PLAN FOR IMPROVISATION

As a manager I've always found it hard to get honest feedback from employees and my management. In larger companies the feedback culture in management often boils down to: positive feedback leads to good reviews - which leads to expectations of paying higher bonus. Employees will give their managers good reviews even in anonymous 360 reviews. The solution LinkedIn's endorsement feature can a be used to get good feedback from people. It will tell you directly what you're bad, but it will tell you which are good at. Here is how it works    If you want to know if people generally think you are good at something Look at how many people endorse you for that skill.  If you have lots of endorsements for other skills, but none for the the skill you are watching. Guess what? People are telling you you don't have it. If you have a skill that you don't use often but you're wondering if you're any good at it Make sure its on your profile. If you get a nu...

I couldn't find a simple description of a product showcase today so I wrote a quick one myself The showcase is an important part of product development. In it the product development team shows newly developed features to the company's stakeholders before releasing them to customers. It promotes early feedback (before the cost of change is too high), facilitates communication between roles in organizations and ensures the correct product is being built.

Photo credit: raphaelchekroun One my most popular posts of all time is one I put up in 2009 about Principled Leadership . I still get traffic from this post and once got a very aggressive job solicitation based on the principals outlined in the post. Recently I came across a quote that nearly sums up the whole list in one sentence: Smart leaders understand it’s not just enough to pursue, but pursuit must be intentional, focused, consistent, aggressive, and unyielding. *I'm afraid I don't know exactly where this came from so, if you are the owner, please let me know so I can link back to you.

I came across this article via LinkedIn. It reminds me of the Maker Schedule, Manager Schedule discussion except its from a maker perspective. Given that I have been doing a significant amount of development in Ruby on Rails for UrbanBound  for the past 3 months, I'm following a maker's schedule again. Being my own boss makes things simpler , however I think its important for makers to understand how to be productive and articulate to their management how they can be best managed. If this seems a bit counter intuitive to you. I can tell you that good managers do know how to manage. However, given all of the pressures around managing a business, its easy to fall into the trap of thinking about management objectives over the needs of the people who getting the work done. A healthy reminder: 7 Things Highly Productive People Do

 Watch my site get slow. Watch me download the logs to make sure nothing happened. Thanks for wasting my time script kiddies.

Anybody who has worked with me knows that I'm a fan of analytics. If you are selling soap or software development services, I strongly believe you should be capturing metrics on how people use and interact with your product. As such, I have Google Analytics on my blog. I have learned quite a few things about my content over the past few years. #1 Short blog posts are the most popular. #2 However, the longer multi-part ones engage users more #3 Good content draws people in. Of the people who stay on my blog for more than 10 minutes - which is a long time in the web -, half come in through the top 5 posts. The top 5 posts are: Boarding Pass - You're doing it wrong How to Interview and Hire a Good Project Manager Effective vs Efficient Teams Principled Leadership Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule ...not in the top 5, but one of my favorite posts... Systematic Amateurism Patterns of traffic Usage: 10% of traffic comes to the site and reads the blog...

I don't like to re-post, but I highly recommend reading this. Tablets are, finally , not going to go away and will only increase in usage. Jakob Nielsen does a great job of discussing the usability and design of 7-inch tablets. Then he talks about the future of 7-inch tablets based on the market and design choices required to ensure their future. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/kindle-fire-usability.html

My family bought me an iPad for fathers day last year.  I have been completely surprised how much I use it professionally and personally.  Here are the ways I have been using it that I never expected: The only computer I use at home (sometimes I don't turn on my laptop at work until lunch time either) Never taking a laptop on a vacation again Teaching my kids the alphabet, numbers, and simple arithmetic (I was shocked how well this worked & how much the kids were into it) Watching Netflix Letting kids use the iPad on vacation so I can sleep in Tracking my finances on Mint (until I ditched Mint - that's for another blog post) Writing blog posts (this one included) Flipboard! Playing casual games (I never used my iPhone or Android phone for this before) Actually using Twitter Finding creative commons images on Flickr Reading articles sent from people at work after hours Reading the blogs I follow in Google Reader Looking at Pivotal tracker while I'm...

Boarding Pass or Billboard?

I have been busy helping customers design apps and doing more reading than writing these days. Here is some of the stuff I am looking at right now: Touch-based App Design for Toddlers Android vs iOS: A Developer’s Perspective Rise and fall: Three Lessons for Entrepreneurs Touch Design – Be Careful of the Eclipsing Effect 8 Incredibly Simple Ways to Get More People to Read Your Content 7 Reasons Your Strategy Is A Problem

Anybody who has been to our office knows I am an Android fan. My prediction is that the Android platform will end up with a much, much larger install base than iPhone OS. Originally, I felt this way because you can get a Android phone on every carrier for a lower cost than the iPhone - many of them are now free with a contract. This is good enough, but I have a new insight. The Android OS does a great job of directing your attention to highly important information. As such, its easier for new users to pick up and for busy people to use. How can this be? You should argue that the the Android OS so similar to the iPhone OS. You are right. However, it comes down to usability. The majority of people out there won't explore their device to find information. They just want the phone to do the work for them. If it doesn't smack them in the head it might as well not exist. Android has two crucial features that make it a helper more than just a smart phone. First, Android b...

One of my colleagues at Pathfinder sent this out to the whole company. I have been on the manager's schedule since 2001. Now [more and more] I'm on the maker's schedule. I realized things were different, but I wasn't able to articulate it until now. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

I don't often re-post from others' blogs. However, I came across a blog post worth passing on. In my career I have never understood working 60+ hours. Even in graduate school I'd work from 10am to 11pm - but only for 4 days a week! It worked for me. I was able to finish my Master's Degree (with thesis and research project) in less than a year. I was happy to be done and never thought about why things had gone so well. Thinking back, per task, I was not a hyper-productive worker. I was constantly suppressing the Shiny Object Syndrome . Apparently my secret was that less is more. That being said, Jeff Shutherland had an interesting post based on experience from a venture capital firm about company who work long hours and the results. He call s it The Maxwell Curve . Take a look: The Maxwell Curve: Getting more production by working less!