Brief back story…

About a year ago AOL acquired TechCrunch and as a result, less than a year later Michael Arrington was ousted over claims of a conflict of interest between tech reporting and tech investment. In the subsequent months we saw TechCrunch’s star bloggers MG Siegler, Paul Carr, Jack McKenna and Sarah Lacy leave the company. Now CEO Heather Harde is reported to have been fired as well. Erick Schonfeld has taken Arrington’s place as editor-in-chief of TechCrunch.

My unconscious reaction…

This morning I realised that my reading habits have subtly changed recently. One by one I’ve added Michael’s, Sarah’s, Paul’s and MG Siegler’s personal blogs to my RSS reader. I surprised myself when I fired up Google Reader this morning by hitting the “Mark as Read” button on the 50 or so TechCrunch posts and then proceeded to read every word on the other blogs.

The surprise was really my realisation that I’ve been doing this unconsciously for a few weeks now.

The thing is…

For the past two years or so, as TechCrunch has become exponentially more prolific, I’ve really been scanning their headlines to pick out the ones written by these authors. (The only exception being Alexia Tsotsis.)

Why? Well, the ‘tech reporting’ aspect of TechCrunch I can happily live without. Or, rather, I can get that very same info from any number of sources; including my colleagues at work who will excitedly scream at me in the morning that Microsoft has acquired Skype or that its totally ridiculous that some photo-sharing app has raised $40 million.

On the other hand, these 5 people have presented opinions: controversial, disrupting and insightful ones. Often openly disagreeing with each other right there on TechCrunch. They’ve looked at the landscape of tech and drawn patterns and conclusions that go beyond merely relaying the facts. I’ve not always agreed with them but they’ve challenged the status quo and made me think.

Companies you love to love…

I recently did some research back at the office into what we call “Customer Experience”. One of the folks we spoke to was TJay Belt, a long-time customer of ours who recently penned this blog post about us.

One thing I realised — or re-realised if that’s a word — is that as customers and users we attribute human attributes to organisations and if we like the organisation’s personality we can often literally fall in love with them. I love Google because despite their humungous size they’ve retained a visible engineering culture. I love Balsamiq because the company’s software and communications matches their founder’s and they’ve retained that despite the painful growth period of a young software company.

I used to love TechCrunch because their writings made me think, stimulated me to write myself and I could identify with the strongly opinionated approach taken by Mike and his gang.

You just need to look at AOL’s “company values” to see something terribly corporate, meaningless and impersonal. And as part of AOL, TechCrunch is slowly becoming impersonal, transforming itself into a useful but bland stream of facts.

I’m not unsubscribing from TechCrunch anytime soon but I hope that they manage to forge for themselves a new and distinct personality. Otherwise they will just become ‘another tech news site’, ripe for disruption by the next up and coming Valley smart-ass…

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During his session he gave us some practical work to do in pairs and for doing so he distributed a small pack of “stattys” to each of us.

They are absolutely awesome!

They’re basically post-it notes that, instead of having a tiny adhesive strip along the top, attach themselves to a surface by some form of static electricity magic. You get 2 great advantages: 1) you dont get that irritating curly effect when peeling them off the pack and, 2) you can slide them around a surface easily with your finger.

Love ‘em.

Partly because they’re awesome and mostly because they show innovations are available to all of us even in the most ‘established’ products.

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The speaker line-up was amazing as were all the attendees. There’s no way I can do the event justice in a meagre blog post however, while its all still fresh, here are my key takeaways:

1. Clay Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma, blew our minds with grounded stories of how companies can make all the ‘right’ management decisions right up until the point they die. The key lessons for me were:
• Try to ‘compete with nothing’. RCA ignored transistor technology because it’s high-end customers would never have bought inferior (at the time) technology. Meanwhile, Sony was selling $2 crappy portable radios to kids who otherwise would have had no radio at all. History relates who won.
• Companies have a life-cycle; and that includes decline and demise. An organisation set up for a particular business model can’t easily adapt to a new landscape. IBM survived 3 major disruptions by setting up completely new business units and giving them the flexibility to do things differently. Do this before you have a problem. It’s very likely that when you have a problem its too late.
2. Jason Cohen of Smart Bear passionately and convincingly advocated the value of honesty in business. Are you really the “leading provider of X” as your website claims? If you’re honest about your limitations – eg we’re only 2 people in our company; our software doesn’t have these features – then you set yourself up to be infinitely more believable when you describe the value that your company truly delivers.
3. Josh Linkner rivalled TEDster Ken Robinson in advocating the importance of creativity education both at a very young age and in mature companies. Creativity is a discipline that you can learn and become better at, and his ‘RoleStorming’ idea (amongst many others) sounds exceptionally good at removing inhibitions and unleashing people’s ideas.
4. Rory Sutherland, of Ogilvy Group, was probably my favourite speaker of the lot. With my design bias I found it exceptionally brilliant to see how a talented and experienced speaker can demonstrate to a bunch of engineers the supreme value of psychology in business. Rory based a lot of his talk on the Austrian School of economics – a longtime favourite of mine – to show how rationality is very often not the key driver of buying behaviour and how to leverage that.
5. Peldi and John Nese, the former of Balsamiqfame and the latter a non-software guy who runs a boutique soda pop store in LA gave us a frank discussion on motivation in business. My favourite quote was “it’s very easy to make decisions when you’re broke” which in everyday terms means: don’t rest on your laurels and some element of pressure is good for business.
6. Finally, the awesome Paul Kenny spoke about how to speak to customers on sales calls and how to close deals. Easily the most motivating session of the lot Paul had me itching to pick up the phone again and try selling to people.

I hope to write a bit more detail about a couple of these but in the meantime a huge well-done to Mark Littlewood and Neil Davidson for one of the best software and business events on the calendar.

If you only attend one conference next year, make it Business of Software 2012.

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Anyone see the ironic contradiction?

I’ll write more at some point about this because it’s interesting.

In the meantime, get a copy of Small Giants dear Lawrence and have a good read.

My workshop, together with Chris and Helen, will be tackling how UX and Agile can work better together.

After some back and forth we came up with (what we think is) a pretty cool approach for this topic. That is, since we’re talking about Agile, why not run the session as a typical Agile retrospective?

Retrospectives are those meetings Agile teams have at the end of a sprint to review the past sprint and plan out ways – ‘experiments’- for improving the next one.

The only difference for our workshop is that the retrospective will be looking at the last 10 years or so of Agile + UX development rather than a wee two-week sprint!

Read the full post here…

As he explained over the phone round about May or so, ICON – already a leader in bespoke web development – is working on being more innovative and creative in the long-term. As part of this process they are inviting various people from different backgrounds to come and talk to the team about the experiences and challenges they face in business life.

Needless to say, I was very flattered to be asked and accepted very happily. So I spent an hour or so nattering away about some of my experiences working at Red Gate, including things like our Down Tools Week and why we organise our own learning events.

However, what I mainly wanted to write about is, how pleasant and genuinely refreshing it is to see this sort of approach to learning and knowledge sharing being taken by a Maltese company. As Edward de Bono correctly pointed out in a recent interview we have a tendency in Malta to “stand on our shores and look inwards”. More bluntly, because of our small size, we have a deplorable tendency to engage in petty wrangling, mud-slinging and a never ending game of one-upmanship.

With a very small shift in thinking ICON is doing something different in a very important way, both for themselves and for the Maltese entrepreneurial community.

It tackles the topic of innovation through design that in a world of “Agile” and “Lean” we hear little about. I’d summarize it by calling it “innovation through introspection”.

As entrepreneurs, designers, developers, product managers and Agile cultists we’re taught to go out there, meet customers, discover their pain and make their world better. It’s a method that works in many kinds of organisations: start-ups, small companies and Googles. And 99% of the time its the way to go.

But there’s a 1% of the time where paying customers and end-users can’t tell you what they want because they don’t yet know they need it. For many companies, this “1% of the time” happens only once in their lifetime: the initial start-up phase. Some crazy entrepreneur convinces some crazy co-founder that what the world wants is X and they set about building it. If it works, they then spend the next 99% of their company’s existence iterating on that by talking to users. Sometimes the iterations are small (new features), sometimes a bit larger (new products) and sometimes bigger leaps (adjacent markets). But rarely does that spark in the initial 1% see the light of day again.

There are good reasons for this. If you have a market of paying customers, why risk it all? If you’re growing you need to optimize for efficiency and maneuver for market positioning and ubiquitous advertising presence. Being ‘crazy’ again is too risky and re-organising your company as Verganti suggests is a mammoth culture shift, not to mention also being rather risky.

At the moment I’m exploring the idea of fusing the Lean and Agile approaches to software development and the introspective design approach suggested by Verganti. Currently, this takes the form of a workshop that is focused on the concept of “innovating meanings”.

The basic premise is: if we identify what a product currently means, and we think laterally to produce new meanings, can we design new products we wouldn’t have imagined and ones that customers wouldn’t have asked us for?

This is all experimental. I’ve done a couple of these at Red Gate with promising results and I’ll be experimenting more on whichever guinea pigs choose my workshop – titled “Inventing Purple Cows” – at Business of Software next month.

I look forward to posting more about this when more results are in!

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A group of us (6 in total) led by the intrepid Dom decided to make the most awesome, unexpected, expensive and addictive 404 page ever.

Everything a 404 page is not, ours would be.

So what’s more unexpected than evil zombies, cute kittens and Colin? Yup, on Red Gate’s just launched 404 page you can find all of that in what we think is a simple but fun game to play!

Check it out and let us know what you think: http://www.red-gate.com/error/404