Everything you take on is forever. Regardless of whether you delegate it or not.
Therefore:
- Choose Wisely
- Simplify
- Eliminate
Such that whatever “it” is gets all of the attention “it” needs. If you can’t give that amount of focus, don’t do “it”.
January 9, 2012
Choose Wisely
December 13, 2011
Give It Away To Make Money?
Free software isn’t bad business. Losing money is bad business. If free enables you to make money through supporting services, advertising or premium upgrade sales, and it eliminates all of the complexities of your sales and marketing effort (lowers your costs!) then that sounds like great business to me.
December 12, 2011
Build For Tomorrow, Not Yesterday
Supporting yesterday, legacy product, does nothing for you or your client in the long run. It squanders your resource pool on the same old rather than innovation and change and it dooms your product to obsolescence in time. Not good for you or your user. Build for tomorrow.
December 9, 2011
Ask for 1 thing, get it, repeat
To really innovate you need to ship software at least every couple of weeks. Get it out there, get feedback, adjust, and ship again. If you can’t ship this fast it isn’t a development problem. It is a management problem. Know exactly what you want. Pick the most important thing to do. Build it. Ship it. Stop asking for everything but the kitchen sink.
December 8, 2011
Canary in a Coal Mine
If you can’t trust your employees to work from home I think that might be the tell tale, tip of the iceberg, for much bigger problems.
November 2, 2011
What Comes First
Create a structure to figure out what you want?
or
Figure out what you want and create a structure to get it?
A structure without a purpose wanders, or worse, it creates a goal to propagate the structure.
Know what you want, figure out what you need to get it, then create the structure to achieve it.
November 1, 2011
My Development Rule of Thirds
Spend a third of a project figuring out exactly what you want and how it should work.
Take a third to build it.
Then test it and make sure it does what you want for another third.
You can afford less time in any given area and still get an end result but I believe the total project time goes up if you do. Short change one, you spend more.
August 7, 2011
Valuing Venture Capital
A recent email from a venture capitalist got me thinking.
Venture capitalists are interested in the transaction and the money they can make from it. I am sure there are those that have greater thoughts and aspirations beyond just their next transaction, but, the structure of their business model is centered around the “flip” so no matter how you cut it the transaction will be their focus.
What they sell is money. There is no greater commodity in the world. What they value add is strategic advice. But I have to ask how can someone who is buying your business based upon what you have done provide you with advice? They want to buy what you made because they couldn’t do it themselves, and then consider their expertise is focused on the short term perspective of the “flip” whereas yours, is, or should be, the long term value of creating a sustainable business.
Add on to this that we are living in a time where creating something is becoming easier, read cheaper, every day. You just don’t need that much money to do something awesome anymore.
Something to think about when chatting with a VC and pricing the value they bring to the table.
P.S. we don’t need money and don’t want to retire, it was just a chat that went nowhere other than this blog post.
May 18, 2011
Momentum
Momentum is the rocket fuel, the turbo boosters, the engine that ships and ships often. Momentum feeds itself from every shipment, every deliverable sparks the flywheel with satisfaction, confidence and education.
Why then would you create big lists of deliverables for each shipment? Why would you pile on and delay a shipment? Why limit the moments to grab momentum to few and far between?
Don’t. Reduce and refine. Ship smaller deliverables. Ship them often. Celebrate, test and recalibrate, and do it again.
May 17, 2011
Disciplined Leadership
I’m 48, almost 49. I have been making software in one way or another since I was 20. I have 28, almost 29 years of watching more crash and burn development efforts then I care to list. Yes, I have seen success, but it is a small fraction of the number of projects that spiralled out of control.
Why?
Leaders demanding it all, right here, right now, touting their market credentials, experience and acumen, bullying the deliverables and shifting the targets. Pushing the lack of business clarity and focus on to development to resolve or make clear.
Real leadership must have a mission and philosophy that is the Rock of Gibraltar. Every need is smashed against it and only the most important and simplest of ideas, with the greatest of clarity, are put to the team to test, conspire with, and create. Real leaders know that their effort, their contribution, is equal in time or greater, than the effort it takes to program what results, and they make that investment generously.
Every time I have witnessed myself and others fail to afford this effort and discipline, disaster results. Hopefully I have finally scarred myself deeply enough that I can never, ever, forget. We’ll see.
