Jay Goldman

I’ve been pondering a thought since last Monday, when I had the chance to speak to a group of Greg Wilson’s University of Toronto CS students. Greg gets me to come in every now and then and extol the virtues of being a UX monkey instead of a Code monkey in order to make sure that his students have some perspective on the various career paths available. I was joined by Adam Goucher, one of the best QA monkeys I know, who was there to do the same but different (if you catch my drift).

Part of the lunch involved the various project groups asking questions related to the work they were doing, which included everything from building visualizations for traffic data captured in near real-time by roadside transponders to designing better spam filtering (and pretty much everything in-between). Greg has a full list of the projects over on his blog: Update on this term’s projects. I was struck by something that all of the teams shared (and that I’ve often seen in entrepreneurs pitching their startups): a lack of clarity of purpose. That shouldn’t, in any way, diminish the awesome work they’re doing, but rather to introduce one of the aspects that I think contributes to the failure of so many enterprises.

Clarity of purpose means knowing your ultimate goal and being able to distinguish it from the intervening steps.

One of the teams in Greg’s class is building a better recommendation engine for Chapters/Indigo, Canada’s answer to Borders (i.e.: giant big online book store AND giant offline book stores that serve coffee). This is similar to the Netflix Prize, in which Netflix is offering $1,000,000 to the team who can beat their own Cinematch system by at least 10%, except with only one team, without the giant cash money, and probably with an easier-to-achieve ultimate goal. The interesting part of the conversation — for me at least — was not about their great grasp of a really hard tech problem but about their clarity of purpose. Their stated purpose: build a better recommendation engine for books. Their actual purpose: help people find books to buy.

That may seem like a subtle difference on first blush, but there’s an entire startup’s world between the two. If you set out to build a better mousetrap, all you’ll ever see is cheese and springs and bait. Intermediate steps masquerading as end goals serve only to narrow your focus, sometimes right down into a sharply myopic laser beam that carves away your success in broad swaths. But look at the world through mouse-free glasses and things change considerably. No longer is it a question of trapping but instead of trapping and removal and relocation and humain solutions and a myriad of other possibilities. It may well turn out that the best way to help people find books to buy has nothing to do with recommendation engines, a possibity that simply doesn’t exist when your entire goal is to build one.

Likely-related posts:

• Social Media Strategies for Organizations My presentation from Web Strategy Summit, delivered May 4th 2009....