Interesting contemplation about how recent advancements in AI will make us all more productive:
You rush through the writing, the researching, the watching, the listening, you’re done with it, you get it behind you — and what is in front of you? … But in the more immediate future: you’re zipping through all these experiences in order to do what, exactly? Listen to another song at double-speed? Produce a bullet-point outline of another post that AI can finish for you?
The whole attitude seems to be: Let me get through this thing I don’t especially enjoy so I can do another thing just like it, which I won’t enjoy either.
A few months ago I tried out ChromeFlex. This is a version of ChromeOS that’s easy to install on traditional laptops. I had an old Surface Pro 3 machine which was collecting dust. It just waited for me to carry it to electronics recycling. As it turns out, ChromeFlex gave it another lease on life. The installation was easy. You create a bootable USB drive via a Chrome browser extension. Then you can choose whether you want to just try (boot from USB drive) or go all in(wipe machine and install ChromeOS for good).
The whole process took less than 30 minutes. Booting from pressing the on/off button to entering your Google ID to enter the machine takes 20 seconds. And then you are ready to go. The gist of ChromeOS is that everything runs in a browser. My nearly nine year old Surface Pro can watch YouTube, I can use the web version of WhatsApp, of course manage my email, run Microsoft Office in the browser (even inking in OneNote works without problems), … and last, but not least, write blog posts without problems. I have a dozen browser tabs open without any performance issues. There are some UI glitches on YouTube, but nothing that makes YouTube unusable.
The wonderful thing about this approach are the limitations. There is not an unlimited amount of apps and configurations, and one has to get a bit creative on how to get things done. For example: How do I get images from my phone into my blog, while converting from Apple’s HEIC image format to JPEG. It took me a while, but now I know that …
selecting the relevant photos on my phone, …
uploading them to Google Photos to then …
download as JPEG and …
upload into the WordPress Media Library
does the trick. Sounds complicated? It is. But WordPress is partially at fault, because I have not managed to understand how I could upload photos from my phone to my self-hosted WordPress instance. Somewhere between my phone, my host and my WordPress installation the system breaks. The workflow above is cumbersome, but it works. And it works on my new/ old machine. Because it is so limited, it takes out the complexity that comes with having degrees of freedom. Besides, creativity thrives under constraints. And ChromeOS has just the right amount of constraints while getting the basics (i.e. speed, speed, speed) right.
Long story, short: If you have an old machine lying around, give ChromeOS Flex a shot. It is a lot less complicated than installing a Linux distro … although, ChromeOS is based on Linux itself.
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.
Having started multiple blogs before with various degrees of moderate success, I know of the dangers of crafting the About-page too early: you write down all your good intentions and once you press "publish", you struggle to live up to your grand aspiration. It would be much safer to do it with a portfolio of posts in your back pocket. However, I understand that it is a good idea to define the scope of the blog early on and that should be part of your about-page. Let’s make this my ingoing hypothesis and if this blog turns out to become something completely different, I’m happy to change it.
As the tagline in the upper left says, this blog is a collection of thoughts on helping others be their best (you can call it leadership if you want to) and software as a strategy to change business models (I still have to write up what I actually mean by this). I deeply care about both topics. If you think of it as a Venn diagram, I like to spend my time in the space, where both circles overlap.
But why this blog?
Writing helps me organise my thoughts and typically improves my thinking along the way. Doing so publicly provides an incentive to be less sloppy. Also: sharing is caring and if somebody enjoys reading these notes, that will make me a delighted person.
What would this blog look like if it is successful?
Success would mean writing one longer piece every other week and sharing two or three articles each week. In other words: making the time to write regularly and thereby progress my thinking. That’s all. That’s quite a lot.
OK, but who are you?
I was born and raised in Northern Germany, my journey has been continually south – Bremen, Regensburg, Munich and now Melbourne, where I work as a program manager, i.e. gathering, filtering, abstracting, synthesizing and delivering information. I’m part of a small team in a large corporation that helps that bespoke corporation learn from high-growth software companies and startups. Before coming to Australia, I worked for six years as a strategy consultant and before that I did a degree in business IT. And now this …
Last week Tesla released a software update that added an autopilot mode to its cars. Earlier this year they made their cars faster – again, through a software update. GoPro doubled the frame rate of its cameras and added new picture modes. Good times, and also a good illustration of the differences between hardware- and software-driven businesses.
If you work in an office, you probably have a phone on your desk. The functions may vary, but it’s essentially a piece of plastic, with 15+ buttons and a display. Each button has a function and the functionality of the phone hasn’t changed significantly since you first installed it. That’s pretty much a hardware-driven business: The product has been carefully designed, produced, shipped … and that’s it. Ship and forget. There are certain implications of this kind of business:
You need diligence in designing and manufacturing your product. Once you ship, there is no turning back. Mistakes are expensive, which is the reason Six Sigma is so popular in manufacturing industries.
The manufacturing process is fairly complex and involves either significant capital investment in plants or complex supplier relationships and coordination processes.
There is little chance that the functionality changes over time. If it does, consider it a bonus and the rare exception.
Now let’s compare that with the smartphone in your pocket, which is very different. First of all, the array of services it provides is much broader. It is an alarm clock in the morning, newspaper during commute, word processor in meetings, TV on the couch. Yes, there is pretty much an app for everything.
BestReview produced a video that illustrates how much gets replaced by software. The only thing missing is the move of the computer into the mobile.
Second, your phone changes constantly with automatic updates of apps. You wake up in the morning and realise that your note-taking app suddenly can scan business cards and automatically import those contact details into your address book. Or your sound system at home suddenly gives you access to a wider range of music. Only software can do that.
Most people think of applications like MS Office or Photoshop when they hear software. But software goes much further. It fundamentally changes the way business is done. There are several characteristics of software-driven businesses that are important to remember:
The barriers to entry are different. Capital is no longer a major barrier. If you know how to code, have a computer and a credit card, it is very easy and inexpensive to rent infrastructure from Amazon, Microsoft or Google to get going. The barrier to entry shifts towards talent.
As the competitive advantage of having access to capital diminishes, most incumbents struggle to compete with smaller software companies: (a) there’s just too many small companies and you don’t know who you’re competing with until it’s too late and (b) long-term access to engaged talent is not a problem to be solved by throwing money at it.
A shipping date becomes an interim milestone, not the end of a project. Once you ship (put your app on the app store) you continue improving and adding functionality. This gives you permission to experiment. If things don’t work out, you can change it. Speed gains importance, reaching six sigma loses relevance.
This accelerates what Clayton Christensen calls disruptive innovation: releasing a good-enough product that targets an un-served customer segment (which typically cannot afford the traditional products) and improve it until you capture not only the new market segment, but also traditional customer segments. You start small, continuously improve and in the process extend the market and take over the traditional market en passant.
A good example of a software-driven business (and probably the one that most people refer to) is Uber. However, the magic of Uber is less in its app. That is “just” the user experience – and make no mistake, it’s an excellent one. The magic is in a business model that is enabled by software. They figured out a way to create a transportation business without having to invest in vehicles. This allows them to be much more flexible and quicker to adapt than a traditional capital-based business. Again: Only software can do that.
Long story short: Marc Andreessen wrote in 2011 Software is Eating the World. It is still a must-read. Companies like Tesla and GoPro, that are on the surface hardware companies, succeeded in creating platforms that allow them to run their businesses as software-driven ones. The question is now: How many incumbents will manage to successfully shift their business from a hardware- to a software-driven one? Are you hungry or are you lunch?
Photo credit: Mário Tomé / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA
