We all suffer through boring, endless, useless meetings but no one is doing anything about it. Here’s a very effective method for reducing the amount of time spent in meetings. In order to work, this will have to be done with the one or two people who really make decisions in your team/group/department/organization/company.
Step 1: Raise hell about time wasted in meetings. Put a dollar amount on it to make it look really painful.
Step 2: Call a meeting to discuss (this will hopefully be one of the last meetings you’ll attend) with the decision makers (and no one else.)
Step 3: Draw a matrix on the whiteboard - rows for required meetings, columns for required attendees. Forget about optional attendees; they are a distraction. Fill up the table, marking a cell only if this person is absolutely required in that meeting.
Step 4: Eliminate meetings that aren’t absolutely necessary, and participants that are not expected to contribute anything. Passive listeners can always get meeting summaries by email - no need to waste their time and yours.
Step 5: Decide on frequencies - not every meeting has to happen on a weekly basis. If you end up with monthly recurrence or longer, the meeting is probably redundant.
Step 6: Have the decision maker(s) announce the change formally and make sure the new schedules get implemented immediately.
On my bi-annual visit to McDonald’s the other day I noticed this sign posted on the drive-thru window: “Two Apple Pies: $1. One Apple Pie: $0.95.” The first thought that crossed my mind was: Is it possible to deduce the actual cost of a single pie from this data? On the lower end of the scale it can be only 5 cents – in which case they make a huge profit on the first one, and sell the second one at cost. On the higher end it could be 50 cents, earning them a large margin on single pie sales but none on doubles. If many customers buy singles, they strike gold. However, it’s almost totally irrational to buy only one when the second one is only 5 cents more, so let’s assume that almost all customers buy two. So why does McDonald’s part with their precious pies in pairs? Probably because this is a good way to move inventory and make good profit. Let’s see how.
There must be enough irrational, diet conscious, or reading-challenged people to guarantee a large percentage of single-pie purchases. Let’s estimate this number at 20%. Even at the high end of the cost curve, at 50 cents, this would guarantee a 9 cent average margin. Assuming a lower cost of, say, 30 cents, the margin soars to 45 cents on average. Pretty nice! If you compound the psychological effect making people buy more because this deal is “too good to pass on”, I bet this store is making loads of money.
The way the sign looks, this is a local initiative and not centrally mandated policy. If the profit margins are indeed so high, they should seriously consider offering this deal chain-wide.
Science Olympiad is a competition for middle and high school students who get excited by math and science. These are the geeks and hackers of our future; the kids who are good at math and are not ashamed of it. Last Saturday I attended the Bay Area competition, where 500 or so kids competed in events like Science Crime Busters, Ornithology, and Mousetrap Vehicle. Plenty of excitement and love for math and science seen in broad daylight on a weekend; not a common sight.
The picture above is from the closing ceremony. What do we see here? the future of Silicon Valley. Look closely – who do you see in the picture? Happy kids and families from Asia, mainly China and India. This is a self selecting group of people who demonstrate their love for science and math through their deeds, not their words or good intentions. And where are the Caucasians and other ethnicities hiding? They aren’t hiding, they simply didn’t bother to show up. An event like this would interrupt their busy Saturday schedules, and besides, it’s so un-cool. The entire crowd had maybe 10 non Asians.
Why does it matter? It doesn’t, really, but isn’t it amazing that they amounted to about 2% of the crowd, an order of magnitude less than their makeup in the Bay Area population?
I risk sounding racist here, but nothing is farther from the truth. I’m writing this out of sheer admiration to the Asian parents who encourage their kids to participate in the Science Olympiad. Largely an immigrant generation, they made it to the US by virtue of their education, not through a birthright. These brave people arguably understand the value of education far better than the “natives”. Being enterprising newcomers, they leverage the excellent schools and the volunteer workforce to better their children’s future.
I’ve seen the future of Silicon Valley, and I’m happy to report that it’s multicultural, passionate, and hard working. I’m so glad that at least one group of people cares enough about science and math, as this is the greatest hope for this area and indeed the entire country.
Last night I attended an SVPMA meeting featuring Google’s Shreyas Doshi. Shreyas is a very smart and articulate guy; one thing that caught my attention during his talk is this quote (probably misquoted, but close enough): “The role of a product manager is to discover the right product to make”.
Product management is hard to define, and this quote actually captures the essence of it in a very succinct way (which, as a nice bonus, makes it a good product definition in and of itself). a thorough discovery process involves coming up with a plan, searching for clues, utilizing resources, experimenting, following the wrong leads, gathering facts, putting puzzle pieces together, and coming up with the desired finding. This is pretty much what a good product manager does. Add to that dealing with difficult people and leading with no formal authority, and you’ve got a complete picture of a day in the life of a product manager.
Straight from the masters of NLP at Apple comes another amazing, extraordinary, incredible, awesome, and cool presentation. I posted one of these before, but this one is even better.
I happen to live about 2 miles away from the Apple headquarters. On my way to the gym I often see Apple employees walking through the campus, carrying a shiny Macbook Air or one of the other Macbook variants. Am I going to see them carrying an iPad on their way to the next meeting?
The device is undoubtedly way cool, and I definitely want one. It won’t fit in my pocket, so I’m going to have to lug it around in a bag. But I already carry a phone and a laptop, so why should I? to replace the Kindle I don’t have, I guess. Or maybe to replace all three of them?
The mass-market use case is not yet clear (to me at least), but the greatest achievement here is Apple’s new A4 chip, which reportedly is extremely fast. This finally lets Apple be totally self reliant, just the way they (rightfully) like it. In a year or so we’re going to see the A4 and its descendants replace the iPhone and Macbook CPUs, and maybe even penetrate non-Apple products.
Two companies entered the prestigious “I’m officially scared of Apple” club today - Intel and AMD. The banter in their executive boardrooms might be giddy and condescending, but they should be revising their 5-year plans instead.
Describing what your startup does in a video is a must. However, making a high quality video is harder and more expensive than it seems. Although video equipment is cheap, finding and filming a professional talking-head is challenging and achieving consistent quality through different scenes not trivial.
Luckily there’s a quick and easy way to ensure your video is excellent without sweating it: use stop motion. Just stitch together a bunch of pictures and add narration, and you have a great looking and sounding video that will get users engaged. Another option is to do a screen capture movie, but it’s easy to fall into the complexity and boredom traps with these. I’ll focus on animated stop motion videos in this post. Here’s what you need to do:
1) Write the story of a typical user and turn it into a storyboard. For each scene, write the narration and sketch the visuals. Tell a little bit about the user’s background and focus on the main steps they take while using your site and the key benefits they get out of it. Simplify the story as much as you can and use plain language. Revise several times.
2) Find a narrator with an “exotic” accent - Australian, South African (my favorite), Jamaican, etc. Spend $30 on good microphone. Use a wind breaker (like a piece of sponge). Record the narration in a small room with lots of furniture, pillows, carpets etc. to choke the echoes. Make sure the narrator holds the microphone at the same distance from his/her mouth throughout the recording. Record several takes so you have a lot of material to pick bits and pieces from and create one consistent sound track.
3) Draw some simple pictures (or have someone draw them for you) according to your storyboard. Use abstract objects - nothing too fancy or complicated. Make sure you have a few version of each drawing to choose from. Scan the pictures and clean them up in Photoshop. It’s best to remove the background altogether to get rid of small blemishes and tone variation.
You can also take pictures of simple objects; just make sure the lighting conditions are consistent. Take all pictures at the same place, one right after the other.
4) Use good video editing program like iMovie or Vegas Pro to stitch you images together. Use fancy transitions and effects sparingly. Render your video in HD - 1280×720, around 30fps, 44k sampling rate for the soundtrack. Post the video on YouTube and embed it in your site.
Common Craft has some good ideas on how to do these videos, although they are using a video camera, which makes producing a high-quality video harder with limited time and resources.
If you are on a tight budget you can definitely do this yourself. If you can afford to pay someone like Common Craft and focus on what you’re really good at - go ahead and do it; at the end of the day, however, it might be cheaper and take less time to do it yourself. It took me 3 days to do the video below with a little help from my friends:
Have you noticed how easy it is to buy applications on the iTunes App Store? Apple made it stupid-easy by skipping purchasing step typically found in most online and mobile stores. Simply find an app you’re interested in (Apple makes it increasingly easier to do so), click it’s price, click BUY NOW, and you’re done! no “Are you sure?” no shopping cart summary (in fact, no shopping cart at all), no tax, no suggestions for other apps you might be interested in, and no shipping options (duh). Click BUY NOW, and voilà. No questions asked. Apple emails you your receipt later on, and that’s the last you’ll hear from them.
Here’s the flow:
Stage 1: Click the app icon
Stage 2: Click BUY NOW
Stage 3: App is immediately installed
Stage 4: Ready to roll!
Isn’t it genius? it’s borderline ethical for sure, but fully legal according to the terms of service which everyone agrees to (do we have a choice?). Apple licensed Amazon’s 1-click patent which allows them to do this. I hope Amazon fails to defend this overused piece of pseudo IP, after profiting from it for so many years. It’s about time the playing field is leveled for the benefit of all players.
If I say that everything is awesome over and over again (and my reputation is high enough) eventually you’ll believe me. Apple executives take advantage of this in an NLP-like manner in their presentations. This video is a great demonstration of this effect.
