paul.bz

Alpha

Thu, 24 May 2012 08:39:01 -0400

love it.. plus, it’s a good way to get yourself in the habit of shipping fast

As soon as you have a product ready that people can use, let them.

Even if its gross looking, you end up learning more than you’d expect.

The problem that arises with this approach is that people often judge a book by its cover.

It’s ok if they dont understand your alpha product or dont like the way it looks.

Dont take it personally.

It’s actually valuable feedback.

It’s your job to make it beautiful and easy to use for all.

Y’know so you can release a Beta :)

Embracing risk

Mon, 07 May 2012 09:31:57 -0400

I haven’t seen a whole lot of discussion on how to create a work environment where people feel it’s OK to fail, so I thought I’d share a few thoughts. As a peer, leader, investor, employee - our reactions to failure have a major impact on an organization’s willingness to take risks and fail in the future.

In a previous job, I worked directly alongside one of Microsoft’s top guys. Part of my job was to ensure when we visited customers or partners, that any account issues were fixed or at least well understood prior to the meeting. On one occasion we flew to Paris to meet with a number of C-level executives. For one meeting in particular, I didn’t dig deep enough to understand what was actually going on with the account and there were some pretty serious issues from the customer. When we entered the meeting, we were bombarded with harsh feedback and were ill-equipped to properly respond. It was bad, damaged the relationship, and fell squarely on my shoulders. Others were accountable, but it all rolled up to me.

On this particular trip I took a big risk. My boss led a multi-thousand person division that was deep in the middle of a massive product development cycle. Taking us (him) away from the office for even a day was a huge commitment but it was equally important to meet with customers that write big checks and share important feedback. So we set up what was probably the most ambitious trip we could have taken - about 20 meetings in 5 cities across 4 countries in Europe. This would give us one day in Seattle for engineering meetings, 4 days to meet with customers and partners in Europe, and we’d be home Friday night (exhausted) to see our families. A typical trip would have been 2 countries in 5 days, and a handful of meetings.

That trip was too aggressive, even if it meant we saved another week of travel to Europe later in the year. Not only did I fail to take into consideration that we’re human and get tired, particularly when you add jet lag, but it allowed this one particular meeting in Paris to slip through the cracks. The stomach-sinking feeling I had in the meeting alone was enough to remind me to always be prepared and balance both ambition and feasibility. After the meeting, the way my boss reacted was counter to what I expected. Microsoft has a culture of immediate and direct feedback, and that’s what I expected. Instead, he thanked me for all of our positive meetings. He acknowledged it was tiring, but was really impressed with the progress we were able to make with a number of customers. I asked him about the meeting in Paris, and his response surprised me. He said he should have been more prepared for that meeting, and needs to stay closer to that account. He put it on himself, didn’t assign any blame at all, and asked me to help him do better next time. It was my fault - he knew it, I knew it, yet he instead sent me a message that said he appreciated the risks I took to make this happen and the overall effectiveness of the trip - and that it was worth one or two less effective meetings.

Two things I learned from this experience -

Praise well-calculated risk (not laziness), especially when it fails.
If someone knows they’ve screwed up, don’t remind them. Instead, spend the energy highlighting what was done right and help them troubleshoot what went wrong.

The Dangers of Being a Purist

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:08:15 -0400

I think of a tech purist as someone that has near-religious enthusiasm for a product and aren’t capable of understanding and truly appreciating the positive, and possibly superior, aspects of competing technologies.

I’ve seen tech purists in the most senior and most junior positions at a company and both can have a disastrous impact. If someone’s job is to be the subject matter expert of a particular technology, you want them to know every little detail about it and be able to defend it against competing technologies. But even those subject matter experts can’t be truly effective at understanding a given technology unless they truly understand and allow themselves to appreciate alternatives.

I saw a lot of purists at Microsoft – bot in the company and within their partner network as well. I also saw plenty of non-Microsoft purists while I was working there with unreasonable affinity for company technologies from Oracle, Linux, Apple, etc. It’s everywhere and we should just accept that. But, if your company will benefit (or fail) from making the right bets on emerging technologies, I would be really sure you’re not looking at any one technology through the lens of a purist.

If you do this right, it’s sort of like buying low and selling high in stocks. There’s obviously a huge competitive and first-mover advantage to being the first to bet on an emerging technology. And on the flipside, there’s a good chance if you follow the masses, you’ll compete with the masses – a scenario that obviously has different implications depending on your business.

There are two things I do to keep myself in check and ensure I’m not being a purist:

Consider everything – I try really hard not to dismiss something because it’s new or has little traction. Remember how many of us laughed off the iPad prior to release…
Change routines – if you’re on Mac, spend 6 months using Boot Camp with Windows. I did the opposite (from Windows to Mac for 8 months). If you’re using Office, try Google Apps. Switch from your iPhone to the latest Android.

If your livelihood depends on making the right bets on technology, removing all consumer bias is fundamental.

How to Fail : Mark Pincus

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 09:03:28 -0400

How to Fail : Mark Pincus:

your vision should never change, you should keep trying different strategies until one works

Avoiding innovator's dilemma

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:17:52 -0400

I realize it’s impossible to say in a few hundred words what people much smarter than me have written about in a series of books, but I’ve been thinking again about a topic I spent countless days thinking about while at Microsoft - innovator’s dilemma. For those not familiar, it’s the predicament innovators face after they succeed in a market and have to decide if/when/how to potentially disrupt a lucrative revenue stream before their competitors.

The story that summarizes this predicament for me is that of a rumored senior Microsoft executive throwing his Windows Mobile phone out his car window due to frustration on his commute home from work. This rumor was maybe 5 or 6 years ago, but the point is the product was so obviously not meeting the needs of consumers, yet they hung on to the product line until Apple disrupted the space. When the iPhone hit the market, there was still heavy cynicism from the incumbents even though they all knew their products weren’t delighting users. The truly sad part? Companies like Microsoft had the technology, resources, and developer talent to compete with products like the iPhone years before it was released. Windows Mobile wasn’t a huge revenue stream, but it represented a capability consumers wanted and thus grew very fast along with the entire smartphone category. It also added value to the Windows ecosystem, which of course is a big deal for a company that makes huge profits from that platform. Fast growth plus support for an adjacent business sound like good reasons to keep a product moving in the current direction, but history clearly tells us that was the wrong decision.

That executive that threw their Windows Mobile phone out the car window and the other 100,000 employees (including me) should have led the way to making a product that worked as intended and met consumer needs. Regardless of the impact it would have had to Windows by abandoning the code base and starting from scratch, it obviously would have been the right decision. The truth is, when Apple started destroying the market with the iPhone, every single Microsoft employee felt terrible. We all knew Windows Mobile wasn’t what it should have been and most of us did nothing about it.

Unfortunately for companies as large and diverse as Microsoft, Apple, Google, this happens all the time. The moment we have a successful business, we’re burdened by the overhead of protecting that business. We look at any new innovation as a potential disruption to existing growth or future revenue. Google faces this dilemma right now with search (Bing) and display (Facebook).

There are examples everywhere you look, and there is no clear solution. That said, there are three lessons I learned by observing innovators, disrupters, and bystanders over the years:

Be the first to disrupt your awesome business - if you build a great product or business, you will attract competition from big players or scrappy startups, and either can take you down. It helps if you know before your business becomes great that you will eventually need to punch it in the face by introducing innovations that completely disrupt it. This ladder of disruption is the only way I think a great company can stay great. Your leaders, board, investors, and employees need to be behind you on this or it will never work and you’ll end up with political infighting.
Listen to your people - encourage your team to constantly challenge your product. Let them use competitive technology and thank them when they tell you how much better it is than your technology. I can’t emphasize this enough - reward your team for that and never get defensive. When they hate using something you produce, take that gift of insight and use it to your advantage.
Rid yourself of those that hold on to the past - if ever you see or feel someone emotionally latching on to something that is no longer relevant or industry-leading, get rid of them. Put them on a new project or encourage them to move on altogether. As a leader, set an example for your people that status quo is never acceptable justification for anything regardless of how successful it may appear to be today.

Looking up to failures

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 10:34:28 -0500

When is the last time you attended an event where the panel was stacked with failures? I’m not talking about the people that made a few minor mistakes as we all do, before they eventually hit it big, but really smart people that screwed something up big-time to the point that it completely failed and never recovered. That’s the event I’d pay to attend because you’re learning really, solid, irrefutable lessons on what not to do. You can’t argue with those lessons - if they’re properly studied, there’s an insane amount of knowledge packed in that failure we should all pay to get.

Instead, almost every event I see in technology focusses on stroking the egos of successful executives, entrepreneurs, and investors. We ask them for advice, mentoring, guidance. They’re typically smart people, so they whip something up on stage or build a few well-designed slides beforehand and we furiously jot down their wisdom as if its a message from above. The reality is “successful” people do a bunch of stuff right and a bunch of stuff wrong. While it’s possible the balance of the two favored right over wrong, that’s certainly not a prerequisite to success and chances are opportunity played the most important role of all.

These two quotes say it best:

Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose. - Bill Gates

Good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation. - Thomas Edison

If you buy my logic so far, then here are a few things I do to help me learn good lessons:

If you’re a leader, praise failure when it happens. Congratulate your team for trying and encourage them to try again. But before you do, spend real time studying the possible root cause of the failure. Understand what went wrong at which stage and why. Use this as an opportunity for your entire team to learn the lesson, not just that one person.
Filter all advice. At the end of the day, no one knows your situation better than you and there’s a 0% chance the advice someone gives you can apply directly. You need to take their advice, discount it, and see what nuggets of value you can abstract and eventually apply to your situation.
Find a real mentor. Look for the leaders that have real wounds from previous failure, aren’t jaded, don’t have an ego, and have enough personal confidence to look back and learn from their mistakes. If you can find a mentor like that, latch on and don’t let go.

If you’re an entrepreneur, check out Founders@Fail, a great resource to learn about all the hard lessons from the people that experienced them.

Delegation abuse

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 09:53:00 -0500

I was planning to focus this week’s blog post on the dangers of learning from success, but I got some feedback from my earlier post dismissing the overused management act of delegation that I want to discuss.

While delegation certainly has its place at work, my point here is it’s totally abused in business. Believe it or not, it’s possible to be a great leader without delegating everything. The best leaders I’ve interacted with let delegation happen naturally by driving accountability, rewarding success, and consistently trimming fat. When it’s clear to a good employee they’re on the hook to make something happen, they’ll get it done and they’ll ask you to send anything their way that’s relevant, without you having to delegate to them. A leader might get stuck feeling like they’re overwhelmed with work, needing to pass tasks off to their minions, but that’s a signal of a different problem. Either your entire organization is overworked, you’re not effectively driving accountability, or you’re allowing your team to delegate up (which is just as bad).

If you feel like you’re stuck in this trap, here are a few strategies I’ve seen work well -

Regroup: If your business is growing fast, it’s likely your setup from last year, month, week is no longer adequate. The bad news is if you don’t figure it out, not only will you be one of these unfortunate leaders we all complain about, but you’ll also be a bottleneck for your team. This is why so many small organizations have a hard time scaling up. They assume they need to start training leaders how to delegate, but that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. It takes time and may feel like a waste, but it’s worth putting in the time to rethink your team setup. You might think about resizing the team or clarifying individual responsibilities.
Reflect: There’s a possibility you’re no longer the right guy/gal for the job. Your group may have scaled up beyond your means as a leader, or shrunk to the point that you’re expected to be more of a subject matter expert (for which, you may no longer be qualified). In both cases it’s easy to see how you might settle into a role delegating versus doing. Do yourself and your team a favor and get out of the way, find a new role or retrain yourself to be a more effective individual contributor.
Address deficiencies: This one makes my skin crawl, but it happens a lot. Part of your organization is terribly ineffective and lazy. Another part of your organization takes on every task you put in front of them and consistently deliver without asking questions. To compensate for your weak group, you delegate their responsibilities to a high performing group. There are so many obvious reasons this is the wrong thing to do. This is classic organizational fat in need of trimming.

I’m sure there are many other approaches you can take to help, but my suggestion is to try something. Delegation has a role in business, but it should happen organically if your team is properly designed. Don’t just assume it’s a natural part of becoming a more effective leader of a growing organization. Its much more a symptom of a problem than anything else..

Velocity trumps magnitude

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 13:05:58 -0500

A few nights ago I caught up with a friend / investor / technology executive traveling through NYC.

We had a great chat about business and the merits of building something truly huge (home run) versus a series of well executed, but smaller businesses / projects / deals (doubles or triples). It’s hard for most of us to get excited about building something small, but we all realize there are factors beyond our control when a business breaks out and becomes truly huge.

He made the point that when he invests in a person or a company, he goes for the group that favors getting things done and has a history of doing so. This statement really caused me to reflect because I think most of us aim to build something big. It wasn’t until this conversation that I realized the two can go hand in hand.

While you can aspire to build a business the size of Google, Microsoft or Facebook, there are just too many variables out of your control. You can obviously assess market opportunity and inspect revenues of the companies you aim to disrupt, but even the most thoughtful business plans require a significant amount of luck to change an industry. What is much more realistic to plan for area building a series of successful businesses that solve a concrete problem. In the process of building your more modest business, it’s possible luck and other variables will fall your way and it can turn big. The point is you don’t give up the possibility of building a huge business while working on your perfectly executed, yet slightly smaller idea.

My takeaway from this is to think about the tradeoff of velocity vs magnitude. The more I think about it, velocity tends to trump magnitude aside from a few outliers (which, ironically are the businesses we all tend to obsess about).

Details matter

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:45:39 -0500

When I first started managing a team, I was advised to become effective at delegating, removing myself from the details, and to not take on too many problems directly so that I can scale. It was something I never felt comfortable with and I didn’t necessarily aspire to “be” the people giving me this advice. So, I started observing what other managers around me were doing. I was surprised to see entire layers of “successful” middle managers do little more than handle basic administrative and people-management overhead. They contributed little if anything to the product or it’s sales.

As I started getting more senior at Microsoft, I noticed something even more interesting about leaders at the very top of the organization - they had a deeper understanding of detail then managers two or three levels beneath them. What was more impressive is they carried that detail across multiple business units.

My conclusion (and opinion), is the link between successful senior leaders and attention to detail is actually more about causality than anything else. It’s not that the senior leaders I worked with were smart (they were), but they are actually at the top because they understand the detail. Great team members are the same - they understand in detail what’s going on around them, can spot opportunities that others don’t, and therefore become tremendously successful in their job.

The lesson I took away from observing and reflecting on this space is it pays to understand the details of your business or product, no matter how junior or senior you are. Contrary to the advice I was given early on, aspiring leaders should immerse themselves in the detail. Study all the detail you can find until the sea of data starts to make sense. It will give you clarity about your business that makes being a leader so much more productive and satisfying. Don’t get lazy and don’t ever say you don’t need to understand a product or business. You’re never too busy or too important to distance yourself from your business.

Don't do this in business

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 09:39:32 -0500

I started making money in tech by hacking game consoles and building custom websites when I was in junior high school. When I got to college, I started a software development company with one of my good friends. We left college a year later to focus on building the business up. As we grew, we merged with another business and before we knew it were selling software to some of the biggest companies in the country. By 19, I thought I knew everything about business - build good software at the right price and you’ll keeping growing. Turns out, it doesn’t work that way (although I was right that product and price are key), and while there are often a whole set of variables outside of your control - there’s a lot you can do to increase the chances your business will take off.

After we wound down the startup, I knew I had a lot to learn about business and I didn’t have the stomach at the time to try again. It was hard having to lay off staff at the age of 21 because I didn’t know how to properly forecast, partner, market and sell. So, I went back to school and finished my engineering degree, joined Microsoft to learn a bit more, and got a non-traditional MBA from a great school in Europe (I’m passionate about international markets). A few years later than planned, I’m back in the startup world running - of all things - the business side of a great startup in NYC called Aviary.

Now that I’m back, looming over my head is all the bad, unproductive, wasteful things I learned in both the startup and the corporate world. I know it sounds a big negative, but having a sense of what NOT to do feels just as important as knowing what to do.

Thankfully, I kept some pretty good notes along the way, so this blog will be more about me digitizing my notes than writing for an audience. In doing so, I’ll attempt to identify the stuff I think we should do more of, the stuff we should never do, and everything in between. I’ll be honest and direct, using real examples where possible, but won’t reveal anything confidential about my current or previous employers, managers, employees, customers or partners.

I’ve come up with about 20 topics I plan to start with, and hoping to post once a week. Let’s see how this goes.

Harry’s first day working at Aviary

Fri, 11 Nov 2011 10:15:00 -0500

Harry’s first day working at Aviary