Posts tagged "business"

FEB 11 February 11, 2017

The Key To Winning In Business -

I have turned entire businesses around with this tactic and I encourage you to at least try it for one week and notice the positive difference.

Stand outside an Apple Store 10 minutes before they open and you will see a team meeting. Have a look at your favourite sports team before they play, they are having a team meeting. Every army command has a briefing before they do their mission. Every successful team, or team trying to win, has some sort of team briefing before they start a game. In a business environment, the “game” is that days trade. And its critical to the success of your business that everyone going into that day is armed with all the information and motivation to help you achieve your goals.

One of the biggest positive impacts in my career was the consistent use of morning meetings to inform and motivate my team.

What is a morning meeting or pre-game huddle? It’s an opportunity to brief the team on the upcoming days events, goals, challenges and generally getting everyone on the same page. There is a lot going on in any given day. Bringing everyone together for 5 minutes is healthy, easy and tremendously effective.

How do you conduct a morning meeting?

Just call everyone together. Time limit the brief to no more than 5 minutes (although you should be able to do it in less than 2) Let everyone know how things are progressing against the goal. Pick someone to congratulate for something they did well yesterday (be genuine, if there was nothing then skip this step, although if you talk to your team there is always something cool or interesting they did or achieved that moved things forward) Let them know or remind them of upcoming challenges and opportunities. Squash any rumours floating around. As long as you squash them with fact. Conclude the meeting with a reminder of what todays goal is. I used to mix things up (I was in a retail environment) and would set challenges for the day — things like ‘an extra 20 minutes lunch break for whomever sells Widget ABC first or first person to sell 10 of this Widget can finish work 30 minutes early today” etc etc. Competition is good. And Healthy. And you get some great observations out of it as to who is really hungry.

So why do morning meetings/team meetings/huddles work?

They keep team members involved. This is huge. A disengaged workforce will not work to help achieve your goals. They will simply do the minimum required to achieve their own — getting their weekly/monthly pay check. Involving them, making them feel part of the process has a massive psychological impact and their buy in will make them truly part of the team. There is no day to day ambiguity on what is expected. If you set a target to achieve X today, then everyone is aware. No need to speak to individuals. No need to send out a seperate memo. Everyone collectively knows what today is about. You can show your disappointment if things aren’t going well. A manager who is locked in their office lamenting and upset about poor results is significantly less effective than a leader who stands up in front of the team in the morning and states their disappointment at the results coming in. The important thing here is to balance that out with hope and tactics to turn the situation around. Being open that targets aren’t being met is a lot better than not talking about it, sticking ones head in the sand and just ignoring the problem. High performers in sales (although I’m sure in most other fields too) have egos that need stroking. They love the spotlight and the occasional mention of their great results in public will motivate them even more. You have an opportunity to talk about decisions and tactics you have made. A lot of teams are informed of a new policy via a memo without understanding the reasoning behind the decision. Your ability to put a human face on the policy will be very effective. Can this be used in any workplace?

YES! I believe so. Every business is trying to achieve something at any particular point in time. A factory needs to produce a certain amount of Widgets. A service shop need to see a certain amount of clients today and get a certain amount of new ones. The sales pipeline always needs filling. And if full, the output needs to be processed. There is always a target. If you haven’t been used to working with a target you need to put the thinking cap on (ideally involve your team) and come up with some. Once you do, start measuring and talking about it each day.

What if I only have 2 staff?

Two is a team, and you need to huddle :) It’s not hard. It may be quicker and may involve nothing more than reminding each other about some stuff coming up that day and when to best get lunch breaks out of the way.

What if its only me — 1 person?

Well you’re in luck. Obviously no meeting for you. However — I encourage you to take 5 minutes before you start work and think through how things went yesterday, and what the plan is for today. The effect will be the same. You will have anticipated problems and given yourself that little psychological kick to achieve something.

Summary If all this stuff sounds too hard or likely to be ineffective I can assure you it is neither. Like with any skill it requires practice. When you start, some meetings will seem awful, fake and boring. But over time you will get into your groove and be able to conduct them quickly and efficiently. You will know you’ve nailed it when the team claps and cheers at the end, pumped and motivated to smash todays goals.


MAY 13 May 13, 2016

What's Next - Occasionally we are presented with two features that we need implemented in our application. Which one do we do first?

The easy option is to do the simplest feature, or the one that will take the least amount of time to complete. However sometimes that goes against the goals of the business. It’s tempting to do the easy stuff. It ticks an item off a list. Moves a Trello card from one list to another.

There are some businesses that have no real goals. No idea who they’re targeting. What features their customers really need next. This lack of clarity makes prioritisation harder. If the goal is to create more signups then working on the easy feature to do with simplifying search results is not as important as making the sign up form clear and easy to use across all devices.

Mark Zuckerberg famously had growth as the big headline goal for Facebook in the early years. If the backlog feature wasn’t going to have a measurable impact on user growth it was shelved. Not a priority.

Feature prioritisation should be closely linked to business outcomes and objectives. Not how easy or quick it is to build.


JAN 13 January 13, 2015

Just Publish It - A lot of companies have blogs and news sections that are stale and not updated often. I’ve long been a proponent of keeping websites updated, particularly the news/blog section. It’s a sign of a healthy business that it is keeping its online face up-to-date and giving its clients (and more importantly potential clients) a sign that the business has a pulse. That it is doing something.

I’ve seen a lot of companies prepare some great blog posts - in draft format. Too scared to press ‘publish’ because the post is not ‘polished’. Not ‘perfect’. I’m not sure if there is a real fear that publishing the imperfect post will send the companies stock plummeting or clients fleeing in droves? Perhaps its an imagined fear that all things must be perfect in business.

My advice is - just publish it. Obviously run a spell and grammar check. Perhaps even have a co-worker read it. But publish it. Let the world know the business has a pulse. That things are happening. If the post was worthwhile typing out, it must have been important to you for some reason. It doesn’t need to be perfect for it to resonate with some of your readers/visitors.

I believe your business will suffer more from not publishing anything at all to publishing an allegedly imperfect blog post.


JUN 10 June 10, 2014


OCT 29 October 29, 2013

Print design is about how it looks. Web (and product) design is about how it looks and about how it works. They are different.


JUL 20 July 20, 2011

Greater Market Share does not always mean Better Product - Use of a particular operating system on any platform is largely a matter of personal choice. Sometimes, that choice is made by a business or corporation on behalf of their employees, and other times, individuals can make the choice themselves. I’m often seen tweeting or facebooking the virtues of Apples operating systems and products, often citing increased sales statistics or my own experiences in my message that Apples products give me a better experience than any of the alternatives. However, I often see mention that Android must be better because it has a higher market share. Or Windows is king because it has a higher market share. Higher market share does not always mean better product. A number of variables play part in determining market share. There are many cases where a product with lower market share, is simply the better product.

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MAR 6 March 6, 2011

Know Your Customer - A few weeks ago, I finalised some new code for a new section of an existing website. I always code websites using web standards and always test on the latest versions of Chrome (v10), Safari(v5), Opera(v11), Firefox(v3.6) and Internet Explorer(v8). In the case of the latter two, I test both the current version and the upcoming version. So the site is also run through its paces on Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9. As for mobile, I test on iPhone and iPad too. As you can see, it’s a pretty comprehensive test. However we began getting customer feedback that they couldn’t log in to the new section of the site.

I looked through the logs and couldn’t even see that they’d made an attempt to login. Very weird. I went back to the tests and everything worked. Then some users were able to log in. But the majority couldn’t. We started to get some screenshots and feedback and discovered that it was a browser issue. Internet Explorer 7 to be exact. The jQuery login popup we had implemented didn’t render correctly on the old Microsoft browser. Hence it didn’t work, and no entry was made in the logs, as the customer wasn’t even able to submit the form.

I had a look at the analytics data for this group of users and found that 89% of them were using Internet Explorer 7. A browser not in my test suite but used by the vast majority of our users (of this part of the site). The fix was easy once we knew the problem. And all customers can now log in.

Suffice to say that Internet Explorer 7 is now part of our test suite. We don’t test that things “look” the same. We just test that the site “works”. Internet Explorer 7 has 5.7% of the worldwide market share, and Internet Explorer 6 has 3.8%.

But the main lesson learned, is that when developing for a closed group (like an intranet or a internet site that is locked to certain users), make sure you know the browser statistics data. Not only will it ensure that what you’re developing works, but it also provides the opportunity to give them a better experience through harnessing the power of that particular browser.


FEB 18 February 18, 2011

Websites are like fashion -

Facebook is like fashion. It never ends.

I was watching..or re-watching….The Social Network the other night and my ears pricked up as I listened to some dialogue between a young Mark Zuckerberg and his equally young financier, Eduardo. They were celebrating the fact that The Facebook was about to “go live” and Eduardo asked if the site is “finished”. Mark shot back, “It’s never going to be finished. Facebook is like fashion. It never ends.”

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