The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps
Really great talk from my favorite VC on the Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps. The main points that hit me are below but definitely hear it straight from Fred Wilson on Vimeo.
Speed - "speed is more than a feature, it is a requirement" ... "see's this more with main stream users than power users" ... uses pingdom, reviews weekly for every one of their portfolio companies
Instant Utility - "instantly useful to you" ... "useful right out of the box"
Voice - "software is the new media" "it has to have a personality"
Less is More - "do one little thing" .. "that you do all the time"... "really well"
Programmable - "others can build on top of, connect to, add to, in some way" ... "if it is not read/write it is not an API"
Personal - "infused with your user's enegery" ... the more that your users can contribute the more ownership they will take and advocate for you - backgrounds, data, skins...
RESTful - "in a REST architecture your resources have a URL and they can be called at that URL" "what I mean by this is a bit of a bastardization" everything has a clean URL, everything can be accessed by an easily comprehensible and memorable URL - it can be sent by email, posted to social media...
Discoverable - "your application has to be built from the ground up to be discovered by Google" ... "social media" ... "viral" ... "you can't pour virality into an app, it has to be built from the ground up to support this"
Clean - "the application cannot be busy on the page" ... "big fonts" ... "very inviting" ... "people know right away what to do" ... "tumblr login is a good example" http://www.tumblr.com/
Playful - "the ability to play in an application is really important" ... "make it a game" ... Foursquare badges, LinkedIn relationships, Twitter followers, Facebook friends
Autonomy
au?ton?o?my1. independence or freedom, as of the will or one's actions: the autonomy of the individual. 2. the condition of being autonomous; self-government, or the right of self-government; independence. 3. a self-governing community.
Everyone wants it but I find so few willing to take it.
Why? I can only find two reasons.
First is fear of responsibility. Autonomy implies I will take responsibility for my condition in the world and few are willing to take that chance. It is just so much easier to delegate that responsibility to your boss, your peers or your family and then bang the righteous drum if you don't end up with what you feel your due.
Second is laziness or a lack of discipline. It is easy to wait to be told what to do. To spend your free time in the pleasure of no responsibility rather than using your waking moments to define where you will go and more importantly, because little can be done alone these days, where you will take others with you. To leave at the end of the day knowing that your peers will look after you and tell you what to do when you show up the next morning has a lure in itself, it does provide some freedom but I put forward it isn't autonomy and you just might find yourself showing up to locked doors screaming how unfair it all is.
The world we live in needs autonomous players, free agents, people who are willing to put their heart and sole into the game, make their own games, and shape their own destiny. Arm chair critics and those who prefer to play it safe by putting someone in front of them to take the fall are not going to leave the chair and their destiny will always rest with those who are willing to carry them.
If you really, truly, want autonomy, park the fear, get disciplined and take charge. We all need leaders.
Predictive Learning
Interesting book "How We Decide" and in particular the first chapter really resonated with a belief I have in always defining a clear goal with a timeline for every action we take to achieve the goal. It turns out that by using FRMI technology to reverse engineer the mind we have found out that we use a predictive model to learn. Apparently in every situation we are in we predict what will happen next, measure and adjust and we build pattern upon pattern of these models to guide us through every action we take in our lives. Our pattern recognition is guiding our actions before we are consciously aware of a situation. Read the book - Jonah Lehrer does a much better job of explaining it than I do.
My take on this is that evolution gave us this model. I feel that we should move from unconsciously using it to consciously applying it to how we shape our lives. We should consciously use and improve upon what evolution has given us.
How? In the workplace I often I hear I don't know what the outcome should be or by when that something that can't be described will happen. Usually out of fear of failure the person avoids describing what they should achieve. Given what this book proclaims as fact and what I have intuitively felt for years this approach begs the question - how can we quickly learn from any effort we take if we don't attempt to predict the outcome, measure the results and adjust as we move through the actions? If we don't do this how can we accumulate the patterns that we will use the next time this situation arises? I am sure the wandering approach will teach us in time but I can't help but feel this is just too inefficient in today's rapid pace of change. Park the fears - stake out what you want to achieve - move forward systematically to achieve it - measure and continually adjust as you do - and voila - you should end up with a pattern, a learned experience, that you can apply to the next similar situation. Your portfolio of experience, leadership and the value that you create and can market becomes greater and greater far faster than what the go for a walkabout approach could deliver. Don't get me wrong, going for a walkabout to clear the mind and reflect on life is an amazing experience as well, but not the approach that we should take to rapid assimilation of new ideas and leadership.
In one's work it is important that we continually learn so that we can make the call as to what will be done by when and others can depend upon us to be more right than wrong. This is good leadership and in my opinion there isn't one leader that everyone blindly follows. Everyone is a leader today, everyone aligns with a goal and leads the charge to achieve it.
I believe this is the best way for individuals and organizations to learn - predict - measure - adjust - repeat - and it turns out that our evolutionary model of learning, predictive patterns, completely supports it. Let's park the relatively new learned behavior of goal avoidance and embrace what is intrinsically ours.
Relaxed, quiet precision
I like to ski. I do a little coaching and instructing and allot of learning. The more I learn about skiing the more I realize it it less about strained effort and more about relaxed, quiet precision. I think you can say the same thing about leadership. Good leaders are relaxed, supple - ready to absorb and extend - adjust whenever necessary. They are quiet - aware and listening more than shouting and flailing. They are precise - they don't drive - they adjust and intervene when necessary.
Relaxed, quiet precision makes a good skier and an even better leader.
What's a leader?
You know who you are, what works best for you, exactly what you want and you can find others who want to get on the same bus and you don't mind ignoring the naysayers and detractors along the way. And oh yeah. It ain't easy.
Situations That Won't Go Away
Robert Fritz has a simple approach to those difficult, emotion charged management situations that we would always rather avoid and we just wish they would solve themselves. Problem is they never do and if left, they fester and get even worse. His approach is so simple that once you get it and start applying it you have one of those "ah ha" moments where you wonder why I never thought of that. It starts off by not avoiding the problem. Face it head on. Define the situation for what it is, no adjectives, superlatives, long stories or excuses, just the facts about the situation please. Once everyone has a firm grasp of the situation and they all agree, then, and only then, talk about cause. What caused this situation to happen?
You will be surprised as to how easy it is to determine cause once you take emotion, stories and the blame game out of a situation. And once you have cause nailed down it is pretty to easy to look at the list of causes and take them out 1 by 1 with corrections. Corrections that are actionable; a clear outcome, 1 owner and a due date.
And to wrap it all up every situation, cause and correction analysis needs a follow-up to close the loop on the execution. By when will you all come back together to review and make sure this situation is closed and behind you. Which by the way is one of the primary tenets of another favorite book of mine Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. I especially liked the audio book as the authors read it themselves and you could just feel the conviction and years of experience coming from the words as they spoke them.
As always there are a allot of subtleties to the above and my summary doesn't come close to doing the book justice The Managerial Moment of Truth: The Essential Step in Helping People Improve Performance by Bruce Bodaken and Robert Fritz - second hand news is just that, second hand, go to the source for the real deal. Hardly a week goes by that I don't use this in one form or another.
Leaders and (not at!) the Bar
I want a leader who pushes me and everyone around me to do better - to raise the bar. I don't want them to give me excuses as to why I can't do it, create long stories to rationalize my shortcomings, or make it so cozy that I just don't mind missing my targets.
I want them to tell me clearly what the goal is, describe honestly where I am at, and then demand that I get rid of any discrepancy between where I am and the objective I have. If the goal is what I want then I'm going to be into it, I'm going to be inspired to be pushed to achieve it. If I'm not inspired and I don't really want it then a true leader is going to push me to poop or get off the pot, so to speak.
This is leadership from my perspective. It aligns mutual goals and pushes all of us to achieve more than what we could without it. Too bad it is such a rare commodity.