Archive for February, 2014

Sell Reputation

Wednesday, February 26th, 2014

The Greek philosopher Aristotle divided the means of persuasion, appeals, into three categories–Ethos, Pathos, Logos. Today, we’ll talk about ethos.

When you’re trying to persuade a customer that your product is worth more than another person’s product, you will invoke one of the three. Substantial investment will be made mostly on the logos and ethos front. In modern day-terms, logos will be data, reports, forecasts and etc, whereas ethos will simply be reputation.

I believe perception and reputation is a good form of investment, because if you want to convince your customers that your product is worth more, you’ll have to employ one of those 3 methods. You can logically convince a customer, and they’ll provide you with logical prices.

The key is to focus on the illogical. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and your evaluation will be based on what they perceive. Sometimes, it can be lower, sometimes it can be accurate, and sometimes it can be higher. The fact that it can be higher gives you a great opportunity to capitalize on the differential.

You can sell logic, or you can sell reputation, and even empathy. If you had to choose one, I’d think reputation would have the most potential for irrational profits.

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Virtual Test Case Definitions vs Real World Expectation Declarations

Wednesday, February 19th, 2014

In my space, there are a lot of parallels between the virtual space and the physical space. When I see a cup, I see a cup class. Then I think how it’s a unique cup, so it’s an extension of the cup class, perhaps, if we were to think about how cups are manufactured, then it’s a cup factory class, and it’s merely an object of that factory. So on.

Before a test is written, there is a clear understanding of what is expected to happen, and the test is considered incomplete until the test passes the assertion. It’s interesting because in the real world, I believe these are simply listing one’s expectations.

As a leader, I think it’s clear to communicate the things you TRULY care about in regards to your company. Just like in test driven development, you don’t care about the how things are defined, or constructed, but there’s a definite end result you care about. Your job as a leader is to communicate that end result. To illustrate this concept and the underlying reactions to such declarations, for example, lets say you said you care about the following things: Conversion rates, sales, traffic, site speed. The people who are responsible for those things might react as follows:

Conversion rates:

  • Examine existing conversion rates
  • Examine which pages convert the best, gather lessons
  • Monitor conversion rates across the site
  • Monitor overall conversion rate performance

Sales:

  • Examine existing sales
  • Examine which products sell the best, figure out why it sells the best
  • Examine current audience and existing markets
  • Devise a way to expand audience and market
  • Monitor sales and etc

Etc.

My point is, to do an effective job, clear definition of what needs to be done, will allow the people who are responsible for execution to determine how much resources are required, and if there are insufficient resources, which corners to cut. One of my mentors told me, in a project, you can control 2 of 3 things: Resources, Features, or Time, but never all three. Listing your expectation is the equivalent of listing the features. If you don’t want a person dedicated to these tasks, then that’s a resource constraint, and the execution team will respond with how much longer such constraints will delay the expected results. A leader doesn’t need to execute, but a leader needs to plan, communicate, assess, and make judgment calls based on assessments.

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Why Segregate Production and Staging

Sunday, February 16th, 2014

I purposely didn’t specify server and environments. It’s EXTREMELY important that the staging environment isn’t sharing the same box as the production box.

A good staging box perfectly mirrors the production box, you’d imagine, that it’d be two birds with one stone, if you simply create a staging environment on the production machine. This is an extremely risky and bad idea.

The staging environment is for testing, all sorts of crazy things can happen, from installing hacked code, to code that are so inefficiently coded that the web server and the connecting database server’s load goes out of control. When this happens, sales will be lost, data won’t transmit, and there will be a definite cost to business.

So when weighing the convenience versus the cost, having a staging environment on a production environment is almost never worth the cost.

Posted in Programming, Work | No Comments »

Know Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Sunday, February 16th, 2014

Nobody in this world can do EVERYTHING, but there are specialist in everything among us. Just like free-trade theory, if specialist engage in work trade, both parties benefit.

This is why it’s important to understand the things you are reasonably capable of doing, and things you aren’t. Then you can harness other people’s specialties.

This is a critical step. If you are under the impression that you’re the specialist in everything, then you’ll come to the conclusion that all work, in order to be completely efficiency, must be undergone by you. This is simply not scalable.

Sure, perhaps in a single person’s man-hours, it might be more efficient, but it will ultimately result in the project taking much longer to deliver than necessary.

None of us is perfect, but it’s the concept of working together to achieve a greater goal that’s been at the core of civilizations’ success and prosperity. Learn to lean and learn to lead.

Posted in Economics, Programming, Work | No Comments »