Ask a Senior (professional)

I'll do my best to ask successful industry leaders hard career questions.

[lonelysandwich]

That’s the whole secret, is if you hire great people and you don’t mess them up with a lot of analysis and conversation and speculation and nonsense—if you just get out of their way and shut up, they give you the performance that has made them the great performer that they are.

Woody Allen on directing actors, from Woody Allen: A Documentary, which yes, of course you should watch (via lonelysandwich)

[askasenior-blog]

How to bring good design to a platform (Marco Arment)

I can do no better than simply quote Marco Arment:

How to bring good design to a platform

Demonstrate from the top that high quality and attention to detail are prioritized and appreciated above everything else, including being the first to market, having the most features, or having the most aggressive prices. If you can get those as well, that’s great, but quality will not be sacrificed to do so.

Instill these values in your staff. If you can’t, hire a staff for which you can. Better yet, hire a staff for which you don’t need to. Aggressively pursue simplification, elegance, craftsmanship, and the highest-class user experiences in the product line. Ruthlessly cut or hold features or entire products that aren’t good enough.

Make it pretty.

How not to bring good design to a platform

Skip steps 1–3 above.

[askasenior-blog]

…[it’s] the insecure client who depends on informal office surveys and pseudo-scientific research to deal with questions that are unanswerable and answers that are questionable.

Paul Rand, from the idsgn article "Steve Jobs and Paul Rand: The Impact of Confidence." 

[thomasqbrady]

[askasenior-blog]

Dealing with critical feedback is an incredibly important skill for a leader. Thanks, Steve.

[askasenior-blog]

Aaron Hillegass on Leadership and Steve Jobs

On Steve Jobs:

Steve [Jobs] can look at any product, and he can tell you exactly what's wrong with it. You could drive a garbage truck up in front of his house... and he would tell you 7 things that are wrong with the garbage truck, and if you fix them, you would have the greatest garbage truck that ever existed.

Steve [Jobs] has always hired really great people to work around him. People who are really confident. So that he can yell at them and tell them what they've done wrong, and they don't take it personally They recognize the wisdom in what he's saying without being too self-conscious.

On leading a team:

Here's what I believe: If you hire really good people, then they also expect everybody else to be really good, and they'll hire really good people, and they will mentor people and bring them up to be great. If someone is not very good, they tend to hire people who are not as smart as they are, so that they can order them around. I have always made an effort to hire people who are smarter than me, and do exactly what they tell me to do.

What I believe is that what you tolerate becomes your job. If you put up with people who are not doing their job, then your job becomes compensating for their shortcomings.

– Aaron Hillegass, of The Big Nerd Ranch on The Pipeline Episode 57.

[askasenior-blog]

[Steve Jobs] has not been chasing the ancillary rewards. He has not been chasing profits or marketshare or stock price. He has gotten those things by chasing the one thing he cares about: making great stuff.

John Siracusa, in the latest episode of Hypecritical, speaking about Apple's corporate strategy

[askasenior-blog]

The idea is that you don't go after the thing that is your goal: "We want to be the biggest company in the world," "We want to have a strategy that makes us the most successful maker of gadgets" or whatever. Instead you do the virtuous thing, and from the virtuous thing comes all the other goals that you wanted. So the idea is make the best product, and if you make the best product, you'll become the biggest company in the world, the most successful company, the most profitable company. You will dominate your industry. You'll sell more of your thing than the other guy. You'll have better brand recognition. All the good things that a company wants, that a CEO is in charge of - your share price will go up - all of that stuff, if you try to do that stuff... you will fail. Instead aim for the virtuous thing, which is making the best product.

John Siracusa, in the latest episode of Hypecritical, speaking about Apple's corporate strategy

[askasenior-blog]

Jobs: What I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is.Mossberg: And are people willing to tell you you're wrong?Jobs: (laughs) Yeah.Mossberg: I mean, other than snarky journalists, I mean people that work for…Jobs: Oh, yeah, no we have wonderful arguments.Mossberg: And do you win them all?Jobs: Oh no I wish I did. No, you see you can't. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don't stay.Mossberg: But you must be more than a facilitator who runs meetings. You obviously contribute your own ideas.Jobs: I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn't?

Jobs interviewed by Mossberg at D8 via Tom Reestman

[askasenior-blog]

Why join a company when you can *be* the company?

Khoi Vinh via Austin Kleon

[austinkleon]

“The old paradigm of climb up a stable career ladder is dead and gone,” he said to me. “No career is a sure thing anymore. The uncertain, rapidly changing conditions in which entrepreneurs start companies is what it’s now like for all of us fashioning a career. Therefore you should approach career strategy the same way an entrepreneur approaches starting a business.”

Thomas Friedman, “The Start-Up of You” (via austinkleon)

[askasenior-blog]

A generic presentation about how Apple or some other company has a great user experience program (or worse, a presentation showing all the bad user experiences in the world), won’t convince anyone of doing anything different.

Jared Spool, from the article Why I can’t convince executives to invest in UX (and neither can you). Sage advice within.

[askasenior-blog]

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying ‘no’ to 1,000 things.

Steve Jobs, in a Forbes interview, via Konigi

[askasenior-blog]

Microsoft has to buy what it no longer has the people or the culture to create — or copy.

Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note, on the Microsoft/Skyp acquisition

[askasenior-blog]

We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.

Steve Jobs in an interview with Fortune in 2008. This and lots of "Apple Retail Quotes" at ifo-roadtrip.com.

Via Daring Fireball (who cites Horace Dediu).

[askasenior-blog]

Ken Segall is a difficult man to sum up in a sentence, or even a paragraph. He's been a part of some of the most recognizable marketing of the last century. He was on the team that came up with "Think Different." He created the legacy of iDevices by naming the iMac. He's worked with Apple, IBM, NeXT, BMW, AT&T, Intel and Dell. His blog, Observatory, is a wellspring of wit, insight, empathy and honest criticism. He can find the humanity in any story, and never seems to point fingers or make anyone out to be the "bad guy," even when it's very easy and everyone else is doing it. Here is Ken's answer to our first question:

You did a great job of answering your own question with those quotes from Disney and Steve Jobs. They're perfect. I'd add to those a similar quote from Jony Ive: "Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products. We trust that as a consequence of that, we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear what our goals are." Having worked with the executive teams at both Apple and Dell, I can confirm the obvious: these two companies are night and day. At the most basic level, it's the difference between being a leader and a follower. Apple dreams of changing the world through innovation and design. Their goal is to create products people will fall in love with. Dell simply dreams of pulling in a ton of cash — and it's been a while since they've been any good at it. Their goal is to make a more affordable version of whatever the other guy invents. Okay, that's a little harsh, but it's not all that far from the truth. There's an old joke about Apple being the R&D facility for the PC industry. It's remarkable how often Dell has attempted to latch onto an Apple revolution: music players, smartphones, all-in-one computers, super-thin laptops, and now tablets. However — if you love working at Dell, it doesn't mean you're a bad person. What's important is how you feel when the alarm clock goes off on Monday morning. If the idea of going to work is depressing as hell, then yes, it's time to move on. If you enjoy the challenges of your job, the people you work with, the company's culture, and most important, the quality of your work — then you're in the right place, Personally, I've always put the highest value on the culture. If that's a good fit, your job will always be fun and rewarding. Your mission is to find that place before your meter runs out. Some of the most talented people I've known have at some time questioned their own worth after being beaten down in one place — only to find fame and fortune in another. I wouldn't put a lot of hope in changing a company from the inside. DNA isn't so easily re-programmed.

[askasenior-blog]

In his coverage of Microsoft's Acquisition of Skype, Andy Ihnatko offers this analysis of what makes an "Apple" and "Apple" - and an "Amazon" an "Amazon," for that matter:

Over the past five years, Apple and Amazon have been the biggest “this changes everything”-scale tech innovators. Both companies are smart enough not to take the wraps off of something until it’s D-O-N-E. Not “an impressive concept video,” not “a functional engineering sample,” not even just “Available for sale.” By the time these “A” companies add items to their online stores, they’ve got the product, they’ve got the infrastructure that gives it a purpose beyond its function, and almost just as importantly they’ve got their story straight and can explain to everybody exactly why this thing needed to exist.

[askasenior-blog]

David is another friend of mine, and a Senior CAD Manager at NVIDIA. David is just one of those friends that everyone should have. Immensely wise, incredibly generous and generally speaking a good example to live by. He's also wicked smart. And very modest. And he has a killer blog.

Here's his answer to our first question.

From my own observations, I’d first say that culture strongly flows top down in an organization.  A boss is okay with covering a few defects because his director has asked him to do it before.  The director is okay because the VP only values schedule, … all the way up to the CEO.  So, I think the first key is having the right CEO.  He or she sets the overall tone for a company.

But then the question becomes what’s the most important quality in a CEO.  Out of the many answers I’ve heard, the one that seems most demonstrable to me is a willingness to reinvent the company.  In a startup, the first product usually isn’t successful.  It’s typically not even publicized.  Despite the entire company’s full effort, Rev 0 is usually cancelled before it even goes into production – maybe even cancelled before it’s fully staffed.  But the startup is so small and nimble, it has the potential to rapidly learn from its mistakes, even making drastic changes in direction, until, if the place and time are right, it can make a splash in the marketplace.  And even if that doesn’t happen, it’s okay.  Everyone sulks for a bit, but then a new idea comes along, and another startup, perhaps with many of the same familiar faces, takes a stab at making it big.

But what happens when they make it big?  Now they’ve got the recipe for a market-winning widget.  Hiring takes off like mad, so they can make 10,000 widgets, 1 million widgets, widget 2.0, widget 3.0, ….  But before they know it, their idea has inspired lots of competition, or perhaps another startup with a slightly fresher angle is sneaking up from behind.  So what do you do?  The typical response of the now big company is “we’ll just make our widgets even better!”, and soon Windows 7 or the Core i7 Duo is hitting the shelves.

A startup risks everything on a new idea because it has nothing to lose.  Then again, a big company has so many more resources.  Why couldn’t they carve out a small portion for trying out new ideas?  That can work, but keep in mind my first statement about the importance of the CEO, and the whole top-down flow of culture.  In a startup, everyone from the CEO to the new grad is seething with energy toward a singular focus of developing their new idea.  But in a big company, how much attention does “Bob over in North Carolina”, who’s working on “who-knows-what new idea”, get from upper management?  And how much pressure is on Bob?  Vacation? No problem.  Roadblock?  Oh well, cut the losses and move on to something else.  There’s not the startup pressure of an entire company hinging on a successful idea.

But what if the CEO comes in and says “Hey guys, I know we’re a computer company, but how about if we put tons of money and resources into starting a really awesome music store instead?”  (Remember MP3 players were around a long time before the iPod.  It was iTunes, in my opinion, that made the iPod successful.)  Well first, he or she needs to be prepared for a lot of flak from the board about this “apparent waste of money”, and second it’s bound to cause some waves within the employees.  Will their job be threatened or less important because of this change in focus?  Has management reached a level of desperation that indicates it’s time to move on?  Then the stock market will weigh in with falling shares as they observe the company “losing its focus”.  But if the CEO keeps pushing through, maybe, just maybe, they can turn the company into something else – something that keeps up with the fickle marketplace and truly becomes a new company.  And so now, an online bookstore is selling home appliances, a computer company is making cell phones, and a search engine company is writing an O/S.  I think, especially in the high tech area, this is what makes a great company.

But what if you’re not the CEO?  If your job is stagnant (no room for promotion nor lateral moves), then it might be time to move on.  But if there’s at least some fluidity within the company, I think it’s possible to act like a CEO, and begin by reinventing your job.  Yes, actively engineer yourself out of your current job.

Does your job involve planning schedules?  Perhaps develop better tools (use a scripting language, Perl, a chart, whatever you know) to make your schedules more accurate and faster to develop.

Does it involve understanding different aspects of the company?  Perhaps arrange for your new hires to “rotate” through adjacent divisions of the organization and volunteer to let new hires from other groups rotate through yours.

Does it involve knowing a lot of facts and various people in the company?  Create a document that helps new hires and less experienced engineers learn the ropes faster.

Does it involve designing a product?  Perhaps come up with an innovative way of testing it e.g. bringing in donuts and hosting a “request for comments” from engineers in other groups.

Does it involve writing code?  If some of that code is repetitive, could you work on a code generator that allows you to code at a higher level?

Finally, pray for ideas and the success of your employer (“as if working for the Lord” -- Col 3:22-24)