Managing expectations is always hard. Lots of angles, lots of risk. Who is right? Should you track all of your hours? Should you pad your hours? In my experience, people want predictability in an unpredictable world. They want to hear, “This is exactly what we can do at maximum efficiency.” with the follow-up later of…
I’ve been pretty excited about the work I have been doing at Marketo. The marketing automation platform we built has alot of really unique models. The way segmentation works is just beautiful. I am really proud of it. Additionally, the stuff coming out in the next few months is making it even better, faster, stronger.…
Writing effective documentation is tough. (That page is funny, check out the giant font. Cool) Here are some tips from me: Write as if it was Playskool. In fact, browse through the Playskool website. They are writing good web copy! Ha, I love it when things come together like that. The whole site is designed…
Why am I awake at 3:30am? I should be sleeping. I guess I have alot on my mind. I have had alot on my mind for the last few months. Time has not been available to do personal projects. One proect that has suffered is the book. It has gone through many, many iterations and…
How often have you been in the situation where someone near to you is excited about a project. They are enthusiastic and productive in their project, working hard and happy to do so. They are in Flow. But there is a problem. You think it’s the wrong project. This is a dilemma indeed. What can…
The boys and I were at a Bat Mitzvah, which is a religious ceremony for a 13 year old girl. She reads in front of everyone, pray pray, sing sing, go have a giant party afterwards with music too loud. At the ceremony, there was an interesting phenonmenon. All of the friends of the star…
Very often, I think people do not understand what I mean by User Experience (UX). They think its paint that goes on AFTER a product has been defined and possibly built. Maybe it is deciding where the button goes. I think UX is different. UX is about looking at the world through special eyes. Eyes…
Somebody at Google is trying to confuse me. They keep moving the Google Reader link. Sometimes, its in the menu and sometimes it’s at the top. I can’t deal with buttons moving. Is that lame? Ok, maybe. I wish Google would consider some more advanced UI for stuff like this. Check out this basic EXT…
Of course, I couldn’t help myself. I need my new beta software fix. Must use new software. The upgrade went flawlessly AS USUAL for WordPress. The UI is cleaned up and so far, I like it. I haven’t used it enough to really get a feel for it. Right now, I am trying the editor…
I’m up early again. I get ideas in the middle of the night and need to wake up and record them. Anyway, this is a follow-up from the last post. I think I have a new idea how to manage predictions in a software project. This would fit in nicely with a program like TargetProcess.…
Project management is hard work. I feel for anyone who has to do it in the software industry. The problem is simple. To do any kind of prediction in project management, you need to be able to guess how long something will take. Let’s say you want to build a web page. How long will…
I can hardly remember the growing pains from Koko. We had 30 people at the peak. I remember agonizing over organizational charts. I remember thinking about communications lines. I remember how hard it was to get engineering leaders to communicate effectively (at all) to account managers. I remember isolated incidents, but I really don’t remember…
At work, they promoted me to Director, UX and Product Management. I feel pretty excited about the whole thing. As part of taking on more product management responsibilities, I can also hire a product manager to report to me. I haven’t managed anyone since 2002. Very exciting! It brings back all these thoughts about mentoring…
My general theory of arguments/disagreements it that they occur for one or more of the following reasons: One party knows something the other doesn’t. One party is making an assumption the other isn’t One or more parties is feeling an emotion that instigates disagreement. The first reason is the easiest to solve, although it isn’t…