Likes & Launch

(Photo: Splice in action, source: Billboard.)

Two weeks ago we kicked off the first Product Management Summit of 2014. It’s an event we hold twice a year for a full day to bring together all of the Product managers from the USV Portfolio. The goal of these summits is to provide portfolio peers a place to share best practices, lessons learned and tools that make the biggest impact. Given the diversity of perspectives, I always learn a ton from these events. 

As a way to give more insight about each company, we always start the day with introductions and a question. At this event we asked each Product Manager to share one of the KPIs that they are currently focused on.

As you would imagine, most product KPIs revolve around user growth, downloads, content consumed, and revenue growth. Now one KPI that surprised me was from Splice, it was “number of collaborations”.

This makes sense, Splice is a platform that allows music creators to share pieces of music in order to collaborate to make a final song, but it’s the first time I’ve had a company mention collaboration as a KPI.

Now, collaboration is a not a new thing, especially not in music. Many songs on Soundcloud were collaborations between multiple people, they just didn’t happen on the platform. Since Soundcloud isn’t a tool for creation, they wouldn’t measure number of collaborations, only completed songs. Shared works in progress and final products have a home on SoundCloud, but not the process in between. 

Building a platform focused on multiple people working together brings up some interesting challenges: 

1. Collaboration already happens, why is it a problem to solve?

Most collaborations happen offline. Co-creating in the open is challenging and there aren’t many tools that help make it easier (yet). The Postal Service got their band’s namesake from sending files to each other by mail. Now with digital file sharing, files can be shared in an instant but usually aren’t shared publicly. And even if they are, it requires a purchase of closed software like Abelton on both sides to open or change the file. 

2. Collaboration as a digital workflow can be clunky.

If you work on a team of more than 5 people you’ve probably used a tool to collaborate on a project. Whether it was Google docs, Asana or Pivotal Tracker, members of your team likely had to make adjustments to their regular workflows to participate in the collaborative workflow. If everyone isn’t using the same tools, it’s harder to work together than defaulting back to email. 

3. Roles and responsibilities are undefined and changing. 

If you’ve used a digital collaboration tool with your team there is usually a clear definition of who’s on the team, what they will work on and what the end goal is. With an open collaboration platform, people can collaborate with people they’ve never met. The only unifying incentive would be the final product, but that can be largely undefined until work begins. 

4. A social network built on differences.

Facebook and Linkedin, are social networks based on people you know. SoundCloud, Twitter and Wattpad are a social network for people with shared interests.  On a collaboration platform, it’s a social network of strangers who have different, but complimentary, skill sets. If everyone was the same, it may not create interesting collaborations. It’s the fact that individuals find people who are different than them that makes it work. 

5. User acquisition should come in twos. 

For most social networks user acquisition is very much a single player. If you acquire one customer and they start using the product, that is a win. With a collaboration network, you need at least two people. If people were able to collaborate without the platform, why wouldn’t they do that? There isn’t really a ‘single player mode’. You need two people working together to consider it a win. 

6. Convert teams but encourage side projects. 

There will be existing teams that use a collaboration tool. It might be harder to get those team collaborations on platform because they probably already have an offline workflow to complete tasks together. Github is a great example of a collaborative tool that teams love. Developers get hooked on the tool at work and then expand to use it for themselves to work on personal or open source projects. 

7. Skills make the team, acquire talent to fill gaps. 

The ideal customer for a collaboration network is someone that has an underutilized skill and wants to collaborate with other people. Or someone who has a project they started that is missing something. They key is to help surface these skills or projects to the network to encourage collaboration. A customer must know what they are good at and how they can contribute. That can be a harder target to hit with user acquisition since it could be very open ended. If the person who started the project already knew someone who could help complete it, they could’ve brought them on. 

Closing thoughts:

I’ll be curious to watch as more collaborative companies figure out the best way to grow their collaboration KPIs. From Splice to Scratch, Github to Assembly, the next wave of social is emerging. This time it’s about bringing together strangers with complimentary skill sets, not just shared interests. Where else have you seen this happen?