In the space of OKRs there is an unwritten rule: Once a team announces the introduction of OKRs they must face within five minutes the question of which software tool they will use.
This question is mostly glazed over in books like Measure What Matters or Radical Focus. For good reason: The biggest hurdle of introducing OKRs is almost never the OKR management tool, but rather understanding, socializing, and implementing OKRs as a tool itself. Techniques like pressure testing OKRs, outcomes vs. output or focusing on few but meaningful key results are a lot more important than the tool in the early stages, and it often takes a few quarters for a team to get good at OKRs and see results.
I used to be dismissive when I got the question of the management tool. My standard anecdote was:
Remember pickup basketball? You never worried about the person with brand new Jordans at the pickup game. But whoever was ready to play in whatever they were wearing? For sure they were going to be trouble.
I advised to use a simple shared document, spreadsheet or presentation, because ultimately OKRs are simple: Select a few objectives, find a small number of meaningful metrics to measure progress against those objectives, track progress. This should not be artificially complicated through a specialized digital tool.
For smaller teams that line of reasoning still holds true even as comfort with OKRs develops. Most OKR management tools are designed for larger teams. While well intentioned, they tend to distract in the beginning – not unlike productivity porn or tweaking a fancy IDE before learning how to code.
However, as a team grows and OKRs permeate the organization more people are getting involved. They all have their part in setting, tracking and reviewing OKRs. In that process multiple sets of OKRs emerge along the management hierarchy that need to align. Managing this through documents, spreadsheets and presentations starts to become unruly. I’ve been there. You start with a document to set OKRs, track them with a spreadsheet only to review them later with a presentation. And throughout the year you are endlessly cycling through those three artefacts. This is highly manual, error prone and massively annoying.
Once you reach a team size of a few dozen people, it is time to think about investing in software tools. None of them are perfect, but they do provide structure, control and visibility that help deal with growing complexity. Pragmatically, they help keep data consistent, avoid double entries, and help crush the general entropy that comes with growing teams. Ultimately, it’s an investment in a more inclusive and transparent culture.
Many thanks to Isaac Hepworth for many discussions about this topic, help with this post, and general encouragement.
May is traditionally the month where the big tech companies host their developer conferences. Google, Facebook and Microsoft all have their gatherings with Apple quickly following in June. When COVID hit, many in the tech scene wondered what would happen to conferences. The traditional format brought thousands of people together in one space to mingle and exchange ideas in close proximity. That no longer works in a COVID world.
All the big tech companies responded differently. Facebook and Google decided to wait this year out and canceled F8 and I/O respectively. Microsoft and Apple decided to go ahead and take Build and WWDC online this year.
Impressions from Microsoft’s Build
Microsoft was the first to come out of the gate last week. Their Build conference heavily leans towards developers. It’s typically held in Seattle with around 7,000 attendees, big rooms, expo floor and lots of space for the community to meet. Within the last eight weeks, this huge event was re-imagined for the virtual space. And it has been an innovative interpretation of an all-online conference: a 48-hour non-stop event with presenters from all four corners of the world. Yes, here and there minor seams were showing, but Microsoft was pushing the envelope and for a 1.0 this was very stable.
You could choose to either follow the main events in a streaming player or switch to one of the smaller sessions that were held in Microsoft Teams. Those smaller sessions had the benefit of being more interactive with polls and Q&A with the audience. Prior to the conference, attendees could compile their schedule and were able to navigate the entire conference with little effort from one event to the next. That schedule also made it easy to re-visit sessions after the show. That was especially relevant for those sessions that were held at 2am, which most people don’t want to follow live.
No question, it is different than an in-person event – you miss the applause and excitement of the audience when their particular announcement is made or meeting like-minded people in the hallway. But the format also offered an opportunity to show a more relatable side. Presenters in their own home, kids popping up in the background, pets becoming part of the conversation. I loved the excitement especially from some of the more junior program managers that were presenting out of their bedrooms. It all felt authentic and different from the highly polished on-stage performance of past conferences.
The attendance numbers were impressive: 230,000 registered conference visitors (30 times more than in previous years), 65% from outside of the US (vs. 20% in previous years) and 500,000 views for some of the sessions such as the Imagine Cup final judgment. All of that was pulled off within eight weeks. By Microsoft’s own statement they accelerated two years worth of evolution within eight weeks. It felt like a bigger leap as it’s hard to imagine online attendance becoming a first-class experience by 2022. It sure did feel like one in 2020.
The road ahead – a bigger tent is a better tent
One cannot help, but wonder what that means for conferences going forward. It feels reminiscent of Clay Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation playbook. At first innovation happens in the low-end with good enough products, serving an audience that cannot or does not want to afford the traditional premium products. Over time, innovation and technological progress improves the experience of those low-end products and outpaces customer needs. In other words, the low-end products become viable or even superior substitutes for the premium product for an increasing number of people. It has happened in many industries from communication, displays, electronics, photography, … you name it. For a while we had an overabundance of companies digitally disrupting everything from dry cleaning to juice production, not everything successful or necessary.
One of the areas that seems to have been exempt from digital disruption was the conference sector. Even big flagship tech conferences continued to be held in a fairly traditional format. Presenter screens became bigger and events were streamed online, but the main event has largely remained a physical one. That is no longer possible. And while traditional conference visitors are pointing out that a virtual conference is no substitute for meeting in person, virtual events are leveling the playing field and make it possible for whole new audiences to attend.
The barriers of participation have substantially been lowered, in terms of money (conference tickets, hotel, airfare and associated costs), time (just think about the time spent on airports, planes and taxis) and overall hassle (organize trip, time away from families, …). Interacting with fellow attendees from Nairobi, Melbourne and Karlsruhe showed how much more inclusive conferences can become when reimagined online. The Microsoft Build numbers seem to confirm that it paid off for them as well. If this was the work of eight weeks of scrambling, think about where we will be in a year, let alone five or ten.
As always with disruptive innovation, it might look like a toy for now. But if you squint you can recognize a path forward that will create a superior experience for a meaningful part of the conference ecosystem.
Into the unknown – let the experiments begin
It was interesting to see Microsoft experimenting with different formats: the newsroom with anchors, pre-recorded demos from people’s homes, live-sessions with audience interaction and Q&A. It all felt like the birth of something new and it was definitely appealing to see them push boundaries and try out new things. To get a feel, just have a look at Scott Hanselman’s keynote, which was fun, entertaining and informative – 45 minutes well spent. Taking a step back, it only feels natural for Microsoft that they seamlessly transitioned out of their 48 hours of non-stop programming into the newly launched LearnTV. LearnTV is a traditional broadcasting format where they stitch together existing live and pre-recorded content, combining previous conference presentations with Twitch sessions, Channel 9 interviews and whatever else is there. The boundaries between conference and day-to-day broadcasting are starting to blur.
While this is certainly true for the flagship tech conferences, the jury is still out there about what will happen to the major trade shows and smaller independent tech conferences. The former are indeed heavily reliant on in-person interactions which are still hard to replicate online. Given the level of investment in standing up such shows and the newly associated risks, only time will tell how that space is going to evolve.
Independent conferences have probably been hit hardest given the massive disruption in their economics. We’ve already seen O’Reilly shutting down their conference business – not just putting it on hold, but shutting it down indefinitely. Those kinds of conferences have always been a labor of love that barely broke even, if at all. In an all-virtual setting they are increasingly competing with online learning providers such as the Udemys and Masterclasses of this world.
A crisis is a terrible thing to waste – Paul Romer
The conference sector and all its adjacent ecosystems have been hit hard by COVID. While we see digital transformation being accelerated in most sectors, conferences let you watch that digital disruption in real time even more clearly – both the bad and the good. As with every crisis, this one is no exception in that it offers opportunities. Therefore it is not surprising to see A16Z, the high priests of Software eating the world, investing in this space. With Run the World, Bevy and Hopin we have an emerging category of startups that are trying to fill this gap in the world and redefine what conferences will look like in the future.
More than ever, we are living in remarkable times.
I remember distinctly when I got my very first email address. It was a mid-nineties summer in Germany and I finally got my hands on a modem. That was a big deal, as it required me sending a cashier’s check via mail to a business that I didn’t know, wait for seven or eight weeks with no status update to receive a no-name modem with at best spotty documentation. After dabbling in local BBSes and QWK readers, I signed up for a BBS that was connected to Fidonet which meant that my online community was no longer restricted to the local area code. Fidonet provided access to a global network of nodes that replicated messages with each other via dial up. Because of dial up messages were replicated between nodes only a few times per day. Therefore it could take days for messages to travel from sender to recipient, but this was a global network.
Part of that deal was an email address. Admittedly, one that took days to deliver, but one that allowed me to communicate with people on the other side of the world without long distance calls. That left an immense impression on me and I remember going outside to tell the great news to my father who was working in the garden. After all it was summer. I told him about how it was all connected and that I could send emails to people in places like America. He just looked at me, baffled, and just commented that I didn’t know anybody in the US. He was right, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my English was broken or that my email address was a lengthy and random assortment or letters and numbers. What mattered was the possibility.
While I didn’t know any Americans, Australians or even Austrians at that time, email allowed me to change that. Email established itself as the lowest common denominator and as such allowed me to reach out to people, stay in touch with friends and current and former work colleagues, independent of country, company, operating system, device or phone carrier.
That’s now more than a quarter of a century ago. There are still a lot of things that I appreciate very much about email:
Email addresses have proven to be durable. After the first wave of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses, people (at least in my generation) have settled on one main email address that has been stable over the last ten or so years. The fact that a lot of services use the email address as the unique identifier for logging in just underscores this kind of perseverance.
Email is permission-less. As soon as I have somebody’s address, I can reach out to that person. There are a lot of downsides to this approach, most notably spam and harassment that are real and that I don’t want to downplay. But the fact that I don’t need to be part of a specific network to be able to connect with somebody still seems wonderfully egalitarian to me.
Email has little friction through authentication. So much information these days is hidden behind paywalls, which are notorious for erring on the side of false negatives. As soon as a cookie is not ad-related it seems to expire much faster leading to unnerving extra authentication hoops to jump through. I get a lot of my news and analysis via email, which removes that friction. The information just comes to me.
Email creates a searchable repository.Randy Pausch once said that email storage is basically free (so much goodness in his time management presentation, this tidbit is slide 87). The day I realized that was the last day I deleted email. And its rich meta information allows for powerful search, filters and sorting. Over the years I’ve given up on folders and labels and mostly rely on search. It works. There is always something about an email that I remember, be it a date, the sender, a list of recipients, … that all can be used as part of the search criteria.
Email clients are mature. While there are every now and then slightly new approaches to email clients, the problem seems mostly solved. Most email clients provide sufficient features and good enough keyboard support to be able to manage email swiftly and with little mental overhead.
Emails are inherently asynchronous. Everybody can deal with email at their own pace. For some it means that they reply to most emails within 5 minutes, others try to comply with the 24-hour rule, others just … don’t. And that is fine. The fact that there are no “the other person is typing” indicator, slows things down enough to allow for thoughtful replies.
These are only a few of the things I appreciate about email. It is easy to hate on email these days and get broad support. It has lots of downsides, most notably that it can feel at times overwhelming. Email has been declared dead many times and a lot of systems are chipping away on its value proposition. As with most things, it is just a tool. But it has proven to be simple, reliable and durable enough to survive the last five decades and probably a few more.
One last thought: As mentioned above, I’m originally from Germany. Over time I’ve had the privilege to live in the UK, Australia and now in the US. And every single time it started with me reaching out to somebody that I didn’t know with an email. Only email can do that.
If you like podcasts, keep reading. If you don’t, you can stop here – the rest is probably not interesting for you.
Have you ever received a YouTube link to a talk that you wanted to watch, but never got around to it? Or did somebody recommend you this one episode of a podcast, but you didn’t want to subscribe to the entire podcast? HuffDuffer is a service that let’s you pinpoint interesting MP3 files so that they are automatically downloaded with your normal podcasting app. Here’s how it works:
You find a link to the episode or YouTube talk that you’d like to listen to at a later time.
You use a handy bookmarklet to pinpoint HuffDuffer to the file.
That file is now added to your podcast and will be automatically downloaded by your podcasting app.
I started somewhere in the middle with an interview with Jan Brandt, the lady who led AOL’s marketing. She came up with the idea to spread first floppy discs and later CDs to promote AOL. It’s an amazing interview giving insights into how difficult it was to convince non-tech people in the 90ies how amazing the Internet was. Little fun fact: At some point AOL used 50% of the global CD production capacity for their CDs.
While I found it weird that I haven’t heard of this podcast before, I’m happy to be able to binge on more than 100+ episodes and I’m very much looking forward to it.
“That is, technology is in a sense anything that hasn’t been working for very long. We don’t call electricity technology, nor a washing machine a robot, and you could replace “is that AI or just computation?” with “is that technology or just engineering?””
It’s a very good read with and I recommend it to anybody interested in the field. If you don’t want to invest the time, just skip to the last paragraph, which offers a good summary.
There are some very special conferences, where the actual conference-track is embedded into a much broader community experience with very deliberate choices of venue, speakers, code of conduct and support like day-care for children. It’s a celebration of the organisers’ superb sense of taste as if they imagined a great day that happens to be a conference. With Above All Human, Susan Wu, Bronwen Clune and Scott Handsaker created such a wonderfully curated event in Melbourne:
“Above All Human is a conference for startup founders, makers, designers and innovators who want to do great things, build innovative products, and be the most effective entrepreneurs they can be.”
I had heard very good things about last year’s first instalment and it single-handedly surpassed those high expectations.
Things that I really, really liked about the conference:
The quality and variety of speakers — a lot of people whom I’ve never heard of or whom I would not have actively sought out, but they shared such a great variety of topics and backgrounds. Who knew I’d be fascinated by the philosophical aspects of astrophysics?
The diversity of speakers — apparently is was no big deal to pull off 50% female speakers, but I think it was and think it should be highlighted as an example for other conferences to follow.
The tone of the conference — there was very little brouhaha and a lot of sincerity. As pointed out in the opening remarks, it was a heartfelt, inclusive and honest conference. Presenters talked openly about their struggles to share their hard-won learnings and present food for thought rather than half-baked solutions.
The venue — it easily hosted 1,000 people and never did I feel constrained, packed or uncomfortable, which is not a given for an introvert at conferences.
The food — plenty, good and easily available. Such a great idea to place food all over the place instead of having one central trough where everybody crams around.
So, what did I learn on Friday?
JOMO — The Joy of Missing Out. Being so immersed in the moment and disconnected from everything else that you very deliberately avoid any distractions. That was not part of the conference itself, but it came up in a conversation with a stranger in-between sessions.
There is still room for growth in the Australian venture capital (VC) ecosystem. $500m was invested amongst the Australian VC community in 2015 vs. $800m that were gambled just on the Melbourne Cup in one day alone. I found that an exceptional way to illustrate that the Australian VC community is way below saturation and Australia has a significantly higher tolerance towards risk that it currently admits to startups. In that same session, I liked Annie Parker’s version of know your customer intimately: “The best ideas at our refugee hackathon came from non-technical caseworkers and refugees themselves. Those ideas had little tech involved and a lot of impact.”
A culture-first company (i) knows what it is willing to suffer for, (ii) builds on a promise (a brand is a promise to a customer and its culture is how it is going to deliver on that promise) and (iii) sees a world that others don’t. Didier Elzinga gave a great presentation about why culture matters and why it is not that soft and fluffy thing, but a hard-hitting tool to drive company performance. As Didier put it “moral makes the difference between whether you get on your dollar a return of 25 cents or $3.” I wish that talk had been longer with time for Q&A.
Persistence come from purpose — if you have a strong purpose and can communicate it with passion, you will inevitably end up with traction with employees, customers and investors. Kate Morris of Adore Beauty told the unglamorous story of her startup and how she got to be as successful as she is now. Long story short: a lot of suffering and conviction — it’s not pretty (ironic for an online beauty business). It reminded me of the Parker’s law: “Running a startup is like eating glass. You just start to like the taste of your own blood.”
The total amount of kids taught coding by Code Club Australia could now fill the entire Googleplex in Mountain View. Being one of their volunteers that visual made me very proud, especially given that we target a very specific niche of kids between 9 and 11. Just imagine the potential of a whole generation being able to understand how code works, its potential and its limitations. I’m looking forward to seeing us fill another Googleplex in the next year or two.
Software is the ultimate infinite game. Ali Rayl of Slack gave a good reminder that in hardware businesses like construction it is very difficult to continuously improve your creations, whereas software can improve infinitely. It’s a way more optimistic view of the world where bugs are constantly fixed, features implemented and new functionality invented.
There were two other sessions by internet royalty at the conference, that were just too rich to put into a simple bullet of insight (fortunately, you can find their talks here and there). The first was by Mike Monteiro talking about the apprentice model and why it might be a good idea as a designer toget some experience before joining a startup (very applicable to other professions as well — you can see a version of the talk over at Vimeo). He’s a force on stage, very insightful and highly entertaining. If you haven’t seen him, I highly recommend checking out someofhispresentations online.
The closing session was by Anil Dash talking about why we should get rid of the cynical notion of “don’t read the comments on the internet” and rather start transferring our learnings from 10,000 years of building a society into the online world. In his Q&A he gave one of my favourite quotes of the day: “These companies [Google, Facebook] have all the money in the world. They shoot rockets into space, design self-driving cars and work on pro-longing life. But once you ask them to make sure that the jerks on their platforms behave for five minutes, they throw their hands in the air and declare that it’s too hard.” Anil posted earlier this week his talk Against “Don’t Read the Comments”.
It was a great conference with very insightful talks and great people on stage. Thank you, Susan, Bronwen and Scott. You’ve done a fantastic job. I am very grateful for this conference and hope to have the chance to attend again next year.
If you want to see an example of software with a truly long-lasting impact, go watch a talk by Susan Kare. She talks about her work at Apple where she designed "iconic" pieces like the original fonts and the original set of icons. You learn so many things like why the Apple-key’s icon is not an apple, how icons that were designed more than 30 years ago are still in use in applications like Photoshop today and the difference work ethic can make.
What makes this video great in particular is also the second half where John Gruber interviews her. (a) it’s great to see somebody like John being all giddy and excited about meeting one of his heroes and (b) it is in this part that you begin to understand how meaningful Susan Kare’s work is, because she was too humble to brag about it in the first half.
Go, have a look. With an hour, it’s fairly long, but excellent entertainment and a lesson in modern history.
Stewart Butterfield wrote last year We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, a great piece on Slack’s vision. It describes how one shouldn’t just look at the product or what the product can become, but rather on the impact a product can have on its customers as this will give a better north star for product decisions.1 I’ve now read it three times and still find new gems. This time I discovered his understanding of innovation, a term that only few people are innocent of having abused (cough, cough), and how tangible and intuitive it is:
The best — maybe the only? — real, direct measure of “innovation” is change in human behaviour. In fact, it is useful to take this way of thinking as definitional: innovation is the sum of change across the whole system, not a thing which causes a change in how people behave. No small innovation ever caused a large shift in how people spend their time and no large one has ever failed to do so.
1 See also Bruce Lee’s quote: “It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.”
Evergreen is a fortnightly business newsletter by Eric Jorgenson compiling great articles around a specific topic. The current edition is around company culture. It contains so many great insights and anecdotes, including this bit
When Facebook first started to grow, Mark Zuckerberg spent time asking other CEOs about some of the things they did early on at Microsoft, Apple, and others to establish culture and explain to people what it meant to work there. One of the best pieces of advice he got was to write down a succinct list of what it meant to be “one of us.”
