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Ah, You Got Me… (The 4M framework)

August 27, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

Ketchup, chips, and chlorine.

Filed Under: assumptions, innovation, metrics, release planning Tagged With: market risk, testing

Introducing the Align Remotely podcast

July 31, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer 2 Comments

I’m excited to share that I’m finally launching a podcast, after a few almost successful attempts in the past.

Filed Under: alignment, metrics

Just how expensive are all these online meetings?

July 23, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer 2 Comments

If you want a high-leverage way to improve your company’s culture, one of the highest leverage (even financially) ways to do so, is to take a close look at your meetings. This includes your regularly re-occurring ones, as well as big long ones when kicking off or closing an initiative.

Filed Under: assumptions, metrics

Why addressing errors effectively lies at the heart of team performance

July 2, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

No one wakes up in the morning excited to go to work and look ignorant, incompetent, or disruptive. While it’s not true of everyone, I think it’s fair to say that anyone who gets a job wants to be there and usually wants to do well–for the purpose of self-respect. Look at how elated most people are when they accept a job after getting an offer. It’s when they enter into the “systems” at a particular company, that everything usually takes a left turn.

Modern Times (1936) trailer: capturing the essence of managing

In established companies, it’s sadly common for employees to be habituated in a context of fear of failure. Especially if there is a lot of pressure from management to perform at a high level. There are ambitious goals, often coupled with a lack of clarity on how they will be achieved. In practice, employees focus on looking busy (however that is defined). They end up fearing failure, of not living up to expectations.

As a manager, there is a fine line to draw here. You don’t want to set the bar too low and cause everyone to just slack off. The starting point here is one of psychological safety; according to the research, this is one of the main factors driving high performance in teams. In particular, how you handle errors, failures, or surprises in a way that keeps the team accountable while enabling them to believe that they will be listened to–if they speak up.

Common error types

According to Amy Edmondson in The Fearless Organization, there are 3 different types of errors which happen professionally, and their meaning is largely driven by context:

  1. mechanical errors in a highly repeated process that just need to be minimized in frequency: this is what Modern Times parodied
  2. interaction errors which result from highly complicated relationships, especially in a larger company
  3. thwarted expectations around a goal in the context of experimentation, often a surprising result of an experiment

A large part of the challenge of large companies is that they treat all errors as if they were all #1 by default. This approach may be tied to political gamesmanship. But not everything is just a deviation from a standard (regardless of who actually decides and imposes that standard). Especially in knowledge work like software, where completing something requires you to learn something you don’t know up front. Edmondson quips, “For knowledge work to flourish, the workplace must be one where people feel able to share their knowledge!”

I don’t know who dropped this in Leeds city centre but I feel their disappointment.

Filed Under: alignment, assumptions, metrics Tagged With: digital taylorism, output, principles, process risk, throughput

Why early stage virality can indicate product readiness

June 26, 2020 by Luke Szyrmer Leave a Comment

In the early days, when I was just polishing off the manuscript of Launch Tomorrow, I gave it to a friend who also lived and breathed startups. I specifically requested that he keep it quiet and just asked for feedback. Professionally, he was a marketer but in this case I was hoping to get some honest “tough love” from him. To make sure the book would be good.

After speaking with him in person, I dropped a pdf into gmail, and forwarded it on to him. Coincidentally, I also happened to have an early trial version of Streak installed on my gmail account, which is an app which measures email opens, now primarily used by salespeople.

Over the next week or so, it turned out 37 people had opened that email 56 times in different locations around London and Europe. This simple indicator was enough to convince me that the manuscript is definitely at least a minimum viable product. If not a bit more. There were a lot of tweaks I wanted to make, but clearly my idea audience was enjoying and using it. Even though this viral spread was accidental, ultimately I was pleased that my friend had effectively proven to me that my product was ready.

This was a special case of someone who knew me well, the fact that he forwarded it without my consent and that it was re-forwarded so many times implied that my soon-to-be released product will be able to generate word of mouth referrals when I do launch. This was particularly poignant, given that this was a B2C product. Like most impulse buys, books (on their own) tend to be low $ value products. There is little margin for error with a high customer acquisition cost, yet you need to be great at generating awareness and discoverability. So you can only use channels that have a fixed cost up front but little additional variable cost of reaching another person.

Going Viral

While virality seems “free” from a financial point of view, it’s expensive in terms of your time. The idea is to create enough product (content in my case) which people naturally want to share. Once you have their attention, you include some kind of call to action which then turns into a conversion , like a sale. Or at least a micro conversion, like getting an email subscriber.

Filed Under: assumptions, metrics, modelling Tagged With: faster time to market, growth, launch

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    Luke Szyrmer is an innovation and remote work expert. He’s the bestselling author of #1 bestseller Launch Tomorrow. He mentors early stage tech founders and innovators in established companies. Read More…

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