Now what?04/10/2009
So, I'm working on this thing
Rather than continue to preach and not practice, I figured it was about time to start making some progress on turning an idea into a real live product.
I was really lucky to find a friend who not only could code up an initial prototype, but also shares some important product values (an underrated benefit in my mind when just starting out).
We’re not ready to release, unleash, launch, or whatever your favorite exaggerated term is yet…but if you’re interested you can follow us (on our blog, or Twitter) as we make our product from scratch. Hopefully, there will be lots of valuable learning along the way.
(Quick pitch: Do you ever forget why you were following someone, or wondered why some people were following you? We’re hoping our app can solve problems like these…If you want help, add your email to be notified when it’s ready)
ps: To the people active on Tumblr, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc…at what point does it become difficult for you to keep up with the people you’re following? ie: How many people can you follow before it becomes confusing to keep who’s who straight? 50+, 100+, 500+?” Thanks!
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01/31/2009
John Carmack on making games
Lots of solid advice from John Carmack (of id fame) in an old Slashdot thread:
“There is not a hell of a lot of difference between what the best designer in the world produces, and what a quite a few reasonably clued in players would produce at this point. This is the “abstract creativity” aspect. This part just isn’t all that valuable. Not worthless, but it isn’t the thing to wrap a company around.”
“The real value in design is the give and take during implementation and testing. It isn’t the couple dozen decisions made at the start, it is the thousands of little decisions made as the product is being brought to life, and constantly modified as things evolve around it.The focus should be on the development process, not the (initial) design.”
“The games with 500 page design documents before any implementation are also kidding themselves, because you can’t make all the detail decisions without actually experiencing a lot of the interactions.”
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01/30/2009
Any definition of success is bound up with time.
From an interview with Demetri Martin:
We live in time. So any definition of success is bound up with time. With other things you can say, “Can I yo-yo? Can I juggle?” Usually you have a pretty small window in which to get your answer. The question is - “Will I enjoy this?”
Because by enjoying it enough, now I have a nice big window. You can suspend judgment and make that hole very big. If I make my window ten days for stand-up, the conclusion is that I failed and that I’m not good at stand-up. If I make it ten years—if I just wait (and work at it) —the conclusion might be something totally different.
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01/21/2009
via Thomas Freidman.
This quote is probably the main reason I got into product management in the first place. If you are a person who’s capable of helping people make things (either dreaming things up or making existing things faster, better, etc…) then your skills will always be in demand.
ps: I’m also hoping this is a good example of making fundamental vs. instrumental career choices (jump to slide 47 for more)
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01/13/2009
That’s why most designers make awful team members. It’s why, when the biz dev guy says “this is how our startup is going to make money,” our first inclination is to tear the living shit out of the idea.
But what designers need to understand is that nobody likes a negative blocker, and when we attack an idea, it feels personal to the guy with the idea, and invariably leads to us being left out, which is that last thing we want.
Fortunately the solution is simple: just force yourself to come up with an alternate solution. It’s a great mental exercise - think to yourself, “what’s the solution I want to see?” If I can’t come up with one, I won’t say anything. Better to be quiet and see how things progress than to be the negative blocker guy.
„via Derek Powazek’s “Things I Learned the Hard Way”
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01/11/2009
Work on Stuff that Matters (aka: how we can turn our economy around)
Tim O’Reilly’s got a great New Year’s themed post out, titled “Work on Stuff that Matters”. Here a few of my favorite quotes from it:
“You should regard money as fuel for what you really want to do, not as a goal in and of itself. Money is like gas in the car — you need to pay attention or you’ll end up on the side of the road — but a well-lived life is not a tour of gas stations!”
“Whatever you do, think about what you really value. The time you spend understanding your values will help you find the right kind of company or institution to work for, and when you find it, to do a better job.”
“If you’re thinking more about the competition than you are about customers and the value you’re going to create for them, you’re on the wrong path”
“You may sometimes find that others have made more of your ideas than you have yourself. It’s OK. If your goal is really big, then you’ll want your competitors to jump on the bandwagon and help spread the word”
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01/07/2009
via John Battelle.
I think this could also apply to careers or individual roles. What argument(s) would you put on your resume?
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01/04/2009
How do you solve problems?
Came across an interesting post by Matt Gemmel on the decline of real problem solving among software developers (and probably our Google-ified society overall)
The problem is that this person’s problem-solving technique is to ask for the solution. Not to seek advice on how to approach the task, or ask for the names of likely classes to look into, or a link to an example - but to just ask for the code, fully formed and ready to go.
But problem solving skills are not a secret handed out at institutions of higher education, it’s just how things work…Here’s a secret: willingness and desire to learn are the true qualifications, not ability. If you want someone to spend time and effort (especially if it’s time they’re giving freely), then you’d better earn it.
So next time you’re considering asking a question, you’d better be ready with a convincing answer when you’re asked “What have you tried?”
If your answer amounts to “not a lot”, take my word for it: the next question you get back will be “then why should I help you?”
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via Tim Ferriss
Quote posted at 00:41
10/26/2008
Once you have learned how to speak, what will you say?
Lots of great quotes and career advice from this talk, titled Beyond Flash, including:
You will become known for doing what you do. Many people seem to think they must endure a “rite of passage” which, once passed, will allow them to do the kind of work they want to do. Then they end up disappointed that this day never comes. Find a way to do the work you want to do, even if it means working nights and weekends. Once you’ve done a handful of excellent things in a given way, you will become known as the person who does excellent things in that given way.
Text posted at 15:26
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» Building Web Apps Together
notes from the talk above:
• technical wife and a design husband: and 9 months later a website is born
• product development is more like sculpting not painting
• must know the spectrum of technologies that we use to build the web
• make revisions while the mocks are “easy to throw away”
• we have to win lots of arguments as to why we make decisions
• everyone responds well to having an interface presented to them
• designers shouldn’t be afraid of developers
• don’t hand them a spec and say “build that”….have collaboration early on.
• “it’s difficult for me to respect something I don’t understand”
• “developers know what’s possible more than designers”
• everyone on this panel is a generalist
• the voice of your product is something important for everyone to understand
• “process is an anecdote to stupid people”
• how can designers make themselves easier to work with? “show you’re working”, ie: share philosophical pretensions/beliefs, explain the models in their thinking.
• learn SVN
• the design quality of your prototype should reflect how done your actual product is
Overall, the talk was a high quality hour of discussion from battle-tested people. It’ll help to guide me on what I should be learning more of (“the spectrum of technologies that we use to build the web”, SVN) and how I should be interacting with people going forward.
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05/11/2008
The small things add up
via Joel Spolsky’s post on User Interface Design:
That’s what days were like. A bunch of tiny frustrations, and a bunch of tiny successes. But they added up. Even something which seems like a tiny, inconsequential frustration affects your mood. Your emotions don’t seem to care about the magnitude of the event, only the quality.
UI is important because it affects the feelings, the emotions, and the mood of your users. If the UI is wrong and the user feels like they can’t control your software, they literally won’t be happy and they’ll blame it on your software.
update on 1/11/09: see also “Retired by not forgotten”
Text posted at 20:04
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Reverse engineer your job description
One of the best things I did during my recent job search was to collect key bullet points from my favorite job descriptions (see: http://jobs.37signals.com/categories/3/jobs.rss). Subscribing to the job feeds was an easy way to see what was out there, and it made my procrasting with RSS reading somewhat productive :)
Even better, if you’re lucky you’ll get asked what key things you’d like to work on at your new job, and you’ll already have a list waiting. And you can also use that same list to keep yourself honest and make sure you’re working on what matters to you.
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