Ducklings vs. rainfall on water
A friend explained to me that at her school, the students were described as “ducklings” - calm above water but paddling hard beneath the surface to keep up. The same can probably be said of people who work in startups in the Bay Area. People appear chill, and they sort of actually are, except when you discover how hard core they are about their work.
I prefer the opposite analogy.
(What is the opposite of a duck? I have no idea. But bear with me.)
There is this print I bought from 20x200 by Chikara Umihara titled Rainfall, Upstate New York. There is nothing eye catching about it. Heavy rainfall on a lake. What caught my imagination was Umihara’s interpretation of the image.
Here, in this work, a downpour violently hit the water; there weren’t ripples and nothing is reflected on the surface. But after I printed this image, I realized that this is my first image that perfectly reflected my subconscious mental state—disturbed, but calm.
I think of what it’s like on my craziest days. The ones where people keep asking for 5 minutes of your time, and your attention is pulled in a hundred directions. The ones where someone is agitated, occasionally blaming you or someone on your team for something you had limited control over. A confrontation. Or the ones where you know you’ve fallen below the mark because you couldn’t quite get your act together and it’s all too much.
Disturbed, but calm.
There are many things that I cannot change about my environment. The “violent downpour” is an intrinsic part of the role, and indeed often the source of the intensity, the fun.
But what I would like to be more of is the “calm”. To be like that body of water. Agitation absorbing. Unshakeable beneath the surface.
I have a long road to get there.
Not urgent but important moments
If you work in a startup, you will understand that it is very, very hard to get out of operating in the urgent bucket and into the not urgent but important bucket. The bigger important things are easier to identify (you should build X). The smaller important things, those are hard to catch and sometimes seem frivolous, but they add up. They matter.
From the not urgent but important bucket this week:
Spent 45 minutes shopping online on behalf of the company for a gift for a well-loved coworker who is a brand new dad. Smack in the middle of a day when I should have hurried up and finished work so I could leave for an event which I missed. What can I say, I really like picking out nice gifts when I care enormously about the recipient’s happiness.
Two long chats with someone I rarely have long conversations with about recent company culture. It is a privilege to work with people who care so much about building a company that’s a great place to work.
Invested many hours this week trying to find new contractors to outsource some work. Who knew trying to get other people to do work would be so much work! I want to get better at this. I’d like to outsource more of my life.
Blogging. I have been trying to hit publish more often without worrying so much. I’m intrigued by this 750words thing. I would sign up except that 750 words per day (3 pages!) is too daunting. But really, I am under all kinds of fascinating, if sometimes crushing, pressure lately. It makes me think a lot about how I could do just a little bit better in every single moment.
What actually matters in goal setting
The engineers on my product team asked why I didn’t defend their interests in our quarterly goal setting meeting. This is presumably part of my job as Product Manager. (This is funny to me, since it’s the only time they have ever accused me of not defending them. Whether they like it or not, I have far more frequently erred on the other side.)
The senior leadership exec was doing his job of raising our goals. All the numbers were being adjusted upward. By “adjusted” I mean ratcheted way up. We have been here long enough to know he does this every time. This time, as with all previous times, a couple of the engineers tried to convince him that these goals were impossible.
I would agree, except for this:
Two quarters ago, the leadership set a revenue goal that I thought was a major stretch. To give you a sense of magnitude, I think most people would agree that any goal that requires more than a 100% increase is intimidating. But we blew through that target. In fact, we blew through it with a month left to go in the quarter.
Last quarter, encouraged by our success, we set what we all believed was a genuinely bold goal ourselves, only to see the leadership raise it far beyond (what I considered) reasonable reach. The number was so ridiculous that it made me nervous to think about it seriously, so I turned it into a bit of a joke. When we made major decisions or shifts in the way we operated, I would say, “Oh yeah, we need to hit that $X revenue goal.” In the end, we missed the ridiculous goal but came surprisingly close to it. We are likely to pass it fairly soon, if we haven’t done so already. The joke, oddly enough, became inspiring because it was a Big Hairy Audacious Goal.
With this track record, we’ve pretty much lost all credibility for our claims that certain goals are impossible. We have done “the impossible”. A slightly bizarre, mostly good problem to have.
So this time I didn’t step in to argue down the numbers.
First, we have consistently lost this argument over numbers with the leadership. We can persuade but cannot control what number they want. Similarly, they have limited control over whether we reach that goal. They cannot force us to reach it, if it really is beyond reach. Ultimately, we build what we build.
Second, the number doesn’t really matter. I mean, it does matter in terms of training our motivations. A very high goal trains us to raise our ambitions. On the flip side, if we set a more humble goal, it’s not like we’re going to reach it mid-quarter and go take a vacation for the rest of that quarter. We don’t operate that way.
Third, we were in broad agreement with the direction of the goals. These were priorities we had selected. We believed they were the most important goals for our product at this stage. So regardless of what the numbers were, the work wasn’t going to change very much. Our team was going to put its best foot forward in the direction of the goals.
I have no idea if we’ll reach these goals this time. I never know. But I’ve learned that that’s part of the point. If you can see a clear path to your goal, you’ve set the goal too low.
Giving credit where it’s due
The salesguys had gotten free tshirts and jerseys from a client. Really nice brand, nice swag. It’s been a ton of work to get this launch out. The salesguys H and S were giving out shirts to the people who worked on this.
I told the salesguys, make sure you give one to A!
A is the engineer who has been working incredibly hard on one crucial part of this. There were many pep talks involved, many frustrated discussions about why we were doing this. She is not one to fight for the limelight, but this one took an incredible amount of mental and emotional effort. All that success that people were predicting and making bets on? None of that would happen if not for A’s work.
Later that day, salesguy H came over with a jersey. He told A to put it on. She put it on not realizing what we were trying to do. I said, how do you like the logo? She looked down and noticed. It was great. She kept the jersey on for the rest of the day. Every time someone commented on it, she beamed.
That evening when A had left, I saw H on his way out. Why aren’t you wearing one of those shirts, I asked.
H goes, I gave mine away.
And there I was feeling pleased with myself for being the kind of PM who makes sure that the engineers on my team feel good about their work and get the credit they deserve.
H’s gesture has made me feel better about working here than anything else in a long time. I feel great about many parts of the job, but that - that was grand.
Growth requires friction
In the first couple months of my job, the two most common phrases I used to describe my experience were “thrown in the deep end” and “drinking from the fire hose”. I felt slightly overwhelmed on most days, totally overwhelmed on a few days, and it was great.
Fast forward half a year later, I work less hours (somewhat). I generally no longer feel lost. I am less stressed. Which is great… except that in order to be in flow, you need to be sufficiently challenged. Growth requires friction.
In the next 6 months, my biggest challenge will be to force my learning curve to be steep enough so that I stay in flow. I could optimize around the edges - be faster to respond to clients, know the product better, tweak processes. But that is pretty much cruising to me. Not very interesting. The point, the proper use of my effort, is to be performing at an entirely different level in 6 months.
Need to go think about how to do that.
**
I wrote the part above around the new year. A turn of events in the last couple of weeks has basically offered me my challenge. I’ve had to shift from thinking about what I can contribute as an individual, to what we need to contribute as a team.
And lately, I find, the less you think about yourself and the more you think about everyone else, the better things seem to work out.
(Perhaps one could also say, the less you think of yourself and the more you think of everyone else, the better things seem to work out.)
I am definitely back to feeling the learning curve. And feeling grateful for that.
Fire drill
We have fire drill situations every now and then - it is a startup after all - but today was the first time I really had to escalate. It was truly bizarre to feel so responsible for getting a project across the finish line and to realize that you can do so very little of it yourself. You need everyone else’s help. They have the skills, and all you have is a long list of things that need to be done.
There were some interesting lessons to come out of all this.
1) Escalation is very useful for raising awareness, sometimes less useful actually for getting the tasks done.
2) If you wait until the people to whom you’ve escalated the problem get around to solving your problem, you will have wasted a lot of time.
3) Far better to escalate, assume you won’t get any intervention, and then just go about getting people to help you out.
4) It is essential to know process, but you will be far more effective if you know who can do what. In today’s bind, it occurred to me at some point that the lead engineer I work with on a different project, who is hands down the clearest thinker I know, could probably fix my CSS problem quickly. It was not the best use of a colleague with a PhD, but I had no other option. So I semi-jokingly asked him, “Hey, how’s your CSS?” and next thing I knew he was working on the problem.
5) It obviously helps a lot to have people trust you and like helping you. People like to say you have to build “good relationships”. That’s overused. And I have no idea what that means. I do know what it means to have people whom you will help any time any day and who will pitch in for you when you’re totally jammed.
6) It also helps to have super awesomely nice colleagues. And a company culture that rewards that.
At some point, I finally got attention and was asked if I had all the support I needed. And it occurred to me that they couldn’t do more. I would have liked more resources for help, but I had pretty much maxed out all reasonable options even before their intervention. I think that’s when I finally started to calm down…
One-slide decks
I was asked a difficult question by a customer that sent me on a long data analysis chase. I wanted to be thoughtful and thorough about it, so I:
- Asked my colleagues how they would think about it.
- We filled a whole white board with ideas, charts, arrows, lists.
- Downloaded a lot of data. This took more hours than I care to admit.
- Worked some excel magic on the data. Tried to make sense of what it all meant.
- Made 8 slides of charts trying to answer that one question.
Then I was given feedback that the charts were all well and good, but they danced around the answer without getting to the heart of it. I was missing one slide that would answer the question head on.
“If you could answer the question in one slide, before you even look into the data, what would it say?”
So back I went to the drawing board. I imagined the slide first. Then I pulled exactly and only the data needed to populate the slide. I made that slide, added to it to my deck. It improved the deck.
Then I realized, actually, I ONLY need that one slide. Everything else went to the appendix. Eventually, when I convinced myself that it was ok to part with hours and hours of work, I deleted them.
Economy is as valuable to great design as it is to slide decks.
I sent the work to the customer, offered to get on a call to explain further, all ready to pull out my 8 slides of backup if needed. Their reply? Thanks, we’re looking into that part of the problem. No need even for a call.
One-slide decks. I’m a fan.
Thank You Project Update #2: What people respond to
(Cross-posted from update to the Thank You Project)
As of this morning, we are 315% funded. Woohoo! Still 23 more days to go.
One of the neat things about running this project is learning what people respond to. Even though this is a project about greeting cards, people generally don’t mention the craft. Which is a good thing, because I’m not a professional crafts person. There is Hallmark and Etsy if you want to get fancy on craft.
Instead, what people talk about is:
1. Simplicity. The project is straightforward. Most of us have made / sent / received cards at some point, so you know how it feels to be part of this exchange. There is nothing fancy about the card technology here. In fact, some people mentioned tradition. Kickstarter also makes it really easy to pledge.
2. Interaction of the virtual and the real. You type a bunch of stuff on your end, and out pops a real card on the other end. If you know me personally, you know I live on the internet. :) And yet here I am doing a project that has a very tactile, very old school back end. But this is one of my favorite aspects of the internet. It’s not all virtual. It makes new things possible in the physical world. I will be mailing a whole bunch of cards to people that you know, but that I don’t know.
3. Being part of something bigger. Someone asked, “Does a handwritten note lose some of its meaning when it’s handwritten and sent by someone else?” My response was, “I think what you lose in the handwritten-by-proxy you gain in being part of a project designed to send gratitude to lots of people.” It’s not just you sending a card to your friend, which you could do on your own. It’s you and your friend being part of a project where lots of people are getting surprise thank yous.
One of you asked if I had any $10,000 ideas yet. Not yet. But I like what I’ve learned from #3. Whatever it is I dream up, I want it to draw people in because they can be part of something bigger.
**
If you’re reading this from the blog, send a card through the Thank You Project here.
How it feels to launch on Kickstarter
(Cross posted from my first update to backers of the Thank You Project.)
When I hit “launch” on the Thank You Project on Friday, I expected to feel relief. Shipped! Out the door! In reality, I can tell you the feeling is less like relief and more like the sensation of… jumping off a cliff. My first thought? “OMG what if no one backs my project.” So I started tweeting and emailing friends personally just as I had planned, but I could not shake the feeling that each moment that my project sat at $0.00 funded made me think the lizard brain was right after all. What if no one backs my project. Then the very first one of you backers showed up. Getting that first notification email is an amazing feeling. Relief, excitement, and pure delight! Roughly in that order. THANK YOU. My next thought was, oh man, $5 is an awfully long way away from $100. I had set the funding target low so that people could surely get their cards. One of you said I’ll be funded in no time. Well, “no time” feels like a really long time when you’re at $5. Perhaps this fundraising thing becomes scalable at some point, but in the initial stages you really have to earn each and every backer’s support. Think about it from the backer’s (your!) point of view. To back a project that 10, 20 other people have backed is not such a huge deal. The project is likely to be funded or already funded. Other people validate your belief that this project is a cool idea. To be one of the earliest, that’s a bit of a leap of faith. THANK YOU. So I emailed a few more people, and over the next couple of hours more people back it, $5, $10 at a time. Every notification email made me want to cheer. Or to use one of my favorite phrases, *throws confetti*. In my mind, anyone who has ever set a fundraising goal of any size is brave. If my $100 goal can seem daunting, I can only imagine what it must feel like to set it at $1,000 or $10,000. When people set out to fundraise a few million for a startup or $50 million for a fund, that is incredible to me. (And some of you backers are doing exactly this!) With the creation of any boldly defined goal comes the creation of the very real possibility of failure. There are some who say that it takes as much effort to execute a $10,000 dollar idea as it does to execute a $1 billion dollar idea. While that may be true, all these journeys are amazing to me because it takes such an act of courage to put yourself out there. You are telling the world that you believe your idea is worth their attention, your work is worth their money. Every single sale is a huge deal. As of this morning, 3 days after launch, we have… $103. WE ARE FUNDED!!! You are all getting cards!! :) THANK YOU so much for making this leap off the cliff an enjoyable ride. Tell your friends about this! We have 26 days more to go for more people to be backers and send more cards. I shall start making cards. I am also accepting ideas for a $10,000 project. :) ** If you are reading this on my blog and want to be a backer of this project, join us! You are now definitely getting cards.
From $100 business idea to Kickstarter project
(Or, how to squash your lizard brain.)
Remember the $100 business idea? Yeah, that one. I actually got pretty far along back in January. I had card designs, sent out a survey, bought materials. I even signed up for Shopify and built a site. I spent hours and hours trying to figure out liquid (their template language) to customize the site to what I wanted.
Then my lizard brain won. And I stopped.
The lizard brain, if you’re not familiar with it, is what Seth Godin uses to describe the resistance, that internal force that makes us get scared, be careful, back away from taking risks, and be too terrified to ship.
It makes no sense, except that if you’ve ever tried to do a large project just because you wanted to - not because it’s homework, or you’re supposed to, or you really need some other end result. If you’ve ever done something big (and many small things can seem big) motivated by nothing but this vision that you want the world to have this, you will know the sound of that little voice that says, “I’m not sure this is such a great idea…”
So as school picked up in the spring and recruiting pressures became stronger, I stopped. Excuses. And the lizard brain.
**
Last Friday afternoon, it occurred to me that my card idea could be a Kickstarter project. I love browsing Kickstarter. Every time I meet a friend who’s into launching artsy projects, I say, “Hey you should use Kickstarter.” But me, do my own Kickstarter project? Hmm, how hard is this really…
So I looked it up. It seems you need to submit a proposal first. Turns out the proposal is really short. So I think, “I can write this, in fact, I can I write it now.” So I did. And I hit submit.
It was only after that that the lizard brain started to kick in. Wait a minute, did I put in enough effort? Should I have shot pictures of the cards and linked to them? I’m not even an artist. I should have done more research. I should have checked their blog for guidelines or found examples or… Quora! I bet someone on Quora has asked how to get your proposal accepted.
On and on. Then I was glad I had hit submit before I had time to think all these thoughts. Because if I went down that route, the lizard brain would probably have won. Again.
As it turns out, this Monday morning, I got an email that said, “Your Kickstarter project has been accepted!” Wow. Woohoo! I am throwing confetti. My $100 card business idea is being reborn as a Kickstarter project. I guess this is what they call a pivot!
**
And then the real work begins.
This time the lizard brain will not win. To defeat it, I am going to keep going and not think. Well, no, not not think. I need to think obviously. But I am going to tell myself that… that shipping trumps perfection. The point is to ship. Real artists ship.
How’s it going? I am discovering that it is the unobvious things that are hard.
Knowing what to do next is hard. I know I need a project page, with a video and write up and reward levels and I need to promote it. But it’s not easy figuring out where to start, what to do next, and how to pull it all together.
Making a video is really hard. (All you people who work in video - respect!) I wanted to do cut-outs, so ok, I picked something pretty tedious. But it’s tiring to shoot frame by frame. It’s even harder if you’ve never done this before, and you have no video editing equipment, and you kinda want to make the whole thing for free.
In the end, I made the cut-outs for the video using scraps of card stock. I went for a stop motion look because I don’t even have a tripod. I shot it off the floor of this apartment, because it happens to have nice hardwood floors. I tried to use iMovie, couldn’t get it to cooperate, and in the end, because I know photography better, made the entire thing in Picasa (which has a movie function!). And then I ripped off a soundtrack in the most ghetto way possible using Windows Movie Maker. Yep, this is pretty scrappy video-making.
But 36 hours later, I have a video! It astounds me that I do, but I have a video.
You will see it when I launch. Now, back to work.
