Evolvingwe

Hmmm… I wonder what’s not easy to read, thin, and under a pound?!?! 

Business

Over the weekend I finished Rework and figured I’d share some quotes from it as well. This book was excellent and the perfect complimentary read to Linchpin.  There was a lot of overlap and similar concepts.  While Linchpin was more psychology, Rework gets a little more practical and specific in it’s advice.  Now, onto the quotes..

“Another common misconception: You need to learn from your mistakes/ What do you really learn from mistakes?  You might learn what not to do again…You still don’t know what you should do next.”

They go onto to talk about how the best learning comes from success.  This, IMO, is like choosing to build your product based on it’s strengths and not it’s weaknesses.  If you’ve done something well then chances are you can do it even better the next time because you will have learned from the success.

“We’re just as proud about what we don’t do as we are of what they do… We’re willing to lose some customers if it means that others love our products intensely… if you had to launch your business in two weeks, what would you cut” 

Just a reminder of the classic advice that you can’t make everyone happy.  I also loved the discussion that follows about how the are OK when customers outgrow their software. 

“The business world is littered with dead documents that do nothing but waste people’s time, reports that no one reads, diagrams that no one looks at, and specs that never resemble the finished product.  These things take forever to make, but only seconds to forget.” 

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen a 60 page specification written when only 10 pages of the functionality are implemented. It’s so much easier to say yes when you are months away from doing something than it is when you are right about to do it.   The ones that read the document are blinded by the end of the story about the awesome thing they saw in their heads… which wasn’t really the key part of the feature being described.  The writing it just not consistently that good.

In our last cycle there was an opinion that we never wrote specs or planned features.  The reality is that, if you lined up the work item descriptions, comps, and real mock-ups we generated nearly 300 pages of documentation.  But the hit rate on those 300 pages was MUCH higher than if we’d started out be trying to write 300 pages of functionality. In retrospect we were working hard to remove “the illusion of agreement” that Jason described. 

When it comes to reports… I’ve also written my share of reports that I’m pretty sure I could have filled with LOLcats… and no one would have noticed.  Critical data doesn’t need to be repeatedly shared.  One time analysis, when it’s needed, is MUCH more powerful than regular, de-humanized, status.  So, my advice would be to at least try and humanize any required status reports you make and come up with one insightful stat that means something to everyone that week.

“If what you’re doing really worth it?  is this meeting worth pulling size people off their work for an hour? Is it worth pulling an all-nighters tonight, or could you just finish it up tomorrow. “

One of the best managers I’ve had put it to me this way “If a difference of 1-3 months matters that much then what you were doing probably wasn’t going to succeed anyway.”  Not weeks… MONTHS. 

“Interruption is not collaboration, it’s just interruption. And when you are interrupted you’re not getting work done. “

One of the advantages of being a remote worker is that I get 2-3 hours of “alone zone” time.  It really is when I’m most productive.  I’m not sure how anyone in the office gets real work done without working 12 hour days sometimes.  I also enjoyed Reworks rant against meetings that followed this. 

“Meet at the site of the problem instead of a conference room. Point to real things and suggest real changes”

+1

“… estimates that stretch weeks, months, and years into the future are fantasies. The truth is you don’t know what’s going to happen that far in advance”.

This continued Reworks assault on traditional planning.   Do you think the release known as “windows phone 7” was actually on Microsoft’s roadmap… or did it completely break the long term plan when they saw the market rejecting Windows Mobile?

“How should you keep track of what Customer want?  Don’t. Listen, but then forget what people said… The requests that really matter are the ones you’ll hear over and over… You won’t be able to forget them. “

I’ve found this VERY true.  The important bugs, features, and requests will simply keep coming up. The ones that seem important to one customer, when it’s not repeated, is probably not that important.

“Geography just doesn’t matter anymore. Hire the best talent regardless of where it is.”

+1

“The more people you have between your customers words and the people doing the work, the more likely it is that the message will get lost or distorted along the way.”

I tweeted “Second hand feedback kills” a week or so ago.  This could not be more true.  The people that file the best customer reports are the people that simply post verbatims or even recordings of what the customers actually said and know how to ask the best questions.  No interpretation can substitute for the customers actual words.  The skill is not in the translation… it’s in the interview.  The answers should speak for themselves.

“There are four-letter words you should never use in business… they’re need, must, can’t, easy, just, only, and fast. When you use these four letter words, you create a black and white situation. But the truth is rarely black and white.“

+1

“Create a rock star environment… there’s a ton of untapped potential trapped under lame policies, poor direction, and stifling bureaucracies. Cut the crap and you’ll find people are waiting to do great work. They just need to be given the chance.”

This was the part of the book that really overlapped with Linchpin.  The simple point was to create an environment where the linchpins can thrive and you’ll get more out of everyone. 

Just like Linchpin, there are a bunch of quotes I didn’t share with you all, but that’s why you should read the book.  

Business book, inspired, review, rework, simple

Thanks to the birth of our first son I’ve been granted a lot of reading/feeding time.  You could say that this was baby Gabe’s first book.  I can’t say what he thought about the book, but I can say that I really enjoyed it.  It was the first book I’ve read using the Amazon Kindle service.  I don’t have a kindle so it was 100% absorbed through my iPhone and the PC app.   Along the way I highlighted some quotes and wanted to share them…

“…Achkowledge to yourself that the factory job is dead.”

“Having a factory job is not a natural state. It wasn’t at the heard of being human until very recently. We’ve been culturally brainwashed”.

I love how Seth correctly describes how “white collar” work has been successfully converted to a factory system over the last 100 years and how that’s now made the majority of our workforce replaceable.  There are even whole books dedicated to how you can create your own software factories. So not even “modern” jobs like software engineering are safe from the commoditization… and who wants to be a cog… which of course becomes the key part of the book. How to avoid being a cog.

“Answering questions like ‘when was the war of 1812 is a useless skill in an always on wikipedia world”

I found this in a chapter about how our educational system brainwashes us from the start to worry about questions like this.  It made me very grateful that my parents rejected public schooling in my area.  Most of my education focused on answering the why’s and hypothetical’s instead of the what’s.  I missed out on brainwashing. 

“Six-Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units.  The problem is that once you’re heading down this road there is no room for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. “

This explained, to me, why pursuing training in the ways of Six-Sigma never interested me. It’s learning a skill that takes you down the path of a solved problem for perfecting execution… which isn’t interesting to me.  It’s the perfect example of how white collar work has been turned into a factory line. 

“Artists think along the edges of the box, because that’s where things get done.  That’s where the audience is, that’s where the means of production are (still) available, and that’s where you can make an impact. “

This statement tackles the absurdity of “thinking outside the box”.  The real win is doing something on the edge of possible that keeps pushing the goal line at the intersection of innovation, audience, and possible to ship.

“You work with people who are totally at the mercy of the resistance. They assist the devil by being his advocate in meetings. They follow the rule book, even parts you didn’t know about. They love what worked before and fear what might be coming. “

There is a lot of talk about “the resistance” and “the lizard brain” that comes from our evolutionary heritage where survival comes first and change is scary.  I thought there was some oversimplification of these points, but it served the book well.  Everyone has a resistance in them that tries to prevent us from making forward progress, improving ourselves, and shipping something outstanding.  The resistance could include fear, office politics, and generally worrying about things you have no control over.  You do, however, have control over what you do every day and a chance to do something awesome with your time instead of 20 things that are merely good.

“In a world with only a few indispensible people the linchpin has only two elegant choices: 1. Hire plenty of factory workers and scale like crazy. Take advantage of the fact that most people want a map… 2. Find a boss who can’t live without a linchpin.  Fine a boss who adequately values your scarcity and your contribution, who will reward you with freedom and respect. Do the work, make a difference”.

That sort of speaks for itself.

There were a lot more sections that I highlighted to share with you, but i committed that I’d ship something on a deadline so here we are. 

Business artist, factory, indespensible

My Starbucks has slow service and they are going to improve.  How do I know this?  They’ve posted it right next to where I pick up my drink.  They seem to be posting the results, each month, of the local customer satisfaction cards for everyone, including their employees to see.  They aren’t shy about this feedback either.  I learned yesterday the Starbucks down the road “puts out stale food that isn’t fit to be sold!”  

What does a manager have to do to tell them to work faster… show them what the people paying them had to say. Starbucks was clearly ahead of the curve when they were one of the first companies to employee the mystarbucksidea.com concept and this, IMO, is the next logical step. 

They need to arm their local outlets with the same sort of tools to connect with customers, publish their feedback, and respond.  Enter the “hyperlocal ideation” age.  It’s only a matter of time before they will want software to manage this process once this concept proves popular.  Heck, every star bucks I go to already has a big-screen that could show this information. 

Combine the data from cards, online surveys, a group created for that branch, foursquare tips, etc and you can get an idea of the type of BI that a local manager could soon be armed with to improve business. 

Business ideation, starbucks, transparency

Everyone believes that their product has a few strengths, This is the set of things that your product does better than anything else out there.  If you didn’t you wouldn’t be building it right?  But do you really know what those strengths are?

The reality is that you have very little to do with what your true product strengths are.  True product strengths (or TPS for office space fans out there) is really defined in the intersection of what you do well and how customers use the product you sell them. 

On the left side you see “Employee Talents”. This is what you are good at building and what you may currently be defining your product strengths as.  On the right side you see customer usage.  This is how your customers are using the product you sell.  In the middle is your TPS… this is the set of things that you really do excel at that combines the two. 

Strength based product development would be a set of practices that focus on growing the True Product Strengths intersection by focusing on them.  A very simplified set of practices could be incorporated into any development methodology:

1. Self Evaluation – Always re-evaluate your employee talents, what you are good at building, and define the list on the left hand side. 
2. Customer Listening – Working with your customers to identify what parts of your product they really love and leverage you for.
3. Create your TPS Report – Create the unison (TPS).
4. Prioritize the TPS items in your development.

It’s not rocket science and any good company is doing at least #1 or #2, but doing it right involves combining the two into step 3. 

The side effect of doing this right… You will stop focusing on your weaknesses and your requirements become absolutely clear. Other than baseline requirements for all products like security, performance, etc you are wasting time you spend not focusing on TPS.  Features & requirements that don’t focus on TPS will only frustrated your teams since they aren’t good at delivering those things and your customers will complain they get things they don’t need to pay for.

Executing strength based development properly will result in growing the true strengths of your product, employees will love working on things they are good at, and customers will be delighted that you are delivering more of the things they already love about your product. 

Business development, program-management, tps

It’s that time of year and as Frank Costanza famously said… “I’ve got a lot of problems with you people…”

This years list is a large one so bear with me.

Google Chrome and every other company that decided to release their own web browser – I love you, but you’ve added yet another browser to test web applications against. You should therefore be required to all contribute to an agreed upon suite of tests (ACID is fun, but isn’t real in the least) and test harnesses that web developers can run to validate their applications look identically pristine in all browsers.  I also hate  you because you remind me how much I despise the market share IE6 still enjoys and the 35% development tax that must be paid to support it.

 Social Media Experts that grow on trees. You people are as useful as the so-called SEO experts you all used to be and the talking heads on 24 hour cable news channels.  I’m glad I’m not on any of these lists.  You can game social media just like SEO, but the crimes are going to catch up to the poor companies who bought your advice. 

The immutable laws are now that the web is social & that people will go where-ever the best conversations and content lives.  If you don’t have something worth talking about and good content to seed discussions with then it doesn’t matter what else you do. This goes for your companies intranet as well. 

Twitter has a spam problem it’s ignoring. I’m sure a social media expert has a strategy bullet for it, but I call it thread hopping.  Just about every post I make earns me a public reply with someone offering their services, asking me to try out schmap-it-a-ma-gass, or (not kidding) buy an official festivus poll from their site.  Don’t create an inbox you want people to check if you aren’t going to prevent spam from getting to that inbox.  Don’t get me started about the # of spam followers I have that get to send messages directly to my real inbox.

I’m sorry that, like the underpant gnomes, you haven’t figured out what step 2 is on your 3-step plan for profiteering and world domination.  That does not, however, excuse you from continuing to dupe users into making their content public so you can serve more pages.  I suspect a lot of them starting using your service because they believed (wrongly) that it was more private than posting everything to flickr and public blogs. 

The message I received logging into facebook one day was “We think you may have set your privacy settings incorrectly…” because I had locked down a lot of content.  Trust me, if a user found their way to your security panel… the action was very intentional and they do not want to open up their lives.  I accept that if I post something online there is no place that’s really private but I don’t accept the assumption that your users were dumb and really meant to do something else.

People that don’t realize they can change the channel. These are the app developers that complain about the App Store approval process and the lack of one for Facebook apps.  The solution is simple… don’t play.  Write a mobile web app or go build an opensocial widget instead. 

The SQL Express management console installation process. Have you done this lately?  There is nothing “express” about it.  It’s easier to install the operating system. At least it asked less questions.  Yes, this made the list because I did it today.

Anyone that confuses Excel with Infopath or a documentation tool. Excel is awesome for spreadsheets, graphs, calculations, etc.  Word is awesome at word processing.  Excel is a terrible word processor and Word is a terrible spreadsheet.  Lets all agree to use the right tool for the job.  How the heck to you enter a line break in Excel anyway?  Bullets?  Sometimes I think the worst thing Microsoft did was make the office products work so well together that people think you only need one of them.  Yes, I had to do this today too. 

Fairy tales sold as business books. I may agree with your concepts and will implement any good advice I receive regardless of the source.  But I want you to come back to me when you have case studies, hard data, and real success stories.  Until then you should have stop your analogy at the level of a long blog post.  It would have been just as insightful. (Perhaps even more so as a manifesto)  But there is no need to stretch out a storyline in a non-fiction book.

Major League Baseball is broken.  I don’t know how you are going to fix it, but when one team can command a payroll of 5 other teams combined and 6 umpires can blow a foul ball call by 1 foot there is not competitive balance. And I’m not just a whiney Red Sox fan.  They enjoy the same unfair advantage that the Yankees have in terms of relative payroll… the Yankees just did a better job exploit
ing the system this year. Every other sport seems to have solved this problem and now it’s your turn. 

If you’ve read this far I hope you can see this post for the humor it was intended to be.  I really do love Baseball, Chrome, Facebook, Twitter, etc… but there will always be a list of grievances. And it’s no fun to complain about things you really do hate.

Happy Holidays everyone!

Business baseball, facebook, management, office, twitter

Jana sent around a set of questions to the Product PM team at Telligent today that made me write up this blog entry about some of my favorite 2009 things related to our work life.

1. What was your favorite work-related or field related or technical read for 2009 (white paper, book, etc)

My favorite read this year was Predictably Irrational.  It is a great follow-up to Freakonomics that was better than SuperFrekonimics.  They explore some great topics such as…

• Why we like Doing something less (often) if we are paid… which really helps explain why money is NOT the only motivating factor managers have at their disposal.
• Why people are drawn to “Free” even if it costs more.
• Why a 50 cent aspirin works better than a 1 cent aspirin.

Runners up: Art of Agile Development & SuperFreakonimics

2. What was your favorite new Telligent feature for 2009?

Easily enterprise microblogging and activity streams with replies. The simplicity of a service like this really drives up adoption.

Runners up: Drag and Drop to build themes – Embed Reports from Telligent Analytics like youtube videos in your sites.

3. What was your favorite enhancement for Telligent products in 2009?

V2 of our Web services API. Lets me do all sorts of cool things like build a Social Connector for Outlook 2010 in a much simpler, less chatty way.

4. Favorite external app/product/feature you used in 2009?

Probably Tokbox.  As a team we’ve become dependant on the real time video communication it enables. You can also embed it into Telligent Evolution pages to create virtual meeting rooms. I can’t imagine our remote developemt working as well as it does without this service.

Runners Up:  GoWalla & Twitter

Business best, features, telligent, tokbox

Remote employees – You probably know one of these slackers by now.  Their office is listed in the address book as “remote” or <blank> and you don’t see them in the office much.  You are pretty sure they are doing anything but working because you can’t given them your patented “case of the Mondays” nod in the elevator every day.  Well, this is your glimpse into the future. Imagine if 50% of your workforce today wasn’t in the office – what would change? In this future there will be winners and losers…

Winners

1. India, Tennessee, and Suburban Sprawl – If it doesn’t matter where your employees are located then you can find the best or cheapest talent match for each open position.  Outsourcing doesn’t have to mean out of the country, but that the same technologies that empower remote work enable traditional outsourcing as well so that will continue to be part of the answer.  It could mean you find those wonderfully talented and strange people that just don’t want to leave their home town in rural Tennessee or Arkansas.  Having the right tools and process in place also means that more work could simply be done at home even if your employees live within “commute” distance of the office.
2. Coffee Shops & Shared Office spaces that embrace “remoters” – I have two coffee shops near me and it breaks my heart that I can’t go to the local one that has better coffee in the afternoons. As coffee snobs they view people on laptops as pests instead of a money making opportunity.  People are social in nature and it most of us can’t work in 100% isolation from (in person) humanity all day every day.  We don’t want to commute 2 hours a day, but we do want the social experience.   The people at my local Starbucks seem to get this.  I get free wi-fi for using my starbucks gift card once a month and they sell me treats by offering me free samples while I’m working. 
3. Collaborative Software Vendors – If the amount of geo-distributed work increases then money that was once spent on the square footage to hold whiteboards, hallways, cubicles, and water coolers will go towards alternative solutions.  If you can replace the meeting rooms, hallway conversations, and water cooler chit chat and you are poised to capture some of this money.  I think the buzz-word is “real time”, but I think I’ve been living in it too long to not just see it all as complimentary to asynchronous communication.
4. Geo-Location Services – I’m not sure why I separated this from collaborative software, but it’s also great to know where your co-workers are and why. Foursquare is not just a game. There is business potential there.
5. Airlines – There is truth to the fact that face to face collaboration can’t be thrown out the window altogether so remote workers are also going to be hoping on airplanes more frequently. Hopefully, one day, to meet in neutral locations for irreplaceable face time.
6. The environment – Less people stuck in traffic for an hour a day is a good thing.
7. Free Time – If a remote employee wants to work an 8 hour day… it only takes 8 hours.  No one gets more money for more travel time in most salaried positions. You get rewarded on work done and not the time spent getting there. 

Losers

1. Geo Centered Companies – If a company is not exploring the potential of remote work and their competition is then that company is in trouble.  They are artificially limiting their hiring pool… which can be a very bad thing if the hiring pool in your area is either expensive (Silicon Valley) or talent limited like it might be for tech employees in other cities. 
2. Drive Through Coffee Shops – These places serve commuters… less commuters = less drive through coffee.  Of course I imagine these venders will find other ways to expand their business.
3. Micro-Managers – If your idea of being a manager is to be constantly looking over your employees shoulders then you are going to find this practice increasingly more difficult when half of your employees aren’t within eyeshot. If your company creates a vision of success, sets great goals, and can measure effectiveness then you’ll be much better off managing remote employees.  But these things are always the case anyway right? 
4. Poor Performers & Bad Communicators – If your idea of being a good employee is to wait for something to happen or your micro-managing boss to tell you want to do then you will not thrive in this environment.  Good employees will communicate well regardless of their environment.  Working remotely stresses the importance of mastering all aspects of good communication and self direction in a way that most poor performing employees will fail completely.  So the weight here is on the employee as much as the management.

What do you think?  Who will benefit the most and least from this world?

Business

Every other week our product team completes an iteration and holds a demo meeting to showcase new features, improvements, comps, spike results, etc.  We do this meeting online via LiveMeeting & a phone conference system.  We average around 50 participants (including customers & partners!) and 4-8 presenters each week.  It’s a circus and we’ve learned a lot…

1. Be a participant too – If you are the organizer of the meeting and not a solo presenter you need to know what the viewers are seeing.  I typically log into our meetings as both the presenter and as an attendee on a separate machine.  This way I get a sense of how the content & demos are translating for everyone else.  If you are busy presenting make sure you have someone else playing the observer role to give you feedback. 

2. Have a presenter backchannel – Our team is always on IM and our demo presentations are no exception.  It’s a great way to pass along signals like “Lets wrap this up” or “You’ve got time for one more”.

3. Log in early and test the links – No one likes hearing whatever terrible hold music your company has and it’s no fun making sure the links work in the first 5 minutes of the meeting.

4. Practice Demos in Advance – I always know ahead of time what demos are going to go better than others.  The best demos are the ones done by the people that sent me a screencast before the meeting.  They’ve already figured out the rough script (all it takes is one/two tries really) and tend to keep them more concise & to the point without “click-wandering” through the feature.

5. Assume people will miss the event – And post the results, videos, & recordings afterwards to get feedback from people that couldn’t make it live. 

6. Bump up the color settings – Livemeeting, in particular, defaults to 256 colors.  If most of your participants are going to have a broadband connection please adjust the colors up. Here is a quick tutorial…

Share your slides or application.

Hover at the top of the screen to pull down this menu…

Click sharing options

Open the display tab on the sharing options screen

Change to 16 or 24 bit color.

Rejoice at the glory of broadband meetings!

Remember that all the presenters need to do this since there is no “Meeting Default” that I’ve found.

7. Be aware of your screen size – Not everyone in the world has a 24”cinema display 2560-by-1600-pixel resolution screen.  Either adjust your resolution down to a more reasonable 1280×768 or shrink your application window down.  Otherwise the viewers will be scrolling their screen to keep up.  Livemeeting doesn’t scale the display.

8. Be wary of desktop sharing – Sharing your whole desktop could cause a scrolling issue if you have a large screen, but if you don’t need to switch apps during your presentation then only share the app. This will maintain viewer focus and they won’t see all of your mail, messenger, twitter, & facebook alerts popping up.  Wife IMs FTL.

9. Avoid scrolling quickly – Be aware that, for the viewers, it takes a while for the screen to refresh sometimes.  Assume there is a couple seconds of lag time.  If you scroll down, click something, and the page refreshes…. most people will miss it.  Pause at the point of action and explain what you are clicking on.

10. Set ground rules & paint the room – We’ll often have a welcome slide we leave up while people are logging in that explains that QnA is to be held, mute phones if you aren’t presenting, how many people are in attendance, etc.  I’ll also re-enforce those messages at the start of the presentations by saying something like “50 is the crowd today”.  It’s easy to think, when you are alone in your office, that it’s just you and the presenter… so describe the room and who is in it.

I’ve probably missing something, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while and wanted to capture these off the top of my head for posterity.  Enjoy!

Business livemeeting, presenting, tips

Your next customers. They are coming from Facebook.  You need to welcome them with open arms, make it easy for them to sign-in, and bring all their friends to your community. 

Which brings me to news that was too cool for me to just tweet.  Telligent’s friends at 4-Roads have developed a Facebook Connect module for Community Server that you can implement on your Community Server site today!  The module is Nexus and it’s pretty cool.  Here is my own crude visualization:

And here is a video that illustrates the results you can expect…

On a more serious note.  Facebook is going to remain a central location for users, a starting point online, and essentially represent the mainland of the online world… but you have these cool islands you want people to visit.  People do all sorts of cool things on your island they can’t do on facebook… but you need to build them bridges to the island.  This lets you do just that. 

Check out http://www.4-roads.com/shops/products/nexus_5F00_personal.aspx for more information.

Business community-server, facebook, partner