Tag Archives: customer

Takeaways from Derek Sivers’s “Anything You Want”

Derek Sivers, in his book titled “Anything You Want“, shares tales and lessons he’s learned when he started, built, and sold CD Baby, a global music distribution platform, for $22M (which will return to musicians after he dies). He’s an entrepreneur, but a divergent kind of entrepreneur from the ones I’m accustomed to, and I’ve grown fond of his philosophies in both business and in life. Perhaps it’s because of Seth Godin‘s influence, perhaps it’s because he’s a very slow thinker, perhaps it’s because the things he says just sounds about right.

Some favorite lines from the book:

  • Most people don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won’t make them happy. Don’t be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what’s worth doing.
  • The key point is that I wasn’t trying to make a big business. I was just daydreaming about how one little thing would look in a perfect world. When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia. When you make it a dream come true for yourself, it’ll be a dream come true for someone else, too.
  • Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working. We all have lots of ideas, creations, and projects. When you present one to the world and it’s not a hit, don’t keep pushing it as is. Instead, get back to improving and inventing. Present each new idea or improvement to the world. If multiple people are saying, “Wow! Yes! I need this! I’d be happy to pay you to do this!” then you should probably do it. But if the response is anything less, don’t pursue it.
  • If you’re not saying “Hell yeah!” about something, say no. When deciding whether to do something, if you feel anything less than “Wow! That would be amazing! Absolutely! Hell yeah!” then say no. When you say no to most things, you leave room in your life to throw yourself completely into that rare thing that makes you say, “Hell yeah!” We’re all busy. We’ve all taken on too much. Saying yes to less is the way out.
  • Never forget that absolutely everything you do is for your customers. Make every decision – even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone – according to what’s best for your customers. If you’re ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, “How can I best help you now?” Then focus on  satisfying those requests. None of your customers will ask you to turn your attention to expanding. They want you to keep your attention focused on them. It’s counter-intuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers. Just thrill them, and they’ll tell everyone.
  • Watch out when anyone (including you) says he wants to do something big, but can’t until he raises money. It usually means the person is more in love with the idea of being big-big-big than with actually doing something useful. For an idea to get big-big-big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn’t need funding. If you want to be useful, you can always start now, with only 1 percent of what you have in your grand vision. It’ll be a humble prototype version of your grand vision, but you’ll be in the game. You’ll be ahead of the rest, because you actually started, while others are waiting for the finish line to magically appear at the starting line.
  • Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?
  • We all grade ourselves by different measures:
    • For some people, it’s as simple as how much money they make. When their net worth is going up, they know they’re doing well.
    • For others, it’s how much money they give.
    • For some, it’s how many people’s lives they can influence for the better.
    • For others, it’s how deeply they can influence just a few people’s lives.
    • For me, it’s how many useful things I create, whether songs, companies, articles, websites, or anything else. If I create something that is not useful to others, it doesn’t count. But I’m also not interested in doing something useful unless it needs my creative input.
  • When you want to learn how to do something yourself, most people won’t understand. They’ll assume the only reason we do anything is to get it done, and doing it yourself is not the most efficient way. But that’s forgetting about the joy of learning and doing. Yes, it may take longer. Yes, it may be inefficient. Yes, it may even cost you millions of dollars in lost opportunities because your business is growing slower because you’re insisting on doing something yourself. But the whole point of doing anything is because it makes you happy! That’s it! You might get bigger faster and make millions if you outsource everything to the experts. But what’s the point of getting bigger and making millions? To be happy, right? In the end, it’s about what you want to be, not what you want to have. To have something (a finished recording, a business, or millions of dollars) is the means, not the end. To be something (a good singer, a skilled entrepreneur, or just plain happy) is the real point. When you sign up to run a marathon, you don’t want a taxi to take you to the finish line.

Lessons from Kent Beck and Martin Fowler’s “Planning Extreme Programming”

The first edition of “Planning Extreme Programming” by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler was published about 18 years (that long) ago, and already it says so much about how planning for software projects can be done well. It talks about programmers and customers, their fears and frustrations, their rights and responsibilities, and putting all those knowledge into a planning style that can work for development teams. It doesn’t have to be labeled XP, but it does need to help people be focused, confident, and hopeful.

Here are some noteworthy lines from the book:

  • Planning is not about predicting the future. When you make a plan for developing a piece of software, development is not going to go like that. Not ever. Your customers wouldn’t even be happy if it did, because by the time the software gets there, the customers don’t want what was planned; they want something different.
  • We plan to ensure that we are always doing the most important thing left to do, to coordinate effectively with other people, and to respond quickly to unexpected events.
  • If you know you have a tight deadline, but you make a plan and the plans says you can make the deadline, then you’ll start on your first task with a sense of urgency but still working as well as possible. After all, you have enough time. This is exactly the behavior that is most likely to cause the plan to come true. Panic leads to fatigue, defects, and communication breakdowns.
  • Any software planning technique must try to create visibility, so everyone involved in the project can really see how far along a project is. This means that you need clear milestones, ones that cannot be fudged, and clearly represent progress. Milestones must also be things that everyone involved in the project, including the customer, can understand and learn to trust.
  • We need a planning style that
    • Preserves the programmer’s confidence that the plan is possible
    • Preserves the customer’s confidence that they are getting as much as they can
    • Costs as little to execute as possible (because we’ll be planning often, but nobody pays for plans; they pay for results)
  • If we are going to develop well, we must create a culture that makes it possible for programmers and customers to acknowledge their fears and accept their rights and responsibilities. Without such guarantees, we cannot be courageous. We huddle in fear behind fortress walls, building them ever stronger, adding ever more weight to the development processes we have adopted. We continually add cannonades and battlements, documents and reviews, procedures and sign-offs, moats with crocodiles, torture chambers, and huge pots of boiling oil. But when our fears are acknowledged and our rights are accepted, then we can be courageous. We can set goals that are hard to reach and collaborate to make those goals. We can tear down the structures that we built out of fear and that impeded us. We will have the courage to do only what is necessary and no more, to spend our time on what’s important rather than on protecting ourselves.
  • We use driving as a metaphor for developing software. Driving is not about pointing in one direction and holding to it; driving is about making lots of little course corrections. You don’t drive software development by getting your project pointed in the right direction (The Plan). You drive software development by seeing that you are drifting a little this way and steering a little that way. This way, that way, as long as you develop the software.
  • When you don’t have enough time you are out of luck. You can’t make more time. Not having enough time is a position of helplessness. And hopelessness breeds frustration, mistakes, burnout, and failure. Having too much to do, however, is a situation we all know. When you have too much to do you can prioritize and not do some things, reduce the size of some of the things you do, ask someone else to do some things. Having too much to do breeds hope. We may not like being there, but at least we know what to do.
  • Focusing on one or two iterations means that the programmers clearly need to know that stories are in the iteration they are currently working on. It’s also useful to know what’s in the next iteration. Beyond that the iteration allocation is not so useful. The real decider for how far in advance you should plan is the cost of keeping the plan up-to-date versus the benefit you get when you know that plans are inherently unstable. You have to honestly asses the value compared to the volatility of the plans.
  • Writing the stories is not the point. Communicating is the point. We’ve seen too many requirements documents that are written down but don’t involve communication.
  • We want to get a release to the customer as soon as possible. We want this release to be as valuable to the customer as possible. That way the customer will like us and keep feeding us cookies. So we give her the things she wants most. That way we can release quickly and the customer feels the benefit. Should everything go to pot at the end of the schedule, it’s okay, because the stories at risk are less important than the stories we have already completed. Even if we can’t release quickly, the customer will be happier if we do the most valuable things first. It shows we are listening, and really trying to solve her problems. It also may prompt the customer to go for an earlier release once she sees that value of what appears.
  • One of the worst things about software bugs is that they come with a strong element of blame (from the customer) and guilt (from the programmer). If only we’d tested more, if only you were competent programmers, there wouldn’t be these bugs. We’ve seen people screaming on news groups and managers banging on tables saying that no bugs are acceptable. All this emotion really screws up the process of dealing with bugs and hurts the key human relationships that are essential if software development is to work well.
  • We assume that the programmers are trying to do the most professional job they can. As part of this they will go to great lengths to eliminate bugs. But nobody can eliminate all of them. The customer has to trust that the programmers are working hard to reduce bugs, and can monitor the testing process to see that they are doing as much as they should.
  • For most software, however, we don’t actually want zero bugs. (Now there’s a statement that we guarantee will be used against us out of context.) Any defect, once it’s in there, takes time and effort to remove. That time and effort will take away from effort spent putting in features. So you have to decide which to do. Even when you know about a bug, someone has to decide whether you want to eliminate the bug or add another feature. Who decides? In our view it must be the customer. The customer has to make a business decision based on the cost of having the bug versus the value of having another feature – or the value of deploying now instead of waiting to reduce the bug count. (We would argue that this does not hold true for bugs that could be life-threatening. In that case we think the programmers have a duty to public safety that is far greater than their duty to the customer.) There are plenty of cases where the business decision is to have the feature instead.
  • All the planning techniques in the world, can’t save you if you forget that software is built by human beings. In the end keep the human beings focused, happy, and motivated and they will deliver.

Who Are Your Customers?

Who are your customers? Is she the angry lady over the next department who loudly express her disappointment over an application miscue? Or is he a new programmer on the team who is asking for clarifications about a system’s business rule? Is he our immediate supervisor? Or is she a fellow software tester who continuously lets her developer sort out bug reports alone without further information? In businesses and marketing, knowing who we need to target for products and services means we’re serious, for the long haul, and out to be remarkable while still making good profit. This goes for software testing too (or or any other kind of work). We need to know who our clients are, what they want and what they need, if we are to be exceptional at what we do.