Britain’s Got Talent: The ultimate in Agile

BGT embodies Agile. Think of acts as products.

• SMALL STEPS. Iterative. Every week takes the show one step closer to finding the Next Big Thing.
• EMPIRICAL FEEDBACK (aka experiments). An act’s potential is measured using audience votes.
• SELF-ORGANIZING TEAMS. Bottom-up. Some of the acts could never be conceived in a board room. (Susan Boyle, anyone?).
• FAIL FAST, FAIL OFTEN. Doomed acts are eliminated at a furious rate in the early stages of the show.
• SIMPLICITY. Acts are forced to distill their talent into a few minutes. The minimum viable product.
• CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT. Every week acts gets feedback to improve their performance.
• COLLABORATION AND CONVERSATION. There is lots of open discussion (on the show and in the media/pub) about which act is best. And it includes dissent.

In my next post, TOWIE share tips on iPhone development using Objective C. I’m joking.

Business projections: beware the crystal ball

The chances are that your company has a graph of projected profits over the coming years.

It is dangerous. It is dangerous because profit cannot be predicted. Profit can be wiped out by an nimble competitor or shift in consumer trends. Profit can skyrocket due to unforeseen success.

Past performance is not a good indicator of the future.

The world is becoming more interconnected and more complex. “Winner takes all” and power laws are more common than linear growth.

Be wary of anyone with a crystal ball.

The best defence is innovation. The bible is The Black Swan.

The Lean Startup – Highlights

A startup isn’t about size, it about extreme uncertainty. Startup = experiment.

The measure of innovation is the rate of validated learning. In fact, the best way to achieve sustainable profit is validated learning.

Validated learning is THE NUMBER ONE OBJECTIVE.

Only borrow big money if it’s the best way to pursue validated learning, otherwise it’s just a distraction.

Most startups fail. General management (the sort of management taught on MBAs) fails.

Traditional management is not the way things have to be done. It was “invented” by Frederick Winslow Taylor in 1911 (to address the problems of a bygone era). His ideas are so pervasive it’s hard for people to conceive that there are alternatives. It’s summed up brilliantly by this excellent 3 minute video (from another author).

In the Q&A session, one person said that The Lean Startup sounded a lot like “trial and error”. The author agreed but pointed out that what it’s called isn’t important. The important thing is if people do it or not, and largely “trial and error” is undervalued. They don’t teach it in (business) school.

This 15 minute video is the bible for trial and error: Trial, error and the God complex (by Tim Harford, a journalist for the FT).

Lean Startup links:

• View the talk online
• The Lean Startup

Where you at Lean Startup? What did you think? Leave a comment!

The Google Story – Highlights

“The billions of dollars in money and profits that flow from it [Google] are a by-product of the company’s concentrated efforts at innovation, rather than a yardstick used internally to measure success or to determine whether a project is worthy of exploration. Unlike most companies, where executives and product managers try to think of ways to make money and then create products, Google is a place where technologists think first of ways to solve problems; only later, if ever, do they worry about how to “monetize” them. Dedicated teams of engineers are encouraged to dream up entirely new ideas to make the search engine operate faster and better. One reason the company has no need for marketing is that its culture fosters a laserlike focus on serving the best interests of Google users. They, in turn, become it’s best advocates.

Google does not seek to make as much money as it could in the short run. The most obvious example of this is the Google homepage, considered the most valuable piece of real estate on the Internet… Google displays no advertising on this page, forgoing tens of millions of dollars in revenue and profits to give users a higher-quality search experience.

The soul of the Google machine is rapid innovation, the most important subject discussed at nearly every board meeting of the firm… for innovation is the reason the company raced ahead of others and stays out in front. Its founders are keenly aware that someone, somewhere, is always attempting to find a better, faster, smarter way to do things.”

“At Google, the preference is for working in small teams of three, with individual employees expected to allot 20 percent of their time to exploring whatever ideas interest them most. The notion of “20 percent time” is borrowed from the academic world, where professors are given one day a week to pursue private interests. Because the company lacks the usual layers of middle management, the hierarchical structure found in traditional corporations is non-existent”

“Google is the place with the buzz where the best and brightest engineers on the planet flock to work. They are leaving universities, NASA, Bell Labs, Microsoft and elsewhere for a dynamic setting that more nearly resembles a graduate school campus than a traditional business headquarters.”

Taken from the introduction of The Google Story.

The Black Swan – Highlights

The Black Swan is a classic book on risk.

“We will see that, contrary to social-science wisdom, almost no discovery, no technologies on note, came from design and planning – they were just Black Swans. The strategy for the discoverers and entrepreneurs is to rely less on top-down planning and focus on maximum tinkering and recognizing opportunities when they present themselves. So i disagree with the followers of Marx and those of Adam Smith: the reason free markets work is because they allow people to be lucky, thanks to aggressive trial and error, not by giving rewards or “incentives” for skill. The strategy is, then, to tinker as much as possible and try to collect as many Black Swan opportunities as you can.”

Bottom Up Organisation and Innovation

Google and Facebook where the vanguard but now it’s taking off. Here are just a few of the books on the subject published in the last few months.

• Adapt by economist Tim Harford (FT, BBC). Inspiring. Original. Great stories. A classic.
• Loose: The future of business is letting go
• The Power of Pull. Good intro on the importance of a learning environment.
• Radical Management. Agile. From a business perspective.

Leave a comment below!

Testing. Usability. Awesome.

The dev team recently got showed up by the newspaper iPad team. Their usability testing was awesome.

Firstly, they actually did some usability testing.

Secondly, the subjects were from a range of teams and “ranks”.

Thirdly, the tests were with one subject and one observer at a time. As a subject, i found that this approach made it easy to have a proper conversation. It was open, engaging, enjoyable and didn’t take up much time.

It was a contrast to product meetings which i find can be riddled with groupthink, politics and, i confess, boredom. (For more on groupthink check out “Irrationality” chapters 3-7).

Maybe we can take the awesomeness to the next level. Usability testing is late in the process… what if we applied a similar approach earlier? To mockups. The ideas/concept stage. Work in progress.

On the dev team we do seek feedback. But usually only from the relevant stakeholder, not from elsewhere. Maybe we can recruit people via Chatter (especially if they say in their bio what their pet projects are).

And we should seek out opinions from the frontline such as the developers implementing the feature or the writers who will be using it day-in day-out.

I suspect we often look for validation, not a fresh perspective. Maybe getting just one or two other people’s views could make a difference.

Maybe we could stick a mockup/concept/screenshot on the kitchen/toilet wall with a space for feedback.

Feedback is good. Engaging other teams is good. It might just conjure up some innovation along the way. I intend to find out

the incredible hoque

hoque, i love the user generated article idea. you dont need to wait for a big meeting about it. start small. write one short article for metro.

if a channel doesnt exist for it speak to content team about creating one. (maybe a community channel?). miguel and artur are also into diversifying our content.

if you need help, gareth is a closet writer. or persuade someone else to write an article. panos is into gaming. gareth is into books. larry is into film. miguel is into travel. zoe? friends?

start small and let your idea gather momentum.

maybe content team can give us a 5 minute lightning talk: a beginners guide to writing articles.

Conversations. Not meetings.

Maybe we don’t need a big meeting about X.

Maybe it’s better to have lots of small meetings. 2 or 3 people meeting for 5-10 minutes. It’s the Steve Jobs approach.

Today it was Dave and Jamie, then Dave, Matt and Martin. Friday it was Matt and Larry.

Tomorrow it might be Martin and Joe. You get the picture.

It gives space for ideas to ferment. It gives more people a real say. It avoids groupthink. It avoids bottlenecks. And besides, big meetings are boring. Would you prefer more meetings or less?

To put it more formally: It might accelerate the evolution of successful memes.

Meetings = groupthink (unless you use 6 hats) = extinction.

We don’t need a grand plan. We need small experiments. Preferably 1 day. Max 2 weeks. We need feedback. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It might expose a critical flaw! No big deal. You didn’t invest much in it.

You might learn something. It might drive more traffic. It might give momentum for… another small experiment! Within a couple of weeks you might have a couple of wins and a couple of losses. You can build on the successes.

Everyone should do it. Anyone can start a blog. Or do AB testing. Or design a logo. Or learn HTML or javascript. (All cool sites have  javascript api so you can mashup their data). Or learn about usability. Or run an online survey. Everyone should spend 2 hours every 2 weeks trying something.

(A caveat: meetings can be OK for some things, but not innovation).

Top 5 Books For Evil Masterminds

If, like me, you are plotting world domination, here are my favorite books on the subject.

1. “Purple Cow” (Seth Godin). Remarkable products sell themselves. Seth has a great writing style. Inspirational.
2. “Adapt” (Tim Harford). How to innovate your way to a remarkable product – experiment based on variation and selection. Great stories including toasters, Iraq, Google, climate change and much more.
3. “Super Crunchers” - first two chapters. Expands on the “Randomistas” chapter of “Adapt”. AB testing for the win!
4. “80 Minute MBA” - ”Conversation” chapter. The “new marketing” is all about Community, Conversation, Co-creation and Customisation (long tail).
5. “Getting Real” (37Signals). A refreshing view of business in tasty bitesized chunks. Stay lean.

What have i missed? Let me know!

BTW. I’m applying the “Adapt” approach to books. I’m reading the first chapter of lots of varied books and casting aside the ones that aren’t awesome. It’s slightly expensive, but for the insight gained its a bargain! Thank god for the Kindle…