Kevin Davis

Great post by Joe Stump at Sprint.ly (great product too btw!) addressing how to prioritize product decisions based on usage.

Something that I’ve been thinking about a bit lately is how to prioritize across various feedback channels (support, usage, paying down technical debt, competitive pressure etc). I’d be curious how Joe and others think about this.

Great post. Make your product useful for a few people before thinking about how it can grow.

If you haven’t checked out decide.com you should. They’re a Seattle-based company that helps you make big purchasing decisions by aggregating what they’ve learned crawling the internet (reviews etc).

A couple of ideas that I think would make them even better..

Landing pages for unhandled products
Decide is wisely focusing on doing a great job in product categories they know. However, when you search for something they don’t handle you get a pretty sparse ‘no results found’ page. I think they could recognize you’ve typed a product, explained that they haven’t gotten to that class of product yet and sent you off to Amazon for referral dollars. 

Filter explanations
When I was searching for a digital SLR camera I found a filter for ‘SLR’ vs. ‘mirrorless’ I only happened to know what that meant after having talked to my camera-nerd friend Chris the week before. I think Decide could have provided a brief explanation to help customers make an informed and confident decision.

“What really matters” content
Taking the above idea further, Decide could provide (probably static) content giving visitors the low-down on what really matters in a category.

Personalized results
Knowing a little bit about me, Decide might be able to provide me with better recommendations. Inferring that because I work at a Megacorp that treats me well I might be less price sensitive and so on. This idea might be a bit harder.  :)

As I recall this was Hunch’s game plan. While I’m not sure how well this ever worked it didn’t end poorly for them.  

Decide has already been a huge help with xmas shopping - looking forward to seeing what they do over the next year!

Don’t be put off by the 139(?!) slides or the rather unfortunate styling. Really solid material for anyone thinking of becoming a product/program manager.

Great personal and introspective post by Sam Stephenson.

I really like going on recruiting trips. In addition to the free trip, I get to meet all kinds of students excited to throw themselves on the fire enter the workforce building software. Recently I got to go on a trip to the University of Calgary. Probably not my first choice of venues but at least it wasn’t winter!

After a day of taking resumes, chatting with candidates and frantically purchasing all of the drinks for sale at a campus store some students hung around for a bit afterwards to chat. 

A girl with her arm in a sling introduced herself. Immediately I asked what had happened to her arm - expecting a sports injury, or otherwise amusing story. She proceeded to explain that she has a genetic condition that requires her to have surgery semi-frequently and this was the result of her most recent hospital visit.

Awkward.

Her questions for me weren’t about salary, or whether Microsoft does agile development or whether there were positions available on the Access team (we still make it!). She asked me whether she would be able to take time off to have surgery when she needed it. She asked about how much insurance would cost and whether it would cover her condition. Her primary concern was that Microsoft is located in the United States and that meant her health would be in jeopardy.

I was really proud to explain that at least at this company, we take care of our people. While I don’t know the specifics of her condition, I am absolutely certain that Microsoft would do the right thing by her. I know that she would receive great treatment and be accommodated by her team at work. Indeed any manager that would raise an eyebrow about accommodating her would be a in a shit-ton of trouble.

This is just one example, but throughout the civilized-healthcare-providing-world there are untold numbers of bright and qualified people that happen to have - or have family members with - medical conditions that will make them think twice about moving to America. 

While I also agree that in the greatest country in the world* it is an embarrassment that people are having to make a choice between food and medicine, I believe that fixing healthcare is also an economic imperative.

* not including Canada

Bret Victor again. I like to pretend I have a keen sense of what’s unreasonable, or a stepping-stone in our technical landscape. I clearly haven’t been thinking big enough.

Incredibly well thought out and well presented. Bret Victor does an incredible job making the case for exploration of better programming environments and languages.

One of the things I love the most about the software industry is the culture of openness. In this article, some folks at Spotify thoughtfully describe how they take on the challenge of moving fast with a large and growing organization. Since much of the literature on agile development focuses on small (~10-20 person) teams, this is a great real-world example of how a successful company has scaled these practices out. 

The authors detail their organizational structure and importantly, acknowledge the tradeoffs and tensions between roles. 

Some bits I found especially interesting..

• Autonomous, multi-discipline feature teams called “squads” with the inclination to move fast are balanced with single-discipline “chapters” with the inclination to do things correctly
• Regular surveys that track several key metrics (and direction) over time assisting management making decisions about which areas to focus on
• Ops as a supporting role supporting devs deploying rather than being responsible for deployment themselves

I strongly agree with Gruber that Twitter clients are a design UI playground. Tons of great innovation has come out of the litany of Twitter clients for iOS, most notably the ‘pull to refresh’ gesture.

However, I think that there is a lot more than UI that is ripe for exploration. A couple of ideas:

• Muting people (1 day | indefinitely). Why do I have to listen to @gruber talk about baseball?
• Automatically segmenting your stream (by topic / funny / interesting etc). Sometimes I’m in the mood to learn something, other times to laugh, others to figure out which party to go to next. Why do I have to scroll through my entire feed or fumble through the neglected list experience?
• Automatically filtering out tweets (using personalized thresholds for inane / uninteresting topics). I’m sure a ton of people outside the US were sick of seeing tweets about the election
• A thoughtful approach to following events and topics. Every time I go to a conference I search for the hashtag and am subsequently overwhelmed by the poor signal:noise ratio

I’m pretty bummed that recent decisions taken by Twitter will likely discourage anyone from implementing these.

I went with two friends/colleagues to the Business of Software conference last week. It was easily the best conference I’ve been to. 

This is skewed towards an internal audience (we work on Microsoft Access), but I think some people might still find it interesting.

Update: see this post from Alex Czartoryski for a whole bunch of other great takeaways

I was wondering how much it would cost me to back up my stuff on S3 and found that Amazon’s pricing page was kind of.. ass.

Hope this is useful to someone. Let me know if you have any thoughts/feedback.

Yes, this is a total rip-off of the database.com pricing page.

On github so you can laugh at how I struggled to make this :)

This really made me think. For as long as I can remember I’ve been of the opinion that religion is total rubbish - charlatans peddling anodyne at the cost of their followers’ critical thought, often with dire consequences. I have simultaneously viewed science as a panacea.

Maybe there is more grey out there than I normally acknowledge. Maybe it’s ok to trust tacit knowledge sometimes.

To be clear, the idea of living one’s life in service of the supernatural claims of a murderous organization is still totally absurd.

I find myself in a strange position on the fence with this one. I certainly catch myself making assumptions about the intelligence of those unintentionally referring to fictional broom-riders and the like. However, I have a number of ‘gramtarded’ colleagues and friends who are incredibly effective and diligent despite the article’s assertions to the contrary. 

I can imagine throwing out a resume with a glaring error but wouldn’t go so far as to test candidates for grammar. 

Side note: Since moving to America I’ve noticed a huge upswing in incorrect subject-verb agreement. Every day I’ll hear a “they was” or “we is” from native English speakers. 

Hilarious URL btw.

Finally something to point folks at work to when they demand “proof” something will work better.

SalesForce takes a fairly complicated pricing model and makes it straight forward..

Contrast with very similar UI with pricing levers that are significantly more difficult to understand: http://www.heroku.com/pricing (admittedly Heroku has a different audience..)