The last two years has been a major education for me in Marketing. First at Intuit, where I felt the entire organization is run by the Marketing Department. I felt that the main goal of marketing was to project (micro)manage incremental changes in high volume processes. In other words, there was a marketing person in…
At dinner, Jared likes to pick a “theme” that we can talk about. I asked the family, “What was your favorite present ever?” Jared looked at me and thought. Finally, he said, “George Washington!” It took me a minute to get it. Matthew had the Croup this weekend. Katie felt compelled to bring him to…
Just finished watching Superbad from Netflix. At first I thought it was funny. There were some scenes that I laughed out loud. Couldn’t breathe sort of laughing. Katie was laughing too. Then after a while, I started feeling bored. Something else too. I was feeling like, “This is way too much like high school, except…
In technology development, there is a famous triangle. It shows how you prioritize your efforts. By focusing in one area, you mess up another. It is a brutal game that never has a happy ending. No matter what you choose, something suffers. Even the “balanced” approach has flaws. I created a game to play with…
Marketo is starting to launch into beta, bringing on a few customers at a time. It’s a stressful time for all as there is so much left to do and so many details. I really appreciate how good Katie was at this sort of thing. Keeping track of a million details. She kicks ass. Meanwhile,…
Katie and I were in bed talking after a long day. The door was not shut all the way, just most of the way. We had a light on and were chatting. I heard the pitter-patter of little footsteps (Matthew) come down the hall. I mentioned it to Katie. The funny thing was that he…
CompUSA is closing it’s doors. Apparently they are being liquidated. So now is the time to purchase electronics if one is near you. Maybe a color printer! It’s amazing to me how long it takes for predictions to come true. In the 80’s they said, “Computers will make a paperless office”. We still aren’t paperless,…
I saw an article that caught my eye this morning about how to introduce jQuery to a large organization. Interestingly, on the post there was a link to “Digg this story”. I thought that was pretty cool and tried to Digg the story. Lo and Behold, it worked. That was my first time, “Digging” something…
I added print.css to the blog. This is something I hardly ever do, but should. Printing is important. Now commadot.com prints properly. Mostly I hid things. But I found I had to update a few fonts and alignments. #body_left, #hero, #search, a.postToggle, div.item_panel, #header2, #footer, div.navigation, #comm_form { display:none } * * { font-family: verdana;…
User Experience Architect: “So guys, I am going to go to the user and try the product. Does the basic use case work?” Engineer: “Yes, it works.” Quality Assurance: “Yes, it works.” User after trying it: “No, it doesn’t work.” Engineer: “Must be user error.” Which part of the joke is funny? It doesn’t really…
Yesterday, someone I know had a bad day. It is a common occurence. Everyone has a bad day once in a while. It colors your whole outlook. How do these things happen? Bad days can be triggered by any number of things. Some are: Physical environment. If you are too hot, too cold, slept funny,…
What are the worst management sins? Here is my short list. Micromanagment. I really hate it when a boss says, “I want you to be responsible for this, but I am going to dictate how you do it.” This is the thing that made me want to leave Intuit. If you delegate then, let the…
Yesterday, I was struggling to achieve a basic goal. I wanted to list out the sections of the application and specify all the different buttons and menus and features. It was basically a quick outline of the product to be used as a UI specification doc. There are lots of task managers, but none achieved…
The first company I worked as an interaction designer, Remend has officially closed it doors. Here are some lessons learned for dot-coms building a product: A dollar spent in architecture is 10 dollars saved in maintenance. Never hard code anything if you can help it. The lesson is that things change. Details change. You have…