The Zuck Highlights
by Giff on February 2, 2012
Like many, I just read Mark Zuckerberg’s S-1 letter. There are two things I really appreciated: the focus on long-term value, and the results-oriented innovation culture it espoused.
The letter states that the company wants to embrace risk and focus on long term value, not “maximizing investor returns” or quarterly performance. I’m glad to see more companies resisting Wall Street’s corrosive short-term thinking. If you missed Steve Denning’s Forbes article about how “maximizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world“, read it here. He covers the issues well.
The second is the general ethos of how they want to go about creating products. Over on Eric Ries’ blog, people are getting distracted by the word “hacker”. I don’t really care about that word. Here are the things that I highlighted:
an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration
believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete
try to build the best services over the long term by quickly releasing and learning from smaller iterations rather than trying to get everything right all at once
Done is better than perfect
just prototype something and see what works.
Code wins arguments. (giff’s note: honestly, a better way of putting it would be “proof wins arguments”)
the best idea and implementation should always win — not the person who is best at lobbying for an idea or the person who manages the most people
to have the biggest impact, the best way to do this is to make sure we always focus on solving the most important problems
Move fast and break things
“The riskiest thing is to take no risks.” We encourage everyone to make bold decisions, even if that means being wrong some of the time.
All in all, I thought it was a pretty well done letter. Of course, it is easy to talk about these things and much harder to do them, but if nothing else I hope the letter starts a dialogue in other large companies.
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Collaboration vs Individualism is a False Choice
by Giff on February 1, 2012
Susan Cain in the NYTimes wrote a broadside against collaboration, calling it groupthink. Now Cliff Kuang in Design.Co writes “the brainstorming process is BS.”
Honestly, I don’t get the fuss. Isn’t it obvious that creativity and innovation is enhanced by both introspective and collaborative time?
I’m only a fan of collaborative idea generation sessions *if* people have done their thinking individually ahead of time. I think team meetings are particularly good at providing feedback, refining an idea, or even taking an interesting idea and making conceptual leaps in great new directions (which often should then trigger more solo time).
I’ll also admit, however, that meetings tend to decrease in productivity for every person you add over 3 or 4 contributors.
For many tasks, it makes sense to dip in and out of collaboration, whether pairing or larger group settings.
I would be a lot less effective if I never had a chance to think or execute on my own, or conversely if I never had cross-functional colleagues to collaborate with.
For groups to work, you need to create a safe environment for both sharing and critique. Pixar seems to do this quite well.
On a separate but related topic, I *have* become a fan of pair programming after seeing it in practice at Pivotal Labs for the last several months. It is the most effective way of interviewing and onboarding that I have ever seen, and I’m buying into the promise that you end up net-ahead in terms of speed and quality (as long as the personalities and skill levels work), even though at face value it seems less efficient.
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Goals not Features; Patience for Speed
January 31, 2012Laura Klein has a thoughtful post up about validating problems and needs and behavior before product. I agree with her. It still doesn’t mean that you’ll get things right but you can prevent a lot of wasted effort. It again made me think about the liberating power of deciding to focus on learning goals, rather [...]
Fear of the False Negative
January 28, 2012
I used to worry about false negatives, or killing a good idea too early. “Startups are not instant hits,” I would tell myself. That’s a true statement. All startups are a hard fight. Almost all startups take far longer than the “overnight-success” articles imply. But after years of creating new products and companies, I would [...]
We test to uncover clues, not facts
January 22, 2012I’ve been hearing an excuse lately for avoiding experiments and “getting out of the building”: It boils down to this: “if the results don’t have clarity and repeatability then why test in the first place?” Or put another way, “if you can’t perfectly design the experiment and isolate a single variable, and if you can’t [...]
We need a startup-friendly lobbying organization
January 16, 2012
Members of Congress, particularly Republicans, like to talk about how over-regulation strangles growth businesses in this country, which makes it particularly ironic that the SOPA/PIPA bills got this far. If you want to let entrepreneurship flourish, get government out of the way. Don’t legislate protections for old industries that would prefer to manipulate government rather [...]