Subject Matter 16: 2020 Winter Update

Hello and a belated happy new year.

Contents:
1. Business Update
2. New Writing
3. Other 

After I left Underdog.io last year, I worked on a bunch of different projects. I thought I'd share some recent reflections about this.

On the product + brand front here were some projects I enjoyed:

• New product research + design sprint for [large social media company]

• Helped a few early-stage software businesses with go-to-market positioning (health insurance, dev tools, real estate coop)

• Product / brand design work with the CEO of personal finance media business

• Marketing workshop for decentralized computing project

I've also been trying out a new type of engagement, sustained 1-on-1 knowledge work with senior business leaders.

• Working with a VC to develop thesis + investment strategy around new models for brands and companies, turning this into public thought leadership

• Helping a senior CMO-for-hire develop insights from his consulting business into longform writing.

Sometimes I felt like I was doing many different types work, but writing this down, I realized that there's a common denominator. They largely involved communicating some emerging reality in order to drive specific audience behaviors. 

How to develop a new way of seeing? And how to communicate this to stakeholders—users, investors, readers? ​These are not just "marketing" or "brand problems." In the former cases the primary audience for this work was not the public but internal stakeholders within the client company. 

• Social media co --> R&D around emerging ways of using "stories" format --> motivate new internal product design strategy

• Decentralized computing project --> understand "fitness" of marketing within p2p computing landscape --> specify and prioritize early adopter personas

• Novel health insurance product --> identify most important value proposition --> new product site design

• Personal finance media biz --> develop new business meta-narrative --> product design --> motivate new perception of company + deeper user engagement

This is also true of the 1-on-1 thought partnership work. Here the goal was to translate macro level thinking, or personal experience, into actionable insights for the client's audience.

• VC thesis development  --> thought leadership --> motivate new behaviors in entrepreneurs

• CMO level consultant --> blogging + book --> motivate new behaviors in independent consultant

Themes, narratives, metaphors, abstractions. They are tools for understanding. They can be deployed internally to set a vision for the company; they can drive product vision and roadmap; they can be used in sales decks; they can even be used in product interfaces.

For example, it can be powerful to develop different metaphors for explaining your business. The personal finance company I worked with is a classic SEO business that makes money by affiliate marketing. They have thousands of pages of product reviews and comparisons, and thousands more offering advice on investing, saving, homeownership, and so on. If you squint, it's possible to view this company as in the business of education. We tried designing based on this assumption instead, and suddenly interface design and product strategy fell into place. Thousands of pages could be leveraged into an app-like edutainment experience. Multiple layers of stakeholders operating on a new orientation to the market. 

I have never considered brand and product to be separable, and this is part of why. 

One challenge of our era, if not the defining challenge, is to reach a coherent, actionable understanding of what is happening in our culture. This is always what I have tried to accomplish with my writing, and increasingly this is what I find myself doing in work. Little today is clear. There are still questions to be answered on how to orient to our present situation. This is cultural strategy. There are still questions to be answered on how to forge a compelling, actionable vision of the future. This is narrative strategy.

Cultural strategy flows from the top to the bottom.

• Research (market analysis, cultural analysis, interviews,) 
• Developing proprietary insight (1-1 knowledge work with CEO - writing, diagramming, theorizing)
• Narrative formation (Co-writing, visualizing, develop shareable artifacts) 
• Product / comms strategy (Set organizational strategy)
• Interface design (drive KPIs)
• Communications (drive KPIs)

..


New writing
My latest piece is simply a tutorial for how to make the block quote elements I've recently been using for my site. Open Transclude for Networked Writing. Open Transclude is a web-native, iframe-based live portal into any other blog post on your own site. Its primary innovation over a regular block quote is context. As a reader, you can get a much better sense of the context in which the quote lives. As designer Malte Müller said on Twitter, Open Transclude is "a native, simple, highly effective solution to a complex problem."

• Jazz guitarist Jeff Parker has a new album about, Suite for Max Brown.

• Interesting new psychedelic jazz group from Chicago, Resavoir. This one is going to play right into spring.

• Soho Rezanejad makes dramatic, electronic art rock. I don't typically go for this kind of thing so I'm pleased to have found this really moving.

• In my last email I said I was looking for modern composers who inherited the classical tradition. Then I was introduced to Nikolai Kapustin, a classical/jazz composer. His playing of his own Sonata 1 gives me shivers.

• Very jazz heavy entry here, so to round things off here's the dark, energetic The Act of Falling From the 8th Floor by electronic musicians Carl Gari and Egyptian poet and vocalist Abdullah Miniawy. I'm really excited by this project.

..

Thanks for reading, as always. This has been a rather straightforward update. I expect to be back soon with more ideas, more new language, very soon. In the interest of manifesting, I'll leave one final thought here: In 2020 I'm looking for more projects that take me to San Francisco. 

Toby