“Buy Zoom.” That ’s what a good friend of mine told me he’d instructed his investment broker to do last March. I was impressed and irked.

Why had I lacked the foresight and why had he not tipped me off? 12 months later, his monetary investment is probably equal to the number of hours I’ve spent on the video conference platform. My ROI? A stronger contact lens prescription, his… well, best not think about it.

Zoom is the ultimate overnight success, a victor of circumstance. Imagine Facebook’s 2006-08 growth charts, then concertina them into a single week. Friday, March 20 th , 2020: a handful of us had Zoom’d. Friday, March 27 th : hands up who hadn’t?

This accelerated awareness is the stuff of an entrepreneur’s dreams, and it’s hard to imagine it will happen again. The circumstances are chance.

But with product ubiquity and a billion-dollar valuation around the corner , has Zoom really got anything to worry about? Yes, I would argue. And it comes down to brand.

To control, or not to control?

Here’s a thing, Zoom is now a verb. I’ll wager Miriam-Webster’s will rubber-stamp it in their annual update. Entering the dictionary is a kind of marketing erotica: brand managers breathily utter names like Hoover, Biro, or Google in conference rooms around the world.

But entering the vernacular is dangerous, particularly if you don’t own the narrative that accompanies it.

For Zoom, the phrasing is mostly pejorative; zoom fatigue, zoom hell, back-to-back Zooms. The platform is becoming the scapegoat for our dysfunctional home life; for boundaries being crossed and toilet breaks lost.

Brand building is about controlling the narrative. Unfortunately, when a business explodes onto the scene without one, it can be hard to rewrite the one it’s handed. But why does it matter?

Simply put, it makes Zoom vulnerable to a new, more empathetic alternative. Most established utility companies know how hard it is to retain consumers now adept at switching with just a few clicks.

Digital startups that undergo rapid growth often overlook brand narrative. I’d go as far as saying some roll their eyes at the importance of it — believing ‘if the product is good enough, it’ll market itself’.

I’ll concede this might be true, up to a point. Disruptors also get disrupted, and without a solid brand narrative, it can get ugly — just ask Facebook or WeWork.

If your product is your brand, there’s little defense when a storm rolls in. And as sure as nature, it will. It might be an economic downturn, regulation, a rogue exec, or just a better product. Whichever, you need to control your brand narrative and use it to retain people.

How do you create a powerful brand narrative?

The first thing is to align on a mission, a reason for being: To democratize information (Google); A computer on every desk, every home (Microsoft); Connect the world’s professionals (Linkedin).

But don’t stop there. Now load the mission with humanity and manifest it in the product, the company, and the marketing. This involves truly understanding people’s needs and wants.

This is a human-centric approach and it’s the absolute foundation of a brand narrative. Your product will bring people in, but it’s the humanity of the company that will keep them there; particularly if you’re investing in the newest generation of consumers.

Defining the brand and the narrative can easily be deprioritized — but don’t let it happen!

If there’s one thing the pandemic taught product owners and marketers, speed of response matters. I can tell you first hand that those businesses who knew their narrative, knew how to respond instantly. Consumers embraced them, flocked to them in some cases. Those who didn’t took months to respond, and it has hurt their business.

Zoom will be worth billions by the time this article is published and many employees will pocket life-changing cheques. It’s a remarkable story, but it doesn’t end with the IPO. Brands have been known to outlive their original products, but products without brands get unstuck at some point.

I mean… when did you last Skype?

Employee surveillance doesn’t increase productivity — it’s demotivating

Writing for Aeon last week, Martin Parker , a professor of organization studies at the University of Bristol in the UK, relayed the origins of the word “management”, explaining:

Though we might prefer to believe that its meaning has evolved since then to convey something more respectful and collaborative, it is still the case that workplace leaders and managers have mastery over their staff. Promotions, opportunities, hirings and firings — all life-altering events — are subject to their authority.

It is a mighty responsibility, and abuse of managerial power can have devastating consequences.

During the pandemic, the relationship between workers and their seniors has evolved in unexpected ways. Managers are having to trust more, and ultimately accept that they have less of a window into how employees spend the day. For lots of companies this has been going surprisingly well , and Facebook, often seen as something of a pace-setter when it comes to employee flexibility, announced that their staff would be given the option of working from home permanently once lockdown lifts.

Given this, you would be forgiven for thinking that the outbreak has seen companies forge new bonds of faith with their workers, and that this is an unexpected silver lining to the chaos wrought by COVID-19. But calmer seas can hide dangerous currents, and just as businesses appear to take a more relaxed attitude to home working, scores of them have been enthusiastically implementing surveillance software to ensure that every click, every break, every lapse in attention is observed, collected, and used as evidence of worker efficiency.

The MIT Technology Review gave an overview of some of the snooping programs are looking for:

Unsurprisingly, people find this clandestine data collection unsettling and, frankly,  sinister. It reveals the veneer of trust to be exactly that. But there are lots of reasons we should be resistant to workplace surveillance tech. Here are just four.

Values

Wh o decides what optimal performance looks like? Which data emissions should hold the most weight when it comes to evaluating an employee’s prospects? When we’re talking about screen-time or interactions with colleagues, these questions do not have clear and unambiguous answers.

We might suppose that spending a lot of time at one’s workstation is a good thing, but clearly there are implications for mental and physical health when staff are incentivized to work extended hours. Similarly, messages and conversations with colleagues might be indicative of collaboration, but at what point does this tip over into over-reliance and an inability to work independently?

If these questions even have provable answers, even if teams of psychologists and behavioral experts have been employed in research to support the classification of these signals, we still don’t know who they are.

Those who determine what counts lurk in the shadows and avoid accountability for the decisions their software prompts and the faraway lives they may change.

Chilling effect

We know that being watched changes our behavior , and these programs are specifically designed for unbroken and penetrating surveillance. Speaking to the MIT Technology Review , the CEO of Enaible, Tommy Weir is unabashed about this:

Except of course, this would never happen in real-life — it would be considered utterly oppressive — and we can only imagine what kind of stifling impact it would have.

We can reasonably speculate that once workers become aware of this constant critical observation they will adapt their habits, perhaps in unhealthy ways. A climate of nervousness feels inevitable, and employees may choose to shun personal messages, breaks, snacks, exercise, light chit chat, and any other opportunities for respite that punctuate working days and make them more tolerable.

Productivity myth

Lots of enterprise technology makes claims about boosting productivity, but we should examine these with some skepticism. When we’re dealing with humans and not machines, what does 100% productivity even look like? Is it possible to produce maximum output every hour of the working day? If it were possible would it be desirable?

No matter the role and the level of concentration required, it remains the case that we need periods of downtime throughout the day . They are restorative. To create an environment where moving more slowly becomes equivalent to “slacking” is to create a very toxic environment indeed. Moreover, it may even be sabotaging for the businesses in the long-run.

Dehumanizing

When working remotely, it can be easy to forget that there is a human-being behind each email address. Depending on the type of work, employees can become synonymous with — and indistinguishable from — their quantifiable output. This surveillance software further reduces workers to the sum of their data in a way that is undeniably dehumanizing.

Moreover, it is important to recognize precisely who these tools will largely be weaponized against. We’re not talking a bout lawyers, physicians, high ranking executives, and consultants. This software is for the aggressive surveillance of junior and low wage workers. It undercuts the humanity of those who are desperate to remain in work or to progress in their careers. These people are the most likely to willingly overwork themselves to avoid getting fired or overlooked for promotion or replaced by a robot .

On some level, mass deployment of these programs could be reinterpreted as a kind of abuse or exploitation of the most vulnerable sections of the workforce.

Some of this may sound a little dramatic, and one might argue that we’re still in “early days”, but intrusive employee surveillance systems like this are not new . In geographies like China where this software is more widely used, there are already signs of how much more invasive it could become.

Martin Parker notes that recently, “ that sense of managing as the art of ‘organizing’ to cope with challenges is largely obscured by the idea of the manager as someone who helps to create financial valu e for organizations .” This expectation explains why these tools are becoming a popular crutch for pseudo-strategicdecision-making. But in this time of uncertainty we should retreat to our human sensibilities, and avoid persecuting employees in their own homes just to squeeze a few more dollars of value from them.

If we don’t, though we may cultivate legions of productive and docile subordinates to execute repetitive tasks, we will undoubtedly lose the innovation and creativity that comes from being given the time and space to reflect.

This article was originally published on You The Data by Fiona J McEvoy . She’s a tech ethics researcher and the founder of YouTheDataom .

What the hell is a minimum lovable product? And why should designers care?

This article was written by Nick Babich and originally published on Built In .

One of the most severe fears product designers have is the fear of creating products that nobody wants to use. So how do you minimize the risk of product failure? The answer is simple — invest time building a minimum product to validate the product with target users. Today, creating an MVP (minimum viable product) is an essential part of many teams ’ product design strategy. By following the approach to “think big, start small,” product teams invest time and effort in building an MVP and testing it with the target audience. An MVP is not the only type of minimum product that product teams can make, however. The MLP, or minimum lovable product, represents another concept that is becoming popular among product designers.

If you’re working in product development, you may wonder what approach you should follow. Should you build MVP or MLP? Let’s dig in and see what each path offers in order to answer that question.

What is an MVP?

A minimum viable product is a version of the product with just an essential level of functionality that helps creators validate their hypothesis about its utility. Product teams build a solution, which can be anything from an early prototype to a full-fledged product , and test it with their target audience, i early adopters and/or potential customers. The goal of this testing is to understand whether the original vision for the product was correct.

Product design is an iterative process, and the goal of creating an MVP is to make the most of each iteration. If the product team realizes that it’s moving in the wrong direction, it can easily adjust its design strategy and create another MVP in the next iteration.

Key characteristics

Well-designed MVPs share the following characteristics:

Value . People won’t have any motivation to use a product that doesn’t bring any value to them. That’s why the set of features available in the MVP must deliver clear value to the customer. Evaluate your users ’ true needs; only after that should you invest time and effort in building a solution.

Reliability . The MVP should perform consistently well. Users should not face any unexpected failures while interacting with a product.

Usability . Good usability is an essential part of product design. The MVP should be both easy to learn and easy to use.

View the MVP as a solution to users ’ problems. Therefore, conducting user research to understand user needs and wants and building proper product characteristics is vital.

Advantages

The cost and time involved in creating the product are two significant advantages of an MVP. Since it contains only a bare minimum of features, it should be very cheap to produce. For the very same reason, it also shouldn’t take much time to design an MVP. These advantages empower product designers to test and validate various hypotheses in a short period.

Downsides

An MVP typically looks like an unpolished product, and first-time adopters rarely form an emotional connection with it. As a result, it becomes harder to predict how the product will behave in the real world and what emotional reaction this product will elicit. All you can determine by testing your MVP with the users is whether the functionality of this product works well.

What is an MLP?

An MLP, or minimum lovable product, is an evolution of the MVP concept. Steve Blank, the entrepreneur who popularized the MVP, once said , “You’re selling the vision and delivering the minimum feature set to visionaries, not everyone.” That may be true, but it’s much easier to sell the vision when you make people fall in love with your product. And that happens when products not only meet users ’ needs but also delight them. The MLP approach prioritizes emotionally engaging design — that means creating a design that makes users feel good about the product.

Key characteristics

An MLP shares the same characteristics of an MVP (value, reliability, and usability) but adds one new attribute — delight. When you create an MLP, you strive to provide surface delight via well-crafted animated effects, crisp microcopy, and lovely imagery as well as deep delight , which puts users into a state of flow and allows them to immerse themselves in the experience. Both surface and deep delight bring about positive user emotions, and emotions play an essential role in how they evaluate products. Products that foster positive emotions have a better chance of staying in our memory as something that we want to use repeatedly.

Advantages

An MLP is designed to be appealing. “Appealing” doesn’t necessarily mean creating a beautiful user interface, though. Instead, it means developing products that users will enjoy interacting with. The goal is to get a positive reaction from their interactions with a product. For example, you could use visual styles that you think your target audience will love. Thus, an MLP requires heavy engagement from users, and, in most cases, that means it leads to a better understanding of users ’ needs.

Downsides

Generally, creating an MLP takes more time than an MVP. To build an MLP, you first need to find out what features your target users love. To do that, you’ll need to invest more time in user research since it’s important to talk to the target audience and learn what makes them feel good in both real life and in the digital space. You’ll also have to spend more time refining a solution, testing your product and learning how it makes users feel, and then improving your design based on those findings. As a result, production costs for an MLP will be higher than for an MVP.

MVP OR MLP: WHICH IS BETTER?

“Should I go for an MVP or an MLP?” is a common question among product designers. If you have time and budget, it’s always better to raise the bar from viable to lovable. Why? Because when a product is lovable, it gives you additional competitive advantages. Adding love to your product’s ingredients will lead to better changes in your design, creating products that users will cherish from launch. Your product will also stand out from the competition, and this will give you an additional competitive advantage on the market.

But what to do when you don’t have enough time or budget for a full MLP? In this case, you can apply the Kano model , which will help you consider both product functionality and customer satisfaction. The Kano model can be represented as a two-axis diagram that maps customer satisfaction (on the vertical axis, from delight at the top to dissatisfaction at the bottom) against effort or investment (on the horizontal axis). Keep in mind that the features are evaluated from a customer perspective. Using this model, you will be able to decide which features and options will create the most value for users.

Ingredients for a great MLP

Here are a few simple rules that can help you save time and make your work on your MLP more effective:

Be clear about what user persona you’re targeting. It’s hard to build a product that satisfies the needs and wants of several user personas. Thus, identify your primary persona and design your product to satisfy its needs.

Focus on what’s important. Don’t try to add a lot of features to your MLP. When you try to solve every problem, you’ll end up creating a poor product. Start with a high-value problem for your users and define essential features, meaning one or two features that would most acutely address the problem of your target audience and ensure that you can deliver them in a timely way.

Clearly communicate your vision to your team. Ensure that every team member understands where you’re going, what you want to build and, more importantly, why. This understanding will motivate people to create something that other people will love.

Stay focussed. When you’re already working on an MLP, it might be tempting to add one or two extra features because you think that they’ll make your product more desirable for users. But it’s better to resist that temptation because you’ll end up having to invest more time and money into your MLP.

Listen to your users. If you don’t, you’ll never even build something that’s viable, let alone lovable. Ask what they think about your product. Start with a problem that users experience and ask questions like “What is the most stressful or painful part of this interaction/experience?”

Observe user reactions as they interact with your product. Watching your users’ reactions will help you to distinguish between a viable solution and a lovable solution. When users can’t shift their focus from the screen, that’s a good sign that they are highly engaged in interaction.

Key takeaway: Make it loveable

Both an MVP and an MLP represent the simplest versions of the product that can solve your users’ major problem. When you build an MVP, you create something that users can tolerate, but when you make an MLP, you create something that people will genuinely love. In many cases, lovable products work better because genuine excitement from using a product will guarantee better user engagement.