Tech Product Manager

Venture Capital and Future Tech - a Reading List

2016-01-19T08:16:00.000-08:00

Reinventing the Past

In a prior post, I wrote about my experience with a food startup. It was a small window into venture capital, a small, but vital part of new economic growth.

I was reading a Harvard Business article about how venture capital works. Among other things, I learned that being a good VC is about knowing how to take only those risks you can control and in the right industries (read, growing industries).

I shared the thought with an industry veteran, and his reply was that a lot of VC success is just "luck." For instance, food delivery business only became a growth industry because VCs were pumping so much money into it. He said:

"Anything looks good if you pump enough money into it."

Sounds plausible. The disparity between skill and luck, and the dynamics involved in outcomes made me want to learn more.

In many ways, it's an old story about the force of technology driving businesses to become more efficient. It's about the good enough solutions dislodging the best, because it's cheaper and easier. Simply, consumers want it. Yes, it's an old story, a la Innovator's Dilemma.

Tidal Forces of the Web

In Paul Ford's: What is Code? Ford notes how the profession of programming is very adaptable to change. Languages written to solve one set of problems is often (inevitably) adopted to solve a problem in another. For example, with V8, JavaScript could run outside of the browsers for which it was designed. Now, it could read files, send emails, erase your data, and made the client a server.

In this "flow" of the river of software, we often observe trends toward:

abstraction (of information and processes)
adaptation (one solution applied to different use case)
universality (good patterns can be repeated anywhere)
acceleration (solutions enable other solutions)

These trends have resulted in pretty drastic power law outcomes, where you have few big winners, and then everyone else. How should the modern professional adapt to this reality?

How You Can Keep Up - Great Books About Tech

Perhaps the easiest and the best thing you can do is to read good books.

Great books. I was particularly interested to read more into the VC world, because it's a bridge to the traditional world of finance. And importantly, I think it also sheds light to the financial incentives so key to driving change.

In a way, this is a contrast to the craftsman's focus on just building something great for the sake of building. There are those whose reward is simply to build something great. There are those whose reward is to get rich. In our tech world, both must work together.

Tech, Future, Building

Bold: How to Go Big ... Impact the World. By Peter Diamandis.

Tomorrowland: ... Science Fiction to Science Fact. By Steven Kotler.

Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age. By Paul Graham.

Zero to One: How to Build the Future. Peter Thiel.

More Strictly VC

The Startup Game: Inside ... VC and Entrepreneurs. By Bill Draper.

Mastering the VC Game. By Jeff Bussgang.

Venture Deals: Be Smarter than ... Your VC. By Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson.

5 Simple mistakes that could kill your product

2015-11-08T18:50:00.000-08:00

You can crunch CAC and LTV and MAU and DAU all you want, but there are simpler explanations for why your product may be underperforming. Noodle on these simple ideas with respect to your business or product. Hope it helps!

1. Not going where the people are -

I was among the early members on sites like Producthunt (member # 2921) and theGrid.io (was founding member 16207). Grid is an AI-based website builder, and is touted as an evolution/revolution in how websites are built. I agree, but I later realized that for a website to matter you need eyeballs. And to get that today, you don't build your own website. You post on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter.

If you are a single dude wanting to find a girl, you don't go to a bar full of dudes. You join a yoga class full of single ladies.

So, I asked for my money back, and decided I didn't need an AI-built website.

Certainly, team Grid.io is building value, as I'm sure AI will better optimize clicks and impressions and replace many human SEO/SEM consultants. That said, the technology might be better applied in helping people share on existing platforms. Or perhaps it can help optimize SMB marketing. For example, Buffer has become a successful tool first and foremost because people wanted an easier way to post on Twitter and share on social media.

2. Going where it's too crowded -

Going where people are is a truism. That's not to say go where the crowd is. If you show up where all the cool kids are, the problem is you might look like a loser. At any given four-year term, there's only one President of the United States (POTUS) no matter how talented and smart you are.

Remember #1. I'm not saying go to an empty pond where you can be king. But, for the love of God, don't try to be another big social network. Apart from being annoying, you'll get crushed by Facebook and Google. So, to be clear, I'm not advocating Blue Ocean Strategy. Going for an uncontested market either makes you a visionary or a fool.

(Apparently, don't do as I do, but do as I say. I should be blogging on Medium and Quora, not here.)

3. Differentiate or die -

Which brings me to marketing 101: differentiate or die. As the world gets more crowded and user time more scarce, you need to be remembered. Out of sight, out of mind. Which is why Hollywood stars know that any publicity is good publicity. Worst thing is for people to forget who you are.

What are you doing to stand apart from your competition in the minds of your customers?

What are you doing to emotionally connect with your users?

I think one reason StartupDigest was/is so successful compared to other startup events lists is because it's memorable at many dimensions. It achieved this partly by using local, human curator, who could express the relevant and important startup themes to the audience locally. You couldn't do that with one global curator. And even if you could, people appreciate knowing someone local, so you always lose that edge. (Of course, the offset is cost, but the local curators were volunteers.)

4. Missing the feedback loops -

This is just another away of saying don't build myopically. Often, one piece of the puzzle is related with another, with another, with another. And understanding how that little flame burns will either enable you to build a bonfire or end up flaming out.

With so many tools available to streamline communication (e.g. Slack) and process flows (e.g. Git), this should not be a big problem for most teams.

5. Not minding the culture -

And building on that last point, it all comes down to your team. Your processes and good communication will determine how effective your team can work. But, ultimately, it's your team culture that makes or breaks your team and your product or your business. It's the most important of the nodes in your feedback loops. Mess up the culture, and everything else will fall apart.

No need to repeat stories of scores of startups that grew too fast, messed up its culture, and imploded across many dimensions of its business - Homejoy, Fab, WebVan, et al.

I'm hungry, and what I learned about startup investing: Is it time to eat?

2015-06-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

It's not quite noon, and I'm hungry. I debate whether to drum up a scramble and scour my fridge. I'm not impressed; supplies are low.

There's a taco joint, a cafe, and a Whole Foods all within a five-minute walking distance (I'm lucky to be in a very central part of San Francisco). But, I'm in middle of something. Plus, I want to try something new. Something convenient.

A meal from SpoonRocket is $10 bucks (including delivery and tips) and promises a fast delivery. But what really gets me to submit an order is the humor. Step 3 is "put on your pants." Hey, how did you guys know? (I wonder if I would be instructed to put on my skirts if I were a woman.)

I get a two minute warning text almost immediately, so I walk out to the curb. A minute later, a SpoonRocket delivery truck pulls up, I grab a boxed lunch and I get back to my kitchen. What did I have? Grilled chicken apple sausage with BBQ chipotle sauce. The meal was decent; the speed and convenience was superb.

Motivated by the positive experience and the promotion, I share the referral code on my social media and email a few friends. My friends will get $10 bucks off when they make their first order.

Free Food

In fact, a few days earlier, my roommate had sent me an email, subject "free food." I was invited to try Munchery and claim a $10 credit. Whereas SpoonRocket's tagline is "Good Food Fast," Munchery promises "wholesome meals from the best chefs in town." I guess I'll eat free tonight.

While at it, I decide to take advantage of promotions by Sprig ("Dine on Demand") as well. And to fill up on my low running fridge, I try out Instacart. After placing an order of groceries from a local Whole Foods (yes, the one that's three minute walk away), someone shows up in the evening with a bag of groceries at my door. Call me a bit old fashioned, but I oddly feel obliged and sorry for the gentleman who delivered the grocery bag. Is this how millionaires live? Someone shops your groceries for you and cooks your meals for you.

Insight Into Food Startups

This foodscapade taught me quite a bit about this food startups. For one thing, I began to be more attentive to the space. It turned out one of my friends worked for a team that delivers corporate catered meals. He was paid $25 per hour to pack food. Not bad. But, what did I really learn, though?

1. Logistics as core UX - These companies all have to get the logistics right. Food startups have to assemble the food, manage perishable ingredients, and deliver on time. These companies were more like Amazon than they were like LinkedIn; more analogue than digital.

2. Engagement model - Sprig's CEO Gagan Biyani often speaks in public about growth hacking. I once watched him give a presentation about Sprig's user lifecycle. It shows a feedback loop consisting of "before the buy -> first purchase -> repeat purchase -> referral." The referral leads to another "before the buy" cycle. My own story above reflects this business model. And this gives you an idea about where key drivers and costs of the business are. What is the drop off from first purchase to second? From second to third? What are some things that can go wrong? Try out the service once or twice, and ask your friends, and you can gain a grasp of these metrics.

3. Expensive customer acquisition - And speaking of the repeat purchase to referral, this is an expensive way to acquire new customers. Remember that free meal I had? Well, it wasn't really free. It's coming out of investor's pockets, and reflects the competitive pressure and pressure to scale quickly. By contrast, consider Intercom.io. When I click to download a 'free' e-book, I'm asked to share 2 emails to get the free book. That friction will lead to something less than 100% conversion, but that's a much cheaper way to build virality in my book.

4. Huge market - So, with logistics as a constraint, and expensive costs, why all the fuss about food delivery services? Well, as a friend of mine likes to say "I'm pretty good at eating. I do it three times a day." And so does hundreds of millions of others.

For me, taking the product or the service for a drive and a little digging helped me put my arms around the business. For food startups, if I wanted to learn more about the team of executives, I would expect to see some logistics or operational excellence experience: someone from Amazon or Walmart, perhaps. I would also be keen to pay attention to emails or promotions to assess whether the team can efficiently retain a new customer.

In general, when customer lifetime value (current value of all future purchases by that customer) exceeds the cost to acquire the customer, the business is making money. Take Munchery, for example. It took $10 to get me to try it. If I spend more than $10 down the road (and I did), they come out ahead. The more profitable customers a business has, the more valuable the business becomes.

Finally, these food startups have different goto market strategies and different market constraints. For example, if Munchery limits itself to providing food by local chefs, expanding to new cities may challenge greater logistical complexities. By contrast, a template model of assembly simple food in a kitchen and delivering could be repeated much more efficiently.

Have fun investing! And don’t go hungry!

More

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Practical Personal Happiness and Success Tips

2015-03-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

I hope you had a great weekend! I published a book on how to be happy and successful in your daily life. The book isn't about tech or product management, but I wanted to share the news with you! It is available on Amazon.

How To Be Happy: 12 Powerful Steps to Boost Your Confidence, and Live a Happier Life Now

I wrote this book for you to share tips I have applied to move forward when life seemed at a standstill.

I will show you how to be happy with 12 powerful, yet simple actions you can take.

How To Be Happy by David Kim

It will be available for a FREE kindle download for the next few days, and I would love it if you downloaded free of charge and read over it. Also, for your sign-up on BetterAndHigher.com, you'll receive a FREE audio download to Tip #8. "You Say Yes, I Say And."

And, if you like it, then would you please consider leaving me a good review (i.e. five star review) about the book? Thank you ever so much!

3 Book Recommendations to Help You Earn Respect from Software Engineers

2015-03-05T14:16:00.001-08:00

Technical Background Needed?

Companies like Google are notorious for preferring technical product managers. (How dare they forgo your talents just because you don't have a C/S degree!)

Yet, if you look under the surface, you'll find many exceptions. For example, take a look at Google product manager Kamila Staryga, who used to run the (now defunct) Google Helpouts. She does not have a computer engineering background. Her prior career background was with companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Procter & Gamble.

Lest you think this is an exception, take a look at Serena Keith. Serena is heads product at Lovely, a mobile apartment hunting app (acquired by RentPath). Serena graduated college in 2008 as a social studies major. Then, she worked a handful of jobs in non-technical roles.

So, What's Going On?

You could assume that Serena or Kamila simply relied on their industry expertise and strategic prowess. Perhaps you're right. Or, you could give them the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps they really studied up on technical matters. People like Serena worked really hard to overcome their technical deficit to earn the trust of the mobile and web engineers on their team.

I have seen this humanist-turned-technologist narrative play out first-hand with people like Shanely. Shanley used to work at Heroku, an uber-engineer kind of place. The engineers there told me first-hand that when they worked with Shanley, they had no idea she was not from a technical background.

Meaning, basically, you get there by taking time to learn. Big surprise!

Take Action and Read Up!

So, this is the part you've been waiting for. Book recommendations that closes the technical knowledge gap. That's right, you got to earn that respect from your engineering team. There's no free lunch, my friends.

I found a few books on Leanpub that should be worth checking out. Best of all, they have a nice satisfaction guaranty. So, hop to it and beef up your technical library!

Growing Agile: A Coach's Guide - This book is a collection of our workshops that will help you run similar workshops to create agile Release Plans.

Inceptions, Starting a Software Project - A professional software craftsman has many tools under his belt. Many are technical in nature, but many others are considered soft skills. This book focuses on one such soft skill; The Inception Workshop.

Talking with Tech Leads - A book for Tech Leads, from Tech Leads. Discover how more than 35 Tech Leads find the delicate balance between the technical and non-technical worlds.

Lending Club Borrower Accelerated Payment Teardown

2015-02-09T13:37:00.002-08:00

Lending Club

The Lending Club is a peer-to-peer lending juggernaut. It is "the world’s largest online marketplace connecting borrowers and investors." The company recently went public (December 2014).

Earlier, I wrote about a key competitor: Prosper.com, and its 1-click borrow flow.

Scenario

Let's say you're a borrower with a $4,000, 36-month term loan on Lending Club. Your monthly payment is $130.47 (Figure 1).

Figure 1

Problem Summary

What happens if you want to pay off your loan faster, or wonder what happens if you change the monthly loan payment amount? How would you approach this problem as a product manager?

Possible Solutions

First of all, as a product manager, your job is not to do the user-interface (UI) design work. You have design experts who would be insulted if you thought you could do their work for them.

Rather, your role as a product manager is to explain what the goal of the feature is: explain the benefit to user and to the business, and help the team understand why it's important.

That said, I don't have a designer, so by way of communicating, I'm going to share a few screenshot mockups to illustrate a few possible solutions to the problem.

When possible, you want to think in terms of common design patterns. Be creative, but not too creative. A common UI-pattern for changing prices is a slider (think Kayak).

Slidebar

In figure 2, I borrow Kayak's price slider to let the user perform a "What If" analysis on the summary page.

The bordered box and the fonts clarify to the user that the loan term has not changed. This is simply a what-if calculator for informational purposes.

An alternative to leaving the UI as is, would be to make this kind of calculator a pop up, or placed on the side navigation bar (below the referral incentive, for example).

Figure 2

Payment Spinner

Perhaps another way to solve the problem and keep the UI clean would be to add a spinner to the Next Payment line. In figure 3, you can see the up and down spinner, and next payment dollars in brown font.

It goes without saying that the amortization calculator in the backend would adjust the due date accordingly.

Figure 3

FAQ Approach

Now, I am not a Lending Club product manager, and therefore do not have a broader view of the problem and its impact. Let's suppose I have access to customer support calls, and this happens to be a frequently asked question, and something that is not yet automated.

The best first approach to this problem might simply be to provide the user more information (it'd be worth parsing some of those customer service calls) and provide a self-serve page explaining the impact.

All you really would need is a hyperlink that answers "Can I pay more?"

In figure 4, I visualize what this could look like. I added a red dot with question mark as a way to create a common UI pattern within LendingClub site itself. Whenever we find a common question, we can insert it within the default screen. It acts as a supplement to the "Common Questions" already found in the side navigation bar.

Figure 4

Stepping Back and Advocating for the User

It is the product manager's job to advocate for the user, and understand the business goals. If the user wants to increase the monthly amount (in the slider example), it could be a signal of financial strength. However, if the user wants to decrease the monthly payment, it could be a signal of some problem. For the business, this presents an opportunity to deliver user delight, and at the same time mitigate business risk (for example, by providing pertinent information or options that mitigate default risk).

On the whole, I think there are other small improvements that can be made to the summary borrower screen.

For example, as a borrower, I really want to know what the overall amount of money I am paying is going to be, interest and all. Rather than purely text-based rendering of that information, a progress-bar type of visualization could be much more effective (and would be relatively easy to implement).

And as a borrower, I might be confused to see the lenders of my loan. Thus far, nothing in this space has shown me I have any incentive or useful interaction with the lenders. It's a distraction, unless it were clearer to me what I am to do with that information (figure 5).

Figure 5

Testing, Revenues, Summary, etc

Let's suppose that the user actually wants to pay off the loan faster. The first task is to work with the designers to design some possible solutions (as we did above). Next, we would want to consult engineering (or communicate to them) to ensure that the implementation is feasible within time or other resource constraints.

I can say that all of the changes suggested above are mostly cosmetic, and would not take long to implement. The thing is, you don't actually know a priori whether it is going to help or harm your business.

Testing

You already know that I'm going to tell you you need to test. Since the changes are relatively easy, I would opt for having multiple versions of possible solutions and running A, B, C tests in different markets and segments to see which ones perform the best.

Revenues

Moreover, for those borrowers accelerating payment, you want to convert that intent to a new call to action. For example, "would you be interested in becoming an investor?" Why not, you have money spare.

Here, Lending Club has a potential weakness. Unlike on Prosper.com, on Lending Club, you need to create separate accounts to lend and to borrow. Why? Why can't I be both a lender and a borrower from the web product perspective (never mind the regulations for a second)? The answer is, no reason at all!

As it is, Lending Club will need two separate email addresses from you for you to be both a borrower and an investor.

Figure 6

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Do you have articles or teardowns of your own to share? Check out productmanagementfasttrack.com.

Prosper 1 Click Quote, Not Really 1 Click

2015-02-09T09:37:00.002-08:00

Prosper P2P Lender

According to its website, "Prosper is is America's first peer-to-peer lending marketplace, with more than 2 million members and over $2BB in funded loans."

I've been a Prosper member for years, an early adopter since the first days before other competitors popped up. I've also been a fan of Kiva.org (a similar, yet different kind of service where the loans are made interest-free to developing world individuals), where I have made over 100 loans.

1 Click Quote

I've only used Prosper as an investor, loaning out small micro-loans to various users - most of them consolidating debt, or paying off an auto loan, or borrowing money for home improvement. I decided to see what it would look like to become a borrower.

I loved the simplicity of the trigger from the investor summary page, prompting me to consider borrowing a loan.

Figure 1

You are teased with a low APR, and big call to action "Get Rate" button.

Now, I'm already logged in as a user ... meaning my basic info is available. Too bad, then, when I click on Get Rate, I'm routed to this page.

Figure 2

Prompting me to provide the purpose of loan and some other basic info. It still like the clean UI, but my problem with this is, why make me repeat the same information? (Figure 1 and Figure 2 essentially duplicate information). Why make me do this?

Further disappointment then, when I am routed to the next page, where I am told "Get a Custom Rate in 1 Click." This is my 3rd click, so I feel this is bit mismatched from meeting expectations point of view.

Figure 3

Understandably. Many of this has to do with the regulated nature of lending and borrowing industries. Often, the business constraints are such, that the end goal is not the most streamlined user experience (UX). Sometimes, it makes product sense to create some friction for the user. That said, I think there's clearly a room for improvement in conversion and user experience here.

Anybody home?

As another example of UX issues I found with Prosper. When I go to my investor profile page, I see something like this. This is me (figure 4).

Figure 4

What happens when I click on the "View" hyperlink? I get a broken link. Page Not found (Figure 5). Which is not bad. The page reroutes to the summary page shortly.

Figure 5

However, look at a different Page Not Found message by another product - StackExchange. There, you see clearly more humor. It is a way of empathizing with the user.

"You didn't find what you were looking for?"

"We are sorry, let's see if we can at least make you smile while we help you." That seems to be StackExchange approach (Figure 6).

Figure 6

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And a product teardown is intended to help you become a more effective product manager by improving your acumen. There's a whole lot more to this profession. Check out this book:

Take Charge Product Management: Take Charge of Your Product Management Development

Keep on building! Good luck!

Taking Assembly for a Test Drive

2015-02-05T08:07:00.000-08:00

I have been taking the web product Assembly for a test drive.

Assembly is a platform for crowd-sourced web-based products. A product for product development online. Sounds like recursion!

It's got to be a dream for programmers and web geeks!

Product Description and Traction

Assembly is really interesting, just because you get to see what other people are thinking about, in a transparent way. The product seems to have solid traction based on cosmetic review of the activity. Here are some key observations about this product.

Coderwall Project bounties and contributors (from Assembly)

Virtual - The projects are mostly virtual from around the world. The landing page is filled with many approved and pending projects. A large product like Coderwall has 100 contributors, although contribution follows a steep power law distribution (probably even more than 80/20 rule - meaning 5% do 95% of the work ... the nice thing is, they are paid accordingly).
Platform - The diversity of products is as wide as people's imagination. Of course, what Assembly provides are the building blocks (see below) of a web product building.
Revenue Positive - As far as I could tell, Coderwall is its most profitable product; based on 2014 payouts, it seems to have about $24K MRR with 86% profit margin. Wow!
Engineer Heavy - I've joined a few products and started one to test the default experience. I don't have hard figures, but based on new people who sign-up to a project, the site is engineer heavy, followed by designers, followed by non-technical people.

What Are the Building Blocks of a Web Product?

One of the reasons Assembly interested me was that the product makes you think about what the building blocks of a web product development are.

https://assembly.com/discover

In essence, Team Assembly would have had to deconstruct the core elements of software development, and so doing, virtualized and abstracted a traditional coming together of a team. Abstraction and virtualization are both long-term trends in the software-centric world.

So, apart from that interesting academic question, here's my hypothesis about what Assembly believes are core building blocks.

Software engineers - Which is great, because a platform like this would be self-selecting to software engineers who are used to working "in the web." Remote working is a norm in this community.
Comprehensive communication - Communication is key in product management. Many good vs. bad outcome can be traced back to good vs. bad communication. Assembly uses Slack threads for each project you join. Seems like a good solution.
Project management - This seems to be a missing piece of the platform. Teams likely will use a Trello board or Google docs outside of Assembly. The communication threads are nice, but not sufficient for serious collaboration.
Version control - Assembly-built products are linked to Github repositories. There is no separate bug tracking here, but can be managed through communication threads and pull requests.
Incentives - I think Assembly's solution is particularly novel and effective. I think it is very meritocratic, because coins are awarded based on contribution. The overall model is very Silicon-Valley-esque. The founder holds the lion's share of initial coins, and if everyone maxes out the contribution efforts, the founder's holdings can be diluted down to 50%, and everyone else holding 50% ... unless founder herself is doing a lot of work and awards herself. Apart from monetary incentive, the product also leverage's people's sense of curiosity and personal value. You can say, "hey, I'm only a designer, but I can add this little piece to the overall effort!" And so on. For many, I would say, money is a distant second or third incentive.
Team Trust - This is another challenge. Trust is really hard. Most startup teams at least, fail because of bad founder selection. Here, the process is just left up to the wind.

What else is important to building a good product? Really, it is customers, and a good process to deliver what those customers want. That's it. If you don't have customers, things like project management, engineers, and everything else doesn't matter. Only thing is, some startups start out with a hypothesis they can get customers, and start building. But, in the end, you need customers. Communication, version control ... don't get lost in the details.

It's just tools and processes to serve the customer.

Assembly's mix of light-weight and mostly off the shelf tools is an interesting approach to discovering better ways to build for the customer.

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Are you a product manager? What's your philosophy and approach to building great products?

You might also like the following teardowns and meta talks on products:

What Is Your Approach to Product Management?

2015-01-27T07:20:00.000-08:00

A product manager at Radius asked what my approach or philosophy about product management is. My answer wasn't very interesting. I subsequently read a post by Ernest Kim that was.

Certainly, getting the build, measure, learn cycle can be a key part of the iteration necessary to walk toward building anything good. Are you getting analytical in your product management? Click the link for some great articles on building with data.

Additional Reading:

WTF is a product manager by Ernest Kim
Hierarchy of product love by David Kim

Or if you want to get more nitty gritty on actual product management, Marty Cagan goes into ton of details, including how to staff and work with your engineering and designer teams, what product manager really does, etc, etc.

Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love

Marty worked at Netscape, among other places, where he worked with luminaries like Ben Horowitz. So, some of his experience is a little dated (in my opinion), but the wisdom and the principles hold true, because those are timeless!

Getting Analytical and What Makes You a Great PM

2014-11-10T07:45:00.000-08:00

Few months back, Peter and I started connecting with the Startup Digest readers.

To be transparent and fair, Peter and I wrote a medium post (“What makes a good startup event”) and shared it with our readers.

Still, we were frustrated with the lack of good data on those readers. We had a choice. On the one hand, we could ignore our readers and improve the digest using our knowledge. On the other hand, we could devise ways to collect more information.

Quantitative data is important. But, I recall a conversation with Ryan Glasgow, in which he pointed out how valuable qualitative data is in the right hands. (By the way, Ryan will speak on 11/18 at Weebly - see below.)

We decided to craft a very simple survey, and we gathered some direct data not available via Google Analytics or Mailchimp. For example, we obtained data like job title, which could link to net promoter score.

I performed a rudimentary regression analysis and compiled the results of the Startup Digest survey analysis - Silicon Valley.

It turns out, asking the right questions is really important, and in some ways, this was a squandered effort. We are now looking into something like a cohort analysis, but the data we have from Mailchimp is pretty limited.

I started looking into this, and suspect that many of you would either enjoy teaching or learning either one of the following:

Survey design - asking the right questions
How to perform cohort analysis

As related in an earlier post about data-driven hustling, the first step is simply getting into the mindset of measuring, and starting super simple.

Reading List

Use this spreadsheet for churn, MRR, and cohort analysis by Andrew Chen

“Cohort analyses are also essential if you operate a SaaS business and want to know how you’re doing in terms of churn, customer lifetime and customer lifetime value.”

53 Articles and Books that will Make you a Great Product Manager by Noah Weiss

This is a collection of links and articles.

The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data by Julie Zhuo

“Can’t decide how you truly feel about the future? Have Data and A/B Test take the decision out of your hands. Don’t want to invest long-term in something that has the uncertainty of failure looming in the horizon? Take the easy path instead with a bevy of A/B Tests.”

Hierarchy of Product Love

2014-09-29T07:42:00.000-07:00

How Good is Your Product Anyway?

Recently, I had a chance to sit next to a tech executive during lunch. Our brief chat meandered to the topic of what makes Startup Digest special.

You may be aware, there are dozens of email newsletters in the startup space. Some are good, some suck. And Startup Digest is king.

Why is that so? The question made me think about what it is that any given product does for its users.

How does a newsletter, a product, or a service (or a person) win the hearts and minds of users?

What Need Does it Fill?

What kind of a model do you apply to address a question like that? The model that came to my mind was the well-known Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

Source: “Maslow's hierarchy of needs” by J. Finkelstein - created using Inkscape. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 viaWikimedia Commons.

At the base of the pyramid are basic necessities for physical survival. Keep walking up the slope of this pyramid from food to safety, to community, and you eventually end up self-actualized. (I don’t know about you, but the word amuses me, and evokes an image of someone sitting like Buddha in the middle of the day at Dolores Park.)

When I started googling for “product hierarchy of needs” I came to a Smashing Magazine article called Designing for a Hierarchy of Needs.

You might have seen innovation thinker Clayton Christensen apply a similar idea to businesses: Jobs to be Done. Here’s a rationale from Christensen’s institute:

“Customers rarely make buying decisions around what the “average” customer in their category may do — but they often buy things because they find themselves with a problem they would like to solve.”

You can see why psychological underpinnings of the hierarchy of needs model is so powerful. It strikes at a deeper truth. We do stuff because we need to satisfy our desires and needs, not because of some cosmetic marketing.

Applied Psychology - using FeeX as an example

Let’s apply it! Take a product like FeeX, for instance.

FeeX helps individual investors by showing your hidden fees (the stuff that mutual fund companies make incomprehensible with words like ‘deferred sales load’ and ‘12b1 fee’) so that you know how big the hit is, and hopefully take action to save.

The old product focused on the fee saved in dollars.

That appeals to the rational mind, to the part that says, save and you’ll have more left over for food. This is the bottom of the pyramid of hierarchy of needs.

If you happen to have some money socked away in retirement savings (and you’re not a CPA), do you ever think like that? “Gee, I am paying too much on my hidden fees!”

I don’t. And ironically, I have a CPA.

During a conversation with a team member, I suggested, why not link it to something with stronger trigger, something closer to home.

For example, “save $X and you’ll have saved enough to fly to go see your [loved one].” Or “Fly to Hawaii for free, with money saved on your 12b1 fee.”

That’s higher-up on the pyramid: need to belong, family, love, etc.

Click image for full-sized view of hierarchy of product love

Back to Startup Digest and the House of Startup

So, what is Startup Digest, and what makes it special?

Why should a user rely on Startup Digest curated events as opposed to, say using CrunchBase Startup Calendar?

Startup Digest solved an archetypical founder’s problem. Chris McCann started the digest so he could figure out what was going on and meet new people as a newbie in Silicon Valley.
Startup Digest connects with its audience very personally. Chris shared the story of how in the early days, he used to make waffles for the readers in his apartment, then at VC offices. (The larger and slightly more scaled version of this is having local curators be the ‘faces’ of each city edition. While not scalable, sometimes thing that don’t scale can represent a competitive advantage, like personal relationships.)
Startup Digest benefits from strong network effects. You all know that when there is a successful incumbent, often the bar for surpassing it is high.

Changing an existing user behavior requires not 2x improvement, but a 10x improvement (borrowing from Andy Grove’s book about paranoid survival).

Far better, therefore to go after a new base with a new twist of the service.

These observations point to how the Startup Digest resides beyond the utilitarian in us. It helps us connect to a community and gain a sense of belonging.

Escape Velocity

This brings up another question. At what point do you lose the glues that hold a community together?

If you could (potentially) make waffles for 350 people, what can you do with 350 thousand people? Brute force will not work, and you have to look for beneficial intersection between technology and the human users.

What would be the digital equivalent of a handshake or making pancake for a friend, or seeing a familiar face on a digest each week?

Time for Action

More pragmatically, few things that Startup Digest or CrunchBase Startup Calendar could do (and should regularly do) include:

redraw core user persona - in this case startup founder/early employees persona, to understand the way the user thinks
re-align user success to business success - for example, Crunchbase is aimed at creating a world’s best dataset of startup activity and people. Does events align at all with that business goal?
use technology to work smarter - this is something Startup Digest could do much better. We remain very human-driven.

Building the right tools to empower the enthusiastic users takes lot of resources, but it is absolutely the right path forward. Does your product roadmap reflect that truth?

A strong community is one that scales itself.

At Startup Digest, we are pushing beyond our comfort zones by digging deeper into what we want to grow into. We are testing where our audience wants to go while diagnosing what they need most.

We are doing that using a mix of data-driven decision making (slides) and building new value through partnerships (for example, recent offer through ZenPayroll) and observing how our audience reacts.

As noted, we are behind when it comes to applying technology to help our community scale itself.

Peter and I liken the journey to climbing a mountain. You want to set your sights on a peak, and start testing different routes up, frequently changing when you get closer to the terrain and see new obstacles.

Often, the peak is shrouded in fog, and weather conditions and fatigue may impact your performance and progress.

Here’s how you can train your climbing legs. Think of ideas to improve your product. Anything. Then, pick and prioritize a few you could implement within a reasonable period of time.

Then take some small step forward toward that goal. Try it! I would love it if you shared your story in future!

Mapping Your Career

2014-07-01T07:30:00.000-07:00

A new friend invites you to a dinner party, and you have never been to her house before.

Do you head out the door and start driving?

Hell no!

You plug in the address and map it out first. I use google maps. And it wonderfully paints a path for you in cool blue. Not necessarily a yellow brick road, but see how it wonderfully takes you from point A to point B.

Doesn't this tool give you a peace of mind?

Clearly, a map is a wonderful guide, a reassuring helper in your journey.

Your Career

Wouldn't you like to have the same assurance in going from point A to point B in your career?

Except, what does a career map look like?

Thing is, you don't know. It is one of the axioms of life that you know with some clarity what happened in the past, but you are completely clueless about the future.

How did Google Maps know where you are going? Well, someone took measurements and made a map in the first place. In our society, we have mapmakers, or cartographers, who literally make maps.

"Stop looking at job boards. The best jobs are found or made."
A wise friend

When it comes to your career, you can look to your heroes and mentors and trace their success stories.

But, that only goes so far.

As an analogy, those examples may be like street lights in your neighborhood. Once you leave your familiar city, and head out into the wilderness, there are no lights but the stars, no paved roads.

You will have to build your own map. You may decide to later invest in paving a road.

A rocketing career paths are true for only a few people in the world, and is a career fallacy. And the truth seems like hard work. But, the truth sets you free to move forward toward a better and happier you.

You fear failure.

What do you do if your efforts come to nothing, if you fail? That's okay. You learn, you grow. Your map improves, and you gain little more clarity.

Every day.

In an uncertain world, be a map maker

The world is literally blowing up everyday. Technology is accelerating the cadence of change in all industries, and no job or career path is secure.

As a friend told me “focus on excellence.”

It is another way of saying invest in your value and skills. As to know how to use those skills, start building your own map, and not relying on job descriptions.

The highest paying and most valued work (where you also will feel more fulfilled and valued in your work) are not found in job boards.

My friend: “The best jobs are found or made.”

Now then, start today!

The Geographer by Vermeer

Suggestions?

What do you want to talk about? Share your suggestions.

Hotel Tonight teardown: trigger and room analysis

2014-06-07T09:01:00.000-07:00

Background - Triggers

This week, I have been reading a book called Hooked, which is about building habit forming products by Nir Eyal (who also writes about it in his blog nirandfar.com).

In this post, I take a quick-pass analysis of an email I got from Hotel Tonight, an email which was an external trigger to goad me to act. The focus is not so much on habit formation, as general product and trigger observations.

A lot of us go through the day and do things automatically, because we have been conditioned to do so. The first step to such conditioning is a trigger. To use an example (from the book), before you became addicted to Instagram, you first became aware through an external trigger, such as an Instagram picture posted on your friend's Facebook wall. Once you become a regular user, you find yourself opening Instagram to capture and share a beautiful moment. This describes a transition from external to an internal trigger. Instagram has got you! As the saying goes: “we are what we repeatedly do.”

Hotel Tonight Email Trigger

So, Hotel Tonight sent this email, and I woke up to it in my inbox.

Email: Hotel Tonight

Notice the copy language used. “Let's make history” and the last sentence “fire up the app to see even more …” Clearly, the language is intended to move you to act.

It is also clear, the big emphasis is on visual language. The first image is a beautiful perspective of a luxurious hotel lobby looking into a high-end bar. It beckons your aspirations - “would you not want to walk into this stylish, high life?” - the image suggests.

As you scroll down, you see different hotel room types. In the following two room types, you notice the box in the lower right corner “HIP” and “SOLID (yellow circle).”

HIP and SOLID rooms

Alright. My curiosity sufficiently stoked, I open the mobile app. The email trigger successfully lead to action.

Room types and images are complemented with room prices.

You can find a few techniques in the image above intended to move the rooms (i.e. action triggers).

The first is bargain hunting. See how the room price has been cut from $324 to $199.
The second is scarcity. Notice that there are only 2 rooms remaining at Hotel Monaco. Get this room now before it is sold out!

Room Categories Confusion

I have to say that I am puzzled by the product team's decision around room categories.

First of all, how should the user decipher the room categories and the colors? Does the intended user use the app often enough to be able to associate the colors with the categories?
Are the catgory names themselves intuitively defined? I had no idea what “SOLID” meant. I fumbled around the app to find what it means in this next screen shot.

Solid is a comfortable, reliable hotel with all the gotta-have-em amenities.

There is another categeory called Highroller. Once again, you kind of know what this means, but not really.

This is not me. Is it you?

So this brings up all a few questions:

What problem is the product manager trying to solve with these categories?
Is HT currently serving room types based on past user transaction history or generically?
If the intended action is click, are the room categories an effective trigger?
How does the color coding relate to UX?

Compare Airbnb

Compare Airbnb. If the catgories are intended to trigger something, it is interesting to note that Airbnb approaches this problem narratively: “You'll enjoy city at Loft in Nature.”

Airbnb landing page.

The aspirational imagery subtly leads to an internal trigger. Next time you think about vacation, you may find yourself going to Airbnb to browse.

One final question for both Airbnb and Hotel Tonight is, given the observation that human beings attract attention, why are people missing from the picture?

Imagine that top image, with an attractive bartender staring squarely at you, or the Airbnb deck, with a playful gal sipping from a cup, living the good life. Now, wouldn't you like to be there?

If you liked this post, you may want to try a comparative mobile app teardown screenshots forAirbnb and Hotel Tonight. Give it a try, annotating what you see in detail, and improve your product sense in the process.

You may also enjoy the post of test drive of Assembly product.

Data-Driven Hustle, A System

2014-04-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

Have you ever parked your car at an airport without marking the lot number? You thought you would remember, but after a few fun nights at (insert: your dream vacation spot) and you forgot!

Essentially, you started at point A and wanted to get to point B, but because you didn't jot down point A, you got lost.

How to build a system

This is you not jotting down point A on your journey to point B, aka forgetting wher you parked, 1000 BC style.

Source: Wikimedia Minotaurus

I talked about hustling versus measuring, how analysis and team meetings somehow lead to 0 increase in membership for our PM Fast Track community, but a little hustling lead to 30 new members in like two days! I mentioned that we had a system.

To do anything complex effectively, you need a system or a framework. For this discussion, a system is a set of details and tools that helps us get stuff done and deliver results. You will slip on meeting your goals anyway, but at least with a system, you will do better. My proof for that assertion is a huge sample size of one. Me. (You should test it out, and then we will have a statistically significant sample size of two!)

Well, how do you build one?

Step 1 - State the goal. This is obvious. In my example, let's say the goal was to get 50 new members.
Step 2 - Set a timeline. Preferably quickly as possible, but long enough that you have good data about whether it's working or not. Try it for a month - whatever you want to work on.
Step 3 - Deconstruct the process. What do you need to do to get to that goal? Sometimes this is known, and at times unknown. Somewhat counter-intuitively, you want to focus on the process and not on the outcome. Why? Look at step 3.
Step 4 - Link process actions to goal. For example, a process related to the goal of new members is creating new events. To do that, you have to book new venues and you have to talk to potential speakers. You have to think up new event ideas and topics. These are deconstructions of the process and the goal into small actions that you can measure.
Step 5 - Measure it. You got to track it. Which is kind of a bitch, but if you get into the habit of spending a few minutes as part of your routine, you might enjoy it. But, probably not. No one likes budgeting and recording things, unless you are an accountant (which I happen to be, by training - but I still like good jokes). So, look at step 5.
Step 6 - Really important. Tell someone, everyday. Yeah, this might be hard, but did I say it is really important? Good thing is, it doesn't even have to be your boss. It could be your friend, or just someone generous enough to give you five minutes of his or her time daily. What you do, you call or skype and say “Hey, I met my goals for yesterday.” Or “I met my goals, except this or that, and here's why and here is what I will do about it.”

That't it. Don't get into long discussions. The other person may not even know what you are talking about. But, it works. It works because it is about training your brain to be accountable, and to form the daily habit.

There's an app for that

Yes, there are apps out there. Lift.do is one, for example. Their tagline is, succeed at everything.

Source: Techcrunch

And it may work for you, but you may or may not find you want to be more granular on how you break down your goal. For example, Lift may allow you to set ‘inbox zero’ as a goal, but not necessarily how you are going to get there. So, I just use a spreadsheet. In this example, I track business interactions each day and number of words I write each day. It just ties to my personal life goals - hence life check-in. I have a wonderful friend, Chris, who helps me and motivates me to do my part. And I just call him in the morning.

Source: me

Checking in with an app, or getting notification from Lift that you didn't do something is not quite the same as telling Chris or Jane or whoever about your progress toward your goals.

Pride or Shame

Whether it is pride or shame of telling someone you succeeded or you failed, there is this emotional trigger to your brain that makes this last step a big driver of your success. You have to try it and let me know, then we will have incontrovertible proof from our statistical analysis! (Told you I like jokes.)

kanban

Notice how my system is a simple spreadsheet tracker, but I added a visual signal to it.

Green - success!
Red - fail!
Gray - not relevant

That is all kanban is. It is a Japanese word literally meaning signboard, and used to great effect in the Toyota manufacturing system.

And after I commit this post, hopefully I will have completed my daily writing goal!

And you? For you, a free gift!

What about you? What are your goals and will you test out this system?

And just for you, I am enclosing this free gift. It is a spreadsheet for job seekers to apply a system to superpower their hustle. Make a list of contacts, then record whether you are meeting that goal or not. Give it try and let me know how it goes! And have fun!

You may also enjoy reading Getting Analytical and What Makes a Great PM.

Suggestions?

What do you want to talk about? Send in your ideas.

This year, let your resolutions look back

2013-12-27T12:01:00.002-08:00

A Story Year-ending

With a new year around the corner, people make resolutions. At year-end, people also look back and reflect. It occurred to me that one can't be prepared for the new until at peace with the past. If you are chained to the past with heavy chain, you can't run forward.

In fiction writing, resolutions aren't about making a todo list for the future. Instead, resolutions wrap up the tensions and struggles the characters experienced throughout the narrative. Whatever disappointments or complications one suffered from, there's comfort and light at the end. That's what a resolution is - to make peace with the past.

With that in mind, I don't want to make plans for the future yet. I want to remember the past year in summary and reflect whether it means a beginning or an ending.

Resolutions

1. About this time last year picked up an online Python programming tutorial - since then I explored other materials (Udacity is awesome) and learned to program.

What I learned - I learned to program, which helped me appreciate technology in a different way, which helped me understand our Zeitgeist a bit differently.
I also learned that the really valuable skills relating to code may not even be coding. It might be problem-solving, learning to abstract, learning to manage complexity, and learning to create re-usable modules.
It taught me patience: you really can't get good overnight. All good things takes time.

2. During the last year and a half, I built a bunch of products with a friend with hopes of launching a business.

What I learned - I suck at building stuff. But, it was fun and I got a lot better. Failure teaches you things about yourself (related post) as well as about a new craft. There's huge value to simply trying ... you'll suck in the beginning.

3. Read a whole bunch of stuff that I never read in business school or in my past life - Martin Seligman and Gretchen Rubin on Happiness, Thiel's essays (mind-blowing!), Paul Graham's articles, Andreesen's blogs, Noah Kagan's newsletters, Amy Hoy's Unicorn Free, Chris Gullibeau, Ferris's 4-hour book, etc.

What I learned - there are lots of smart people, and the possibilities for making a living in the world are really endless. In the short-run, options may be limited (because of expenses), but if you can begin to think what your passions are longer-term, rich and rewarding life-career is within your grasp. It helps to be working with smart, successful people. But, usually, you have to become smart and successful yourself to attract those people. Catch-22.

4. Wrote some cool blog posts about my experiences across business and coding in SF.

What I learned - I learned to communicate with readers. I'd spent a ton of my life sending email back and forth in a corporate cube. None of that stays with you. No one cares. But for the first time, I learned how to build an audience and a following; to communicate.

5. Became an author! Wrote my first e-book about Coding Bootcamps based on my insider-view experience of having worked for one and knowing bunch of people in the space.

What I learned - You can productize just about anything. It doesn't have to be software.

6. I tried a coding project with someone.

What I learned - You don't have to be an expert or have talent in the field (though it helps). The only talent you need is talent for action and energy. If you start, it is possible to bring others to contribute to the effort. It is the first requirement of team building.

7. Built meetup communities - Ruby Rookies and SF Product Management FastTrack (the latter with a friend, Ritu).

What I learned - learned what it is like to start something from nothing, how to create resources, identifying and tapping into unmet need of anonymous others, and how that leads to a community of like-minded folks.

8. Family. My younger brother got married to a wonderful wife, and my parents' cat is adorable.

What I learned - We go through ups and downs. Friends sort of come and go ... and it's hard to know who is a friend until you fail. Those that are real stay with you. Family on the other hand is family. They love you and support you no matter what. They are more important than all the rest, so remember that.

What I learned - Cats are cute!

Sharing

This seems good enough place to stop. Everyone is busy, and I'm too old to keep making lists. Would love to hear from you - what your resolutions are; what you did and what you learned.

Happy New Year!

New Project

One of the things I decided to do for 2014 is to put up a new website with my own URL (since I had always used someone else's url - like this blogger.com blog). I'm going to do something constructive with it by getting non-technical MBAs more familiar with some of the tech stuff I'm playing with - sort of web101 for non-technical MBAs. It will go up on http://techproductmanager.com/. Would love your readership and support!

(If you enjoy these thoughts and would like to support my writing efforts promoting personal learning and understanding of technology, please consider supporting me through gittip.)

What hackers (and you) can learn from the Pope

2013-12-22T21:25:00.000-08:00

Are you thirsty for knowledge?

How will you recall 2013? Did you want to do something great? How far did you get?

One of the hallmarks of a great hacker (not just in programming, but great leaders, great teachers, great anything) is thirst for knowledge. That trait is a cornerstone of greatness.

What is a clear evidence of genuine thirst for knowledge? Learning. If you are learning with intent and consistency, it might be driven by an underlying thirst.

Why you learn

And why are you learning? Why are you thirsty to do something great? It is because we are human beings with capacity to do more than simply copy and paste spreadsheets or make sales calls all day. Here, I want to reference a well-known hacker manifesto called "How To Become A Hacker" by Eric Raymond. Raymond asserts, "hacker attitude" includes the following beliefs:

The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
Boredom and drudgery are evil.
Freedom is good.

If you think about it, education isn't simply about learning facts to obtain a degree, in order to be employed. Rather, learning is a means to knowledge and wisdom, such that you can become free. So that you can avoid drudgery, but most importantly, to elevate beyond personal freedom to solving interesting problems (interesting to you individually, but also with the potential to help many around you). That is why you learn.

How you learn

Steven Raymond's exhortation is more specifically about programming. He notes that:

"Learning to program is like learning to write good natural language. The best way to do it is to read some stuff written by masters of the form, write some things yourself, read a lot more, write a little more, read a lot more, write some more ... and repeat until your writing begins to develop the kind of strength and economy you see in your models."

So how do you learn? You learn by waxing on and waxing off around the master.

Learning Mr. Miyagi style

Apprenticeship is quite powerful. I don't know the full history behind it (and may be interesting for someone to write about it), but it is plainly a model widely adopted across human disciplines - from medicine, academia, computer programming, politics, the list goes on.

How else can you learn apart from apprenticing and tireless practice? You have to be curious. You have to tinker. Otherwise, you'll never surpass the master.

Step 1 - stand on the shoulder(s) of giant(s)
Step 2 - copy/master everything they teach you
Step 3 - try a variance, try and fail, and learn

Along these lines, the person who most refreshed my attitude about learning to program wasn't a programmer, but the Pope. And I'm not even a Catholic. And I think there's a lot that other hackers (in any discipline) can learn from his example.

Personal Dilemma: Enter the Pope

The "Cold Call" Pope

So, one of my personal frustrations and dilemma has been picking up a new field of knowledge.

Frustration comes from feeling like teachers in past disciplines have failed me or failed to save me time by pointing me in the wrong direction - teaching me such useless things like spelling or accounting.

Dilemma. Now that I have an aim, I still have to learn. It's time and energy-consuming to 'wax on, wax off.' I'm lazy. Is there a short-cut? How can I do it without the hard work, without the 10,000 hours?

And it would be far better if I were still in college. But those years have been squandered. I'm now in my 30's and I feel I have less luxury with time. The thought is frustrating.

Enter the Pope. He taught me the following.

One: You're never too old to be New

The man is almost an octogenarian. That doesn't stop him from breaking thousand year traditions (like washing women's feet on Holy Thursday or inviting former Pope as an equal to the alter).

Pope Francis also warmed millions of hearts when he embraced and kissed a severely disfigured man suffering from pain.

Confirming the humanity of all human beings

There were many other incidents that demonstrated the uniquely human iconoclasm of this man from Argentina. (We are all human, so why aren't we all as human as he is?)

Truly, you're never too old to do something new, to do something amazing.

Two: To be yourself is to be Great

At this point, let me note that I'm not Catholic. I just admire this man, because he teaches me much. Apparently, Pope Francis is so humble, that when he became the pope, he called his newspaper delivery man to cancel subscription.

Now, that's ridiculous. And amazing. Amazingly humble. Amazingly himself. This is not for show (apparently), not a pretense. The newspaperman, he knows the Pope well. When he realized what was happening, he apparently broke down in tears. The story relates that the then Cardinal used to collect and even "return the 30 rubber bands around the newspaper."

Cardinal Bergoglio is just being himself. There are thousand such stories among the parishioners who fondly remember this man's kindness.

In the end, greatness isn't about being good at something. Rather, it's about being good. About letting the goodness in us shine forth.

Three: To fail is to Learn

But the most revealing thing I learned is that the path to this kind of greatness - of goodness in life - is never smooth.

Sure we may read of the touching stories of the Pope before he became Pope and think he was always like that. Sure we may see stories of startup success and 20-somethings who have become CEO's of corporations.

"Surely, they have known nothing but success," we think.

Not so. James Carroll recently wrote a piece about the Pope in the New Yorker. The former Cardinal had had some difficult periods of leadership during violent "Dirty Wars" years of Argentina's military dictatorship. Some priests might have lost their lives because of the Cardinal's misjudgments.

What sort of pain and frustration might such difficulties leave on one's memory? The experience, apparently was "searing," according to Carroll's article.

Failure is absolutely necessary to growth. Failure. Mistakes. The trick is not to dwell on it. The trick is to learn from it.

And what is learning? Learning is a sign of desire for thirst for knowledge. And why do we thirst for knowledge and wisdom? So we can be free and solve the world's problems.

And you're never too old to do that. You just have to be yourself and learn from your past. Like the Pope. Then, in a manner of speaking, you'll be great. You'll be a hacker.

What's Next?

There aren't many days left. Before the year ends, I'd like to write two more posts.

One summarizing how I spent my time - what I learned, achieved.
Another, I'd like to remember all the wonderful blessings of the year - people I met, lucky breaks, those who helped me, celebrations.

Ubuntu espeak Merry Christmas!

2013-12-22T16:06:00.002-08:00

Linux is so cool, especially Ubuntu, which makes Unix and programming accessible to anyone - not just the technically-trained, but anyone with some initiative, desire to learn, and willingness to overcome some fears of technology & fears of getting stuck.

I remember I actually tried programming on the web, tinkering with Sun's Java toolkits, configuring Apache servers. Perhaps I should have stuck with it. It was hard, but it didn't occur to me that others may also have struggled, and at least I would have been among the few. Still, I remember all the random scripts and verbosity of Java ... it was not very approachable. Today it's much different.

Anyway, I digress. I'm not writing about learning to program. I'm just exclaiming how cool Ubuntu is. If you have a linux terminal open, then try this ... type:

$ espeak "Merry Christmas"

espeak is an old-school speech synthesizer, and if you want to hack, you can check out the source for espeak.

Watch what you're saying!

Really neat, right? Merry Christmas, everyone from me and Ubuntu!

If you liked this, you might also like to know how to partition your Windows machine to boot unix, and for further reading, get comfortable with your command line.

The Linux Command Line: A Complete Introduction

Merry Christmas!

JavaScript typeof vs instanceof

2013-12-10T11:37:00.000-08:00

Reading is good

And I assume almost no one reading this post would disagree that reading is good. And once you agree with that, then it follows that good books are valuable. Good books alter our thinking. Good books can be life-changing.

I have been reading Professional JavaScript for Web Developers (3rd ed). It find many little details of the JavaScript language that I almost never comes across when simply learning to code or following a tutorial or a newsletter.

Theory and Practice in the world

I suppose this is the dichotomy between theory and practice that many professionals experience, whatever their profession might be. For example, a good trader may be familiar with modern portfolio theory, and be able to outline the efficient frontier. Then, on the trading floor, find that day-to-day, she never really applies that theory or knowledge. However, there maybe a longer-term project, or a strategic shift in investment for which that knowledge may make the difference between success and failure. Likewise, when scaffolding a JavaScript app using a tool like Yeoman or Meteor, many programmers may never think about memory management or garbage collection. Do you know how it's done in JavaScript? And how will you apply them in your application, even if you were familiar with those concepts?

We live in a world of changing contexts, between clean theoretical Platonic concepts, and a messy practical application where little details could matter, or may be totally immaterial.

It looks quirky for now - typeof and instanceof

For now, the details look very quirky to me. I'm sure it will change over time as I see other contexts, and find cases of the theory applied in practice. With that statement of faith in mind, it's time to play on the console (Using a Chrome browser, F12 key on a PC brings up the developer tool, which includes a console).

According to the book, typeof is used to determine if a variable is a primitive type, whereas instanceof operator is used to determine the type of an Object. Here are some examples - play with other variations in your console.

typeof "anything" // "string"
typeof 3 // "number"
typeof null // "object"
typeof [1,2,"3"] // "object"
typeof {} // "object"

So, lots of things are object. Let's move on. Keep in mind that primitives are not objects.

var array = [1,2,3]
array instanceof Array // true
array instanceof Object // true
Array instanceof Object // true
Array instanceof Array // false

So, an array is an object, not an instance of another Array.

Check out other technical things I am learning on http://pleaserefactor.com/.

Masters-Thiel's 2x2 model applied to learning to program

2013-11-22T14:05:00.002-08:00

Thiel's 2x2's

I've really been really enjoying CS183 notes by Blake Masters. One of the biggest take-aways has been Peter's insightful 2x2 look at the world. The technique itself is nothing new, and probably litters countless number of blogs and powerpoints. For example, last year, I talked about 4 kinds of people in a hacker matrix.

Difference is that Peter's thoughts are quality, and his matrices are actually useful. One of the key ways it is useful to me right now is to serve as an underlying motivation for learning, and for designing a learning roadmap.

Optimistic & Deterministic

One of the several ways Peter views investment opportunities (and hence a mental view of the world) is along the optimistic-pessimistic axis and along the determinate and indeterminate axis. Optimistic-pessimistic is self-explanatory. Determinate means that there's a specific path that will unfold. Indeterminate is what lot of us has been doing ... future is uncertain but there seems to be lot of choices, so you do what you can and trust things will turn out okay.

That's indeterminate-optimism, by the way. Since the indeterminate-pessimism would be just saying everything will go to hell anyway in an unpredictable way, so you might as well just stop stressing.

Copy of the chart from Blake Masters Thiel's CS 183 class 14

Applied to Careers and to New Programmers

I find that this is reasonable map for career strategy. It also provides a good mental-model for someone new to software engineering. That matters, because with things as non-linear as careers today or when you have a small field of vision due to inexperience, it's helpful to have map. (Think of sailing across the Atlantic in a pre-Columbian world vs. post-Columbian world.)Soft

What about as applied to software engineering.

As a learning map - analyzing the optimistic quadrants

The main focus for me is to motivate and determine a sensible path for learning and growth. I can rule out pessimistic quandrants outright - it's just not a good way to live.

The optimistic quadrants are telling. To me, it's clear that determinate-optimistic is appealing and should be the goal. Yet, in practice, I live an indeterminate-optimistic life.

Why is that? What might it be tempting in concept and necessary in practice to understand little bit of lot of things even within the narrow confines of software engineering? To stay relevant, should you know hadoop and noSQL and bunch of other things in addition to growing your knowledge in TDD/BDD, frameworks, optimization, etc, etc?

And determinate-optimistic isn't trivial either. Clearly, if you had a very specific problem to solve - let's say you want to make data analysis easier in the big data cloud - you still end up with bewildering requirements as to techniques, tools, and technology. More to point, how did you come up with that specific goal in the first place?

Making the choice to step into the light - focus

Yet, that last quadrant seems sensible, because only then, can one be specific about what to learn. If you want to confine your (near-term) interest to databases, let's say, then you can begin to concretely list what steps you can take to get there ... it is the power of focus.

More

Somewhat unrelated, I saw this post on Startup Digest on the topic of focus by Brad Feld. Something to chew on, for sure.

There's no time like today to start getting more technical. If you are a non-technical MBA like myself and want to become more conversant in software, I am posting relevant posts on techproductmanager.com.

If you enjoyed this piece, and want to support my writing efforts in promoting technology in business and personal development, please checkout my gittip page.

day5 - beef jerky, culture, and why performance reviews are toxic

2013-10-10T23:47:00.004-07:00

Reflections on beef jerky day - feeling like my colleague was a jerk

I'll just share the video I recorded at the end of the day. I basically felt like there was some gap in the engagement and accountability in the team. You can tell I'm a bit pissed off in the video.

We are delusional as people

So almost immediately after recording, and feeling discouraged about lagging engagement, and thinking back on the day, I had a realization. It's interesting the two of us incorrectly perceived our contribution and role in the team. Who was who's apprentice?

And we're just freaking two people! We are delusional.

Good intention to help people not be delusional
I can now better appreciate why organizations create measurements and performance reviews - so as to check members from becoming 'delusional.' For example, if my manager and I agree that I was a 4 out of 5, and have it on paper, then I can't come back and say 'but I delivered more revenues than he/she who also has a 4 rating!'

Performance reviews are used to avoid perception of unfairness.

But it's wrong
While I can now appreciate first-hand the organizational leadership's position in defaulting to performance reviews, I also believe that it is the wrong step to take.

What you really want are individuals to become more self-reflective, self-aware, and self-sufficient. You can't enlighten people by banging them on the head with 360 reviews. That only makes them less engaged and bitter and resentful. It is a sure sign of distrust at a deep level among the team members. Instead, focus on dialogue and communicate your grievances.

Instead, focus on dialogue and communicate your thoughts. Support each other and help the counter-party see the reality. Difficulty conversations aren't supposed to be done through mind-numbing written performance reviews using sanitized words. (Didn't you always love that guy who had no filter in his mouth and said whatever the hell came to his mind?)

Talk to each other. Know that hard is good.

Yet there's a tension
I can also appreciate the tension present here. It is the tension between having great people, and being able to scale growth. If you had to hand-pick and cultivate great people one by one, you might spend too much time recruiting for the team.

How are you resolving this tension in your organization?

Learning by doing

To see what this overall project is about, see the original 12appyDays entry.

Today was project 5 - a skeleton eCommerce site for beef jerkys. On the previous day, we built a simple and simplistic site using google map api to show the path back to the car. And on the prior day (project 3 pickr), I wrote about the experience of how knowing what's hard is ... hard.

And I'm learning so much, because I am building. Lot more so than I could by thinking and reading.

day3: ActiveRecord, Pirates, and knowing what's hard is hard.

2013-10-07T21:08:00.001-07:00

Appy Days

This is a day 3 reflection for 12 days of coding projects. We also have link to source code and other info on github pages at http://12days.github.io/.

Prior blog about this project and its rationale are:

Day 3 Reflection

step 1 - User Stories

We decided to build a Flickr clone with a pirate theme, hence Pickr (source code). What I learned was not that mind-blowing. Nonetheless it is worth capturing. As usual, we started with user stories. Something like the following:

As a user, I want to be able to upload my photos and delete them (paperclip gem)
As a user, I want to see a livestream of recent uploads
As a user, I want to see a stream of my friends uploads

Once we understood the expected behavior, and the general idea that it's a photo application, we were ready to build.

step 2 - Survey Existing Tools

First, it's great to leverage existing technology. For example, we used a gem called paperclip for photo upload. It saved us a ton of time to be able to use this technology.

Since we wanted to be able to see friends uploads, we needed to be able to make friends, etc., and that means we needed to authenticate a user. It also meant that for the first time in three days, we would be using a database. Thankfully, there is also a gem called devise, which makes authentication quite easy - it gives you almost on the fly the ability to get users to sign up for an account with password.

step 3 - Mapping Data

So the next step is invariable mapping the object model relationships. In Rails programming (and more generally in the model-view-controller (MVC) paradigm of programming), "model" is the business logic of data object. So for example, in this case, we would have something like the 'user' object, which would have 'photo uploads' and also have 'friends.'

Rails abstracts these types of relationships via Active Record associations. Using this convention, one uses syntax that writes out model relationships in more or less plain English, like user has_many uploads. Or photos belong_to user.

step 4 - have fun
And pirates ... well, we just want to have fun while working. Arrrrggghh!

What we learned

So, using gems like paperclip and devise, we set up the initial authentication and photo upload in no time. Before noon, we had a running app.

Then, even after sketching out database table relationships, we found that it was not very straight-forward to build the many-to-many relationships between users and friends, especially since we wanted to be able to allow users to interact on a permission-based flow of first receiving a request, and then deciding to accept or reject a relationship. It was pretty late in the night when we had all the models hashed out, and it fell to the more experienced among us (Josh) to do most of that coding and validation.

As someone less experienced struggling through the associations and related validations, what I learned was the following:

As a new web developer, we probably don't spend enough time thinking about database design and data associations. Frameworks like Rails has encouraged this by abstracting database queries. You no longer need to write SQL to look-up data. But, it is still necessary to build the right relationships, meaning one needs to get into the mindset of thinking about how data is stored, and what the relationships between data tables might look like. It's easy for those experienced, and yet very abstract and difficult to handle for those inexperienced.
Development time is hard to estimate. This is a truism. But, part of the 'hack' of placing a one-day constraint on building a product is to limit the error in estimation. Even so, it seems, we are notoriously bad at estimating our progress and estimated time to finish. We are often mislead by early success (as we were with a skeleton of a working app by noon). The harder pieces happened to come later, and took quite a long time to build.
Unless you've built it before, it's hard to know what's easy and what's hard. This is a catch-22. I would think that this insight is useful from hiring point of view. Why does one hire a senior developer vs. a junior developer and what does senior mean anyway? It means that the developer has built the very piece of technology you want, and knows exactly how hard it is. It is not to say that senior developer is better ... but just an important observation that knowing what's easy and what's hard is ... hard.

I think these were the main points, and the rest are probably not worth mentioning. If you enjoyed reading this post, you might also enjoy reading about my observations from attending a local meetup event called RailsBridge, and how I started to go down this road of web development after working in business as a MBA grad.

Finally, if you're interested in engaging Josh or me to help you with your web development projects, please feel free to reach out.

Pickr was hoisted up in a day and could use some love. Please fork it and contribute. Once again, you can get all of the posts, lists of projects, and source code links at the project page.

Can you really learn to code in a month?

2013-09-29T14:28:00.001-07:00

[Topic - this post is about learning and coding, and relates to the post about 'attitude over aptitude' observation.]

Can you really learn to code in a month?

It has taken me a hell of a lot longer than one month to learn to code. Am I just dumber than other people? Or is this a marketing gimmick?

Who am I to talk about this?

As I have been learning to code for a several months now, I've become quite familiar with various tutorials and resources about coding. For example, I worked for a few months at a local coding bootcamp, and ended up writing a short e-book to help people think about choosing a full-time program.

And I am fortunate to have experienced mentors who give me good advice about my progress - as I highlighted in attitude over aptitude.

Are we brainwashed as a society?

More recently though, I realized that many of us (including myself) have been conditioned to rely heavily on others for our education. We have limited time; it is wise to use existing systems for our education. (In his book The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb points to neuroscience research and points at that this is part of how our brains work (primarily our left-hemisphere). We reduce complexity by overlaying patterns and order. We need structure to keep things simple and be able to absorb information.)

So, it's not surprising that we often rely on others to make things easy for us. For example:

Textbooks - Why do we use something called textbooks in schools?
Teachers - Aren't we our best teachers ... how can someone really know how we learn and what we find interesting?
Schools - Why are we paying an ungodly sum of money in tuition to attend schools? Are we trying to stoke our ego by paying for a piece of paper? Or are we genuine about what we want to learn inside of walls of some remote institution?
Tutorials and courses - Again, rather than determining how best to pick-up a topic based on our own learning patterns and need for structure, too many people simply "pay" for content or a course, in the hopes that it might lead to accelerated learning.

I realize these are simplistic questions. I simply make the observation that many exhibit a behavior of dependency and fail to think independently and originally. And the reason often is: we are lazy!

This is 'Murica. Get rich quick!

The polar opposite of paying someone to help you learn is the Do-It-Yourself learning. I think the term DIY was popularized by home owners making fixes and home improvements on their own. One can apply it to education as well. Today indeed is a good time in history to do things yourself.

Internet & accessibility - Internet has made niche knowledge as accessible as common knowledge. Just google it.
Commoditization of knowledge - With that accessibility, things like tutorials and online courses have proliferated. These days, you could take an entire career's worth of education on the web using Udacity.com, Coursera.org, and similar resources.
Curation - Good news! Someone else already has done the hard work for you! Just checkout something like superherojs.com to get started on JavaScript.

Even so, there is this thorny issue of time. We don't have enough of it. And capitalizing on the accessibility of knowledge, DIY attitude, and need for effective use of time, I have seen various offerings that promise learning quickly. Just check out the claims of "I learned to code in a month" genre:

Taught myself in 8 weeks - http://lifehacker.com/how-i-taught-myself-to-code-in-eight-weeks-511615189
Learn Rails in one month - https://onemonthrails.com/

But, is it true? Does it work?

As I shared above, I feel dumb. I certainly couldn't learn Rails in one month. (Yeah, I could generate a rails app on day 1. But, it was just monkey-see-monkey-do. It took me a while before I felt comfortable writing code and understand what was happening. And I'm still learning.)

I don't mean to gather the case here against learn quick programs. However, I am sharing my skepticism about learn quick in the same way you should be skeptical about "get rich quick from home" claims. I saw this blog post of someone who tried one month rails and still couldn't program.

The truth is that good tools, good books, and good communities help us learn. No doubt. For example, I respect and consider Daniel Kehoe's RailsApps to be a valuable resource that builders can use to kick-off rails projects. (In particular, check out http://railsapps.github.io/rails-composer/)

That said, my life experiences convince me, that there are no short-cuts. There are no free lunches in life (unless you work at Google). In the end, you have to invest the time and effort to learn.

Learn for yourself.

On education and schooling

There is a Mark Twain aphorism: I have never let schooling interfere with my education. And this points a finger at the culture of dependency in learning that I didn't know until I got older and wiser.

http://www.npr.org/2010/12/01/131703237/on-publishing-mark-twain-s-autobiography

We have been conditioned to rely on others to make things easy. We want a short-cut. We want to be a programmer in one month. Well, good luck! At some deep level, schools, degrees, and courses are a hoax that prey on our insecurities or fear to tread into the unknown. You need good mentors in life, but certainly no diplomas.

Think of it this way. Did the first climbers of Everest get certified or take courses to get to the top? Hell no! It was just blood and sweat and years of training to prepare. Today, of course, you can pay a guide to essentially take you up to the summit - it has become a tourism destination.

I think this guy gets it - http://learnpythonthehardway.org/. See? The "hard" way. The right way.

Let's get edumacated!

Good! Let's get started then, and start building! Or try Code School and start learning by doing.

Like what you read? Check out my other posts on Medium.

12 days 12 apps - an experiment in building and teaming

2013-09-29T12:59:00.003-07:00

What is 12 days of coding?

It is 12 projects in 12 days. Each project would be started, finished, and shipped in a given October day.

It is an experiment in coding and learning. It is an experiment in teaming and creating a culture of doing. I will be blogging about our experience in my blog, starting with reflections about attitude over aptitude and critique of learn it quick mentality.

Appy days are Happy days

Why 12 days of coding?

Josh and I both had time to kill. But, not too much. We wanted to do something fun, build up our coding skills, and our portfolios. (The project will not always take place over consecutive days - but basically we are saying a half a month is low-risk enough to invest in an experiment ... whatever may come of it.)

And we wanted to learn: learn to be better coders, learn to be better builders, learn more about our interests. And that was it. We don't want to get ahead of ourselves.

We thought a good way to do this would be to create a set of constraints around our efforts. Constraints are key to discipline and focus.

One of the first choices we made was to keep it short and simple (KISS principle).

We are devoting around 2-weeks to this experiment.

We are keeping this to 2-person engineering team.

We are doing projects we can reasonably finish in a day.

Methodology

What about the process? No ground-breaking principles here:

Build on strength - for speed, use familiar technology (for us, mostly Ruby on Rails)

Prepare - for new technologies (e.g. a Node app), do some advance reading/tinkering

DRY - Do not repeat yourself - look for gems wherever possible

Best practices - we will use TDD; red-green-refactor; frequent commits

Pragmatism - product should work; function over form (i.e. it doesn’t need to be pretty)

Modularity - we will try to build templates we can reuse on subsequent days

A lot of these ideas are well-known to software engineers from works like Rework and The Pragmatic Programmer.

How you can get involved

You should join with your own mini-rapid-project(s). Do it solo. Do it as a pair. What would you like to get out of a process like this? How would you structure your efforts? Write about it and send us a link to your post or project.

Josh Wilborn - joshua.j.wilborn@gmail.com

David Kim - daviddarden11@gmail.com

Project & resources

You can find full-project page/link here - 12 appy days!

Please let me know your thoughts about attitude over aptitude and the get-rich-quick mentality that makes one-month-rails type of marketing so tempting.

Attitude over aptitude: why "I know enough code to be dangerous" is BS

2013-09-29T12:42:00.001-07:00

"I know enough to be dangerous"

[Topic - this post relates to my thoughts about learning to code, about careers, and about attitudes people have about picking up new skills - see related post 'can you really learn to code in a month?']

"I know enough [choose your subject matter] to be dangerous" is something I never heard while living in North Carolina. It is something I often hear in and around the San Francisco.

As someone who had built a career in roles like business development and finance, I have been tempted to say similar things. However, whenever I heard someone else say it, it always seemed glib and shallow. Call me silly, but I don't want to be shallow. Somehow, I felt I need to genuinely learn to code before I could say things like "I know enough to be..."

I'm sure you know it as well as I do. People who say things like 'I know enough to be dangerous' are either full of BS or insecurity.

Please spare us the platitudes

Attitude over aptitude

I get hung up on the details. It is my left-brain pre-occupation for patterns. I have been brainwashed for decades to learn from textbooks, or pay tuition to go to school, or to think that getting an A in a class means that you learned something.

(I reflect a bit more about this observation in 'can you learn to code in a month')

I recently shared my frustration with a mentor, Quincy: how is it that some people can seem to learn to code and start building in 3 months, while I still struggle with building more than half year out?

Quincy's advice.

Attitude over aptitude. If you take a leap and tie all your self worth in your ability to code, you will do what you need to do to get good at coding.

Of course, you are probably good at a number of other things. The key is dismissing all these other things as unimportant. During my transition, I kept justifying to myself, "I'm good at Chinese", "I can fall back on a career in operations", or "I have a business background - I'm pretty good at coding for some guy with a business background". These are traps! You have to do without an ego safety net.

Wow! It's true. The glib things we say are crutches. They are the ego's way of protecting itself for being too lazy to learn, or too afraid that we will fall and fail and look like fools trying.

Look for good people, not good tutorials

This isn't really an advice column. Instead, I hope that the experience I share here will help you learn something more about yourself and enable you to have more clarity or confidence in your walk.

So, don't take this so much as an advice as a personal observation. I found that in really learning - not just skimming over a topic, but really learning - some things are more important than others. For example, good tutorials count, maybe paying someone to give you will help. But, as I observed above, the right and sincere attitude trumps these. What else counts? People. Good books. Good ideas.

So, by all means, keep using those free tutorials, but next time also consider these:

Look for good people - Quincy shared an invaluable advice, because he cares. Another friend, Robert (mockdeep), has graciously been sharing his valuable time as a code reviewer and mentor on his open source project. Not all experienced professionals take interest in junior developers, or take time to invest in them. Good people do.
Good books / good ideas - I recently read Rework by DHH and Jason Fried (folks who built Ruby on Rails). I probably learned more about career (not just about coding) from this book than I did in two years at Darden MBA school. And at $10 a copy, it was orders of magnitude cheaper than the $100K I sunk into MBA education.
Right attitude - as we talked about above.

What good books and ideas are you absorbing today?

Start building

We are all apprentices in life. If you want to start learning today by building, join me and Josh as we try a 12-day-long experiment in coding and producing products.

Feel free to check out our 12days github page, contribute torepo, help us by sharing suggestions, etc.

Confusion around upgrading ruby using rvm ...

2013-08-24T15:59:00.000-07:00

Confusion around upgrading ruby

I have three ruby versions running. For an old open source project, I use ruby 1.8. For many rails tutorials or recent apps, it is ruby 1.9. The latest is ruby 2.0. The version I ran is an early one - ruby 2.0.0-p0. I wanted to upgrade it. So, using RVM's instructions, I tried upgrading.

http://rvm.io/rubies/upgrading

Basically, I do $ rvm upgrade 1.9.2-p0 1.9.2-pxxx (xxx is version you want to upgrade to)

The command is intended to "migrate gemsets, wrappers, aliases and environment files." It also would remove the 2.0.0-p0 gemset, which I wanted.

Is there a way to isolate single ruby version upgrade?

Thing was once it was done, I couldn't use ruby 1.8 and ruby 1.9 without having to upgrade those versions as well. Does anyone know how to upgrade a single ruby version in RVM without messing around with the other versions? In the end, I had to upgrade 1.8 and 1.9 as well, which added more needless time to setup upgrade.

Stackoverflow

As you can guess, I looked on stackoverflow, but didn't find a ready answer. Ended up leaving a question: is it possible to isolate 'rvm upgrade' to single ruby version?

Ruby. Gotta love it.