Critical Thinking

I'm Kevin. I'm pretty fun. I have opinions about a lot of things so I figured I'd start writing them down. What to expect: thoughts about the tech industry, unsolicited feedback on various products, ideas that I won't do anything with

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People come out of super successful companies and learn that it's too easy or come out of failed companies and learn that it's impossible. PayPal was somehow just the right in between.

Peter Thiel on Charlie Rose

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Business of Software 2013

Presentation to my team at Yammer on the Business of Software conference. Highly skewed towards an internal audience. There was a ton of great content presented that I don't touch on here. 

Slightly delayed due to child having. 

Thanks to Tyler for passing his notes along, helping me remember some stuff I didn't write down.

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Don't assume people know what you're talking about

When you work full-time on a product, it's easy to lose track of how real people think about your product -- if they think about it at all. They're worrying about making payroll, pissed that Sam just quit or celebrating a big deal they just closed. 

In most business communication I receive the author makes a huge assumption that I know who they are and what they're talking about.

From the subject line mail at work:

Welcome OSS to the _____ (and Hello Again, OCS)!

I have no idea what OSS or OCS are. Presumably Office something or other. If I knew, I definitely wouldn't identify with the term.

From a meetup I went to on Thursday:

We're building out a DIYBio lab space where people can use [biology apparatus of some kind] and [some other lab equipment] 

I was still looking up DIYBio on my phone when you hit me with more unintelligible terms.  

From a recent promotional email:

Bit Munkey here. We have some pretty amazing Cyber Monday deals available..

Hold up, who the fuck is Bit Munkey? It wasn't until I looked at a link at the bottom of the mail and clicked through to their site that I even remembered what this company was about.. and I'd signed up for it!

So what should you do?

Remind people who you are and what you're about. If you're a company you probably have a tagline. Use it.

Avoid jargon. This includes your made up names for parts of your offering.

Only communicate to deliver value to the recipient, not because you want to extract value from them. You're pumped you finished building Mercurial integration, but unless your customers are going to be just as excited, maybe just let them discover it on their own.. especially if you see they're already using Git. 

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Some ideas for unroll.me

I signed up for unroll.me a couple days ago and have been really impressed with the service. It's already really cut down on the amount of mail in my inbox, by killing a ton of annoying stuff I have been deciding to press delete every day rather than go through an annoying and possibly ineffective unsubscribe process.

You should definitely sign up and save yourself some time. I was surprised to see I was signed up for over 150 different emails.

A few things that would make this service even better for me:

Preview the subscriptions  There are a ton of subscriptions they've detected that I'm unsure if I can safely unsubscribe from. For example, they found three different emails I get from Honda. I'm sure two are promotional garbage and one is the one that tells me I need to get my car looked at. If I could take a quick look at the mail that comes through for each subscription I'd be able to make more confident choices.

Multiple accounts I bet a ton of people that use this service have more than one email address - it would be great to have several tied to your unroll.me account to manage them all in one place. That said, easy workaround to sign up with multiple email addresses.

Label / folder / forward to unsubscribe One way to reduce the friction to unsubscribing to mail would be to set up a special label (Google) or folder (other services) that would signal unroll.me to unsubscribe me or add the mail to my daily rollup. Alternatively, let me forward mails to the service to unsubscribe me. 

Transactional mail from event services showing up as subscriptions Invitations from people using Evite, Paperless Post and EventBrite show up as separate subscriptions. "All Evites" is a reasonable thing to rollup, "Evites from Wes and Kim" isn't particularly.

Multiple rollups I'm probably on the heavier usage and more anal-retentive side of things, but I'd really prefer to group similar mail types of mail together into topical rollups. Presently, I use the rollup to group the various tech/startup event notifications I get. I probably don't want to scan these at the same time as looking at cheap airline tickets and other deals.

Report subscriptions that fall through the cracks Unroll.me does a great job of detecting many of the emails I've subscribed to, but they still miss some. It would be great to be able to designate a mail as a subscription that I could unsubscribe from or add to my rollup. 

Unsubscribe me from my physical mail :-) CatalogChoice.org means well, but it doesn't really work and the experience leaves a lot to be desired.

All that said, you should sign up right now if you haven't. Unroll.me is a great service. 

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Please take the time to watch Greg's talk "Developers, entrepreneurs and depression" (32min) Really poignant, really important. 

www.DevsAndDepression.com

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Really interesting analysis. 

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Kara Swisher on why Facebook bought Instagram

Kara Swisher talks to Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and others about Facebook'€™s acquisition of Instagram.

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http://robotics.stanford.edu/users/ronnyk/puzzlingOutcomesInControlledExperiments.pdf

Really interesting article about the types of issues that you can encounter running tests online.

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Fuck yeah! Tumblr is now made up of 100 million blogs.

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Gotta love a company that announces a milestone with "Fuck Yeah!".

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Great post by Joe Stump at Sprint.ly (great product too btw!) addressing how to prioritize product decisions based on usage.

Something that I've been thinking about a bit lately is how to prioritize across various feedback channels (support, usage, paying down technical debt, competitive pressure etc). I'd be curious how Joe and others think about this.

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Great post. Make your product useful for a few people before thinking about how it can grow.

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Ideas for decide.com

If you haven't checked out decide.com you should. They're a Seattle-based company that helps you make big purchasing decisions by aggregating what they've learned crawling the internet (reviews etc).

A couple of ideas that I think would make them even better..

Landing pages for unhandled products Decide is wisely focusing on doing a great job in product categories they know. However, when you search for something they don't handle you get a pretty sparse 'no results found' page. I think they could recognize you've typed a product, explained that they haven't gotten to that class of product yet and sent you off to Amazon for referral dollars. 

Filter explanations When I was searching for a digital SLR camera I found a filter for 'SLR' vs. 'mirrorless' I only happened to know what that meant after having talked to my camera-nerd friend Chris the week before. I think Decide could have provided a brief explanation to help customers make an informed and confident decision.

"What really matters" content Taking the above idea further, Decide could provide (probably static) content giving visitors the low-down on what really matters in a category.

Personalized results Knowing a little bit about me, Decide might be able to provide me with better recommendations. Inferring that because I work at a Megacorp that treats me well I might be less price sensitive and so on. This idea might be a bit harder.  :)

As I recall this was Hunch's game plan. While I'm not sure how well this ever worked it didn't end poorly for them.  

Decide has already been a huge help with xmas shopping - looking forward to seeing what they do over the next year!

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Don't be put off by the 139(?!) slides or the rather unfortunate styling. Really solid material for anyone thinking of becoming a product/program manager.

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Great personal and introspective post by Sam Stephenson.

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Healthcare is a competitive disadvantage for the United States

I really like going on recruiting trips. In addition to the free trip, I get to meet all kinds of students excited to throw themselves on the fire enter the workforce building software. Recently I got to go on a trip to the University of Calgary. Probably not my first choice of venues but at least it wasn't winter!

After a day of taking resumes, chatting with candidates and frantically purchasing all of the drinks for sale at a campus store some students hung around for a bit afterwards to chat. 

A girl with her arm in a sling introduced herself. Immediately I asked what had happened to her arm - expecting a sports injury, or otherwise amusing story. She proceeded to explain that she has a genetic condition that requires her to have surgery semi-frequently and this was the result of her most recent hospital visit.

Awkward.

Her questions for me weren't about salary, or whether Microsoft does agile development or whether there were positions available on the Access team (we still make it!). She asked me whether she would be able to take time off to have surgery when she needed it. She asked about how much insurance would cost and whether it would cover her condition. Her primary concern was that Microsoft is located in the United States and that meant her health would be in jeopardy.

I was really proud to explain that at least at this company, we take care of our people. While I don't know the specifics of her condition, I am absolutely certain that Microsoft would do the right thing by her. I know that she would receive great treatment and be accommodated by her team at work. Indeed any manager that would raise an eyebrow about accommodating her would be a in a shit-ton of trouble.

This is just one example, but throughout the civilized-healthcare-providing-world there are untold numbers of bright and qualified people that happen to have - or have family members with - medical conditions that will make them think twice about moving to America. 

While I also agree that in the greatest country in the world* it is an embarrassment that people are having to make a choice between food and medicine, I believe that fixing healthcare is also an economic imperative.

* not including Canada

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Bret Victor again. I like to pretend I have a keen sense of what's unreasonable, or a stepping-stone in our technical landscape. I clearly haven't been thinking big enough.

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Incredibly well thought out and well presented. Bret Victor does an incredible job making the case for exploration of better programming environments and languages.