Ravi’s Blog

One of the key principles i have realized over time is about operational Friction. Everyone is competing for the same rewards. What seperates winners from losers is that their product or business is somehow “better”. We have seen countless examples of products with better/more features lose out against seemingly worse competitors. What this means is that in the overall context of making things better, easier, faster, cheaper, somewhere the loser is weaker and thus worse overall. The “product/business” with lowest overall friction wins.

In order to win, not only you have to have products with better features, they need to be cheaper, easier, simpler to operate, market, sell, use. Everytime a customer has to call customer support because something went wrong, it’s friction. Everytime a customer has to interact with multiple parties to get their work done, it’s more friction. Every time an engineer has to make changes to push a data feed, it’s friction. It might only take 5 mins of engineer’s time, but it’s friction none the less. If there’s no self-service way of doing a task, and we have to have a human review things, it’s friction.

To be clear friction cannot be eliminated. In some situations, some problems may be too hard to solve (currently) without any friction. For example, verifying quality and relevance of a website when it gets submitted for inclusion into yahoo! directory or open directory. Another example is of security screening the baggage and people at the airport.

I hope i am making sense. Essentially, the friction could be business process friction (security screening), or technology friction, or automation friction or may be some other kind of friction. But friction is life and it is inhibiting.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 20th, 2005 at 9:47 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.