Archive of posts from October 2020

Ever caught yourself thinking (or worse, saying) “I know that” when someone is speaking or sharing insights with you?

Check yourself: you only know if you can answer “Yes” to all of these things:

• You’ve spent some time really thinking the topic through (if you haven’t, how can you really know that you know?)
• You know enough about it to know the extent and limits of your knowledge on the topic (if you don’t have any, you don’t know...

Unless it has stewards.

Process needs stewards. It goes stale when you think you’re done making process. When it’s ‘done’, it stops getting better, it stops reflecting the best of your knowledge. Stewards represent the results by ensuring the process reflects the greatest your team has to offer.

Products need stewards. They go stale when you think they’re the best on the market. When it’s ‘done’, it slows while others reap the rewards of your coasting. Stewards represent the market...

To be confident in your work is to tell the truth:

Lacking confidence while applying skills, product development or engaging in sales conversations means the truth is suppressed. There is meaningful, ethical advantage that a project, company or individual could benefit from that you wilfully withdrew, because of that lack of confidence.

An equal but opposite concern is when over-confidence appears, which augments truth with delusion. Here the same meaningful, ethical advantage is still available, but misrepresented so the project,...

What do you revere at work?

Small businesses often hustle in hope of becoming large corporations, even at the expense of sacrificing their advantages as a SMB. But SMBs that own the work, innovate methodically serve people with care, ultimately get to outlast the corporations who forget the things that matter.

Digital marketers often hustle for a transaction at any cost, even at the expense of their own integrity. Web practitioners that revere the work of helping others with technology...

What is “good communication”?

Is it saying the right things? Partly, but what if those words don’t land on those who needed to hear them?

Is it saying the right things to the right people? Closer… but again, what if those words don’t land because those right-people weren’t truly listening?

Is it saying the right things to the right people where those things will be heard? That’s more like it. The environment matters. The state of the listener (or reader)...

It all comes together, in its timing.

The brand vision you share with your team may be great, and the elements you’ve prepared may all look super. But it all comes together when it’s been lived in, and it’s personality reveals itself as an reflection of those it exists to serve. Rushing it doesn’t help.

The new product you’ve worked hard on might be excellent. The value and results might be great too. But it all comes together when those...

Do you understand your target market?

Let’s see…

A ‘hermeneutic circle’ depicts the way we interpret information when we read.

It depicts the cycle of understanding and context that leads to, well, more understanding and more context.

The fact that it is a cycle suggests that it continues to rotate; understanding begets context, context begets understanding.

Many of us don’t cycle when it comes to truly understanding those we wish to serve.

Rather, we decide that we have come to...

Reproducing the office in remote-work-land reproduces it’s problems:

Real-time voice/video calls are vaults of exchange where nobody outside of those present knows what went on (call recordings don’t count, who listens to those, really?)

Synchronous creativity where “you had to be there”, where great ideas were missed because they were on a slightly different timezone, where the thinking behind the genius is left to folklore rather than documented fact.

Heroes who heroically save the day with a great plan or...

There always seems to be a rhythm with work:

It starts off simple. We’re taking a few courses and reading around the subject, getting acquainted with its principles. “Seems simple enough”, we think, as we make our way through the basics.

Then it gets complex. We become aware of all the possibilities and buttons. And so we must press those buttons and model those possibilities so the world will know that we found them.

Then it gets simple again. So...

Being clever sounds great, until you have a product to sell:

Being clever means you finish other people’s sentences with domain knowledge rather than their language. When the uninitiated speak differently to those experienced in the solution, how can one relate with those they wish to serve other than by listening?

Being clever means you’re so versed in the solution that you may not fully understand the problem anymore. When operating in a world void of that problem, exploring deeper...

These are just a few of them that affect people who work on their work:

You want what you decided to buy, the alternative becomes less desirable when you’ve made a decision mentally. It makes us blind, the solution is to know it’s happening and choose to see the full picture.

You want what you decided life should look like, the alternative makes you anxious because you’re living alongside ego in the gap between those worlds. It makes us blind,...

…is that folks don’t want to stop being a startup.

If a startup fails because it didn’t plan a suitable solution to a problem, that’s one thing. We see that happen all the time, as a result of a lack of customer-centric focus or lack of resourcefulness or just plain bad luck.

But succeeding as a startup is to no longer be a startup, too. To graduate from startup-town and move into being… well, just a business. An operation that...

It’s rare to solve a problem that previously had no solution at all.

It’s also often unprofitable since there’s usually not a developed market there.

But when we’re in a sales environment, this fact sometimes gets forgotten:

“You need to buy this if you’re going to X.” Do we, really? Is there no other path for us to reach our goal, than the one you’re pitching to us?

“You’re going to miss out if you don’t X today.” Maybe, but...

We get to choose the byproducts of our work:

For instance, when we boost videos on Facebook designed to peddle products or bask in our own majesty, we wear people down or wind them up. The byproduct is that they may tolerate you, ignore you, or yield to your pursuit under duress.

Conversely, when we spend money boosting videos on social platforms that are designed to make problems go away, we make lives better. The byproduct is that they may...

What do designs, business plans and product development plans have in common?

They’re conversations, not deliverables.

For instance, design software isn’t for making pixel-perfect designs. It’s for allowing creative mediums to converge in one place prior to preparing them for development. Illustrations, animations, things that if you were to take straight into code may not quite work together in quite the same way without first having a canvas to spike it all out in varying levels of fidelity.

Design files...