Turning 40

OK… I’m turning 40 on Monday and amongst many mid-life crisis thoughts (not with standing this past week of a burst water heater, two computers catastrophically crashing and being nearly hit by a car) one is, if I picked my old guitar, what songs would I play for say a twinge of morbidity 5 song set.  Here’s my first pass.

1. Old Man – Neil Young

  I've been first and last, look at how the time goes past.
  But I'm all alone alone at last, rolling home to you.

2. Afternoons & Coffeespoons – Crash Test Dummies

I’ve watched the summer evenings pass by
I’ve heard the rattle in my bronchi

3. Standing on the Moon – Grateful Dead

Standing on the moon, with nothing left to do.
A lovely view of Heaven, but I'd rather be with you.

4. Time – Pink Floyd

And you run and run to catch up with the sun, but it’s sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath, and one day closer to death

5. Death Don’t Have No Mercy – Rev. Gary Davis

Death don’t have no mercy in this land.
Death don’t have no mercy in this land.
Well he’ll come to your house, but he won’t stay long.
Look in the bed and somebody’ll be gone.
Death don’t have no mercy in this land.

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Work Out Song List

Good for a 30 minute run on the treadmill

Tom Sawyer – Rush (Live in Rio. Hell of a way to kick off a concert)
Even Better Than The Real Thing – U2
Beautiful – Laurie Sargent Band
Zoo Station – U2
Solsbury HIll – Peter Gabriel
Exodus – Bob Marley

Cool Down:
In Spite of Me – Morphine
Temple Caves – Mickey Hart & Planet Drum

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The Tests of a Leader (another collection of numbing HBR articles)

While I think for the most part the Harvard Business Review has become complete crap over the last couple of years (much like Forbes but I still keep renewing my subscriptions every year hoping things will improve) every once in a while a sidebar of an article will catch my eye. January’s edition is a special issue on The Tests of a Leader (immediate eye rolling and groaning of warmed over huggy and fuzzy stuff riffed with “Be a change agent!”).

One article is basically a self assessment entitled “What to Ask the Person in the mirror”. Fortunately in this article is a sidebar summarizing the 11 pages of mostly drivel containing a few reminders for anyone who is a manager. In the end a manager is solely judged upon the teams output as it relates to increasing shareholder value. Nothing more, nothing less (more on this in a future blog post). The 7 concepts mentioned are basically common sense but worth thinking about and reminding oneself about on a regular basis. I’ll try to boil down the HBR language into common english:

1. Vision and Priority: Basically the people that work for you should know what’s going on and what they should be working on. This is more than assigning action items. Assuming the people that work for you prefer a bit of independence, the vision provides the context for which they can make their own judgements. Without this you the manager becomes a task master. No fun for you, less fun for your employees.

2. Managing Time: Let’s face it. Most of us suck at managing our own time let alone the time of others. It is human nature to do what is easiest not necessarily what is most important first. Also, tasks with a short term nature are much easier to get started and finish than longer term tasks even though the latter could be more important. I’m always impressed with those that surmount these two tendencies and I find it to be one of the true tests of a great manager. Also, as much as it sounds like micromanagement it is imperitive that the manager is aware of what the employees are spending their time on. Delegation is important but, as a CEO I once work for says “Delegation without monitoring is abdication of responsibility”.

3. Feedback: Give it and seek it out. If someone is screwing up they need to know about it. If someone is doing a good job they need to know about it. It’s can be hard. It has to be done. It is the right thing to do. Always encourage people to give you honest feedback. As a manager it’s rarely going to happen but once in a while you get lucky to have a brash, opinionated employee or employees (sometimes they prowl in packs) that have no qualms telling you that you suck (and hey, when it comes down to it, we really do mostly suck). After channelling this person’s beligerency into reasonable feedback you might get an honest picture of where you can improve. It’s up to you to listen.

4. Succession planning: Well… Having twice been on the receiving end of getting shafted after I hired in or grew potential successors I’m not too sure about this one. I can see how “My” manager likes some bench strength in case I get hit by bus or go postal but this just smacks of executive brain washing to me. I’m all for growing employees (and is actually what I enjoy most about management) but why would you want someone to take your job? Nothing says great job at having a successor in line like getting layed off or pushed aside. The truth is, and let’s be honest, you want someone that can *almost* fill your shoes.

5. Evaluation and Alignment: Classic HBR speak for don’t get too comfortable. Some people by nature are paranoids and they do well in this area. Others should have a structured, systematic approach to revaluating everything (strategy, resource utilization, etc.). I happen to do this once a quarter as I evaluate how things went the previous quarter and plan for the next.

6. Leading under pressure: Nothing get’s a manager jazzed like having an opportunity to prove him or herself under fire. Unfortunately this usually turns into a manager pissing contest because there is more than one manager trying to prove themselves at the same time. Successful managers have perspective. Most of us aren’t managing a space shuttle with lives on the line. We’re managing some operation that if it doesn’t go well will piss off your boss and/or lose the company money. Both usually aren’t the end of the world. The successful manager either calmy navigates the crisis or calmy fails but always with the appropriate level of urgency and always learns from the event.

7. Staying true to yourself: To me, this is the most important. If you can’t look yourself in the mirror every morning without feeling proud of what you do every day you should be doing something different. There isn’t much you get to take with you in the end. I plan on taking my love for my friends and family, my dignity, and my self-respect (hopefully my ipod too but I’m not counting on that).

So…. Am I a better manager than I was yesterday? Are the people working for me working on the right things in the most efficient manner? Do the people that work for me *believe* they are working on the right things in the most efficient manner? Are the people that work for me more effective because I am their manager? Am I a better manager than I was yesterday?

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Flock Maintenance Release 0.7.9 Update

Hi Folks,

Mozilla has delayed the release of their 1.5.0.9 patch for Firefox until Tuesday, December 19th.  Since this patch is a part of Flock’s 0.7.9 maintenance release we’re going to hold off on our patch until then as well.  Release schedule is here: http://wiki.flock.com/index.php?title=Flock:0.7.9.

thx,

Mike

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Psychology of New Product Introduction

As we continue to think of ways to innovate Flock I reminisce over an email I sent out after my first couple of weeks at the company concerning the Psychology of New Product Introduction.  One of the things we biffed in 0.7 was changing how bookmarks work resulting in an end user experience that was different than what other browser provided (specifically the folder concept was removed).

The economic theories this is based on is one of my favorite rumination subjects.  Kahneman, Tversky and Thaler blew the doors off conventional economics by not assuming irrational behavior and applying Psychological biases

Hi folks,

There is a reasonably relevant article in this month’s (July ‘06) Harvard Business
Review (I think there is a copy in the lounge area) on the psychology
of New Product Adoption. It basically touches on work done by two
psychologists, Kahneman and Tversky, around why individuals deviate
from rational economic behavior (in reality the price of product is
NEVER exactly where supply and demand intersect).

The article’s thesis is that it is not enough for a new product to
simply be better.  People will not necessarily make a rational decision
about a better product because of an irrational behavior concerning
gains and losses where losses greatly outweigh gains.  The common
example is that most people will not take the bet of 50% of winning a
$100 and 50% of losing $100.  This is  known as “Loss Aversion” (and in
today’s pop culture will probably eventually be called “Deal, or No
Deal”).

People have a tendency to look upon adoption of a new product in terms
of gains and losses.  Feature improvements are gains and new
shortcomings are losses.

This leads to a couple of biases:

-

Endowment effect.  The value of products already possessed
greatly outweigh the ones that aren’t.  Another psychologist, Thaler,
sums this up by saying “consumers value what they own, but may have to
give up, much more than they value what they don’t own but could
obtain”.  A similar experience is that once you own something, you
don’t want to give it up.  Some real world examples

       – ebay plays to this effect.  If you’re currently the winning
bid for an item that is still open your mind has already wired itself
thinking that it is the owner.  If someone bids higher it is hard to
resist not raising your own bid

       – “Try before you buy”.  This one is awesome.  I put some kid
through college because a rug salesman convinced me that I could lay
down some Persian rugs in my house for a week before I decide to buy
them.  I bought them.

- Status Quo Bias. People just have a tendency to stick with what they
have even when a better alternative exists.

In typical HBR fashion they boil down a framework into a 2×2 matrix.

low behavior change, low product change => Easy Sell (tweaking angle
of toothbrush).

high behavior change, low product change => Failure (Dvorak keyboard
for example).

high behavior change, high product change => Long Haul.  (Cell
Phone, probably satellite radio eventually)

low behavior change, high product change => Hit (google)

Anyways, these are things to keep in mind as we continue to innovate
the flock browser and find ways to market it. 

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ODBC, Bugzilla and when can we ship the damn thing

One of the metrics I like to use to measure the state of a project, particularly when in the QA phase, is the bug find vs bug fix rate. In my experience the curve is always a bell curve (i.e. the bug find rate ramps up to a peak and then ramps back down at about the same rate). If your bug find rate is still climbing it’s not suddenly going to stop unless the QA team goes on a vacation. At Flock, the unit of time is daily (longer projects may want to use weekly). This does lead to some anomolies but in general you’ll still get the same bell curve.

At a couple of companies now I’ve setup excel to read directly from the Bugzilla database to get the pretty graphs (Never could figure out how to do time charts in Bugzilla).  First thing I do is create a read only account for the bugs database (no, that isn’t the actual user name I use).

mysql> grant select on bugs.* to ‘abcd’@'%’ identified by ‘efgh’;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

mysql> grant select on bugs.* to abcd identified by ‘efgh’;

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)

Daryl Houston, anunderstated SQL master (I suck at anything more complicated than anUPDATE statement) with a convenient, at least for me, case ofoccasional insomnia gave me the following bugzilla queries (I editedthem a little bit to let excel do some of the work).

To find bugs that have been fixed on a certain day I use the following query. The hard part is getting the fix date out of the activity table.

SELECT DATE_FORMAT(bug_when, ‘%m/%d/%Y’) fixed,  COUNT(*) 

FROM bugs b, bugs_activity a 

WHERE b.bug_id = a.bug_id AND a.added = ‘FIXED’ AND b.target_milestone = ‘Danphe RC 1′ 

GROUP BY fixed ORDER BY a.bug_when

The found bugs, i.e. bugs created, has an easier query:

select DATE_FORMAT(b.creation_ts, ‘%m/%d/%Y’) created,  COUNT(*) 

FROM bugs b 

WHERE b.target_milestone = ‘Danphe RC 1′ 

GROUP BY created ORDER BY b.creation_ts)

Once I have this data I create two graphs.  One that shows cumulative bug found and bug fix data.  At the end of the project, the two lines should meet.  The other graph, as I mentioned about ultimately turns out to be two bell curves of bugs found slightly lagged (hopefully) by number of bugs fixed.  At the end of the current project I’m working on at Flock I’ll post some examples.

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How NOT to blog a de-feature announcement

Last week I got to relearn the valuable lesson of the importance of giving context to a decision that can affect how people work. Alot of Flock users had been posting that they were having issues using Flock with Shadow’s favorites sharing service. At one point their site was down for several days and we had heard rumours that they were de-emphasizing the service. After several attempts at contacting Shadows at all levels we basically got radio silence.

In the interest of our users we wanted to get the message out that we could not support a service that was this unreliable. After discussing with Geoffrey on what to say, to be fair to Shadows we decided not to comment on the site’s reliability, or lack there of, before we had a chance to talk to them but we also wanted to ge the message out to the community. Late in the evening I posted a terse entry to Flock’s general blog …and got creamed over the next couple of days.

Naturally, the day after I made the post Geoffrey got a call from the Pluck Corporation that owns Shadows with the information we expected to be true, that they have decided to de-emphasize Shadows. That evening Geoffrey was able formally announce what we had suspected, but with every good intention, decided not to mention in the initial announcement that I had made.

Here are the take aways and silver linings from this little experience:

1. Try to provide as much information as possible when ever possible. If that can’t be done, be prepared for the backlash.

2. While myself coming off as dictorial and uncaring towards the Flock community (100% untrue I assure you), I gave Geoffrey the opportunity to save the day. Maybe he’ll stop throwing the 10 pound medicine ball at me in the office while shouting “Think Fast!” — OK. He doesn’t do that but now that I’ve mentioned it….

3. I even got mentioned in TechCrunch.

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blog post #1

Have to start with something, might as well quote Jorma:

Well now what is going to happen now is anybody's guess
If I can't spend my time with love I guess I need a rest
Time is getting late now and the sun is getting low
My body's getting tired of carryin' another's load
And sunshine's waiting for me a little further down the road

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