Humor in XCode 4

I love product teams with a sense of humor.  This is what you get in Credits.rtf when you create a brand new application in XCode 4:

Engineering:

Some people

Human Interface Design:

Some other people

Testing:

Hopefully not nobody

Documentation:

Whoever

With special thanks to:

Mom

So you want to be the boss?

Nowadays a lot of people feel like they need to move up in order to claim “growth” in their professional life.  Once they master something they think that the next natural thing is having a few folks “underneath them”

I think at the core of this is a failure in American corporate culture. The fact that you are a director actually does not mean that you are smarter than all of the people who report to you.  In the position of a director you are concentrating on different things.

If you are a good engineer you should actually continue being an engineer because if you become a director you are probably not going to engineer anything.  If you are a director that still writes code you are probably missing some other important responsibilities.

What are the issues you are going to deal with as a director?
1) recruiting and talent retention
2) defending your team from external interruptions
3) being an external and internal champion for your project
4) dealing with under performers
5) stroking peoples egos
6) conflict resolution
I am not suggesting that as a director you should be completely oblivious to the details of how things are done, but most of your time is actually spent selling and using other “soft skills.”  You are selling the opportunity to candidates, selling the fruits of your team’s labor to your sales/marketing team and so on.  If you are an engineer and dealing with dense people irritates you, or you take rejection personally, or if you like getting deep into technical problems – you are probably not going to be happy being “the boss.”

How do we keep engineers happy at engineering so they don’t desire to be promoted to the maximum level of incompetency?   Simple – recognize that products are really their creation.  For example a couple of guys on my team just shipped a product.  I made sure that they were the ones who were mentioned in the internal announcement – not “the team,” not “my team,” but Dave and Mike.

-mb

PS: I picked engineers here because I am familiar with this topic, but the same thing goes for marketers, sales people, artists and all other individual superstars.

What did Steve Jobs mean to me?

This afternoon I saw a tweet that Steve Jobs passed away.  I thought it was a joke.  I thought that @AP is going to include a follow up apologizing for a hack... that message didn't come.  What came was an article in Seattle PI and then a page on Apple.com simply stating "Steve Jobs, 1955-2011"

I wasn't there when we lost John Lennon, but now I know how it feels.  A visionary who has propelled the entire world with his ideas is no longer here.  Who knows what would happen if...

Now we, in the tech industry, are left to carry the torch of innovation and uncompromising focus on user experience in our products.  Steve proved everyone wrong time after time and built a company that has disrupted so many things we thought could not possibly change.

Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains

Thank you Steve!  I will now go do that.

Getting early sales

I wrote this to a friend of mine who is creating a startup and I figured that it's worth sharing:

...My advice to get early sales is to figure out what your market really is: 1) who is willing to pay for this stuff 2) where are those guys spending their time? 3) are there partners who are in the same verticals who you can leverage? I would suggest getting hands on with people and investing into good flexible sales people first. Early in the game you don't know how people feel about your software. The best way to find out is to meet them in person. When you do a demo you can sense when people start drifting off. You can see how people react when you present them pricing options. I don't believe you "create a market" as a startup. I believe you find a market that emerging or that already exists. What is your market? Until you can put quotas on sales people you probably don't know for sure. Once you have an educated guess for question #1 and #2 I would suggest that you find a trade show. That's a great way to get in front of a lot of people right away. You can get a modest booth or a table top space and also walk the expo floor. Meet people, talk about your software, set up some meeting for after the show. 70% of communications is non-verbal and you can get a pretty good scientific sample at a big show.