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”As Russell says, you need a whole new approach to prototyping, focused on building something that works with actual data and lets you interactively explore what works in reality, versus the relationships you hope are there from thought experiments….Next time somebody’s trying to sell you on the awesomeness of their new data technique, ask to see a prototype. If they haven’t got that far, it’s snake oil.
http://petewarden.typepad.com/searchbrowser/2010/12/data-is-snake-oil.html
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The rhythms of a start-up
I have three points:
- Start-up rhythms “as seen on TV”…the ideal.
- Rhythms in real life…via my high school football experience.
- How do we get there in our own start-up…”what’s next?”
Aaron Sorkin nailed the ideal for start-up rhythms in one of his creations: 1) hire the rockstars 2) iterate big ideas for the future in parallel to executing the tasks of today 3) have a common passion and feed off of that. But it wasn’t in The Social Network where he nailed it; he nailed it in The West Wing.
In The West Wing everyone is on top of their game; they are the “rockstars”. The rhythms of these people are fast and impassioned. I’m sure these characters have meetings regarding status checks, sync ups, project plans, etc. But these things are not what consumes their day. They execute on theses tasks while walking through the halls and in between the brainstorms and iterations for tomorrows next big idea. Executing what is needed for today just happens. Pushing things forward by thinking about the next big idea for tomorrow is their common passion. As the president likes to say in the show, “What’s next?”.
The closest thing I’ve seen to this level of excellence in the real world was with the 1994 and 1995 Celina Senior High School football team. The guys on those teams were “rockstars”. Excellent athletes obviously, but there was more to it than that. As I joined the 1994 team in camp, I was amazed at how the execution of the daily tasks just seemed so easy for these guys. It was as if they weren’t even trying that hard on the daily stuff and were able to think big about what is needed to take them to the next level. It wasn’t until later, as I worked with these guys in the off season, that I realized that they were able to do that because they were so passionate about what they were doing and they worked their asses off to get good enough to make the tasks of the day seem trivial. You have to put in the effort to get good enough on the day to day execution to earn the right to think big; otherwise you’re just an ideas man with no history of being able to execute.
So how do we get there? You don’t get there by applying tools or processes. Those things are necessary of course; and they often lift a team up to a point of “we’re doing great”. But to get from the plateau of “we’re doing great in day to day execution” to the point of “excellent day to day execution is the norm and the larger part of our day is pushing the bigger picture forward” takes something else. It comes from a common passion about what pushing that bigger picture forward means. A common understanding of “this is why I work my ass off; and I love it.”. Once you have that across a team, then the team will optimize the tools and processes they are already using in a way that makes being excellent on day to day tasks trivial. And their passion will also power the big picture forward in ways that are unexpected and wonderful.
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By the time he (Kent Beck) was done, he had launched a new Agile Manifesto:
- Team vision and discipline over individuals and interactions (or processes and tools)
- Validated learning over working software (or comprehensive documentation)
- Customer discovery over customer collaboration (or contract negotiation)
- Initiating change over responding to change (or following a plan) -
Ben Horowitz: "Why We Prefer Founding CEOs"
A lot of great thoughts on innovation and being agile in this post.
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I like that on a Friday night, nobody is making me go out for a drink, although plenty have put out invites. It isn’t a social faux pas to work.
-Andrew Hyde
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”some people learn to ship…they learn to ignore the critics they can never possibly please. The ability to choose who judges your work—the people who will make it better, use it and reward you—is the key building block in becoming an artist in whatever you do.
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2010/04/who-judges-your-work.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+typepad/sethsmainblog+(Seth’s+Blog)
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Jason Putorti: How Mint.com Acquired 1.5M+ Users
Recently on Quora, my friend Brit posted a question:
…Since the Quora community found my response helpful, I’m posting it here for everyone:
- The Product. Maybe we didn’t have a high viral coefficient but we had a great net promoter score. People loved Mint, it solved a real…
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Without teams of trust and good leaders who take risks innovation rarely happens.
Next, we need to get past our obsession with epiphany. You won’t find any flash of insight in history that wasn’t followed, or proceeded, by years of hard work. Ideas are easy. They are cheap. Any creativity book or course will help you find more ideas. What’s rare is the willingness to bet you reputation, career, or finances on your ideas. To commit fully to pursuing them. Ideas are abstractions. Executing and manifesting an idea in the world is something else entirely as there are constraints, political, financial, and technical that the ideas we keep locked up in our minds never have to wrestle with.
The word innovation is not itself an innovation. Words are cheap. You can put the word innovation on the back of a box, or in an advertisement, or even in the name of your company, but that does not make it so. Words like radical, game-changing, breakthrough, and disruptive are similarly used to suggest something in lieu of actually being it. You can say innovative as many times as you want, but it won’t make you an innovator, nor make inventions, patents or profits magically appear in your hands.
I know from my studies if you are in the room when something that is later on called an innovation is being made, the language is always much simpler. Words like problem, solution, goal, experiment, and prototype, simple workmanlike words are the language you’ll hear.
http://www.scottberkun.com/blog/2010/my-speech-at-the-economist
