Pre-Launch, the founder has tons of time to worry about the product. Even if they are not experienced in product development, they have time to communicate needs and scheduling deliverables with the design and development team. After launch, say goodbye to all of that time spent making thoughtful decisions!

Your design and development time is your most expensive and precious resource. You’re wasting it, but it’s not your fault. Building a good product is hard, requires a ton of focus and mental energy. All of your time is being sucked away to answer questions from VCs and develop the relationships with customers that you’ll need to succeed. But be careful. As you go further down the chain towards development, the more expensive mistakes are to fix. You’ll never get things right the first time, but I effective decisions are rarely made in haste.

So, what’s the solution?

A product manager enables the team to execute the company vision.

The founder communicates the vision to the product manager, and they work together on strategy. Implementation of the strategy is left largely up to the product manager. Where the founders responsibilities end may vary depending on experience of the Product Manager, but the ideal situation is that the PM is an extension of the Founder, and is better able to communicate to the design and development team “what should be built next“.

This hypothetical I describe above is the way things work at ChallengePost. Brandon is a non-technical founder who is inspiring to listen to during pitches to customers (insert sell ice to eskimos reference), but there’s no way he has the time between phone calls and business trips to direct the product. So when I joined, Brandon was able to shift his focus gradually away from the product so that our discussions are primarily about strategy; should we do this or that, rather than execution; how we do this or that.

I’d love to hear about similar situations. What has worked for you?

Remember a time you fell in love. The object of your affection could do no wrong. You had infinite patience for them, and your happiness depended on theirs.

That’s how to do world class customer support.

Hopefully you get the occasional email in the support inbox saying how great people think your product is, but more than likely, when customers contact you they’ve found something particularly troubling or difficult.

By the time they have written you, you’ve failed them.

There’s are some basic messages I try to convey in every support email:

I’m really sorry you’re having trouble – it’s our fault.

Take ownership for the failing. Whether or not the user is an unsophisticated user, if they can’t use the product, it’s not their fault. Maybe the inline help wasn’t clear enough, or maybe they just need a little bit of personal hand-holding. Whatever the problem is, have empathy and show them you care. You’ll be surprised at how far that goes.

I’m going to try to experience what you’ve experienced so I can have an educated conversation with you about it.

Have you ever called up tech support and they don’t have the product in front of them? They are just reciting a script for your model number of router, or laptop? They’ve probably never seen the product you’re using. Or when someone jumps to a conclusion because they didn’t follow the steps you documented? Try going through the issue as the user describes it to see if you can recreate the problem. When responding, tell the user if you were able to make it happen to. If not, you’ll have a set of things you tried to go back to the user with to help you confirm what they did.

I’ll get back to you with a resolution to your problem. You’re in good hands.

When you’ve figured out the problem, give some indication of when it will be fixed, and whether or not you’ll let them know. The response and method should be dictated by the severity of the problem. If it is a bug preventing them from doing a core task in the product, send them a personal email as soon as it’s fixed. If it’s a feature suggestion, give them a rough idea of when it will be live and how they will know.

When users contact you, they care enough about your product to want to make it work for them. It’s an opportunity for you to make a deeper connection and turn them into a customer for life.

She shares some interesting insight about the choice to use lower case rather than the commonly accepted capitals for signage to aid in recognition of words while traveling at high speed. We did a study in the US that concluded the same more recently. She also invented the Transport typeface.

It’s amazing how many decisions like the ones made by Margaret Calvert in the 1950s affect the way we interact with the world.

I’ve read and heard a lot about using a physical agile board to manage software projects. The talented John Allison joined the ChallengePost team last week as our Lead Developer *crowd goes wild*. With his recommendation, we’re switching it up and trying something new. The image above is our agile board for this week’s sprint. Here’s what’s on it.

• User Stories are on white note cards
• Blockers are on yellow post-its
• Bugs are on pink notecards
• Blue Cards are column headings
• Team members have a picture / named notecard that represents them

We have 5 columns to organize our tasks

• Backlog (scoped to this sprint)
• In Progress
• Finished
• Accepted
• Done

So here’s how it all works:

A team member takes a story from the Backlog and moves it into In Progress and sticks their picture on it. Then, they start working on it. When they are done, they move it to Finished. This lets the product owner (me or Brandon) know it’s ready to be validated it and all going well, we’ll move it to Accepted. When the story is deployed to production, it moves in to Done.

Prior to trying the cork board, we used Pivotal Tracker with good success. Out of all online tools, it is by far the best.

However, John swears by the cork board for teams in the same location! After one day, I’m liking it. I’ll write another article after we’ve used it for a few months.

That sucks!

There must be some nefarious old bearded white guy preventing women from getting ahead in tech, right? Errr….

Well, look around you!!!

We have no women currently on our team of 5 at ChallengePost.  – Haha, there’s PROOF!!!!

Not so fast… when we posted for a lead engineer position, no women applied.

How many women applied for the Lead Engineer position?

None.
Zip.
Zilch.

Did the old bearded white guy break the send button on their email?

Probably not. When I was in high school, I was on the fringe of the cool kids (arguably I was never cool) since I was interested in computers and technology. A woman at my school who showed an interest in programming would have committed social suicide.

Well, look where we are in 2010. Tech companies rule the world, and the  captains of those ships are overwhelmingly the male social outcasts who were uncool in high school. I imagine that in the next generation this gender gap will narrow.

I guess my point with all this is that there is no bearded white guy, just social pressures that existed on gen x and gen y during their formative and exploratory years that discouraged women who potentially had the talent for tech to pursue it.

For every tech job, there aren’t an equal number of qualified men and women applying and the women are overwhelmingly rejected. That’s just not the reality. So, forget the stats. Ignore the numbers. Who cares!?

Do what you love, and love what you do. Nothing else matters.

I hope there will be more women in technology applying for jobs and starting companies. However, who cares whether they are women specifically. I want talented people, passionate about what they are doing to work and interact with – regardless of gender.

…the minimum viable product is that product which has just those features (and no more) that allows you to ship a product that resonates with early adopters; some of whom will pay you money or give you feedback.

I apply MVP to all of the work I do. What’s the minimum amount of documentation I can do to express a new feature completely? What is the least amount of work I need to do to get the result I need?

The tricky part is figuring out what the MVP is!

If you’re not sure if what you’ve done is enough, get feedback. When I’m doing sketch wireframes, either on paper or in omnigraffle, I ask other people on the team for feedback as soon as I’ve reached a point I have a deliverable that I think stands on it’s own without any explanation or handholding from me.

What do you think about MVP? Is it the lazy person’s approach to work?

Use Rails

If you’ve got a blank slate, use Rails. If you’ve only built a prototype, switch to Rails as soon as possible. If you decide to ignore Rails you’re one of two things:

• Much smarter than me. You’ve won several awards for your coding chops and you’re building a new Erlang framework that will replace Rails in 6 months
• A complete buffoon who knows nothing

So, before you start hurling tomatoes at me, here are five reasons you should use rails:

1. Intelligent Defaults

The Rails team has some of the smartest technologists working to improve the standard behaviors in the framework. One example of this is error validation and the flash message. The flash message is used to provide feedback to the user after an action has been taken. Things like “Thanks for signing up” or “You need to fill in an email address”. Rails defaults are more intelligent. The default flash message behaves in the way users expect. Other frameworks I’ve seen used on software projects like Seam and Zend have extremely awkward standard behaviors that cause user confusion. Every default you need to correct sucks time away from doing cool things. There are hundreds of examples of intelligent defaults within Rails.

Don’t believe me yet? Pluralize is another. Rails can automagically pluralize words like “user” or “person”. 1 person, 2 people. Rails gives this to you for free too. Think about the sites you know out there built on crappy frameworks that do things like 100 user(s). Why be one of them? Why build it yourself?

2. Super-fast Deployment

Im going to highlight heroku here because this is the way deployment should be:

git push heroku master

That’s it. If your deploy process takes more than 1 – 5 minutes, consider switching to Rails. (Also see Capistrano for deployment)

3. Gems

If you don’t get something for free in core rails, the next place to try to find it is in a Gem. Gems allow you to do harder things really easily – like connecting to twitter, or facebook, or processing images. The same intelligent people working on rails extend it with gems. As of this writing there are over 11,000 gems that a developer can install to make life easier.

As one example, I had a side project where I wanted to make pretty urls – like my.com/people/colin rather than my.com/users?id=23. On a java project I worked on, it took a developer a day of work to get Pretty URLs working for me. It took me 20 minutes using friendly_id, a rails gem.

There are great rails gems for almost EVERYTHING. That’s part of what you get with a solid community.

4. Community

The last thing you want to do is build your application on a framework with a dead community. The community improves the framework, provides support, and shares knowledge about the best way to do things. The rails community is the most intelligent and active developer community on the web right now. That’s why you have a gem for almost everything – and sometimes more than one. The rails community is innovating and other people are borrowing ideas from them. But if you’re anywhere else, you’re already behind the curve.

5. Synergy

Put all of this together and you get every business douchebag’s favorite buzz word: Synergy. You can build better web applications faster. My friend Euwyn thinks you can build a basic version of any application in rails in a weekend. I agree. When everything else feels like an uphill battle, ride the rails and get more done in less time.

What about Django?

This article could have been written about Django too. I like and recommend Django as an alternative to Rails, but it really depends on what your developers prefer. If you have a developer trying to convince you to use something other than Rails or Django, find a different developer.

Convince me I’m wrong

Please, convince me. Show me some alternatives that allow you to develop better applications faster than Rails. I don’t think they are out there right now.

• Getting big quickly does not make you successful
• Try to underdo the competition
• Avoid meetings and other disruptive ways of communicating
• Teach your customers, don’t market to them
• Don’t copy your competitors

37 Signals and their approach to software design and business have become a force on the web. Ironically, though they advocate not copying, their signup screen is the most copied by other web products.

The book is no less inspirational than their products. The ideas in Rework provide a lens through which to evaluate how much of what you do day-to-day is bullshit. From the way you interview new candidates to staying late to appear like you’re working hard, the 37 Signals business philosophy is presented in a clear and illustrative way.

However, JF and DHH are like crotchety old men who have their way of doing things – like always putting on the coffee before going to get the newspaper. It’s important to have an opinion, partially because opinions sell software and books. Their opinions have made them successful – and im sure that reinforces their belief in the strength of that opinion.

But it’s not gospel.

Rework is inspiration. It’s fuel for the intellectual fire that drives you to create something new and do it in a better way. But like any business or productivity book, not everything will apply. And as they say, don’t copy them. Figure out your own path. Theirs is certainly an interesting path to observe.

+10 – you flossed
+10 – you brushed

Congratulations, you unlocked the “Dentist’s pet award”

2. Avoid trending parties unless you’re on the VIP list

If the party is trending, you’re too late… unless you can sneak in the back door

3. We need a unified checkin now more than ever

Fire Eagle guys… srsly

4. Nerds now rule the world

Ashton Kutcher came to see us guys. Not the other way around.

5. Goatse is the best meme of all time.

Nothing can surpass it.

6. Build communities of football teams, not strippers

Football teams want to do better together… strippers will steal your pole when you’re not looking.

7. Social Media Douche Bags are still full of shit

Guys, just say you’re unemployed. You’re not fooling anyone.

The best coffee shops CARE about a lot of things:

• The best coffee shops take care when they create their coffee
• The best coffee shops care about the origin of the beans (fair trade)
• The best coffee shops care about the environment
• The best coffee shops (probably) care about their employees

Washing spoons rather than creating waste is one way that best coffee shops signal to customers that they give a shit about the things their customers value. How do you signal to your customers they are among friends at your business, or in your web application?

So what are the best coffee shops?
My all time favorite is Intelligentsia Coffee in Venice, CA. You’ll get a feel for it in this video:

Some great New York coffee places are:

• La Colombe Torrefaction
• Gimme Coffee
• Third Rail
• Stumptown