Archive for April 2014
Shipping is a Feature: Some Guiding Principles for People That Build Things
I love questions about advice because they really force one to think carefully about what to say. My former colleague (and fellow Cornellian), Jackie Bavaro now at Asana, who recently co-authored a thoughtful book on the ins and outs of securing a role in product management, asked the following question on Quora:
In the back of my head I always have that product manager view of accountability and so rather than “advise” I much prefer to have a dialog in context and make sure accountability stays with the person asking. It is difficult enough to be a manager and avoid the constant pull of “telling people what to do” and certainly on big topics one really has to be careful. At the same time, spouting cliche’s like “what do you think” or “it depends” can frustrate folks. This in itself is a valuable PM lesson.
I’ve been really lucky (literally) to work with many amazing folks and so many routine interactions yield empowering and powerful insights that one can bring forward. I’ve used blogging over many years to share those and many are also republished in our book on strategy and collaboration.
In thinking about the question and some of the recent design-oriented discussions, here are five takeaways that have always guided me. They didn’t originate with me, except in the sense that I discovered their value while making some mistake.
For these five bits of advice, I chose to focus on what I think is the most challenging aspect of being a PM, which is achieving clarity and maintaining a point of view for a product when all forces work against this very thing. What customers value most in a product is that “it just work” or “does what it is supposed to do,” and yet at every step in a product, the dynamics of design work to make this the most difficult to achieve. For those that have not built products, understanding the context and dynamics of decision making while building something is a bit abstract.
Shipping is a feature. Every PM knows this but it is also the hardest thing to get right. As a PM you throw around things like “the enemy of the good is the perfect” or, well, “shipping is a feature” all the time, yet we all have a hard time getting a product out the door. There’s always more to do to get it right. The way this was taught to me was so old it involved software being shipped in a box on floppies, but the visual has stuck with me. When you ship a product in a box on the back of the box are screen shots and marquee features. What does not come on the box are lists of all the features you thought of doing or different executions you considered. It is that simple. Once you release the product you begin a new adventure building then next iteration. It is almost always the case that what you were thinking before you had customers will change in some ways in the version that comes next. So ship. Learn. Gather data. Iterate. Whether you spend three years or three months developing a product this motion is the same.
You get paid to decide. Some people love making decisions on their own. Other people need socialization and iteration to make a choice. Either way can work (or not) as a product manager, but to be great you really do have to decide. Deciding anything important or meaningful at all means some people will disagree. Some might really disagree a huge amount. The bottom line is a decision has to be made. A decision means to not do something, and to achieve clarity in your design. The classic way this used to come up (and still does) is the inevitable “make it an option”. You can’t decide should a new mouse wheel scroll or zoom? Should there be conversation view or inbox view? Should you AutoCorrect or not? Go ahead and add it to Preferences or Options. But really the only correct path is to decide to have the feature or not. Putting in an option to enable it means it doesn’t exist. Putting in an option to disable means you are forever supporting two (then four, then eight) ways of doing something. Over time (or right away) your product has a muddled point of view, and then worse, people come to expect that everything new can also be turned off, changed, or otherwise ignored. While you can always make mistakes and/or change something later, you have to live with combinatorics or a combinatoric mindset forever. This is the really hard stuff about being a PM but the most critical thing, you bring a point of view to a product—if a product were a person you would want that person to have a clear, focused world-view.
Can’t agree to disagree. Anything that requires more than one person to do (and by definition as a PM you are working with Engineering/Dev so that means what you do) will reach a point where you have to do something and not everyone will agree. On a well-run team there are very rarely that many decisions that span many people all of whom have a voice (if you do, then fix that problem first). When you do reach a point where you just don’t agree, first, contemplate the first lesson and realize you have to ship. Second, see the previous lesson and realize you do have to decide. That leaves you deciding something that some people (or one person) won’t like. What you don’t want to do is end that meeting over coffee with the infamous “we have to ship and I think we should do X, so let’s just move on and agree to disagree”. Endings like that are never good. The “told you so moment” is just out there waiting to appear. The potential for passive-aggressive org dynamics is all too real. Ultimately, this is just a yucky place to be. So if you’re on the “winning” side of such a dialog then you have to bring people along every day for a while. You can’t remind people who was right, or that it is your decision and so on. If you’re on the “losing” side you need to support the team. You can’t remind people when little things go wrong (which they will) that you were right. Once a choice is made, the next step is all about the greater good. Nothing is harder for technologists than this because as technologists we believe there is a “right” answer and folks that don’t agree are simply “wrong”. Context is everything and remember you have to ship–as a team.
Splitting the baby is, well, splitting the baby. Even with all those lessons, time and time again I’ve faced situations where there is a stalemate on the team and the suggestion is made for a middle-of-the-road choice. A feature will appear sometimes. Performance won’t be terrible, but it won’t be great. Customers can do 90% of something, but not everything. Yet it would be possible to decide to have the feature, have great performance, or deliver 100%—it is just that the team dynamic is placing a value on finding a middle road. The biblical narrative of splitting the baby often comes into play here, because in practice if you do arrive at such a comprise what you’ve in effect done is reached a state where in fact you have made no one happy in the room and no one happy down the road. Of course, compromise is a critical part of product design for many reasons. The bigger the team, the more varied customers, the increased divergence of customer needs all lead to a stronger need to find middle paths for complex choices. There is magic when you can do this without just muddling the product. But there is risk that if your design language turns into splitting the baby that the output is exactly what you don’t want to achieve.
10% better can be 100% different. The hardest choices a PM can make are not the new choices for a product—a clean slate is challenging, but that is the truly fun part of design for many. It is not easy, but it is fun. The real challenge comes when deciding what to do next time around (in three weeks, three months or more). The first thing you do is remember all those things you could not get done or had to decide sub-optimally. So you think you’ll go back and “polish” off the work. But remember, now you have customers and they are using the product. They might not see what wasn’t done. They might actually like what you ended up doing. Your temptation to tweak things to “finish” them might come across as better in an incremental sense, but will it be that much better for existing customers? Will it be so much better for new customers that it is worth the risk of touching that code again? The big question for you is whether you can really measure how much better something is—is it more efficient, faster, deeper, etc.? There are many cases, particularly in user-experience flow and design, where incremental improvement simply amounts to speed bumps in using a new release and the downside masks the upside. Sometimes when you improve something 10% what you really do is make it 100% different.
Context is everything in decision making as a PM . The skills and experience of the team matter. The realities of where the business is at a given time or the ability to execute on a proposal are all factors that weigh heavily. Hindsight is 20/20 or better in the world of PM, and we all know there are many standing by to offer perspective, advice, or even criticism of the choices a product makes.
If you don’t make those choices in a timely manner then there won’t be much to talk about. Sometimes the most difficult thing to do is keep moving forward. That’s why some of the most valuable advice I’ve received relate to the very challenges of making tough product calls.
–Steven Sinofsky @stevesi
This post originally appeared on a16z.com.
You’re doing it wrong
Smartphones and tablets, along with apps connected to new cloud-computing platforms, are revolutionizing the workplace. We’re still early in this workplace transformation, and the tools so familiar to us will be around for quite sometime. The leaders, managers, and organizations that are using new tools sooner will quickly see how tools can drive cultural changes — developing products faster, with less bureaucracy and more focus on what’s important to the business.
If you’re trying to change how work is done, changing the tools and processes can be an eye-opening first step.
Check out a podcast on this topic hosted by Andreessen Horowitz’s Benedict Evans. Available on Soundcloud or on a16z.com.
Many of the companies I work with are creating new productivity tools, and every company starting now is using them as a first principle. Companies run their business on new software-as-a-service tools. The basics of email and calendaring infrastructure are built on the tools of the consumerization of IT. Communication and work products between members of the team and partners are using new tools that were developed from the ground up for sharing, collaboration and mobility.
Some of the exciting new tools for productivity that you can use today include: Quip,Evernote, Box and Box Notes, Dropbox, Slack, Hackpad, Asana, Pixxa Perspective, Haiku Deck, and more below. This list is by no means exhaustive, and new tools are showing up all the time. Some tools take familiar paradigms and pivot them for touch and mobile. Others are hybrids of existing tools that take a new view on how things can be more efficient, streamlined, or attuned to modern scenarios. All are easily used via trials for small groups and teams, even within large companies.
Tools drive cultural change
Tools have a critical yet subtle impact on how work gets done. Tools can come to define the work, as much as just making work more efficient. Early in the use of new tools there’s a combination of a huge spike in benefit, along with a temporary dip in productivity. Even with all the improvements, all tools over time can become a drag on productivity as the tools become the end, rather than the means to an end. This is just a natural evolution of systems and processes in organizations, and productivity tools are no exception. It is something to watch for as a team.
The spike comes from the new ways information is acquired, shared, created, analyzed and more. Back when the PC first entered the workplace, it was astounding to see the rapid improvements in basic things like preparing memos, making “slides,” or the ability to share information via email.
There’s a temporary dip in productivity as new individual and organizational muscles are formed and old tools and processes are replaced across the whole team. Everyone individually — and the team has a whole — feels a bit disrupted during this time. Things rapidly return to a “new normal,” and with well-chosen tools and thoughtfully-designed processes, this is an improvement.
As processes mature or age, it is not uncommon for those very gains to become burdensome. When a new lane opens on a highway, traffic moves faster for awhile, until more people discover the faster route, and then it feels like things are back where they started. Today’s most common tools and processes have reached a point where the productivity increases they once brought feel less like improvements and more like extra work that isn’t needed. All too often, the goals have long been lost, and the use of tools is on autopilot, with the reason behind the work simply “because we always did it that way.”
New tools are appearing that offer new ways to work. These new ways are not just different — this is not about fancier reports, doing the old stuff marginally faster, or bigger spreadsheets. Rather, these new tools are designed to solve problems faced by today’s mobile and continuous organization. These tools take advantage of paradigms native to phones and tablets. Data is stored on a cloud. Collaboration takes place in real time. Coordination of work is baked into the tools. Work can be accessed from a broad range of computing devices of all types. These tools all build on the modern SaaS model, so they are easy to get, work outside your firewall and come with the safety and security of cloud-native companies.
The cultural changes enabled by these tools are significant. While it is possible to think about using these tools “the same old way,” you’re likely to be disappointed. If you think a new tool that is about collaboration on short-lived documents will have feature parity with a tool for crafting printed books, then you’re likely to feel like things are missing. If you’re looking to improve your organizational effectiveness at communication, collaboration and information sharing, then you’re also going to want to change some of the assumptions about how your organization works. The fact that the new tools do some things worse and other things differently points to the disruptive innovation that these products have the potential to bring — the “Innovator’s Dilemma” is well known to describe the idea that disruptive products often feel inferior when compared to entrenched products using existing criteria.
Overcoming traps and pitfalls
Based on seeing these tools in action and noticing how organizations can re-form around new ways of working, the following list compiles some of the most common pitfalls addressed by new tools. In other words, if you find yourself doing these things, it’s time to reconsider the tools and processes on your team, and try something new.
Some of these will seem outlandish when viewed through today’s concept. As a person who worked on productivity tools for much of my career, I think back to the time when it was crazy to use a word processor for a college paper; or when I first got a job, and typing was something done by the “secretarial pool.” Even the use of email in the enterprise was first ridiculed, and many managers had assistants who would print out email and then type dictated replies (no, really!). Things change slowly, then all of a sudden there are new norms.
In our Harvard Business School class, “Digital Innovation,” we crafted a notion of “doing it wrong,” and spent a session looking at disruption in the tools of the workplace. In that spirit, “you’re doing it wrong,” if you:
- Spend more time summarizing or formatting a document than worrying about the actual content. Time and time again, people over-invest in the production qualities of a work product, only to realize that all that work was wasted, as most people consume it on a phone or look for the summary. This might not be new, but it is fair to say that the feature sets of existing tools and implementation (both right for when they were created, I believe) would definitely emphasize this type of activity.
- Aim to “complete” a document, and think your work is done when a document is done. The modern world of business and product development knows that you’re never done with a product, and that is certainly the case for documents that are steps along the way. Modern tools assume that documents continue to exist but fade in activity — the value is in getting the work out there to the cloud, and knowing that the document itself is rarely the end goal.
- Figure out something important with a long email thread, where the context can’t be shared and the backstory is lost. If you’re collaborating via email, you’re almost certainly losing important context, and not all the right folks are involved. A modern collaboration tool like Slack keeps everything relevant in the tool, accessible by everyone on the team from everywhere at any time, but with a full history and search.
- Delay doing things until someone can get on your calendar, or you’re stuck waiting on someone else’s calendar. The existence of shared calendaring created a world of matching free/busy time, which is great until two people agree to solve an important problem — two weeks from now. Modern communication tools allow for notifications, fast-paced exchange of ideas and an ability to keep things moving. Culturally, if you let a calendar become a bottleneck, you’re creating an opening for a competitor, or an opportunity for a customer or partner to remain unhappy. Don’t let calendaring become a work-prevention tool.
- Believe that important choices can be distilled down into a one-hour meeting. If there’s something important to keep moving on, then scheduling a meeting to “bring everyone together” is almost certainly going to result in more delays (in addition to the time to get the meeting going in the first place). The one-hour meeting for a challenging issue almost never results in a resolution, but always pushes out the solution. If you’re sharing information all along, and the right people know all that needs to be known, then the modern resolution is right there in front of you. Speaking as a person who almost always shunned meetings to avoid being a bottleneck, I think it’s worth considering that the age-old technique of having short and daily sync meetings doesn’t really address this challenge. Meetings themselves, one might argue, are increasingly questionable in a world of continuously connected teams.
- Bring dead trees and static numbers to the table, rather than live, onscreen data. Live data analysis was invented 20 years ago, but too many still bring snapshots of old data to meetings which then too often digress into analyzing the validity of numbers or debating the slice/view of the data, further delaying action until there’s an update. Modern tools like Tidemark and Apptio provide real-time and mobile access to information. Meetings should use live data, and more importantly, the team should share access to live data so everyone is making choices with all the available information.
- Use the first 30 minutes of a meeting recreating and debating the prior context that got you to a meeting in the first place. All too often, when a meeting is scheduled far in advance, things change so much that by the time everyone is in the room, the first half of the hour (after connecting projectors, going through an enterprise log-on, etc.) is spent with everyone reminding each other and attempting to agree on the context and purpose of the gathering. Why not write out a list of issues in a collaborative document like Quip, and have folks share thoughts and data in real time to first understand the issue?
- Track what work needs to happen for a project using analog tools. Far too many projects are still tracked via paper and pen which aren’t shared, or on whiteboards with too little information, or in a spreadsheet mailed around over and over again. Asana is a simple example of an easy-to-use and modern tool that decreases (to zero) email flow, allows for everyone to contribute and align on what needs to be done, and to have a global view of what is left to do.
- Need to think which computer or device your work is “on.” Cloud storage from Box,Dropbox, OneDrive and others makes it easy (and essential) to keep your documents in the cloud. You can edit, share, comment and track your documents from any device at any time. There’s no excuse for having a document stuck on a single computer, and certainly no excuse risking the use of USB storage for important work.
- Use different tools to collaborate with partners than you use with fellow employees. Today’s teams are made up of vendors, contractors, partners and customers all working together. Cloud-based tools solve the problem of access and security in modern ways that treat everyone as equals in the collaboration process. There’s a huge opportunity to increase the effectiveness of work across the team by using one set of tools across organizational boundaries.
Many of these might seem far-fetched, and even heretical to some. From laptops to color printing to projectors in conference rooms to wireless networking to the Internet itself, each of those tools were introduced to skeptics who said the tools currently in use were “good enough,” and the new tools were slower, less efficient, more expensive, or just superfluous.
The teams that adopt new tools and adapt their way of working will be the most competitive and productive teams in an organization. Not every tool will work, and some will even fail. The best news is that today’s approach to consumerization makes trial easier and cheaper than at any other time.
If you’re caught in a rut, doing things the old way, the tools are out there to work in new ways and start to change the culture of your team.
–Steven Sinofsky @stevesi
This article originally appeared on <re/code>.
Hiring for a job you never did or can’t do
One of the most difficult stages in growing your own skillset is when you have to hire someone for a job you can’t actually do yourself. Whether you’re a founder of a new company, or just growing a company or team, at some point the skills needed for a growing organization exceed your own experience.
Admitting that you don’t really have the skills the business requires is the first, and most difficult step. This is especially true as an engineer where there’s a tendency to think we can just figure things out. It is not uncommon to go through a thought process that basically boils down to: coding must be the hardest job, so all the other jobs can be done by someone with coding skills.
Fight the fear, let go of control, and make moves towards a well-rounded organization.
Nice try.
If you’ve ever tried some simple home repairs or paint touchup you know this logic doesn’t work—you only need to spend an hour watching some cable TV DiY show and you can see how the people with skills are always unraveling the messes created by those who thought they could improvise. The software equivalent can sometimes be seen as a developer attempting to design the user interaction flow in a paint program or PowerPoint. Sure it can be done by a developer (and there are talented developers who can of course do it all), but he or she can quickly reach their limits, and so will the user interaction.
Open up your engineer’s mind to embrace the truth that every other discipline or function you will ever collaborate with has a deep set of skills experiences that you lack. Relative to engineering, the “softer” skills often pose the biggest eye-opening surprise to engineers. Until you’ve seen the magic worked by those skilled in marketing, communications, sales, business development or a host of other disciplines you might not appreciate the levels of success you can achieve by turning over the task to trained professionals.
I have seen this first-hand many times. Most recently it occurred while working with the a16z portfolio company Local Motion when it came time to do some of the early announcements around the fleet-management company. The co-founders possess engineering and design backgrounds from elite institutions, and built the product themselves, hardware and software. Both are experienced mountaineers, and so they have this engrained sense of self-sufficiency, which is valuable both for building companies and scaling mountains.
When it came time to work with the industry press to tell the story of their company, in some ways they had to suppress their self-sufficient instincts. The founders were self-aware enough to know they had not done this before and agreed to enlist the help of those who have depth and breadth of experience. The pros showed up and spent time learning the team, the business, and the story (professionals do that!). They came back with a plan, roles, responsibilities, and defined what success would look like. It was amazing to watch how the founders absorbed and learned at each step all those things which they had not personally experienced before.
This sounds easy and pretty obvious. But if you put yourself in their shoes you know that this is not just bringing in a hired gun to get some press, rather this is hiring on a new member of the team and a new founding member of the family. What is vital to keep in mind, is that this kind of work is as important as every line of code and every circuit board. The lesson of letting go and letting professionals do their work is clear: delegating is never easy for most, but is spectacularly difficult if you don’t know what the other person is going to do and when the outcome matters a whole lot. Still, you need to let the specialists into your carefully engineered world.
There are moments of terror. You’re watching people talk about your product using tools and techniques you are unfamiliar with to connect with your potential customers. Even though it is a product, you are apt to feel as though this is a discussion about yourself. You question every step. You doubt the skills of the person you hired. You are certain everything will go wrong.
It is at that point—right when you start to panic and think that unless you do this yourself things will fail—that you need to let go. You need to say “yes” to hiring a person to do the work, and then let them do their best work.
Just keep reminding yourself that you’ve never done the job before, and that you’re role is to hire someone who knows more than you. Even when you’ve wrapped your head around that, there are a few ways you can get tripped up when you are The key to success here is avoiding these mistakes when you are in the hiring process:
- Asking candidates to teach you. A good candidate will of course know more than you. Their interview is not a time for them to teach you what they do for a living. The interview is for you to learn the specifics of a given candidate, not the job function. The best bet is to do your homework. If you’re hiring your first sales leader then use your network and talk to some subject matter experts and learn the steps of the role ahead of time.
- Expecting a candidate to know or create your strategy. It is fine to expect engineering candidates to know the tools and techniques you use. You wouldn’t expect an engineering candidate to know your unannounced product, of course. It is equally challenging to expect a new marketing person to have a marketing plan for your product. Even if you ask them to brainstorm for hours, keep in mind the inputs into the process—they only know the specifics you have provided them. For example, don’t expect a marketing candidate to magically come up with the right pricing strategy for your product without a chance to really dive in. On the other hand, you can expect a candidate to walk you through in extreme detail their most recent work on a similar topic. You can get to their thought process and how they worked through the details of the problem domain.
- Interviewing too many folks. You will always hear stories about the best hire ever after seeing 100 people. Those stories are legendary. On the other hand, you rarely hear the stories that start with “we could not find the perfect QA leader so we waited and waited until we had a quality crisis.” Yet these latter stories happen far too often. Again, you should not compromise, but if after bringing a dozen or more people through a process you are still searching, consider the patterns you’re seeing and why this is happening. A good practice if you’ve not found right hire after going through a lot of folks is to bring in a new point of view. Consider recruiting the help of a search firm, a board member, or a subject matter advisor to get you over the first hire in a new job function. Do you need the help of a search firm? Would you benefit from the help of a board member or subject matter advisor to get you over the first hire in a new job function?
These add up to the quest for the perfect hire. When it comes to engineering you give yourself a lot of leeway because you feel you can direct a less experienced person and because you can gauge more easily what they know and don’t know. When it comes to other roles you become more reluctant to let go of a dream candidate. This almost always nets out costing you time, and in a new effort time is money. That isn’t saying to settle, but it is saying to use the same techniques of approximation you naturally use when hiring people in your comfort zone.
The most difficult part of hiring for a job you don’t know first-hand is the human side. Every growing organization needs diversity because every product and service is used by a diverse group of people. The different job functions often bring with them diversity of personality types that add to the challenges of hiring. The highly analytical developer looking to hire a strong qualitative thinker for marketing, or the highly empathetic sales leader, is often going to face a challenge just making the human connection.
This human connection is a two-way street. Embrace it. Recognize the leap each of you are taking. Realize that the interpersonal skills required to call on customers every day are just different than the interpersonal skills used when hacking. The challenge of making that human connection is one for the person doing the hiring to overcome. Often that’s the biggest opportunity for personal growth when hiring people to do a job you can’t.
–Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi)
Note: A form of this post originally appeared on FastCo.
Learning by Shipping 