I recently received my private pilot license. It feels great to be able to fly like a [noisy] bird; I can’t wait to go on bay tours and longer cross country flights.

One thing that kept me focused during the learning period was to maintain a document that captures everything I learned. It’s like the Cliff’s Notes of a private pilot course, and I decided to make it available to other student pilots. You can download it here. It wasn’t reveiewed by anyone yet, so don’t treat it as the single source or truth. If you find any mistake, by all means - let me know.

Many of the qualities that make a good pilot also define outstanding managers and leaders. Product managers in particular can benefit from learning to fly. Taking your product off the ground is not an easy feat, and learning to fly can hone your skills and help you excel. Here’s a list of ten skills you’ll get better at while learning to fly:

1)      Risk management. Managers take calculated risks all the time, and so do pilots. The consequences of miscalculating business risk are often severe; pilot errors can be catastrophic. Learning to manage risk and optimize reward is an invaluable skill.

2)      Appreciating the value of time. You quickly learn that time is money when each hour costs you around $100 plus instructor fees. Plan wisely and make the most out of the time and resources you have at your disposal, or you’ll end up wasting loads of money.

3)      Healthy fear. When you’re the single pilot in a single engine airplane, mistakes can be fatal or just very expensive. This is a good forcing function for keeping you on your toes and ensuring you do your absolute best at every situation.

4)      Attention to detail. Cutting corners, hoping for miracles, and ignoring the facts are all very dangerous when flying and while managing and organization. There’s no substitute for facing reality and paying attention to every little detail.

5)      Planning ahead. A flight plan is much like a product road map in that it deals with optimizing resource use in order to reach a well defined goal. Having a plan B in case something goes wrong is a good practice.

6)      Be flexible. Even the best plan often fails and has to be altered. Plan B may be obsolete by the time you need it. Being able to quickly adapt and correct your course is an essential skill.

7)      Coordination. Being able to control your aircraft at various conditions is key. Same with an organization you manage - coordinating the various functions and balancing the forces that act on it and within it is key to success.

8)      Technical aptitude. Understanding what’s going on under the hood is very important. Being hands-on is even better. The higher you are in the corporate ladder the less you’re expected to know about the technicalities, but some managers (like this guy) have been known for being very particular about them.

9)      Continuous Learning. A good pilot is always learning. You can never rest on your laurels and assume you know everything. This is true in any endeavor. It’s particularly important for managers to keep abreast of new information and trends.

10)   Stabilization. Inherently stable systems take less effort to control. If you manage to bring your organization to a state in which - just like an airplane - it follows the same trajectory when no force is applied on the controls, you gained yourself considerable peace of mind. When the route changes, course corrections have to be made, but a well structured organization will stabilize quickly again.

You know those people who use curse words not to insult anyone but to emphasize their message? Like a respected business man who says f%$! every few minutes in a conversation about oil futures or hiring or saving panda bears. A young mother of three living in a posh neighborhood who spices up her endless blurb about shopping and nail salons and house maids with an occasional curse.

I’ve been puzzled by this behavior for years. Why did these words, which cause a strong, often negative reaction in many people become such a common part of our language? Thinking about this it dawned on me that this is just a defense mechanism like being cynical or condescending. They swear in order to hide something. I’m not talking about people who suffer from Tourette syndrome (or more accurately, Coprolalia) - just normative folks who use expletives often, hiding fears or insecurities. By revealing part of their inner self and exposing their weakness they give us an opportunity to leverage what we have just learned about them.

One option is to help them. Try to figure out what’s on their mind, what’s bothering them, intimidating them, or stressing them out. Then see how you can help by making it easier for them to handle the situation. Offering a solution is probably the wrong thing to do – just be a good listener.

You can use your newly gained understanding to disarm them, helping them calm down. It might be that they got used to cussing all day and are completely oblivious to the root cause. It is down there somewhere, though, and if you can help them pinpoint it you would do them a great favor.

Another option is to use their weakness to your benefit. In a negotiation setting, when the other side utters the F word, try to quickly figure out what they are insecure about - or better - why they are insecure about it. They are probably angry (or pretending to be), banging on the table and trying to intimidate you into submission. Don’t give up; the curse word is your trigger. Leverage what your opponent just revealed about themselves and get a leg up on them.

Whatever you do remember that if you’re an expletivist yourself others can use these techniques against you, so you better learn to control yourself before they do.

Accuracy can easily be mistaken for usefulness. If you pay a consultant a hefty sum to come up with a detailed analysis of some key business function, the results may be impressively accurate but can also be utterly useless. Take this example: The graph above shows IDC’s Intel Itanium sales forecasts made in nine consecutive years, along with the actual sales numbers; the difference is staggering. The sad part is that thousands of people paid good money to get these wrong forecasts, and they did so over and over again expecting better results.

Predictions are typically wrong, and very often misleading. We still use predictive models though, as they are the only tool we have for managing the future. As George P. Box said, “all models are wrong, but some are useful”.  But what about “real” facts? What about “looking at the data” – querying, analyzing, summarizing, and all that good stuff? No matter how much effort you spend on getting quality data, accuracy doesn’t imply usefulness. Paul Graham tells this story: ”I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search. He told me that it wasn’t worth worrying about. Search was only 6% of our traffic, and we were growing at 10% a month. It wasn’t worth doing better.” David Filo relied on facts to make a [wrong] prediction. The facts were accurate alright, but his interpretation was arbitrary.

Turning data into useful information is not trivial. It requires experience, carefulness, and often intuition. Simple problems like deciding on the color of a button, are fairly easy to resolve. Run an A/B test, see which color gets a better conversion rate, and go with it. This is true only if you can collect enough data points, of course. Startup companies very often don’t have this luxury, and their only option is to JFDI.

When the number of variables increases, it becomes exponentially difficult to draw useful conclusions from the data. This is where statistics comes into play. Using the right statistical tools for job is key. Be careful and know what you’re doing, otherwise your “data driven management” might be as chaotic as they come. As John von Neumann said: “There’s no sense in being precise when you don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Management is the art of creating order in situations that would otherwise become chaotic. Managers do this in various ways, most of which (at the lower rungs, at least) fall in the spectrum between micromanaging and letting employees manage themselves. No matter where you are between these two extremes, management goes against the second law of thermodynamics* stating that entropy can only increase, resulting in more chaos and consequently defining the arrow of time. This is true whether you are managing people, processes, or money; it is particularly true when managing free spirited knowledge workers.

The first approach – micromanagement with frequent course corrections – requires setting clear business rules and periodically nudging employees and middle managers toward what top management sees as the right direction. This often drives employees to resent and become increasingly disgruntled. On the other end of the spectrum is self organized chaos – an organization that strives to manage itself. Most startups operate this way, as do some larger companies – most notably Google. From the outside this may look like a mess, but the results speak for themselves. Self organized chaos is the best way to get groups of creative people to work toward a common goal. Management’s challenge is to let attractors form naturally rather than making them up by pretending to be able to tell the future. They only needs to articulate long term business goals and make sure everyone understands them. Beyond that, it’s up to the employees to come up with innovative strategies and implementations.

The statement in the first paragraph is flawed, of course, as the second law of thermodynamics only applies in closed systems. The more closed a company is, the tighter management should be in order to control its natural tendency to become chaotic. Opening up your business to allow cross fertilization and transparency can lead to more effective self-management and greater stability. It allows for hands off management and self-organized teams that deliver winning solutions. The key to success is hiring the right people – smart, creative, and cooperative - who can make things happen. Building openness and freedom into your company’s DNA is the best way to ensure the second law of thermodynamics does not apply, requiring fewer managers and fostering real innovation.

In a job interview a while back I mentioned the one word you don’t want to say in a job interview (especially when the interviewer is an ex-Googler): “intuition”. Interviewers want to hear about your analytical and well-reasoned thinking skills, not about nebulous concepts like intuition. The interview was the last in a series of eight, and was supposed to seal the deal.

The question in question was about my approach to product management, and more specifically, how I make decisions on tough issues with conflicting requirements. I rambled about “looking carefully at the data”, “analyzing customer input”, “evaluating feature profitability” and other serious sounding sound bites, and then said that at the end of the day after throughly evaluating all the inputs I make a decision based on my intuition. The interviewer paused and repeated: “intuition?” at that moment I new I lost that job opportunity.

So, was mentioning “intuition” a mistake? yes. Does intuition have a place in the workplace? absolutely; especially if you accept the following definition, attributed to Abella Arthur: “Intuition is a combination of historical (empirical) data, deep and heightened observation and an ability to cut through the thickness of surface reality. Intuition is like a slow motion machine that captures data instantaneously and hits you like a ton of bricks. Intuition is a knowing, a sensing that is beyond the conscious understanding - a gut feeling. Intuition is not pseudo-science.”

Every decision we make is based at least in part on our intuition or “gut feeling”. People who lack the ability to intuit tend to get stuck when faced with reams of data. Analysis Paralysis is one of the worst enemies of effective execution. I’m not talking about the obvious cases, where data analysis leads to a clear decision. I’m talking about cases where 1) a decision has to be made, and 2) the data does not seem to point you at any direction. This is where people who can intuit shine. At a startup environment, this is particularly important; if you can’t act on your gut feeling, you can easily analyze yourself out of existence.

So what is the correct answer to that interview question? I’m still not sure. If an interviewer refuses to accept the canned answers and insists on digging deeper, I’m probably going to describe some convoluted thought process based on past experience, innate reasoning, and deep assimilation of analyzed data. Some people will call this intuition, but you didn’t hear it from me.

I was “commissioned” by my wife and her business partner to design a new logo for their business. I’m a big fan of clean and clever logos, like the those of Fedex and Amazon. Not being trained as a designer never stopped me from playing around with visual concepts and creating new designs from scratch. Having some off-time a while back, I started sketching up raw ideas. The first letters of their names are C and D and their business revolves around relationship and intimacy coaching, so I thought about imagery that will somehow capture these elements. After about an hour of doodling, I came up with this concept:

Next, I spent another hour creating a Photoshop draft:

My “clients” liked it a lot, but I thought that creating the final vector-based version was beyond my abilities so I decided to outsource it through www.99designs.com. Turns out this wasn’t such a great idea; although I received around 70 designs, none of them was better than my own draft (according to my “clients”, at least). 99designs stresses quantity over quality, so you end up spending a lot of time coaching aspiring designers from all around the world, a time you could have spent crafting your own design. After getting my well deserved refund, I set out to create a final version myself. I don’t particularly like Adobe Illustrator, and was looking for a better alternative. Somebody recommended Inkscape, a free software that is as powerful as Illustrator, and, in my view, is much easier to use. Here’s the end result:

Needless to say, my “clients” loved it.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the benefits of writing and blogging even in the absence of readers. These ideas resonate well, and I’d like describe the reasons that drives me to write¹:

I blog because it’s one of the best ways to crystallize ideas, short of brainstorming with other smart people.

I blog because it’s the best (and arguably the cheapest) way to gain practice in productizing nebulous concepts, turning them into products that people may actually want to consume.

I blog because it’s the best way to practice summarizing² long and winding thoughts into short, readable nuggets.

I blog because it forces me to capture the essence of an essay in a short and catchy title.

I blog because it gives me a chance to practice writing in a language other than my mother tongue.

¹ “Never before have so many people with so little to say said so much to so few” (Demotivators)

² “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead” (Mark Twain)

Synchronized green lights are designed to enable streamlined traffic flow in major traffic arteries. When you hit the green wave you know it - it feels like all the ­lights are turning green just for you. Nice as this may be for your ego, it’s just a coincidence. After commuting on a such a road for a while, I found a way for making this work almost every time. If you follow the simple explanation below, you’ll save a lot of time and boost your ego at the same time.

The trick is to pass each traffic light in the “middle of the green”. If you have, say, 60 seconds of green light, you want to pass through the intersection at the 30 second mark. If you manage to do so and go at the maximum speed allowed afterward, you are almost guaranteed to hit the next light in the middle of the green as well. Hitting the middle of the green takes some practice and experience. If you have to slow down, make sure to balance it out by speeding up. Here’s the perfect green wave traversal pattern:

If you don’t go fast enough, it can really hurt. You’ll hit many a red light and your trip will become much longer:

Speeding up might actually hurt you as well. While you may end up hitting a similar time overall, your trip will be a miserable stop-and-go experience, not to mention possibly getting cited. Here’s how it looks:

If the traffic is very heavy, no trick will help and you’ll eventually hit a red light. Another factor that might thwart your mastery of the green wave is road sensors that change traffic light patterns based on car presence. Barring these factors, surfing the green wave by trying to hit the middle of the greens is a fun commute activity that can actually save you time, so go ahead and start practicing!

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: