Michael Rill

Einfach machen

Category: Software

  • OKRs and tools

    OKRs and tools

    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.

    Photo by Cesar Carlevarino Aragon on Unsplash

  • Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

    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.

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  • In defense of email

    In defense of email

    Unpopular opinion: I like email.

    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.

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  • HuffDuffer – The best tool that probably nobody knows

    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:

    1. You find a link to the episode or YouTube talk that you’d like to listen to at a later time.
    2. You use a handy bookmarklet to pinpoint HuffDuffer to the file.
    3. That file is now added to your podcast and will be automatically downloaded by your podcasting app.

    The service does a lot more and it does take a bit of time to set it up, but it is well worth the time investment. By the way, once you have set it up, here are the instructions to add the audio tracks of YouTube or Vimeo videos.

    Give it a go here.

  • The Internet History Podcast

    What an amazing treasure trove of goodness. The Internet History Podast is dedicated to telling the story of the Internet, organised in chapters like Netscape and the start of the Internet era, Microsoft gets the Internet, Online services, … The episodes are a mix of narrative (similar to audio books) and interviews with people of the era. 

    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. 

  • AI, Apple and Google

    Ben Evans writing a highly insightful piece on the current state of artificial intelligence, machine learning and how Google and Apple approach the topic. Evans offers a definition of the term  “technology”, that I find most helpful:

    “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.

  • Six great ideas from Above All Human

    Six great ideas from Above All Human

    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?

    1. 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.
    2. 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.”
    3. 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.
    4. 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.”
    5. 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.
    6. 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 some of his presentations 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.

    Image by Scott Handsaker at Vimeo.

  • Susan Kare on her history with Apple and icon design

    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.

  • Taking b/s out of innovation

    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.”

  • Mega post on company culture

    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.”

    Source: Most Company Culture Posts are Fluffy Bullshit — Here is what you actually need to know