“Get your product, your idea, your service to market as quickly as possible and get feedback from customers,” he said. “If you work in a vacuum for six months or a year without getting that feedback, you tend to … forget about the customer.”
Ben Curtis of Catch The Best from Ready, set develop: How to create a six hour startup
Join the feedback loop with Seattle Saturday House.
I am a certified dork because papers about boarding airplanes interest me.
Linked from the above in the comments is this paper: Novel Approaches to Airplane Boarding (PDF Link)
Fractal: A mathematically generated pattern that is reproducible at any magnification or reduction.
At a seminar called Lean-Agile Software Testing – Practices and Challenges Jean McAuliffe described lean/agile processes as a fractal. She was talking about applying agile principles at each iteration of development. Principles are hard to apply because they are nebulous and numerous. What is the formula for the agile fractal?
business value = f(Cost, Time, Functionality, Quality)
In reality the formula is a wonderfully complex optimization problem.
Business Owners Perspective
max(business value) = f( min(cost), min(time), max(Functionality), max(Quality) )
And to the agile team we rename a couple of things…
Agile Team Perspective
max(business value) = f( max( Sizestory) , min(Sizestory * Riskstory), max(Unit Tests), max(Acceptance Tests) )
And when it really comes down to it, you have to try to solve both formulas simultaneously for max(business value):
max(business value) = f(x)
where x {
f() { min(cost), min(time), max(Functionality), max(Quality) },
f() { max( Sizestory) , min(Sizestory * Riskstory), max(Unit Tests), max(Acceptance Tests) }
}
There are only many variations on the theme for agile fractals, let me know about yours.
I think a CEO blog should be natural and professional or non-existent. Seth Godin gives us a non-blogging example:
If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and I think the standards for a multimillionaire CEO announcing a major new venture ought to be pretty high.
Jason, when I read your blog I’m not hearing a confident and professional CEO. I hear the ramblings of a typical LiveJournal user. I feel your blog, so far, is the blogger equivalent of Seth’s description of Stan Sigman on stage at the Apple keynote.
[in the Apple keynote speech] … Stan sure could use some help. He appears at about 1:34 into the presentation. He’s dressed all wrong. Not buttoned down enough to be a CEO, not casual enough for the Valley. And his jacket fits funny. Sort of like he’s at his son-in-law’s second wedding.
I don’t want to be harsh, but I do want to be honest. Go give your two cents here: what should a ceo’s blog be?
Have you ever wanted to share some content with 50,000 of your closest friends but couldn’t find the time to setup an Akamai account? I guess Amazon’s S3 might work for you.
It just turned out that the S3 solution was ready for deployment immediately, where akamai requires more negotiation. In other words, we already had an amazon S3 account where I was test something out, and then when we noticed the bandwidth was pegged, we made a fast decision to speed up our plans to put our viewer elsewhere, and chose S3. http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/10/linden_lab_amaz.html
That quick startup time is great and I love the numbers they are posting:
P.S. In case you’re curious, we switched over halfway during release day; but even for the tail 8 hours of the download rush, we averaged roughly 70 gigabytes of viewer download per hour. Then it settled down to a relatively steady stream of about 20-30 gigabytes per hour. In the last 23 hours we’ve transferred a total of ~900 gigabytes so far- which I’d estimate to be around 30,000-38,000 downloads. This does not include the first several hours of the download rush, which are typically the highest. http://blog.secondlife.com/2006/10/26/amazon-s3-for-the-win/
To do this, we reviewed notes from exit interviews, cross referenced annual reviews and ultimately came up with 178 voluntary terminations from people that would have been considered in the top 20%.
To try and keep focused on macro issues, we consolidated the responses and placed them into categories:
- Money
- Unchallenged
- Too Challenged
- Dead Company
http://dumblittleman.blogspot.com/2006/09/why-top-employees-quit.html
It’s really interesting to see “Too Challenged” listed in this group.
[Developers] also want M&Ms for breakfast and a pony. Joel On Software: Private Offices Redux
I don’t often agree with Joel’s theories of software development management but things are changing… Joel, give me M&M’s for breakfast and a pony and I’m yours.
Guy Kawasaki is a great presenter and you should take 40 minutes now to watch his presentation The Art of the Start he gave at TiECon 2006.
Normally this would’ve cost you $300 (if you could get in), several days off work, hotel/travel expenses… oh and you probably should already have a MBA and some type of super awesome MBA-type job. For those of us that don’t meet these criteria, just go watch the presentation for free. Ah, this is why the intarwebnet is great.
Update: You can find more links on Guy Kawasaki’s Blog
