6 month rule for big changes

As talk heats up about new year’s resolutions, I wanted to share a lesson from my first manager that has served me well over the years.

I have never one to be very patient and when I was working at my first company, I got a call from one of the biggest players in the natural language technology industry to come and join them. I had to make a tough decision. I loved my current job, but it was a small company and I was not really doing NLP work at that time. The company had loads of promise though and was just fun. The other company was the one everyone wanted to work for in Belgium and the reason why I had majored in computational linguistics. I was torn.

Not sure if he shared it in this context, but my manager shared with me that he always made tough decisions by a 6 month rule. If you feel frustrated about your job, give it six months and see if you still feel the same. Likewise, if you think about switching roles, give it six month and still see if you feel passionate about it then. And so on.

It protects you from making big decisions based on short term frustrations, the general ups and downs of your career & life or the infatuations of the moment.

It made sense intellectually but at the same time it felt excruciatingly slow as it all took place during the “internet bubble” times where it all felt about grabbing opportunities NOW.

I did wait however (as that company wasn’t going anywhere) and it was one of the best decisions I made. Not only because that premier company actually went bankrupt but because of the great opportunities I got in that smaller company that I may have never gotten in the bigger one.

Anyway, the lesson has always stuck with me. Be careful about those new years’ resolutions. See if there is some meat on those bones before making an important decision. The 6 month rule can serve you well too.

a tale of poor customer experience

After having lived in the US for a couple of years and then moving (back) to the UK, I still remember what a shock it was to feel the difference in level of customer service between the 2 countries. [Not saying Belgium is better, it just happened to be that I moved from US to the UK]

I am not just talking about service in restaurants (as you can argue if it is right or wrong to pay waiters minimum wage and let them live on tips) but let’s just say that overall there is no comparison.

In fact, every time someone moves over from the US to the UK, I tell them beforehand: forget what you have come to expect as service in the US because you will just get annoyed. Most often heard complaints: banks turning you away as a customer as you are a foreigner (and these are employees of well known global companies such as MS and Yahoo) and the length of time & effort to get broadband set up.

I have now adapted to the different standard and quite happy in UK but yesterday, however, I was again taken aback by an example of poor customer experience.

I am a long term gym member at my local David Lloyd’s and rent a locker for which I pay 60 GBP / 6 months additionally. When arriving at the gym yesterday, I find a note in my locker that they have removed all of my possessions and I need to go to reception to pay 5 GBP for “abusing the system” to get my clothes back.

So I go to reception, where they tell me that my locker had expired and they had left me a note in my locker 4 months ago to say that it had expired. For the life of me, I don’t remember receiving that note (I am one of these people that pays their bills when they arrive) but I was baffled by the fact that they would not put a reminder, or simply tell me at reception the multiple times I scan myself into the premises during the past 4 months.

No, they rather have their long term gym member paying good money every month feel like a criminal by being called to the “principal” to pay its fee for “abusing the system”…

Hack Days

Last week we had our third internal hack day at STC Europe and I am still buzzing from the excitement. For those of you that are not familiar with the concept, hack day “is an event where developers, designers and people with ideas gather to build ‘cool stuff‘”.

I have been organising them at STC Europe since I first joined (after some gentle prodding by Ian Hegerty) and I have found them to be extremely fun and valuable.

Therefore, in this post, I want to share with you some of the learnings & benefits of organising Hack Days and to gently prod you in return to start your own hack days within your organisation or team.

Are you going as fast as you can?

What surprises anyone participating for the first time in a hack day, or attending the demo session, is how much can be created by very small teams – from idea to implementation in 48 hours – while so many traditional software project don’t produce anything over much longer time periods with much more managerial care and oversight. For me, having worked for bigger companies in the last 5 years or so, it is a good reminder of how lethal start ups can be: when you have a highly motivated team that fully buys into an idea,  combined with a strict deadline that forces a team to focus on the essence of the product, not much is impossible.

Although by its very nature, a 48h sprint will be faster than a normal development cycle, and hackers will take many shortcuts, hack days can illustrate shortcomings in your normal systems and processes. For example, are your release management systems causing too much overhead? Are you giving developers enough ownership of feature development to be fully engaged? Is planning becoming a drag instead of a tool? It can also be a call to arms for your leadership team: how can we bring the same energy, agility and excitement to our day-to-day work? Even if you are no longer a start up.

Your team may be better than you know

Remember that quiet guy in the corner that never seemed that interested. He will blow you away with something truly cool. This is not a Hollywood movie. Believe me: Hack Days will allow team members to demonstrate talents, skill sets and great ideas that they themselves may not even known they had. This opens up many new opportunities and improvements for how you structure the team, products or features you go after as a company but also makes for much happier team members.

Joint experiences & adventures make for stronger teams

Surviving release cycles together may create team bonds over time, but hack days will do that for you in much shorter time and will do so cross-team, maybe even cross-office. Hack day is basically one big rush: come up with a cool idea (buzz), find like-minded people (buzz), implement it together – quickly (buzz), demo it for your peers & management team (buzz). All lubricated by pizza, beer and doughnuts. In 48 hours. It’s like a road trip but geekier. You will create bonds, you will make friendships and you will gain respect for your peers.

Great invention ROI

I love this recent tweet from Kent Beck: “once i thought all my ideas were gold, then i realized most of them were crap, then i learned i had to try them to find which were which”. You can try to research if new products and features will work via a variety of means but nothing will demonstrate if an idea will work or not faster than a working prototype. And you will get many of them via hack days, far outweighing the cost of the 2 developer days.

And don’t forget about the ideas. Nothing like a nice mix of backgrounds and experiences to come up with new cool ideas… Much better than a blue sky thinking offsite with similar people just waiting for the open bar in the evening.

It’s fun

Finally, it’s fun. You are likely in the technology business because you love to create. Hack Day is it – close to its purest.

What are you waiting for?

How many things out there are fun, create better teams and have great ROI?

Go for it!

Standards

An idea of one of my favourite authors, David Allen, that really resonates with me is that you often only become aware of your standards or principles when they are violated.

His example is that of dirty mugs around the house. Some people cannot stand to have even one dirty mug lying around while others would not even notice it until they no longer have a clean mug to drink out off. Where it becomes interesting of course is when these two types of people start living together…

Recently, I have become more and more aware of how standards also strongly impact the performance and cohesiveness of a team. Personally, I take a a lot of pride in building great teams and frankly I think I often succeed but there were also the occasional teams that – although not necessarily under-performing – never really felt like they clicked.

Analysing this a bit closer, when I felt that a team really clicked, it was often due to the fact that we were aligned on these standards or the team had higher standards than I had. For example, as a PM, I feel strongly about shipping often and early, be always ready well in time for deadlines if time allows, bring a sense of urgency to project execution, avoid victim mentality, ship things that make an impact for the user (please fill out other clichees). In parallel, when a team did not click, it was often due to the fact that these standards were not shared. Team members may have felt more comfortable with shipping at the last minute or not care so much about making an impact to the user rather than doing something that is interesting or fun.

Now an interesting question is: should you demand your team to live up to your standards?

You could argue that as long as they provide acceptable performance to the business there is no need to force your team to adopt your standards.

I myself had a case where IMHO my manager has impossibly high standards and I certainly felt uncomfortable being dragged there as I could not see the point of them.

On the flip side, I have had managers that have changed my standards and they have proven me a great service. As we all know, a small change in standards (be it extra effort, or networking) can be the difference between good work & great work, and between decent ROI and splendid ROI. And I am forever grateful to them for pushing me there (although, at first, often begrudgingly so).

I guess the key is just to be more very self-aware and analytical of your standards: are these standards clearly linked to success and will I do my team a service by pushing them there or are they just personal preference? Or, alternatively, do I want to be part of a team that do not share my standards?

Why PMs are superior beings and I am the best of the lot

People often ask me “why are you so incredibly awesome, Nick?”

Yes, why am I so incredible? I guess I knew it from a young age. I was special, I was brilliant, I was a PM.

The best presentations in the class. Facilitating blue sky thinking on the playground. Debate team champion. Getting science geeks to do my math homework for me. Raising the flag and driving it. #Winning

Every day I walk in the office I see engineers without direction, lost, hoping for friends on facebook that never come. My product requirements addictive, my vision an experience that will blow their puny little minds. #PMBlood

Need a product out faster? No problem. Just slowly whisper in your dev’s ear to “think faster” and remind them that studies have proven that humans only use a small part of their brains and that you are tired of them holding out on you.

Enlightening experience. Lives changed.

Are they whining about “blockers” in standup? Just yell “Cojones”.

Are they whining about unclear requirements? Reprimand them for lack of vision and call it an opportunity for creativity.

Metrics look poor, compare it with the approval ratings drop of Berlusconi and say that “at the end of the day, in comparison, we are doing great”.

Need search query share? No problem. As I told the Qi-man, “I got this, I am on it”. All in a day’s work. #BingBeatsGoogle

User research, behavioural analysis, relevance… that is for mere mortals. I just *will* users to love my product. I decided it. Done. #Winning #AdonisDNA

Torpedoes of truth. Booyah! I am a PM.. #PMgod

Shared Experiences

Tonight I was stuck on a train that was not moving… for an hour and a half… very full and squished together with the heating full blast on the first warm day in ages.

The driver did not know what was going on and could give no expected time when we would get moving again. He also mumbled and spoke very silently so you could only catch every second word.

Slowly you could feel everyone in the carriage getting more and more annoyed, at the situation mostly but also at each other. Small annoyances become “big issues”. One woman started complaining loudly that she could not hear what the driver had said as “people didn’t stop talking on the phone”. The guy sitting next to here being the only one on the phone. Another one started complaining about the smell and several heavily sweating guys felt singled out.

When we get the news the train will not continue on but go back to London, the fever reaches is pitch.

Then all of a sudden the train starts moving in the right direction. The mood shifts completely. Everyone is elated. The horror of having to return to London and finding another train is gone. We will all reach the station in 10-15 minutes.

People start joking and sharing stories. And unlike any of the other fellow commuters I see every day, I honestly think I am more likely to start a conversation with the people sitting around me today than any others.

It is the power of shared experiences.

I know this phenomenon all too well from people you work with in tough software releases or fellow alumni of companies you worked for. You may not have that much in common… heck, you may not even have liked them that much and / or gotten annoyed by little things they did when you worked together… but once it is all over…

They are your bros. Your fellow veterans of release wars. Your fellow survivors of C-level madness.

Strange how it works that way.

Beginner’s Mind

After having been in the Web Search game for a while now, I start to notice more and more signs of professional deformation.

Major world events happen and my first reaction is to check the search results page for fresh content or the presence (or not) of certain features. You think about likely trending queries, or how it will affect referrals.

Glancing over the ethical questions the above raises, as a program/product manager, you also always tend to get to a point of expertise (or familiarity with the domain) when you notice that you don’t look at the product any more as a normal user would, let alone a beginning user.

It may be unavoidable but it is not inescapable and I have found that simple awareness of the problem matters a lot.

In that context, I have always loved the Zen or martial arts concept of Shoshin or the Beginner’s Mind which conceptualizes the problem and solution so much more elegantly.

It refers to having an attitude of openness, eagerness, and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject, even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would.

Or you may know this famous line:

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.

That said, maybe it is not so bad to not be a true beginner any more as the following quote from the Dalai Lama probably resonates as strongly with me as the concept of Shoshin:

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly

In any case, I think I will take some time off from my normal routine for a day or two of just pure creative indulgence and see if after all these years, I can still clear my pre-conceptions about Web Search and come up with some interesting ideas without regurgitating the old.

Wish me luck.

Experiences with Scrum – Part 1: Sprint Demo

Over the past couple of years, I have used Scrum as the main project management methodology on my projects. I adapt the exact methodology from project to project or team to team and usually it is a pretty light weight, unsophisticated and / or bastardized variant.

That said, I often get asked about my experience with Scrum so I thought I’d do a little series. First up, my favourite: the sprint demo.

Why is it my favourite? Several reasons but in short, it allows you to build a better product by building a better team (which I guess is true of the entire Scrum process).

Most importantly, I am a strong believer that when you use a software product you can feel how well the team understood the problem space, cared about quality, etc. As the sprint demo shows an early, iterative version of the product, it allows you to catch these kind of problems early that would otherwise maybe go undetected until the final milestones of the product lifecycle.

It is also a great tool to help the team develop “outcome-based thinking” which is especially critical with a young, inexperienced team:

1. You imagine / set an outcome at sprint planning
2. Work for generally a very short period on what you think will be the most effective / efficient action steps to reach that outcome
3. Demo whatever you have actually accomplished at the end of the sprint (proof is in the pudding)
4. Repeat

Slowly but surely, you will see the team getting better at setting outcomes, better at reaching them and better at selling them in the demo. You often see 3 different stages:

• PHASE 1: Several team members don’t have a demo prepared. This is especially true for new graduates. Without getting too psycho-babbly on you, the underlying reasons are typically the following:
  • They did not get anything done as they do not yet know how to do “knowledge work” efficiently and effectively and end up frittering away much of their time. This “pathology” can often be resolved through the Scrum process itself and some on-the-job mentoring.
  • They want to produce great work and they just do not feel that any of the work is good enough or worthy enough to demo (“I have got a PhD for **** sake and this demo is just a webpage with an algorithm I learned in Statistics 101″). In short, they need to learn some “humility” and to acknowledge and celebrate their small wins.
• PHASE 2: Individual team members start to enjoy demo-ing and looking forward to it. The whole event becomes a celebration and you feel momentum building. Outcomes and demo’s become crisper and gradually more and more ambitious.
• PHASE 3: The team starts to collaborate to build cooler demo’s. Team members starts to leverage each others skills to get to bigger and better outcomes. That is when you know you are on a roll.

It is a great thrill to see a team getting better and better after each iteration, and a product slowly emerging from what was first just an idea in someone’s mind.

So, in short: demo EARLY and demo OFTEN and by doing that build a BETTER team!

Are you writing a fear or greed presentation?

As a PM, a large amount of my time is taken up by reading & writing powerpoint decks. Yay me!

What I have noticed though is that most of them are seemingly written with the following underlying intents in mind (consciously recognized or not):

1. Show what a great job you are doing
2. Show how smart you are
3. Cover your ***

They typically do not tend to affect any change or motivate me to take any action. I hardly ever go: “He is so smart, I just must follow the recommendations in his deck!”

I have found that when you do you want to affect change, something else needs to be added to the mix. I think one of my old bosses put it quite well, he said: “Ask yourself one key question when creating a deck. Are you writing a Fear or Greed presentation?”

Fear is painting the audience a picture of all the bad things that are going to happen if they don’t follow the recommendations in your deck: market share will decline, good employees will leave or they will look foolish to their bosses.

Greed is based on the opposite: follow my instructions and you will get a “atta boy” from your boss, the respect of your peers, more sales, etc

It is the classic pain / pleasure principle. People want to move away from pain (fear) or work towards pleasure (greed). Pain (fear) is maybe unsurprisingly the biggest motivator…

A different kind of productive

As we decided not to travel home for Christmas, I have had lots of free time during the holidays. It is an interesting feeling. Normally during a typical work week, you struggle to find an hour or two of free time where you still have energy to actually do something and here are hours and hours of free time staring at you. And then my mind starts chirping away: well, dude, you wanted that free time for ever…here it is… how are you going to use it?

Good question, my beloved but babbling mind. How do you use holidays where you are not travelling or attending family functions? Do you just chill and let the days glide by? Do you catch up on email or work projects you have been delaying for ever? Or something else?

Aside of a rigid schedule of midday naps, I have tried to come up with some worthwhile activities that don’t fit into small timeslots in a busy week. Here is what I came up with:

• Read a book cover to cover in a day. Yes, you can make good progress on a book in smaller time chunks (especially when you are a commuter like I am) but there is nothing like some really dedicated quiet time to tackle an interesting book in one day with undivided attention and taking notes while you go along. In my case, I read Seth Godin’s Linchpin as I have been a fan of his blog for some time now.
• Trying out new software and websites. I am a typical geek and could spend oceans of time here all year long if I let myself. Well, I indulged myself during the holidays. My first selection was Axure RP Pro which is UX mock up tool. Main reason is my longstanding jealousy of the skills of User Experience Designers.  I want them too! I am also watching video tutorials on FileMaker Pro as well as recently signed up for Quora which is an interesting new competitor for Yahoo! Answers.
• Learn something new just for fun. I bought a game of Go ages ago but never really played it much. Well, there are some really great software versions now where you can learn the game by yourself. I use Many Faces of Go 12. Very difficult game but intriguing.
• Get your financials & taxes straight. Moving jobs and countries can make your financial picture quite muddled. Lots of free time takes away a lot of excuses to actually update your personal financial “dashboard” and make sure you won’t get a call from the tax man any time soon.
• Watch a whole season of a TV series you missed but everyone is raving about. When I launched my first “solo” product in my career (ExtraTerm, now known as MultiTerm Extract), I bought a season of 24 on DVD and just watched it until I passed out. I still love to do that (except for the passing out, I am getting older). Currently, I am watching “Rome”.
• Review your GTD system & do a really in-depth weekly review. As many of you know, I am a big fan of GTD and it is great to have a large chunk of time to maintain & review your entire system: try out new software, get your inbox to zero, get all your projects pristine and take a look again at all your levels of horizon.
• Cook something new. I tend to get stuck doing the same recipes over and over again. The holidays is a great time to find some new recipes and try some new things without having to rush (except on the main holidays itself where you want proven success).

Well, that is all I can think of. How do you use big blocks of free time? I still have some days left on my holidays so any other activities you would recommend?