I’m Liking It!

3/13/07

My second blog entry – Thanks team for shaming me into this. I kind of like it!

It was the second and last day of our Oxygen Media Ad Sales conference in Miami Florida today and typical of such events there was the perfunctory closing remarks (glad handing, thanks, Rah! Rah!, etc.). Believe me even though this is my first O2 sales/marketing conference, I have been to plenty as I worked as a sales professional albeit in another industry for 5+ years. I have no concerns that this combined team will meet or surpass its goals for the year.

We had a great speaker today about personal performance – Raquel Malo, Energy for Performance. Everything she said about personal performance seemed reasonable. Her biggest point was to make sure you maximize focus/energy for whatever you are doing in life (professional, personal, etc.). In other words make it count. This has always been a personal belief of mine.

My thoughts about her talk was does the same apply to teams? My belief is “yes”. I look at my teams and those of others responsible for creating products at Oxygen Media and I think it’s also true. If teams maximize focus and energy they tend to achieve goals.

The process we use in software development (Agile Development) certainly is designed around this key concept so it supports this premise and indeed I think most would agree that we achieve this at Oxygen.

Another, example that became very obvious to me at this Ad Sales conference was our programming department. Although I am observing this as an outsider it seems like a few years ago that we focused on too many different kinds of programming. In the last couple of years the team has really focused on romantic comedy and reality as a concept (primarily with a few exceptions) and we have really had a few hits and I think the ratings show the results of the focus and energy. Debbie Beece and her team deserve a great deal of credit for this change and momentum.

A counter example though is that I feel our online offering suffers greatly from a lack of focus and building out significant features that our audience expects. The net result is that we are too scattered. We have too many ideas and features none of which is really prioritized higher than any other one. We tend to try and do too many things rather than less of them but really focused on the consumer.