I’ve seen this in every company I have ever worked on. It starts with a meeting. The agenda is about cooking dinner (for example). You are invited to the meeting because you are going to be driving the car to the supermarket. Most of the meeting is about the ingredients and the preparation and the…
One of my favorite values is transparency. The other day, I saw an example of this from Balsamiq, as they reviewed their year. This is probably the most powerful example of transparency I have witnessed on the web. They give complete disclosure including financials, hiring, problems and anything else they thought of. How many companies…
I’ve heard this story many times. The big boss is right in front of you. Normally, you never see him up close. You are in the middle of the organization somewhere and he is the leader. You start to feel butterflies in your stomach. Then, he asks that incredibly insightful question: How’s it going? Arrghhh. …
This was the most stressful purchase I have ever made. Buying a house was nothing in comparison. My jaw is aching…throbbing. Hopefully, it will subside now that the battle is over. Why was this purchase so stressful? Because we tried to Maximize vs. Satisfice. Read The Paradox of Choice for more detail. Basically, in my…
Made to Stick has a great concept called the Curse of Knowledge. (Highly recommended reading) Here is a summary of the curse: Imagine a song (not Happy Birthday) in your head. A common familiar song. Then ask someone listen while you tap out the song on your desk. See if they can understand it. They…
It aint cheap, but plunk down a bunch of money and you can have a new xBox with extra controllers, a cooling fan and a brand new Rock Band 2. Our 3 boys are between 5 and 10 years old and have never practiced an instrument. Katie is musical, so I am hoping they inherit…
I am not a “car person”. I see people all the time comparing this horsepower and that alloy rims and the other sunroof. I wish I could converse with them, but I just don’t care enough about cars to get into it. I appreciate a nice car as much as the next guy, but there…
I remember when Kokopelli (company I ran from 1994-2002) moved offices. It was a short move just across the street. While we were checking it out, we looked out the window and there was our crew waving at us. I almost started crying. The new space was extremely nice and very big. At Marketo, we…
For the past few months, I have been using Balsamiq and loving it. It doesn’t have everything I want, but it has plenty and the design is charming. I am sketching designs very quickly and effectively. However, last week I had a new challenge. There were a series of sketches that strung together to form…
The other day, I needed to use a desktop sharing tool. For the last few years, I had a corporate version of Gotomeeting. It worked pretty well and even had a conference call number that worked most of the time. I wanted to find the same thing, but free, and without the conference call number.…
Yesterday, the topic of competitive analysis came up. I quickly Google’d the topic and realized that there was virtually nothing out there. I am shocked that there isn’t a SaaS product that crawls the web gathering competitive analysis into one spot. The UX would be pretty straight forward. In fact, I quickly (15 minutes) whipped…
One day, I want to build the best Product/Project/Task/Bug/Community Management software ever. But for now, I have to live in the real world. At Marketo, we used TargetProcess for bugs and mild product management. We used Helpstream for community and case management. At Adchemy, we use Jira for bugs and VersionOne for product/project management. There…
Recently, I have seen a spike in the traffic to this blog. Google Analytics is a great free tool to monitor traffic. Just seeing the increasein traffic made me feel warm inside. Like the way a stage actor feels when they get a round of applause. It was a near doubling in overall traffic. I…
Years ago, Alan Cooper pioneered the concept of personas, which are basically fictitious people who represent the customer. They are stand-ins that are used to create empathy for the real people. They are created by amalgamating different characteristics of potential customers into one pretend person. Personas are very useful for decision making, especially for the…