clintgc

two weeks into the new gig @backccountry.com and like any new opportunity i’m getting to know new faces, a new culture and some new technology. maybe i should use the word “different” instead of “new”. is ecommerce new technology?

back a few months ago when i was first interviewing w/ backcountry and thinking seriously about a jump from mozy a friend of mine asked why i would even think about ecommerce “it’s not very bleeding edge”. at least compared to the mozy distributed file system (20+ petabytes, processing power, redundancy & protocols) or other cloud computing services an ecommerce platform lacks the blood.

but maybe my friend is wrong … first of all i’m sorry for using “cloud computing” it’s a buzz word like web 2.0 that won’t go away because no other pithy definition exists for distributed web application and storage environments exist. however, over the past few years ecommerce has been influenced by social applications like facebook, twitter & the variety of blogs out there. of course the subject of “community” and “conversation” , which are enabled by the above mentioned applications, but now the bleeding edge for ecommerce companies and the googles of the world is to create context through implicit/explicit actions and crunch models to provide rich experiences online.

a negative example: i buy a lot of things from amazon, but why do they keep recommending Nintendo Wii games to me. i’ve not bought a Wii game from them in over a year? at some point that should decay from their recommendation algorithm and move on.

backcountry.com is a great catalogue, but it’s not a great user experience. i’m excited to tackle this challenge. as of today i’ll be working product management for community projects, content surfacing and all things bike (realcyclist.com & hucknroll.com).  ecommerce, not so old hat in my opinion.

It happened a few weeks ago; I’ve been hiding under the radar until now, but my days at Decho/Mozy are over.

I have to say at the time leaving felt great! And now … well it still feels great

Mozy was a great place to work!! I can’t say enough about the guys I worked w/ and especially the engineering team; they are an amazing group of guys w/ talent that would be difficult to match. I will miss those guys the most.

As for irreconcilable differences, well let’s just say being managements watchdog will always get you in trouble (in addition EMC has a clause in their comp package that doesn’t allow me to say anything negative about the company or it’s employee’s; they should thank their lucky stars I signed it … )

Nevertheless, I leave w/ excitement for the future and gratitude for the friends and experiences I’ve had over the past two years.

So what’s the plan? Law school? Omniture? Fusion IO? Startup? Maybe! They are all possibilities, so we’ll just have to see.

Special thanks to my friends at Mozy for all their support and love.

Late,
GC

nearly two years ago i decided to leave novell and join mozy, which was not a tough decision in itself, but one major motivation for joining mozy was the opportunity to work for josh coates, mozy’s CEO and founder. i didn’t know at the time that josh was pretty much hands off at mozy waiting for the big payload from the EMC acquisition, but what i did know came from a google-stalker search: cal berkley graduate, founded scale8 and watched it crash & burn, internet archive project, sabbatical in utah and then founded mozy and won a bunch of awards as an entrepreneur.

so when i got to mozy as employe number forty-something i often walked past josh’s office waiting for him to pull me into his office and ask me who the hell i was; this never happened.  but over a few months and few interactions in meetings, chats in the hallway and his office and of course some heckling from him during my  company lunch presentation on arbitrarily increasing mozy prices b/c we want more money (a total failure i should write about sometime in the future).  nevertheless in this short time i learned a lot of little things from josh, but i also learned one really big thing (lesson):

YOU NEED LEADERSHIP TO FOCUS.

it’s just that simple. businesses that fail eventually realize they needed to focus. good companies that survive have just enough focus not to fail.  successful companies have leadership and real leadership knows how to focus. mozy as a startup is a great example of focus …

NOTE: sometimes the ideas and words focus and simplicity are playfully interchanged and mean the same thing and rightfully so b/c simplifying a complex task or project into smaller more manageable and consumable parts makes focus more natural and achievable. i don’t think you can have one w/o the other.

in the beginning mozy had a very simple product: online backup. focused at a very simple market: consumers and small businesses. the company’s mantra exemplified simplicity, “set it and forget it”. even pricing was simple: $4.99 a month unlimited storage (sure it got a little more complex for small business at $0.50 a gb).  though the product functionality didn’t always translate into simplicity we were focused and iterative trying always to improve.

josh had learned the hard way in an earlier startup, so he set the focus. he was the leadership and he made sure everyone understood the focus. yeah, there were times when he understood strategically stepping out of focus was important, but it usually had a certain objective w/ a certain advantage. e.g. the early deal w/ GE (stepping into enterprise software … blah!)

this is pretty anti-climatic, but this all became cognizant after a meeting i attempted to lead on improving the restore experience in the mozy service. i had invited all the necessary stakeholders and had even invited josh, though he was extremely hands off and more of a distraction in meetings than anything else.  the meeting was randomized by differing ideas and opinions and by the end of it nothing was accomplished (sounds like most meetings, why is that?).  but i took a few minutes after the meeting to ask josh what i could have done differently.  in the josh coates nonchalant manner he told me my leadership style sucked big time and that was demonstrated by my lack of upfront objective in the meeting and inability to keep the team focused on that objective. if the objective is reached in 15 minutes then end the meeting. if the objective isn’t being accomplished in 15 minutes end the meeting.

how focused are the leaders in your company?  don’t confuse busy w/ focused … executives and management are always busy, but are they always focused?

Communicate early and often (even if it seems no one is listening).

over the past year mozy has moved towards a quasi-microsoft model for program management. this means before mozy had only the product mgmt role; this meant the PM needed to have one leg in business & market strategy while at the same time had the technical tools to work with engineering to design, develop, test and launch products.  i moved into program mgmt primarily b/c of my relationship with the engineers and my itch to be more technical.

the transition to the program management role has been easy for me, but for mozy i think it has hazardous. a significant advantage to the consolidated role is the development and execution of product roadmap.  this should be where key stakeholders work together to determine the priority of product features and potential launch plans. unfortunately, this task is considered to be wholly owned by PM and input is sporadic and minimal. this removes engineering and pgm at a very critical point. could this be improved w/ better communication and teamwork? absolutely, it just hasn’t happened at mozy.

so what does it mean to be a program manager?

well, i’m not going to put this all in one post, but if someone asked me in an interview (or if i was asking an interview candidate) i would say you are a technical lobbyist. like a lobbyist on Capitol Hill your job is to influence, communicate, be a knowledge expert, coral resources and have an ever evolving plan to execute on your objectives. only difference: you grease palms w/ executives instead of senators and congressman, you trust engineers instead of staffers to get things done and you are paid by the institution instead of a client (the pay is significantly less as a PGM).

and just like a lobbyist the PGM wields no authority, but is responsible for ensuring execution and objectives are inline.

in upcoming posts i will detail some of my experience here at mozy (w/ its dysfunction and all) and hypothesize on what PGM should be and what kind of impact it could have on any organization. interesting content for this discussion comes from an internal document @msft called the Art, Science and Profession of Program Management.

more to come …

it’s no secret i work @ mozy and so it comes w/o saying if you aren’t backing up your family photo’s, muzak and other important data then you are crazy! it’s a no brainer; because of the sheer amount of data we collect and generate data loss is inevitable.  for $5 bucks a month you can backup an unlimited amount data online.

it’s simple, after signup install either mozy for windows or mac, select which files you want protected (we even create convenient backup sets that collect all your files by type),  set when you want the backup to run and it’s that simple.

if you need to restore your files from mozy you can either select the files & directories from within the client or you can login to mozy.com and select your files from the web.

worried about security? don’t worry you can select a personal encryption key and all transfers are done over an SSL connection.

i love mozy, i love working at mozy and the product is only getting better!

i won’t lie to you there are some things that drive me nutz about mozy, so here they are:

• no phone support for home users (i understand the margins are small in this business, so we can’t offer phone support).
• upload speeds are slower than normal b/c we encode your files w/ our secret sauce that will bloat your files 25%.
• crazy error messages that don’t even make sense to me.
• need simpler interface

all these things are actively being worked on … and much much more! mozy is AWESOME, if you don’t believe me try it out for free w/ a 2GB account.