Category: Entrepreneurship

Sometimes you need to go back and look at the things you’ve done in the past to see if anything is due for an update or refresh.  Leaving old products to go stale is a sure way to let your customers know that you don’t care and don’t provide good customer service.

With that in mind we’re going back through our catalogue of products – stuff that we have spent thousands of hours developing – and seeing if we can apply what we know now to those products to breath new life into them.

Beyond the easy stuff like bug fixing, graphics tweaks and updating and modernizing the projects it’s a chance to apply entirely new concepts.

One that I’m particularly keen to experiment further with is Behavioural Dynamic Response.  The idea is to trigger context correct information to users to help push them through the key response indicators.  It may be a notification to get the user to finish the particular level they were on, or to come back to beat their friends score.  When you have sequences defined that you know you want your users to go through you can do whatever is within your power to get them to keep taking that next step.

Behavioural Dynamic Response is a super powerful technique that is not yet being widely used and shows a lot of potential for improving the user engagement with your products.

Even without the major overhaul and completely new features.  Just the occasional touchup to your products shows that they are still active and more worth checking out.

There are plenty of hurdles that you have to make in order to be successful.  Perhaps the most critical is taking something all the way to completion.  When you are not working with a team this is a deceptively difficult thing to do.

It takes determination, momentum and accountability to start a project and see it through to the end and beyond.  Many times you will hit on things that seem insurmountable or mind numbingly tedious.

When I launched the iPhone apps that I’ve worked on the struggles all add up. All the aspects to each project needs to be completed and to an acceptable standard.

• Software development
• Graphics
• Sound FX and Music
• business registration
• iTunes accounts
• bank accounts
• certificates, signing, provisioning processes
• marketing graphics, app descriptions
• webpages, support forms
• backend
• testing and Quality Assurance
• App Submission
• ongoing marketing
• iteration and improvements

If just one of these presents a hurdle you cannot overcome by either doing the work yourself or delegating to someone who can then your project is likely doomed to fail. Like the links in a chain only one link needs to break for the chain to fail.

That is why finishing is so hard.

Projects start with the best of intentions, fantastic ideas and a solid plan and can still be derailed by a hiccup.

The Agile approach of daily stand up meetings is supposed to prevent stoppages from lasting too long.  Eventually someone says: “I can’t continue until X is complete.” This is an indicator that someone in charge needs to take action quickly to keep the work progressing.

When you’re working on your own it becomes incredibly difficult to self diagnose these situations and push through.

That’s why I have tremendous respect for anyone who finishes a project on their own.

Being action oriented is one of the biggest differentiators I have noticed in the most productive people.  It’s amazing what you can get done in a day when you just take action to make it happen.  Even a small step can get the ball moving on a large project.

One of my partners is the most action oriented person I have ever met.  No time is ever wasted with idleness.  A car ride is a chance for brainstorming.  Every phone call is a chance to network, spread ideas and get commitment from others to meet deadlines.  It is no surprise that he has started many successful businesses and has an impressive network of connections.

It can be quite amazing what can be accomplished when you really take action and get some momentum on a project. or tasks.

Most of the time I find myself in these situations when I decide that no matter what “this is getting done today!”  Then it doesn’t matter what it is that needs to be done: clean the house, write code, write blog posts, run errands, fill out paperwork.

Taking action can also take another form.  It is a great immediate response to anything that you want to accomplish or take advantage of, but don’t yet know how.

For example. the Japanese economy is under massive strain. Debt to GDP is at unheard of levels which seem unsustainable and are at risk of a major correction ( think Iceland or Greece x 100 ).  Knowing this you might want to ask yourself what actionable steps you could take to profit off of a default on Japanese debts.

This frame of thought, to always think about what you can do is a key differentiator with the most accomplished people I know.

The theory for motivation has been best described by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Peak motivation can be achieved when you become self-actualized – internally self motivated, however to get there you need to fulfil your lower level needs first.

At each level of this pyramid you will find factors that might be motivating you.  Working up from the base starts with the physical needs – food, housing etc that we need.  If you don’t have these needs met then you would be strongly motivated to satiate them.  Note however, that they are not good motivators to achieve great things in life.  You will never compose an orchestral masterpiece if you can’t afford food and are living on the street.

The next level is Safety, which includes job safety and personal safety.  When you live in fear of not knowing how long you’ll be employed or if the city you live in is safe enough then you will be motivated to mitigate that risk.

Love and Belonging.  Humans have emotional needs to have friends, and family connections that are strong.  Building and maintaining these personal connections can be a strong motivator.

The need for self-esteem and self-respect is important.  People with low self-esteem may be motivated to impress others in order to gain respect.  However, your perception of how others perceive you is not always accurate, and the drive to impress is not an effective way to fulfill this need.  Self-respect comes from within.

At the top of the pyramid is self-actualization.  This is the need to reach your personal full potential. The more time and focus you have to devote to this need the more you are likely to achieve in life.  Someone who is fully self-actualized has all their lower needs met, and can devote all their efforts at pushing their own potential.

Knowing where your needs are is the key to identifying you motivations.

All software developers know that measuring a developer’s productivity by counting lines of code written is not an effective way to measure their output.  The correlation between the technical difficulty of a problem and the number of lines of code is not always 1:1.  Which means that one developer can write 10 lines in a day and be very accomplished, while another could copy/paste a solution of 1000+ lines in a day which was trivial.

On the factory floor managers always should be measuring opposing indicators.  If you’re measuring the volume of output – you also need to measure the quality of output in order to prevent creating an unbounded method for taking advantage.

For example.  If a manager of Intel processor factory production line focused solely on the number of chips produced each day, and cancelled all quality control checks then production output would likely skyrocket.  In short order, however, the defects would be found by customers, the business would suffer.  On the other extreme, if the manager focused solely on quality and checked every aspect of each chip produced then costs would skyrocket and output would crash.

The problem with measuring a software developer by the number of lines of code they produce is that there isn’t an opposing measurement of the quality/difficulty of those lines.  Gauging the quality or difficulty of the produced code would likely require peer review, and for that peer to grade the code.  Nobody wants to be the ass that gives their co-workers D- grades on their code so it becomes difficult to get honest scores.

In my opinion, counting anything is better than counting nothing.  If Bill suddenly goes from committing 100+ lines of code per day down to 10 lines per day it may indicate something that a manager should investigate.  If you weren’t measuring output then it would be impossible to know about or fix anything that Bill was having trouble.

Authors measure themselves by pages written per day.  Writing 10 pages of crap is better than ending the day without having written anything. At least once things are on paper they can be communicated and others can help edit things to find the gems inside.

You know what you need to do to launch your business, you have the skills, you have the idea, and yet progress is slow. Maybe you have White Shoe Syndrome.

The problem with white shoes is that they are always dirty and need to be cleaned. When it is time to sit down at your desk to do some work that pair of white tennis shoes is in the corner of your office just screaming at you to clean them. Even in the dead of winter when you are months away from lacing up those white shoes for some reason now is the right time to clean your shoes.

Of course it doesn’t have to be white shoes. If you are sitting down to do some work and minutes later you find yourself tidying your office, or mowing the lawn, or re-organizing your stamp collection then you are a victim of white shoes syndrome.

The tricks to overcome this is:

• Isolation – close the office door, put on some headphones or anything else you can do to physically isolate yourself from visual noise and disruption
• Minimize clutter – clear your desk, minimize your office, move files off your desktop, run your software full screen
• Turn off notifications – turn off auto-email checking, disconnect from chat, turn off calendar alerts
• Turn off the lights – working in the dark can help you focus on what’s on your computer screen
• Before or after hours – try working early in the morning, or late in the evening when other people are not around.
• Go somewhere to work – you won’t be inclined to clean the counters at the coffeeshop

White Shoes can be a real roadblock to your success.  Try to do what you can to avoid it.