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.

“When 27 year old Jason Bloomstein from Turtle Bay, Alabama walked into his local Piggly Wiggly in early May he was surprised by the number of…”

Feature style articles often start with this kind of anecdotal lead. It is usually followed by some numbers from seemingly respectful sources and one or more pundit opinions. The writer then goes back to the anecdote, finally telling us what happen to poor Jason when he stepped into that supermarket.

Many magazine and newspaper articles start with such deluge of frivolous details meant to paint a mental picture. This could have been interesting if not for the fact that no one really cares about young Mr. Bloomstein in an article about the growing popularity of pickles. He is featured there to make the readers feel part of the story, being a “guy next door” type person.

Other articles are just needlessly long – not telling any story, but adding plenty of unnecessary details. The thing that is often lost in the details? the important facts. More often than not the writer turns a fact that could have been summarized in one or two sentences into a thousand word article, adding negligible value to the reader. But why? Why not respect the reader’s time and provide just the succinct facts? Why do magazines and newspapers bother to write long articles?

One reason lies in emotional value. People like good stories. They like gossip. They like statistics (useful or useless). By turning dry facts into a personal saga, articles provide the readers with an emotional outlet. Readers [hopefully] feel that this could have happened to them and are therefore more likely to engage by following links and clicking on ads. Another reason is findability: two-sentence articles won’t get found online. Even if they are, you won’t be able to post ads against them because there’s not enough “meat” for advertisers to find a good content match. Let’s compare:

Typical article
Length: ~1000 words
Time to get the important facts: ~5 minutes
Monetization potential: High

Important Facts Only
Length: ~20 words
Time to get the important facts: ~5 seconds
Monetization potential: Low

Readers would clearly fare better if they’d get the facts only. The paradox is that they will only pay for the long form (indirectly by consuming advertised goods). Since there’s no business opportunity in distributing the facts only, no one provides that (except for aggregators like Breaking News). Readers therefore end up paying for an inferior product that wastes their time.

P.S.: Yes, I know, the gist of this blog post could have been summarized in two sentences.

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.

How tough must it be for Steve Jobs, Jonathan Ive and the other design-focused people at Apple to engage with everyday technology. Filling up their gas tank, getting cash from an ATM, using their car radio - all these involve interaction with often terribly designed pieces of technology. How will a gas pump’s user interface look like if Apple designed it? simpler. An ATM? cleaner. A car radio? beautiful.

Apple’s influence on product design is already significant, yet it’s reach has been very limited so far. Apple itself is not going to redesign every piece of technology or make their services available to others. Instead, the “Apple style” - simple, clean, and easy to use is going to gradually take over the desgin world. The reason: this style is so overwhelmingly better that by sheer evolutionary pressure it will inevitably propagate and win. This is a bold prediction as it deals with user experience in addition to the underlying technology. Unlike existing designs, this user experience style requires a substantial investment in design and manufacturing. Still, I believe that it will gradually push the old out.

The reason a strong player like Apple leads the way is simple - traditional design consultancy or in-house designers typically do what the customer wants: the customer being cost-conscious consumers or design-agnostic businesses. Apple is led by a fanatic, detail oriented, micro managing design bigot who makes all product decisions. This is not the case with any other major player I’m aware of. Small companies do innovate in this area, but only a few make an impact. One such company is Arc90 that created Readability, a program that turns messy web pages into readable articles. Arc90 did such a great  job that Apple integrated the open source version into Safari.

This better species had now reached a critical mass in the technology ecosystem and is rapidly eliminating inferior variants or transferring it’s genes to them. How long will it take for this superior species to kill off all the others? It might take a while, but the evolution is unstoppable.

In late December I was awarded US Patent 7,860,673 - Distance Measuring Device. I essentially patented the use of a parallax to measure distances from the user to a nearby object using a simple device that can be manufactured for a very low cost. First conceived when I was 17 years old, I kept toying with the idea and entertaining the thought of patenting it for years. A lawyer friend helped me write the patent application 5 years ago. It was a very interesting exercise in turning an abstract idea to a formal patent applications written in legalese, complete with claims, drawings, and calculations. Following a long review process and after hiring a professional patent attorney to fight a prior-art claim, the patent was finally approved.

What should I do with this patent now? not sure. Devices based on it can measure distances alright, but nowhere near the accuracy required for serious usage. I’m thinking about turning it into an educational toy and selling it online and at science museum stores. It can be a great tool for teaching the parallax effect and geometrical optics in general. Doing this will force me continue this multi-year exercise and complete the invention process by commercializing it. Should be an interesting ride.

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!