My First day at Work Photo
I forgot to post this. I took this picture with my new phone (HTC Touch Pro 2) on my first day of work. The rainbow actually ends at the office building at Adchemy! Is that a good sign or what?
Tag: Work
End of an Era: Moving on from Marketo
I joined Marketo in December 2006 as the first non-founder and began a wonderful journey that has lasted 3 years. I learned a tremendous amount from the people here on a cornucopia of topics and I will miss them. I have accepted a new position at another company (I’ll post that later). Some UX…
The UX of Making Progress
I don’t think this applies to everyone, but it applies to me many times over. When I feel like I can not make “progress” I get very stressed. My mind doesn’t think as well, my body feels ill. I generally have a short temper when I am in this state. Progress is my minds digestion…
Idealism in your job
There are lots of people who can do a particular job. Sometimes, however, one gets a new idea. The idea is how you can do that job better, more effectively and more enjoyably. The idea is important. Most companies make that idea difficult to implement. It stays on the shelf with lots of other good…
3 Business Models
Business Model #1: Enterprise This is when your product costs over 100k. Maybe even in the millions. The sales cycle is pretty long. It requires lots of documents to make the sale and build the product. RFI, RFP, MRD, PRD, Roadmap, the list goes on and on. This is a tough business to be in. …
The UX of positive feedback
A nice review of Marketo. I really feel like Marketo is starting to gain momentum in a serious way. Articles like this make me feel all warm inside that I was able to have a positive impact on a company and on the people who use the product. This raises an important thought for me. …
Management of Expectations
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…
Live demos of my UX work
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.…
P-CAMP Unconference for Product Managers
I went to a conference today at Yahoo. Nice campus. It was P-CAMP Unconference for Product Managers. I took alot away from it. Some learnings: There is a huge chasm between what serious Agile practitioners proscribe and what most companies who say they are doing agile actually do. One guy said, “You just have to…
The UX of Time Tracking
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…
Growing pains
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…
Marketing
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…
Too Many hats!
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,…
A funny joke
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…