yes, but they don't have to be as big as you to take away half your revenue.

Bloggers?! That's not journalism! They're a bunch of amateurs!
True, but you're not acting like you're in the journalism business - you're acting like you're in
the "marking-up-paper" business. (Also, once your best journalists leave to start their own
blogs, it's not just a bunch of amateurs.)
– E V E RY R E S TA U R A N T E U R
“Okay, fine... but you can't eat over the internet.”
Now, I now what you're thinking: "Okay, fine... a bunch of relatively small digital upstarts
demolished the newspaper industry. But [MY BUSINESS] is fundamentally different than news.
News is an info product that is easily transmitted over the internet; [MY PRODUCT] is not."
Could the restaurant industry get "newspapered"? You betcha. Mobile first and mobile only
upstarts are already chipping away at discrete pieces of the restaurant business. Take out,
delivery, ordering, payments, reservations, to name a few. You might view these services as a
way to more quickly deliver a better customer experience. On the other hand, using them
means that you've ceded a customer touch-point to a 3rd party - and you might never get it
back. Worse, you might find they become a competitor.

Take Foodler, for example. I'm sure they're is sitting on a treasure trove of "last mile" delivery
logistics data and customer behavior data. They know:

• Peak times

• Best selling items

• Regional preferences

• Optimal price points

• Range of cuisines

In short, Foodler has a better view of the playing field than any single restaurant they serve.
What could they do with data like that? Simple: they could take over the most profitable parts
of the delivery business by a developing a tightly focused menu of only the most profitable
delivery items and produce them in a highly optimized fulfillment environment.

Let's take it a step further into the future. Anybody know what this is? You probably see a
Keurig coffeemaker. I see a prototype of a coffee printer.

W H AT I F ?
• Stored my preferences?
• Tracked my behavior?
• Was connected to the network?
• Was linked to a payment instrument?
What if a Keurig:

• stored my preferences?

• tracked my behavior?

• was linked to a payment instrument?

• was networked?

The customer would have a coffee maker that automatically ordered new pods for itself! And
more interestingly, the vendor would have a wealth of behavioral data on which it could base
promotional offers, customer outreach, and new product research.

F L AV O R I N K
P O D S B E C O M E
Now, imagine that the pods become "flavor ink" that could be mixed like colors in a CMYK
laser printer to create a wide range or different coffee flavors... now you have an honest-to-god
coffee printer, for which digital "coffee designs" could be sold and delivered over the air. Want
to try the latest seasonal brew from Dunkins or Starbuck? Put a mug under the spout and click
here to pay.
T H R E E M A S S I V E
I M P L I C AT I O N S
1.Ability to deliver on demand anywhere moves
into real time. A digital product can be delivered
immediately when requested.
2.A digital product re-defines the base product
through a new wave of innovation. Removal of
the physical limitations of the material the
product was being distributed upon enables a
new round of product regeneration and
discovery.
3.Speculative production is removed thus
producing the ultimate efficiency of supply versus
demand, reducing waste and saving the planet's
resources.
There are three massive implications when digital representation of physical product happens:

1. Ability to deliver on demand anywhere moves into real time. A digital product can be
delivered immediately when requested.

2. A digital product re-defines the base product through a new wave of innovation. Removal of
the physical limitations of the material the product was being distributed upon enables a new
round of product regeneration and discovery.

3. Speculative production is removed thus producing the ultimate efficiency of supply versus
demand, reducing waste and saving the planet's resources.

– M E
“Just because one aspect or your business is resistant to being
dematerialized, doesn't mean they all are.”
Now you're probably thinking:

"This is science fiction! Even if something like that we're actually doable - which I doubt - it'd
be years before it made any impact in our market."

Yes, you're probably right. I don't see "coffee printers" disrupting Starbucks anytime soon.
Food printers do already exist (e.g., pizza, candy), but by all accounts they leave a lot to be
desired. The food production aspect of the dining experience is more insulated from
dematerialization than most, but food production is arguably not the most important aspect of
restaurants. Moral of the story: Just because one aspect or your business is resistant to being
dematerialized, doesn't mean they all are.

S T I L L G R O W I N G
M O B I L E I S
As big and disruptive as mobile is today, it's still gathering steam...

Smartphone industry already dwarfs the PC industry

* There will be 2-3x more smartphones than PCs in use in 2020

* 4B people buying every 2 years vs 1.6B people buying every 5 years

http://www.slideshare.net/a16z/mobile-is-eating-the-world-40841467
In the next ﬁve years, smartphone ownership will go from 2B to 4B


80% of the adults on earth will have a smartphone by 2020

The mobile opportunity much bigger than 2-3x PCs because of capabilities and usage
patterns:

Personal, always with us, always powered on, always connected, crawling with sensors, one or
more cameras, location, payment, social, extreme ease of use.

New sensors create new business opportunities. For example, Uber. Smartphones make Uber
possible. Mobile is the heart and soul of Uber. Not surprisingly, Uber "gets" mobile and wisely,
is using the whole phone:

• GPS

• Mobile payments

• Text messaging

• Voice calling

• Email marketing

• Mobile web

K E Y TA K E A WAY S
• Whatever you did before mobile
doesn't matter
• You need to embrace the entire
mobile experience
• It's never been more important to
innovate
Here are the important takeaways:

• Whatever you did before mobile doesn't matter (being an incumbent is a liability)

• You need to embrace the entire mobile experience (go beyond apps and use the whole
phone)

• It's never been more important to innovate (you're running out of time)

J U S T T H E B E G I N N I N G
M O B I L E I S
As huge as mobile seems at the moment, it is merely the ﬁrst “killer app” of the larger wireless
computing wave. Wireless computing is bringing with it a sea change on par with the printing
press, the industrial revolution, and perhaps even literacy.
Some people say the convergence of ubiquitous connectivity, cloud computers, and aﬀordable
smartphones is as big a deal as the industrial revolution...

...or the printing press...
But I think mobile is on par with literacy - i.e., the shift from an oral culture, in which knowledge
was exchanged mainly by speaking, to a literary culture, in which writing became the major
medium for expressing thought.
“The arrival of the Greek alphabet marked the start of one of the most far-reaching
revolutions in intellectual history: the shift from an oral culture, in which knowledge was
exchanged mainly by speaking, to a literary culture, in which writing became the major medium
for expressing thought. It was a revolution that would eventually change the lives, and the
brains, of nearly everyone on earth.”

- Paraphrased from The Shallows by Nick Carr

– E X C E R P T E D F R O M T H E S H A L L O W S B Y N I C K C A R R
“The arrival of the Greek alphabet marked the start of one of the
most far-reaching revolutions in intellectual history: the shift from an
oral culture, in which knowledge was exchanged mainly by speaking,
to a literary culture, in which writing became the major medium for
expressing thought. It was a revolution that would eventually
change the lives, and the brains, of nearly everyone on earth.”
“The spread of the greek alphabet sparked a revolution that would eventually change the lives,
and brains, of nearly everyone on earth.”

What will it mean to “know” something if we’re all live-wired into Google, Wikipedia, and Yelp?
Developing skills of memorization, for example, would be largely pointless.

[SHOW MOTO HINT]
Could the 24/7 connectivity enabled by mobile computing be pushing us toward a shift of
similarly epic proportions? I believe so, and I'm not alone.
– K AT E W I L S O N , F O U N D E R O F N O S Y C R O W
“I can absolutely imagine a scenario in which mass literacy is just
a historical blip; something that started in the 19th century and
lasted until the middle of the 21st. Technology could easily make
the ability to decode text irrelevant.”
Kate Wilson - founder of prize-winning children's book publisher Nosy Crow - sees the
beginnings of a post-literate society in our current technology:

"I think that there is a generation of children that we have to serve well with imaginative and
compelling digital reading experiences. I can absolutely imagine a scenario in which mass
literacy is just a historical blip; something that started in the 19th century and lasted until the
middle of the 21st. Technology could easily make the ability to decode text irrelevant. I
think that would be a terrible thing. I want to give children the incentive to learn to decode text.
I think we can do that best by making sure that we use technology to engage children with
reading in every way that we can."

Preposterous? Maybe. But consider sheet music. Music engraving and calligraphy are arts in
their own right. A handwritten manuscript of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is a sight to behold.
Unfortunately, sheet music is not a particularly efficient, durable, or accurate way to
encode musical expression. Unless you're an engraver or calligrapher, it probably doesn't
matter that much to you that sheet music is virtually extinct. I have a bachelor in music, I can
read and write sheet music, and even I don't care. It was a tool. There are better tools now.
We've moved on.
In his TED talk, "Will our kids be a different species?" Juan Enriquez shows how technology is
revealing evidence that suggests rapid evolution may be under way. "Throughout human
evolution, multiple versions of humans co-existed. Could we be mid-upgrade now?"

https://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_will_our_kids_be_a_different_species
We already live in a world where we put our bodies into computers (cars/planes) and
computers into our bodies (pacemakers/cochlear implants). This trend will continue as prices
fall and tech shrinks. The connection is going to get closer and closer to our brains, maybe
even to the point of circumventing our sensory organs (e.g., visual impulses injected directly
into the brain, not via retina). What will it mean to "know something" in a world where I can
access data from the web merely by thinking about it?
http://craphound.com/news/2012/01/09/the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computation-2/

http://craphound.com/news/2012/08/15/the-coming-civil-war-over-general-purpose-
computers/

W H AT I T M E A N S T O B E H U M A N
W I R E L E S S C O M P U T I N G W I L L R E D E F I N E
Can you imagine what life was like before electricity? Or clocks? Or the alphabet? It's virtually
impossible because they're all baked into every aspect of our society. Our children are going to
feel the same way about being connected.
My goal here is to impress upon you the magnitude of the change that is underway so you can
respond appropriately. Mobile is not a channel. Mobile is not a fad. Mobile is not going away.
Mobile is a transformational technology that is disrupting every sector of the economy in
every country on Earth. And it's just the beginning.
M O B I L E R I G H T
H O W T O D O

Done right, mobile computing offers brands an unprecedented opportunity to engage with their
customers, guests, employees and partners by capitalizing on heightened expectations.
Unfortunately, doing mobile right is hard. It demands a deep commitment of resources and a
sincere willingness to change that can be lacking in enterprise environments.
The sheer magnitude of a meaningful mobile undertaking - combined with a desire to be first to
market - have prompted many companies to commit so called "random acts of mobility" - i.e.,
releasing half-baked mobile offerings that are silo'd, slow, and muddled. These disposable
mobile offerings are at best a waste of time and money, and at worst a cause of significant
damage to brand loyalty.
H O W T O C R E AT E A
G O O D M O B I L E U X
• Define your business objectives
• Listen to your users
• Meet the needs of both parties
Creating a compelling mobile experience is a lot of work but it's not rocket science. At the most
basic level, you need to:

* Define your business objectives

* Listen to your users

* Meet the needs of both parties

Let's break that down:

1. Define Your Business Objectives

If you are planning an app that doesn't support specific business goals in a tangible way, it is
unlikely that you will be able to justify the cost of maintenance, updates or extended
functionality after the initial release. In other words, it'll be dead on arrival.

2. Listen To Your Users

Your users want to love your app. They want it to be awesome and to show it off to their
friends. But how can a big brand know what its millions of users want?

The answer is simple:
Ask them. Social media is here - use it. Ask users what they want and - here's the hard part -
actually listen to what they tell you. They're savvier than you think.

3. Meet the needs of both parties

Once you have defined business objectives, you need to build analytics into your app to
measure its effectiveness. This is something that should be discussed thoroughly, agreed upon
in advance, and built into your app from day one.
W H Y I S M O B I L E S O H A R D ?
It is hard for large companies to deliver compelling mobile experiences. Why is that? I'll give
you my top three reasons:

• Legacy systems

• Desire for control

• Turf wars
1. Legacy Systems

Most large companies have data silos all over the organization. These silos don't play nice with
the "real-time, all the time" demand of mobile users. In other words, syncing your customer
loyalty data and your POS transactions with a nightly batch script ain't gonna cut it in mobile.
Obviously, modernizing core systems (e.g., CRM, SCM, ERP) is a massive and risky
undertaking - e.g., fixing the plane in flight while performing a heart transplant on the pilot - but
nonetheless, it needs to be done if you hope to move into the post-PC world your guests are
already living in.

2. Desire for Control ("We don't need to talk to our users. We know what they want.")

It is hard for large organizations to come to grips with social media: now that it's easy to have a
conversation with your consumers, your consumers expect you to have a conversation with
them. They expect you to ask them questions. And when they take the time to give you
feedback, they expect you to act on it. The days of ramming mediocre ideas through the
marketplace with ad dollars are over. Before undertaking a mobile initiative, engage with
your constituents. Simply ask them what they want. You'll probably find that the majority have
at least one big "want" in common. Release a simple experience that does that one thing well.
Encourage user feedback. Incorporate the feedback into your next release. Wash, rinse, repeat.

3. Turf Wars

It has been my experience that the business units of large companies are financially
incentivized to compete with each other. While this may lead to increased performance of
individual BUs, it also leads to a lack of cooperation between them. This is a major stumbling
block when it comes to mobile. Your customers don't care which business unit they are dealing
with when they are interacting with your brand. They naturally assume that all parts of your
company are working together in harmony. Why doesn't your online ordering website
communicate with your loyalty rewards redemption app? Why can't your fancy barcode
scanner app access supply chain data to estimate the delivery date of an out-of-stock item?
That customers don't appreciate the level of effort required to create these sorts of experiences
is immaterial. These are the expectations and if you don't deliver, someone else will.
G E T T I N G B U Y- I N
• Visionary leadership
• Industry data
• Customer data
• Push back
Almost by definition, big organizations move slowly. The upside of this is that they offer a lot of
stability. The downside is that "slow" is diametrically opposed to the demands of their guests,
who are more savvy and impatient than ever. Committing "random acts of mobility" will be seen
for what it is - a desperate attempt to remain relevant without making the hard decisions
necessary to actually be relevant. There may still be time for large companies to reset course
but the window is closing.

Again, I'm not trying to be all doom and gloom. I'm using every technique at my disposal to
impress upon you the importance of doing the hard work to get mobile friendly.
T H E A P P
T H I N K B E Y O N D
E M B R A C E T H E
W H O L E P H O N E
• Push
• Email
• SMS
• Geo
• Intents
• Plugins
• Social
• Mobile Wallet
• Game Center
• Health Center
• Passbook
• Siri/Now
Demo

* Passbook

* Google Now

T H E P H O N E
T H I N K B E Y O N D
C O N S T E L L AT I O N
O F P E R I P H E R A L S
• Watches
• Cars
• TVs
• Lights
• Appliances
• Utilities
• Rings
• Belts
• Glasses
• Visors
• 360º Cameras
• Drones
F U T U R E F R I E N D LY S Y S T E M S
Future Friendly Systems

So, given the magnitude of wireless and the challenge of dematerialization, how is an
organization to re-tool for a post-industrial society?

You can't just rebuild mission critical systems from scratch so the only feasible approach is to
deﬁne a future architecture and make incremental changes that build toward it.

The "future architecture" of which I speak will be diﬀerent for every organization, but there are
two characteristics that all will share: Smart Content and self-service APIs.

1. Smart Content

Device and platform fragmentation have made it impossible to know what situations your
content will end up it. Some environments will support video, some won't. Some will render
HTML and/or CSS. I'm willing to bet the next batch of smart devices will be screen-less and
accessed solely via a Siri-like interaction. With this level of uncertainty, you need to equip your
content to stand on its own in any context.

S M A R T C O N T E N T
• Contains metadata that describes
what the data is about and allows for
adaptability
• Is free of display-related instructions
• Is structured based on a natural
atomic unit rather than context-
specific containers
1. Smart Content

* Contains metadata that describes what the data is about and allows for adaptability

* Is free of display-related instructions (e.g., RTF, CSS, HTML)

* Is structured based on a natural atomic unit (e.g., story, post, tweet, et al) rather than context-
speciﬁc containers (e.g., pages, screens, windows)

2. Self-Service APIs

Your content and services should be made available via networked self-service APIs. Access to
these APIs may be limited to certain parties but should be open in the sense that various
groups (e.g., other departments in your organization, registered 3rd-party developers, or the
general public) should be able to access them without ongoing assistance from the publishing
party.
The beauty of a self-service API is that the possibilities are endless. There's no telling what your
customers, employees, and partners will come up with. You could never in a million years build
all the apps your constituents desire. Instead, give them the tools to do it themselves and
they'll be happy to create their own experience.
For example, if Starbucks published a simple REST-based web service that allowed customers
to pull their own personal order history data, I guarantee you that within hours someone would
hack together an app that would automatically post a tweet every time they bought a coffee.

Once there, it's easy to imagine an affiliate program that made it economically feasible for 3rd
party developers to build social media apps on top of a Starbucks API that would drive traffic
from Facebook and Twitter to starbucks.com where folks could buy gift cards for their friend
network. Win, win.

3. Start Small

Smart content and self-service APIs are backend constructs. When it comes time to build a
front end, you want to start small. Mobile does not reward feature richness.
Today, starting small means focusing on the smartphone experience.
Tomorrow, starting small might mean watches...

Or glasses... Or car dashboards... Or ???
S TA R T S M A L L
• Design for most restrictive
environment first
• Forces hard decisions to the front of
the process
• Scaling up is much easier than
scaling down
Start Small

• Design for most restrictive environment ﬁrst

• Forces hard decisions to the front of the process

• Scaling up is much easier than scaling down
Show and tell:

Passbook

Google Now

E M B R A C E M O B I L E
Technology Demos

We talked about the importance of smart content and self-service APIs but I know it can be
hard to envision the benefits if you're only thinking about a single context, like an app. So, I've
set up a couple simple demos to give you a feel for new user experiences that are feasible and
powerful, but not yet in common use.

I'm probably the first speaker in the history of history to say this, but: Please take out your
phone, turn it on, and turn the volume up!

T E X T H A M B U R G E R T O 3 1 3 1 3 1
T O J O I N E Z B U R G E R R E WA R D S
A N D R E C E I V E 2 0 % O F F !
Imagine you're standing in line at your favorite burger joint and you see a sign asking to you
text a keyword to a short code to join the loyalty program and receive a discount. (go ahead
and do it!). With an effort that would be considered minuscule compared to building a native
app for Android or iOS, you have create a mobile experience that: distracted the guest from her
boring wait, delighted the guest with a discount, gained you a loyalty member, and captured a
mobile phone number (which is arguably the most valuable marketing channel).
TL;DR: You should be collecting mobile numbers.

Imagine that you are all standing in line at the Hamburger Hut. You see a sign that says:

"Text HAMBURGER to 313131 to join EzBurger Rewards and receive 20% off today's
purchase!"

[you send text]

"Awesome! Thanks for joining. Show this text to the cashier to get your 20% discount.
DISCOUNT CODE: REDCAT"

[DEMO: PHYSICAL WEB BEACONS]

https://jonathanstark.com/labs/physical-web/
Other possibilities:

* WIFI landing pages?

* Robo calls?

* Oﬀsite POS?

* Popup sites?

* Virtual restaurants?

Tesco's virtual subway supermarket

http://dontbeahayter.com/2012/01/05/tesco-virtual-subway-supermarket/
I N - H O U S E V S O U T S O U R C E
Working with 3rd Party Vendors?

I've outlined a ton of possible strategies, tactics, tools, and technologies on you. I know you
can't do everything at once. You're probably going to have to leverage outside vendors and
services to jump start your progress.

The 64k question is: Which capabilities you should be built in-house vs outsourced?
Why outsource all the things your CEO, CMO, and guests care most about? Better to keep all
guest facing touch points in-house and outsource infrastructure and back office applications
wherever you can. Unfortunately, what I normally see in the wild is the exact reverse.
R E A S O N S F O R
R E V E R S A L
• IT has owned the infrastructure and
back office applications for so long
they are considered synonymous.
• The guest facing stuff is all brand
new, so it seems easier to package
up for someone else to do.
I think there are two reasons for this:

1. IT has owned the infrastructure and back office applications for so long they are considered
synonymous. But those items typically are not adding value, are well supported by a wide
range of vendors, and - sorry for saying this but - are often very outdated.

2. The guest facing stuff is all brand new, so there is a desire to push it off on someone else
because: a. it's possible to do so since it's not a crufty old system that would be easier to
rebuild than document, b. the IT dept is too slammed with maintenance bs to imagine taking on
incremental systems, c. the IT dept might need to do some skill building before they could take
on a new type of work.

[POINT: COMPANIES OUTSOURCE MOBILE BECAUSE THEY - WRONGLY - THINK IT'S SELF
CONTAINED AND CAN BE DONE IN A VACUUM]

So, if you have to outsource something, why not make it infrastructure or back oﬃce
applications?
Since GFSs are inherently public and visible to guests, they are more subject to changes in the
marketplace than something like your accounting system. IOW - A GFS has hundreds of
thousands of stakeholders where a BOS may only have a couple dozen.
IMHO, a guest facing 3rd party system should be considered a stop gap measure (why would
you trust a third party with your guest experience?). Working with vendors who allow you to
integrate with their systems will allow you to start modernizing your backend interfaces. The
ultimate goal is to replace their service with your own once you're backend can support it. In
cases where you do decide to outsource a guest facing system, you're going to want to favor
vendors who oﬀer one (or both) of the following:

* Programmatic API access to your data in their system

* Webhooks support for "events of interest"

[POINT: AVOID LOCK-IN!]

[POINT: THE WHOLE THING IS A DIFFICULT MIGRATION EXERCISE]
That being the case, you want to have GFS in-house so you can turn on a dime. i.e., respond
to the demands of the marketplace before anyone else. A press release about how "your loyalty
vendor is working on their Apple Pay integration" isn't going to hold any sway with fickle
consumers. Agility like this is typically only possible with in-house systems and can be used as
a significant competitive advantage.

[POINT: FLEXIBILITY IS A SIGNIFICANT COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE]
E V E RY T H I N G I S C H A N G I N G
To wrap up...

I'd like to close on a personal note. I've got two little kids (5yo and 1yo). As excited as I am
about the future and the opportunities in front of us, I'm frankly a bit scared about what the
world is going to look like in the next decade. One thing that I find particularly alarming is that
most large organizations appear to be incapable of making the changes they need to make to
keep up with their customers. Therefore, they are vulnerable to disruption from relatively small
companies. If enough large scale disruption happens, I start to get nervous about things like
the economy and unemployment - which as a Dad of two little kids is sobering.

TA K E A WAY S
• Mobile is changing
everything
• Think beyond
standalone apps
• Use the whole
phone
• Rework your content
until it's "smart"
• Make data available
via self-service APIs
• Start small with new
initiatives
• Outsource your
"plumbing"
• Avoid lock-in from
3rd parties
• Migrate guest-facing
systems in-house
Takeaways:

• Mobile is changing everything

• Think beyond standalone apps

• Use the whole phone

• Rework your content until it's "smart"

• Make data available via self-service APIs

• Start small with new initiatives

• Outsource "plumbing"

• Avoid lock-in from 3rd parties

• Migrate guest-facing systems in-house
C O M P L E T E LY E M B R A C E
M O B I L E A S A P
If you only remember one thing from this talk, it should be this:

You must completely embrace mobile as soon as possible.
You won't be mobile-ﬁrst tomorrow, or maybe not even in 3 years; but if you can get the wheels
in motion, start laying the ground work, and slowly but surely change the culture of your
organization, then my kids could have a rich and rewarding future in the restaurant business :)
Thank you so much for your attention. If we have time, I'd love to take some questions...

Questions?

https://jonathanstark.com/ask

Mobile consulting services:

https://jonathanstark.com/

Business coaching for dev shops:

https://expensiveproblem.com/

Rethink Mobile: Mobile Strategy for Product Designers

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