Thoughts

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maybe I would stress less about what others thing. When you really tend to get in trouble is when you really want to impress someone new that you’re not close to, because then you’ll act and do things out of character.

People are only mean when they’re threatened, and that’s what our culture does.
High school kids are mean to each other because of this, because they’re jealous.
Pride and Vanity - why do we let these valueless intangible feelings keep us from valuable tangible friendships?

A reminder to myself in the future that features don’t just have value because they tell a great user scenario (though that is of course primary in many cases). But also, there’s the moment users see it for the first time and just think to themselves “huh, that’s pretty cool”. Moments of delight. Something reviewers will call out about your product, even before they’ve used it.

Ideally, you want these moments of delight to morph into sustained regular value to users’ lives. But even if the feature doesn’t as much deliver on that “level” of value prop in its’ current incarnation, especially if it’s because it’s bedeviled by short-term technical constraints, doesn’t mean you necessarily shouldn’t invest there.

There is a fog of war around shaping markets by creating discontinuous products. Sometimes the little voice in your head says “but if we did X it’d be so cool!” That’s okay. Listen to that little voice. Maybe it’s your user empathy leading you to pitch camp out there, in the fog, and though you can’t see it now maybe there’s gold in ‘em rocks over there.

But first and foremost. Don’t get too lost in the details, derailed about strings or specific edge-case behavior, and give up on the little voice. 

Do not cut early and often. Make a plan, schedule it, and if it doesn’t fit then make a few well thought through big cut decisions. Then stop.

Note to self from experience with software projects: incremental cutting is probably one of the worst things you can do for user experience.

At work people sometimes talk about things like market share and ease of development as the two key reasons that independent developers choose one platform over another. I think they forget that not all developers do the cold calculus of poring over Comscore numbers (which they probably don’t have a subscription to anyway) to figure out whether to build for Facebook Connect or Opensocial.

One thing that does matter that is easily forgotten – I can just make way cooler looking stuff on iPhone than anything else, screw market share. Remember that people started created applications and websites optimized for iPhone pretty much immediately after launch, back when in required jailbreaking. Back when iPhone had a paltry amount of market share against S60… wait, that’s still true. But show me a dev who chose to devote his time to Symbian because of “market share”.

The guy who passed up LeBron James?

The guy who failed to invest in Google?

I’ll be honest that I’m still not convinced of the value of GrandCentral to the general populace, even though they’ve been affirmed by Google’s purchase. The “one number for life” value has been solved by cross-carrier number roaming for mobile phones. The “customize how specific people reach me” has, in a much less granular (but arguably sufficient) way, been addressed by simply giving out your work number to some people and your cell phone to others. Plus, this existing one-device, one-number mental model is very natural mapping that already affords a permissions model based off the social verb of giving and receiving. Much like one key fits one door, and you give your wife the car key and house key, but give your child only the house key.

But they are driving for simplicity. That I give you. It’s hilarious to me that more than a hundred years after the invention of the telephone, one of the pre-eminent technology companies of our time buys GrandCentral to drive back towards simplicity, trying to undo the feature creep and device proliferation of the last century.

Requires throwing yourself into the ridiculous first, and then slowly stepping back until you find your footing.

It’s kinda like testing testing where the quicksand borders land by jumping way in, confirming that you are indeed sinking, and then slowly stepping back towards land until you find somewhere you stop sinking. And maybe along the way, devising some snow-shoe like implement with which you can stand further out, losing some weight, whatever it takes.

Because in this rather hastily-drawn-up analogy, the further away from “safe” land you can stand, the more you’ve been able to differentiate yourself and your product by allowing users to be there with you, in a simpler place where others had dared not tread.

In Gmail, I can the see how the sender labeled all recipients including me in his or her own address book. So once I was slightly screwed by this feature because I forgot an acquaintance’s last name and labeled him "Alex TennisPlayer" and he saw it when I sent him mail. Oh well.

In PicasaWeb the maximum number of photos per online album in 500. If you attempt to upload more, there’s no error message, the server just drops them. One of my friends hit this after a week-long ski trip, shrugged, and just created another album. It didn’t make him switch to Flickr or anything.

In product teams I work on we sweat the small stuff because it’s our job, but sometimes we overdo it. These lessons from very public and very successful products beloved by their users teaches us that it’s not how well you handle the roaming-user-upload-photo-while-server-is-busy scenario that helps you win. It’s how clearly you deliver on a crisp value proposition. Sweat the small stuff, but create a culture in your team where at some point it’s okay to say "I don’t care about this edge case" and that’s ok.

In a roundabout way, skimming the Charles Schultz bio in the bookstore at Midway lead me to thinking about being promoted. And one big thought: in most industries there is some level past which your job changes dramatically, as do the criterion of success.

• Engineering: from being a great problem solver & product maker to motivating people & figuring out what product to build.
• Accounting: from completing projects on time to finding new business and capturing clients for the firm.
• Officer in the Military: from being a great leader of a small group and executioner of orders to a great tactician to a great politician begging the legislature for funding.

Think about the industry you’re in, and what the people at the top *really* do and are judged on. Then, when you think about how long you’re going to stay in that industry and how far up you want to rise, think to yourself now whether you want to be doing that top job, which in many ways is totally different than what you’re doing today.