This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details

Jeff Atwood – This Is All Your App Is: a Collection of Tiny Details:

“Getting the details right is the difference between something that delights, and something customers tolerate.

Your software, your product, is nothing more than a collection of tiny details. If you don't obsess over all those details, if you think it's OK to concentrate on the "important" parts and continue to ignore the other umpteen dozen tiny little ways your product annoys the people who use it on a daily basis – you're not creating great software. Someone else is. I hope for your sake they aren't your competitor.”

(Via James Turner at O’Reilly Radar.)

RIM's Failed Hail Mary

Dustin Curtis – RIM's Failed Hail Mary:

“Instead, they released something uninspiring, uninteresting, and unfinished. That no one at RIM had the guts and authority to recognize the seriousness of their situation–the company is literally dying!–and say, “Hey, maybe we should wait until BlackBerry 10 is awesome before we release it,” is an ultimate demonstration of how RIM's culture will lead to its now inevitable demise. This is what happens when the sales people are in charge.”

Dilbert comic strip for 05/07/2012: Every user we talked to was an idiot

Scott Adams – Dilbert comic strip for 05/07/2012:

“Every user we talked to was an idiot, and their dumb suggestions ruined our product.”

The Accountability Effect

Bassam Tarazi – The Accountability Effect [PDF]:

“We in the West live at an unprecedented time in human history. Our world is filled with mass consumption and physical comforts that would make someone from a previous century fall over with disbelief.

[…] The word “can’t” does not have the same clout it once did. You “can’t” or you “won’t”? There is a big difference.

[…] It is our duty to take that gift and live lives that are befitting of it.

[…] Rest is paramount in life, but laziness lies at the fringes of relaxation. Be careful of ceding ground to the creeping sloth.”

(Via Seth Godin.)

Owning Your Words: Personal Clouds Build Professional Reputations

Jon Udell – Owning Your Words: Personal Clouds Build Professional Reputations:

“So now blogs do have forum-style comments which concentrate discussion but recreate the original problems: attenuation of identity, loss of ownership of data.

Could we have the best of both worlds? Here’s how it might work. I want to participate in a comment thread on your blog. So I write my comment, post it to my personal cloud, capture its URL, and post the URL to your comment thread. Your blog’s comment system syndicates the text of my comment into the thread, identifying my personal cloud as the source.”

The Simplicity Thesis

Aaron Levie – The Simplicity Thesis:

“A fascinating trend is consuming Silicon Valley and beginning to eat away at rest of the world: the radical simplification of everything.

[…] Any service putting the burden on end users to string together multiple applications to produce the final working solution should consider its days numbered. Any product with an interface that slows people down is ripe for extinction.

[…] If you’re making the customer do any extra amount of work, no matter what industry you call home, you’re now a target for disruption.

[…] Focus on details. Simple is hard because it’s so easy to compromise; hire the best designers you can find, and always reduce clicks, messages, prompts, and alerts.”

Transform Your Employees into Passionate Advocates

Rob Markey at Harvard Business Review – Transform Your Employees into Passionate Advocates:

“When frontline employees and managers hear directly from customers — when they see how customers scored their experience, when they hear what went right and wrong in the customer's own words — the effect is dramatic. Applause in the form of positive feedback inspires them to keep up the good work. Criticism often inspires employees to improve their performance on their own or to seek additional coaching so they can do better next time.”

My favourite quotes from the Valve Handbook for new employees

Valve’s Handbook for new employees [PDF]:

“As individuals we tend to gravitate toward projects that have a high, measurable, and predictable return for the company. So when there’s a clear opportunity on the table to succeed at a near-term business goal with a clear return, we all want to take it. […] This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, but it has some downsides that are worth keeping in mind. Specifically, if we’re not careful, these traits can cause us to race back and forth between short-term opportunities and threats, being responsive rather than proactive. […] It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the company should be.”

“It’s natural in this kind of environment to constantly feel like you’re failing because for every one task you decide to work on, there will be dozens that aren’t getting your attention. Trust us, this is normal.”

“Can I be included the next time Valve is deciding X?

Yes. There’s no secret decision-making cabal. No matter what project, you’re already invited.”

“Often, someone will emerge as the “lead” for a project. This person’s role is not a traditional managerial one. Most often, they’re primarily a clearinghouse of information. They’re keeping the whole project in their head at once so that people can use them as a resource to check decisions against. The leads serve the team, while acting as centers for the teams.”

“Over time, we have learned that our collective ability to meet challenges, take advantage of opportunity, and respond to threats is far greater when the responsibility for doing so is distributed as widely as possible. Namely, to every individual at the company.”

“How much shippable (not necessarily shipped to outside customers), valuable, finished work did you get done?”

“How much of your work matters to the product? How much did you influence correct prioritization of work or resource trade-offs by others? Are you good at predicting how customers are going to react to decisions we’re making?”

“We believe that high-performance people are generally self-improving.”

“In some ways, hiring lower-powered people is a natural response to having so much work to get done. In these conditions, hiring someone who is at least capable seems (in the short term) to be smarter than not hiring anyone at all. But that’s actually a huge mistake.”

If you think that's what we want, why don't you give it to us?

Seth Godin – If you think that's what we want, why don't you give it to us?:

“So the marketer brags about how tasty the food on the airplane is, or how reliable the cell phone service is or how magically transporting the aromatherapy of the soap is--and then someone else, someone under different pressures and constraints--has to deliver. And they rarely do.”

Time and taste

Marco Arment – Time and taste:

“Time is twofold: nobody can time-travel to launch a product in the past, and nobody can change how they’ve allocated their time in the past.

[…] And no matter how much Samsung, HTC, Amazon, or Google want to offer high-quality platform software, rich app ecosystems, and well-stocked digital media stores (except Amazon), they can’t change their unfortunate history of minimal investments in these areas over the years.

[…] With very few exceptions, companies that put out tasteless, poorly designed products will usually never change course.

Anyone who wants to compete well against Apple is going to need good taste at the top and deep-rooted design values throughout the company.”

Making shit work is everyone's job

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – Making shit work is everyone's job:

“You can have […] programmers who cry for operations to make their slow code run on time, operations people who refuse to answer customer complaints from their network outage, and on and on. Once the mentality cements, everything is eventually someone else’s job, and they’re being a toad for inconveniencing you with it.”

Picture This: Hosted Lifebits in the Personal Cloud

Jon Udell – Picture This: Hosted Lifebits in the Personal Cloud:

“I want a service that will consolidate my digital photos and take care of them for generations to come, migrating them to new media and formats as the old ones go extinct.

[…] I want a service that will enable me to define an access group, such as friends and family, independently of any silo. I want to share photos once to that group. ”

Agile Smells

Gordon Skinner at techPortal – Agile Smells:

“There are a number of problems, or 'smells', we have identified in the Agile process that could be having a negative impact on all your good intentions.”

These are the ones I recognize from our Scrum practice: “Hit By A Bus”, “Fuzzy Definition Of Done”, “Anonymous Author’s Task”, “Premature Architecture”, “Ramble On”, “Turn Up, Tune In, Drop Out”, “Hidden Impediment”, “Off Topic”, “Memory Problems”, “Problem Solving”, “Pulling the thread”, “Scope Creep”, “Practising Insanity”…

Learning from competition

Marco Arment – Learning from competition:

“Reacting well to competition requires critical analysis of your own product and its shortcomings, and a complete, open-minded understanding of why people might choose your competitors.

[…] They’re choosing your competitors for good reasons, and denying the existence of such good reasons will only ensure that your product never overcomes them.”

Jean Cunningham: A lean leader celebrates disclosing problems and other people’s abilities to solve them

The Lean Edge – Jean Cunningham: A lean leader celebrates disclosing problems and other people’s abilities to solve them:

“A lean leader celebrates disclosing problems. A lean leader celebrates
other people’s abilities to solve problems.”

(Via Jason Yip.)

How Not To Sell Software in 2012

Alex Payne – How Not To Sell Software in 2012:

“Basically, if a given software package or service isn’t free/open, it should be as easy as humanly possible to try it, pay for it, and start using it in production. If it isn’t easy to get started with your product, I’m going to find another vendor.”

What I learned by turning off comments

Dave Winer – What I learned by turning off comments:

“I hear that some people feel there's a virtue in being silent. I don't. I see it as selfishness. You're willing to take but you're not willing to give.”

People resist stupidity, not change

Jack Vinson – People resist stupidity, not change:

“If you see people as "resisting" a change initiative, maybe they just see the immediate impact of the change as "stupid" and not helping them in their goals to learn and grow. Refactor your thinking. Get into their heads - solve problems they actually have, rather than the ones you think they have.”

"How'd it work out?"

Seth Godin – “How'd it work out?”:

“Doctors and consultants and builders are often hesitant to ask about how something worked long after the work is done. It feels like nothing but a chance to hear a complaint.

It's not. It's a chance to show that you care. And a chance to learn how to get even better at what you do.”

rNews is here. And this is what it means.

Evan Sandhaus at New York Times Open – rNews is here. And this is what it means.:

“On September 21, the IPTC and Schema.org officially announced their work together.

So by October 2011, we had a supported standard for embedding publishing specific metadata into HTML documents. Now all we had to do was actually implement rNews on nytimes.com.

And that’s what we did.

[…] all you have to do is view source on any nytimes.com article published on or after January, 23 2012. In the HTML you will see new attributes like ‘itemtype’, ‘itemprop’ and ‘itemid’. If you paste an article URL into the Google Rich Snippets tool, you can see a parse of the structured data now embedded into every nytimes.com article.”