PowerPoint Engineering (PPE)

Sometimes products (and services) can be very large and complex. These sorts of products can be difficult to sell to the customer because the customer just doesn’t “get it”. Under these circumstances, marketers not only need to simplify the “sales story” but sometimes they also need to re-engineer the “perceived product”. This can sometimes result in a presentation being given to a customer that contains a slide entitled “System Architecture” and whose contents would be hotly debated by one of the company’s engineers. This is why this idea is sometimes called PowerPoint Engineering (PPE) by those marketers who engage in it.

The key points of the PPE approach are:

• The mind of the customer is far more important than the minds of the people who actually created the product. (Sorry to say, but the engineers may need to take a back seat on this one.)
• The components of the PPE product may be different to the real product. The architecture may be different too. (Although one would expect there to be many similarities too!)
• The PPE product/architecture must be fairly simple but at the same time it must be coherent, make sense and the customer should have some sense of personal mastery once they have understood it.
• The structure of the PPE product must support the sales story. In other words, when constructing the PPE architecture we must keep in mind the question “how are we going to explain this to the customer”.
• The components of the PPE must have nice, user-friendly, self-explanatory names.

The Application to TWiki

I am not sure if TWiki is complicated enough to warrant the full PPE treatment but I thought that I would post the whole 9 yards because I think the term PowerPoint Engineering is a good short hand way of describing the overall process of sanitizing engineering concepts for the benefit of the prospect/customer. Even so, I think we would do well to look at some of the terms used and how those terms fit together. For example, there is some debate in the marketing category of the terms that should be used in TWiki. Two examples of these are Web (proposal to rename to Wiki) and Topic (proposal to rename to Page). In addition to this I think we should brainstorm some of the other terms that we may like to look at. For example, Formatted Search, describes really well what this facility does – but it gives no sense of the power of this facility. Is this such a good name?

Some of the terms we choose to invent/rename may involve few changes to the TWiki code. Others may involve work for coders. We therefore need exercise restraint and make sure that we don’t invent things for the sake of it. We would therefore need to do a cost/benefit analysis for all terms we look at changing. And given that the benefits are going to be difficult to quantify this could lead to some very interesting debate!

-- Contributors: MichaelCorbett - 29 Aug 2007

Discussion

Another term for this is "Blue Boxing" (blue being most engineers favourite colour). I have tried several times to draw a blue-box diagram of TWiki, with varying amounts of success. It's easy to trivialise, and also easy to overcomplicate.

(Later: apparently this isn't a common term. Just shows what a sheltered life I have lead!)

-- CrawfordCurrie - 29 Aug 2007

Interesting concept, thanks for sharing!

-- PeterThoeny - 31 Aug 2007

One thing I have found useful is to think hard about feature naming (and positioning/explanation to users/customers) early in the development of the feature - by the time the feature is developed, it is often hard to change the name as it's embedded everywhere.

FormattedSearch is a good example, it's a very powerful feature that could be renamed and explained much better - along with some other advanced features of TWiki, it provides a way of rapidly constructing mini-applications.

I've also commented about this on TWikiMarketingMeeting2007x09x03.

(BTW there's a character encoding issue with the quotation marks entered via copy/paste above, e.g. “ resulting from “, probably from a Windows application - something we should fix to make the system more WYSIWYG and 'less surprising'... To follow up, see Support.CharsetChangeOnDakarUpgrade which already describes this issue.)

-- RichardDonkin - 31 Aug 2007