My third son was a week ago, Benjamin Micah Butel.  Benjamin means ’son of my right hand’ – and I have no idea what the person who made that up was thinking, but I know what it means to me.  It means my ceiling is your floor.  I don’t want my boys to repeat my footsteps, but to take what I’m capable of and go far beyond.  Its like a relay race where I pass the baton on (with my right hand) and they run the next leg.

As leaders, we establish innovative and creative ways of doing things, then formalise it so we can train other people to do them.  So often, this becomes a constraint when it should just be the starting point.  My ceiling is your floor.  We should be empowering people to start with what we’ve learned and go further than us with their own creative ideas.  Instead of expecting them to run the same race as you (ie do it this way because that worked really well 5 years ago), instead pass the baton so they can run the next leg of the race starting with your best and then creating their own.

We all know that a picture speaks 1,000 words, but even more important than pictures are actions.  Actions speak louder than pictures and words.

You could write and talk all day about doing something, but its worth nothing until you do it.

That’s one of the reasons why I like the Agile Manifesto:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

We need documentation to help us achieve optimal communications and control; however we also understand that documentation can be an overhead that doesn’t add value to our customers.

There are two types of documentation and you should always be aware of why you are writing documentation and for whom.

Project documentation is for communication
Project documents are used for communication within a project and are not maintained once the project is completed. These documents are necessary to:

• Sell the concept
• Remove ambiguity
• Facilitate a multi-location team
• Manage the details

Product documentation is for management and control
Product documents are used for managing and controlling the product and will be maintained until the product or feature is retired. These documents are necessary to:

• Manage priorities and scheduling
• Maintain quality standards
• Maintain correctness
• Educate people

When you’re using documentation to communicate, then you’re capturing the state of the requirements etc at a given point in time. If the requirements change, then you don’t update your original communication, you make a new documentation to communicate the changes clearly.

Communication isn’t a living document.

However, when you document for education, then it is a living document. If the requirements or scope changes, then anyone reading your old document for education purposes will be misled, therefore in order for your document to meet its purpose, it has to be maintained. This means every time you write a document for education purposes, you’ve just added an overhead to your project – a document that has to be updated as the project changes. If you are not going to maintain the document – then you aren’t writing it for educational purposes. To make the maintenance cheaper, the document can contain less detail and more principals that are less likely to change.

My boys (4.5 yrs and nearly 3) gave me some starwars lego for father’s day so that I can be the bad guys in the great battles that take place in our living room.

I built it and of course they play with it more than me, but yesterday Jacob (the 4.5 yr old) gave me this card:

To Daddy

Thank you for sharing your star wars toys.

From Jacob

How cool is it to be thankful for the little things.

The culture at NetFlix, explained in this slide deck, is nothing short of inspiring.  Its not their values that I admire, but the fact that they also run the company by the same values that they expect their employees to work by.  Having shared values is important because it defines what you celebrate, what you get angry about, what you flight for, what you look for when hiring and its what screams out at you when someone has to go.

I really like that a big part of NetFlix’ culture is to preserve the culture.  I also like their very frank policies of, “if you wouldn’t fight to keep someone if they resigned, then fire them now” and “if you would offer someone a payrise to keep them if they resigned, then offer them that payrise now”.   Culture and values definately come from the top, so the only way to spread these values is to run the company on them too.

A big focus at Netflix is on finding and keeping high performing, motivated people.  Naturally, we all wonder if we’d meet their standards and as a person who’s on the learning curve with my sights set on being a high performer – it seems to me that being high performing doesn’t start with a degree, or with the right experience, job or boss – but with the right attitute.  An attitude that is determined to learn and push the boundaries.

The lowest form of excellence is having the disclipline to push yourself and learn.  Only from this do you start to gather knowledge through experience and upon that knowledge can come a level of proficiency that is necessary to be high performing in some area of expertise.  At this point, you deploy yourself into something that you’re passionate about or into an opportunity that comes your way and this is where things come off the rail.  Opportunity (no matter how great) without passion will always lead to medioricity.  Passion (no matter how great) without opportunity will always lead to fustration (if not for you then for everyone around you). To reach the next level where you start to inspire others into excellence and high performance requires both opportunity and passion.

Like I said, these are the thoughts of someone on the learning curve – not someone who has arrived, so I might change my mind on all this in the future.  However – I still think its interesting to look at this simplistic model and ask yourself the question – which box is my career currently in?

Thanks Andy for the link to David Greer’s article on 11 strategies that will make your company boom.

There are plenty of articles saying the same stuff about surviving a recession, but I really liked some of David’s practical advice.  If it takes a recession to kick-start us into doing these things, then we just have to remember to keep it up when times are better.  Some quotes from David:

On leadership
In crisis situations, leaders often feel the world on their shoulders, especially if you are the entrepreneur or business owner. All those employees. All those customers. You can’t support the whole world. Do you usually go to the gym three times a week? Go five times a week in the crisis. If you don’t have peak physical performance, you can’t have peak work performance. Do you go to yoga once a week?  Go more, both for the physical and mental aspects. Look after yourself, so that you can be there for your families, your friends, your employees, and your customers.

On strategy
The changes in the market have been so large and so fast that pretty much every plan needs to be thrown out the window. It’s time to start with a clean piece of paper and rethink the whole strategic plan for the business. It’s time to reevaluate your positioning, competitors, services, products, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

On customers
Provide outstanding customer service. Treasure and value your customers and let them know you value them. Ask for testimonials and referrals. Word of mouth from your existing customers can be one of the most effective ways to generate leads. Talk to your customers and ask them where they see the most value in your products and services.  Create a customer focus group of your key customers and run webinars with them to get feedback on your product positioning, your quality of service, and future product roadmap direction.

On innovation
Inspire creativity in both product development and in customer interactions. Would a customer be willing to pay for a developer or engineer to work on site as a consultant for a week or month? Being at a customer’s for a length of time is one of the best ways to increase understanding of customer needs.

It must be the time of year when people start asking the question, what am I supposed to be doing? My answer is along the lines of – well, what are you passionate about? Often the answer is, I’m not sure. You can like your job, like your friends, like your city – but still have that nagging feeling that time is wasting away and you’re not doing what it is you’re supposed to be doing.

So – here’s a challenge. Pick a conference, any conference – and go to it.

The catch is, conferences are expensive. Usually thousands of dollars for the ticket, plus travel, plus accomodation. Find a conference anywhere in the world that you’d really love to go to. It might cost you $5k or $10k to get there and its your own money you’re spending. There are hundreds of conferences happening all the time, so anyone can find one that they’d pay their hard earned money to go to. Conferences aren’t just about learning some new skills, or hearing about the latest technology – they’re also about mixing with like-minded people and walking away with some new friends, some ideas and plenty of inspiration.

By answering the question, what conference would I take a week off work for and spend my own money to go to – you’re probably also answering the question, what am I passionate about.

Now go. Its your life so you can’t sit around waiting for other people to look out for you if you’re not prepared to look out for yourself. Its going to cost a lot – but why wouldn’t you invest that in yourself to discover or simply fuel your passion. Set a goal, maybe for this year or for three years away to get to that conference, then make it happen.

One parting comment, if you don’t ask  - you don’t get.  In 2002, I was working as a java developer in London and planning to move back to New Zealand to start a business.  I wanted to move into .NET to build smart client applications and there was a great conference in London that I wanted to go to.  It wasn’t relevant to my job, but I asked and my boss let me take a week off to go the the conference.  The cost was 2,500 pounds – but it was worth it.  On the spur of the moment, I emailed the conference organiser explaining why I wanted to go and asked for a free ticket.  They said yes.  If you don’t ask, you don’t get.  Last year, I decided I wanted to go to Business of Software in Boston.  This time I paid my own way completely and took annual leave.  Both conferences were fundamental in setting the direction my career is going and I’d do both again.

I thought I should introduce myself again – its been over three months since I last posted on this blog.  A lot has been happening – the highlight of which was a 5 week trip to the UK to visit friends and spend some time with my wife and two boys.

Since March, we’ve also been flat out at Xero working on one of our biggest releases ever: multi-currency.  There were a few ways we could have done this and, of course, we opted for the hardest – but the most powerful option.  For the first time – small businesses can now track their FX exposure (realised and unrealised) automatically and have their foreign currency invoices & bank accounts revalued live.  There’s no reason to be looking at out of date numbers and there’s no need to spend hours making adjustments to your accounting system.  To make multi-currency seamless in Xero, we built FX support deep into the transaction engine and general ledger and updated our report framework to natively support foreign currency reporting with automated rates, footnotes and currency codes.

Here’s a short interview I did with Stephen Nicholas from Openside.  Yes, I’m nervous.  No, I’m not being held hostage.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/teamxero/videos/148/

For a long time, we had a two dimensional roadmap – ie a list features and some release dates.  It was quite hard to communicate any dependencies and how projects were prioritised so there was a general feeling that we were just rolling out one feature after the other.

A roadmap is really only useful if you know your destination, otherwise its just a bunch of ordered features, so the first question to ask is:

What is the destination that this roadmap takes our company/product to?
Its quite likely that there will be some competing goals here – maybe its to open up new markets, or maybe its to innovate in your existing market. You may need to focus on one goal, or a few, but its important to first understand your goals so that you can measure the impact of each project and make sure its getting you closer to the destination.

The next question to ask is:

What’s the quickest route to the destination?
This is what roadmaps are all about – knowing your destination and planning how to get there most efficiently.

Once you understand the goals, then get your stakeholders in a room and chuck ideas up on a whiteboard.   Rank each as high/medium/low impact – based on how close they get you to your goals.  Then rank each as high/medium/low difficulty – based on how long they will take to deliver.

The high impact, low difficulty projects are a no-brainer
Now you can start to plan the roadmap against your goals.  There will be dependencies between features and SDP (software delivery platform) projects needed to support customers, operations, billing etc – but you can prioritize the projects with high impact, low difficulties first, then the high/med and med/low projects etc.

Communicate the roadmap based on the goals
Its good to keep your goals in front of everyone and show what goal each project is working towards.  The roadmap below shows goals as ’swim-lanes’, with release milestones marked along the top.  Some people like to give each release a code-name – I like to give it a theme, which sets people’s expectations about what’s in the release (ie: yes – hooking up the twitter API is a great idea, we’ll look at it in the networking release)

Roadmap template

This has become quite an effective template for visually communicating priorities between projects, how our roadmap is meeting our goals and how there are dependencies from release to release and between product and SDP.

If you’d like to have a play with your own roadmap, download this roadmap template for Microsoft Visio and fill in the blanks.  Let me know how you get on via comments.

Three weeks in and 2009 has that feel about it – that something good is going to happen.