Code Yellow

Code Yellow – Not for the Faint of Heart Teachings from True University applied in real time

When Jeff Veen, user experience expert and CEO of Typekit, spoke at True University, he made a brief reference to “Code Yellow,” several days or weeks when his tech team sequestered themselves to troubleshoot and solve a technical problem. In hospital speak, Code Yellow alerts medical staff of an impending emergency: a multi-trauma situation, natural disasters, bomb scares etc. According to Jeff, Typekit’s “emergency” was that its service was getting severely pummeled by new users with the launch of About.me. (Typekit offers their fonts for users’ profile designs.) A serious fix required the tech team to hole up until the problem was solved.

The hunker-down concept gave us an idea. The GigaOM executive team, comprised of technology, marketing, sales and editorial, decided to have its own version of Code Yellow – a series of afternoon meetings every day for three weeks about our subscription product, GigaOM Pro. GigaOM.com reports on technology while GigaOM Pro is where we analyze the impact of technology on businesses, providing timely research and access to over 80 analysts for a mere $199 a year.

GigaOM Pro has been live for two years now, and we need to figure out how to take it to the next level. Each day we looked at the business from various angles: business model, customer profile, conversions from GigaOM.com, customer communications, pricing, marketing strategies, and of course, our very ambitious business goals for the next two years. We even managed to squeeze in a customer survey. Here are the True U “profs” that we influenced our Code Yellow discussions, and what we used from their teachings:

●             Jeff Veen, CEO, Typekit (Code Yellow concept)

●             Alex Osterwalder, Author, Business Model Generation (thinking about our business model, and other alternatives)

●             Kenny Van Zant, COO, Asana (“golden motion” and competing against free)

●             Steve Blank, Stanford Professor & Author, Four Steps to Epiphany (customer development process)

Throughout Code Yellow, and as our collective wisdom increased through our discussions, we were able to immediately implement some measures and plan out others to take place in short order:

●             We identified a number of “holes” in the strategy we needed to fill, and began documentation to create a shared view.

●             We realized that we needed to better understand our customers and immediately fielded a survey of 4,000 subscribers and achieved a 10% response rate

●             We figured out our golden motion (web-based user action) and focused our product and landing-pages around only that.

●             We created a strategic framework for growth, identified the key drivers to achieve our goals, and presented these to our board.

●             We began work on a strategy and operating plan for the employees to get us all moving in the same direction.

Note: This was originally written by Alison Murdock of GigaOm.  It was reprinted here with her permission.