Category: Uncategorized

• Vacations are winding down and people are starting to come back to work. The team is filling out again.
• I convinced the SVP of Product to be quizzed about our product strategy – we’ll put a script and some visuals together for our annual Company Connect and hopefully address longstanding complaints that people aren’t sure how their work contributes to our strategy. This has raised other interesting topics that might also become topics, like how we really make money and where it goes, how our pricing and packaging works, etc. A lot of the things I was hoping to accomplish this year have been deprioritized (rightly) due to some technical pickles we find ourselves in, so this represents an opportunity to be influential beyond the usual process sand product stuff we do on the reg; fingers crossed.
• The ladies are back and the house is no longer empty. This also means my diet will improve – bachelor-mode Jon is (far) less disciplined than husband-mode Jon.

Small quality-of-life adjustments can have an amazing effect. Sure, the fact that you need to push on the door a little bit to lock its deadbolt is not a huge deal; it hardly slows you down, takes little effort, and there’s nearly no additional wear-and-tear as a result. Not a huge deal once, that is. Eight times a day every day as people come and go, sometimes with full hands or in a hurry, adds up to thousands of exactly-repeated minor annoyances per year with a single cause that is readily fixed. So the value of that fix is quite high, even if each incident is barely noticeable.

• I adjusted the strike plates on our exterior doors as mentioned above. It’s fab! (Ordinarily this would have been done by the contractor, but I put in the strikes so it fell to me.) Therese were not the strikes with the tab with the screwdriver hole, either.
• I also some moved boxes and furniture out of the garage, and rearranged some things, so that we can now park one car in the garage. Halfway there!
• During that process I started a tool donation box. There are some things that I’ve bought two or three times, and some things I have that I hope never to use again, and these can go to the tool library. Fish tape, transfer pump, redundant pipe wrench? Sayonara.
• Adapting to people being out for summer trips (and to the recent upheaval in priorities) has not been as difficult as I expected, and it has been fun to dive into a little bit of design work to keep things moving for a team who has both designers out.
• I had a delightful coffee with a former coworker who is looking for work. We’ve resolved to meet quarterly.

Work was…fine…this week. Lots of folks are out or about to be out and while there’s a moment to try to wrestle projects and processes into shape there are not a lot of people to do that with; preparing projects to to bowl along while they are out is more pressing. But with the girl and the lady out of the house I was productive with home projects. In the last week I’ve

• sent a care package
• taken care of a library fine by finding and returning the book
• bought a copy of that same book, as a gift
• set up garage shelves and populated them
• moved the last of the boxes and tools from the neighbors’ garage
• set up a greenhouse (shh, it’s a surprise)
• reconnected with an old friend
• thrilled a nephew with birthday gifts
• installed missing trim on a piece of furniture
• installed a door stop on the door to the cat litter box area
• went to a baseball game
• had the tires replaced on a car that sorely needed it
• replaced wipers on that same car
• replaced antenna garnish on that same car
• washed a different car
• given myself a haircut
• put a hook on the back of the closet door
• built a credible trashcan of an unusual size for a specific installation
• found and replaced a furnace filter
• epoxied together the house numbers and their holding shape
• done some emergency laundry
• kept all the plants and cats alive

Juneteenth National Independence Day was this last Wednesday. It was odd to have a holiday mid-week but

• Juneteenth is worth celebrating, worth remembering, worth considering in this political moment.
• I forgot that most of our walls are backed by plywood, so a towel bar installation I had put off was unexpectedly quick and dust-free.
• The newish head of engineering thanked me for my attention and care to our common (and coming) process fixes.
• The notion that we should (and that it makes economic sense to) focus on the things we can do that will help a lot of (and a lot of new) customers is starting to sink in among influential people. The notion that we should (and that it makes economic sense to) work a little harder so that our customers don’t have to is taking a little more time, but I think we’ll get there.

I fell off the weekly wins wagon hard in November, then wrote just one earlier this month. Time to get back on.

• Social win – I saw a friend and past coworker who lives in town and it was lovely. I should reach out to more folks.
• Social win – the parents and mother-in-law were in town for the girl’s graduation, and brought their attendant challenges, but everything went just fine.
• Social win – a different friend and past coworker who lives all the way across the country and I have agreed to chat monthly. No reason not to!
• Lesson – plan, then check. When I’ve done just one or the other things have usually gone fine, but not always. This time a stainless steel part about 50mm square ($60 worth of material and cutting) was cut too large and is useless. Turns out it was my fault; all the other parts from the job are fine, I just missed double-checking the dimensions on the one piece. So I need to have that one redone. But the nice people at the fab have agreed to give my reorder special attention.
• Leadership – I was able to take a work maneuver, reasserting focus on the goal, and use it with our HVAC subcontractor. “There’s no explanation for water appearing there!” “Ah, but water is there, and got there somehow, so there is an explanation. I don’t care whose fault it is, I’d like to know how it got there and what we need to do to prevent it now that this has happened.”

Whenever you are on an online or text chat with tech support of any kind, keep a copy of everything you write in a text file. That way you can repeat yourself (as you inevitably will) with minimal effort. As you think of better ways to explain yourself you can update the note.

It’s been a bit since I did a “weekly wins” post, mostly because of…lassitude…but with the convenient excuse that we’ve been finishing the house project and moving and setting up and shepherding the girl through the last bits of high school. So some wins have occurred since the last post, the highest of which have been

• High school is done, with great results. Good grades, an IB diploma, grandparents visiting, relief and happiness and the bittersweet knowledge that for some friendships this might be the last hurrah all in one.
• We’re in the house and it is great.
• We got our full security deposit back with no argument, probably because we cleaned the hell out of the old place. And because the owners are nice. And because since they plan to move in the management company was losing the business anyway and it
• I have an employee that has gotten some negative feedback; the core of it is old complaints, transmitted up the chain of command and lingering. People not working directly with the employee have formed persistent opinions that aren’t accurate. How to extinguish the senior management echo of a problem that’s been dealt with? Generate some data – survey the people the employee actually works with to monitor whether or not the positive behaviors in question are witnessed or not. Happily, the employee is taking it seriously, the team members are participating and helpful, and the numbers look good.

Beta is not a release type. Thinking of beta as a release type, essentially a quality level, leads teams to take something not ready for prime time, ship it to everyone, and call it “beta” to excuse its deficiencies. If you are making excuses for the deficiencies of your product you are probably doing it wrong, and it certainly doesn’t feel good to do so.

Beta is a testing period. The purpose of beta testing is to take a product that you suspect might be ready for release and expose it to real users that will break it in ways you didn’t think to test for. That implies a few things:

• These users are testing the product, so you have things you would like them to do to make sure they are exercising the product fully. Therefore you have a testing plan.
• You want these users to be active in testing the product, so you have selected them and are actively managing their activity and feedback. Therefore this is not a passive exercise.
• Since you are actively testing the product, you are able to score and count the issues your testers find. The product can prove whether or not it is ready for general release. Therefore you have release criteria. and if you are doing it right you have one or more dates on which you will examine these criteria to determine if the product is ready for release.

In short, since beta is testing, you have a plan, participants, success criteria, and a decision point. If not, you’re just trying to hide the fact that you don’t care about quality as much as your users will.

At seventeen I joined the staff of a Boy Scout camp, and as an activity area leader I had a role to play in leadership, instruction, and the interactive programming that occurred each week. Each day had something special happening that made the schedule differ from one day to the next, making preparation, instruction, and even rest difficult. With scouts in camp for just a week at a time the strategy to engage them was clearly to make sure there was always a competition, series of skits, cookout, campfire show, ceremony, or recreational extremity (optional, happily: run off the end of the high pier! race to the far rock and back in an overloaded canoe! swim two miles in frigid water!) to draw attention and raise the available hype.

No one day was “normal.” There was no opportunity to settle into a routine, so there was lots of opportunity for scouts, generally between 11 and 16 years of age, to wind up in the wrong place, unsure of where they were supposed to be and how that matched up with what they wanted to be doing, swimming in options and unable to settle into a helpful routine.

It seems the same is true for knowledge workers – above a certain flavor of entry-level position, it’s difficult to settle into a daily or weekly routine that would foster comfort in one’s competence. It only gets worse as you enter into management or become a senior leader; you are constantly adapting, adjusting, re-focusing, trying and abandoning directions.

I’ve learned not to lament the lack of routine. This is the job. But I do try to create it for the people I support who need it.

For me the centerpiece of a design exercise is seeking knowledge and adapting your design ideas to that knowledge. You create and adapt and discard ideas readily and easily if they don’t fit the emerging situation. So it is essential to ask questions during the exercise to understand as much as you possibly can about the people, environment, stakeholders, goals, and constraints so that you can demonstrate this process.

You don’t want the entire exercise to be taken up with this “research” activity – you do need to design something. So consider offering a very rough concept and then asking questions that will lead you either deeper into or away from that concept.

Example – imagine Home Depot had a magical way of printing and delivering orange aprons to new employees, and employee apron customization/self-expression is culturally important. What ideas does this spark? What do you want to know to confirm or discard some of these ideas?

My thoughts immediately go to a part of the new employee offer process that leads people to a website where they can customize an apron at their leisure. But these are hourly employees – the store manager is not going to want ANY work activity to be done outside of the store or in off hours. So the kernel of that idea needs to come in-store. Come to find out that they’d also like to offer this capability to existing employees. What is the technical environment in-store? How much time is the store manager willing to have an employee spend on this while on the clock? What are the required elements of apron customization and what are the optional ones? Etc. Understanding these you can sketch out a process that quickly gets the basics taken care of (perhaps in ONE or ZERO steps) and offers any options easily and quickly.

In a design exercise you’d do this all narratively – talk about the core idea, check it against their answers to your questions, change the core idea, sketch a little, ask more questions, adapt to the answers, etc.