Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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”,…

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…