Hammer Principle, Lean Thinking and motivation
While on holiday over Christmas I finally got around to reading The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. I've been meaning to pick it up for ages but thought I'd probably know most of it already, having seen him speak and talked to a lot of folk about Lean at various socials. I was completely wrong... It's one of the best and most inspirational books I've read in a while. It also happens to be one of the most misrepresented. I hear a lot of talk about minimum viable product; few mention the scientific method, which was the revelation of the book. This focus on running experiments, in the form of small hypothesis -> test -> learn loops, got me really exited. Talking to David about it, we decided to try out a few Lean principles on Hammer Principle, our neglected baby.
Despite getting a constant stream of traffic, Hammer Principle has been essentially untouched for the last 18 months or so while David and I have concentrated on Aframe. We started a complete rewrite to mark its year anniversary but it got derailed and abandoned.
This time around, following the Lean philosophy, we formulated several hypothesis about users' behaviour on Hammer Principle, concocted little experiments to test them, wrote small features to gather data and added Mixpanel tracking to try to track the results.
To give a quick example, Hammer Principle gets constant traffic to programming languages and databases but very little to martial arts. We posited that this was because people didn't know about our other nails (what we call categories). Experiment: make it obvious that there are other nails to visit by adding a global navigation bar. Measure: people who use the navigation bar who go on to participate in another nail. The initial results have been encouraging (we're getting about 10% of visitors following this funnel) and we now have a baseline to improve upon. This was our first experiment and I'm not convinced that we necessarily got our process right but there was an unexpected consequence...
Leaving the whole Lean circus aside, having targets and metrics has made working fun again. We develop something small that doesn't take long and watch the counters tick. Conclusions are drawn and we then decide what to do next. Instead of pouring an arbitrary amount of effort into a black hole, hoping headline metrics like traffic and retweets will let us know whether we've done the right thing, we get a real sense of progress towards a goal, which is satisfying and motivating.
It doesn't matter whether you're doing a startup or just noodling on a personal project, I highly recommend reading up on Lean and playing with an experiment or two.