GrubHubMike

I'm a little uncomfortable

I'm a little uncomfortable, and I'm loving it.I like it when people present ideas that I'm uncomfortable with.  If I were always hearing things that I agreed with completely, that would be a very dangerous sign.  My ideas aren't always the best. In fact, I try to assume that on the best of days I'm batting about 80%.  Some would claim that I've been below that on occasion... If I weren't being presented with uncomfortable ideas, I would look to these potential causes:

1. Being surrounded by homogenous opinions.  This happens when a person is around peers exactly like themselves. They develop policies and opinions in a vacuum of critical thinking and diverse thought. Yikes.

2. Making decisions unilaterally.  My decisions are law. All will love me and despair!

3. Communication has broken down.  Generally, this has happened to me when I get to busy to just sit and listen. I've tried to battle this by dropping down my scheduled work to accomplish the goal of availability. 

Show me the data

I was speaking to a member of our team last week. He had a really great point about how we should be doing something that I totally agreed with. So, I told him to go back to the drawing board and convince me. What!

As an organization grows, there are more people involved. Even at the senior level.  Only a few months ago we had 3 senior management members, 3 more board members, and 4 board observers.  Since our series B investment, we have another 5 people involved in these decisions.  Each additional person exponentially increases the risk of your argument being derailed by speculation or opinion.  So use data. I've been trying to present my cases with more clear and concise data that backs up my intuition.  This becomes more and more important as people join the company.

As we've adopted this data focused decision making approach, I've noticed a subtle and disturbing trend:  opinions being presented as empirical evidence.  The statement "The users would feel very good about this feature"  is a long way from "We tested 10 users and they all felt very good about this feature".   Speculation about user behavior is not the same thing as actual data about user behavior!   I recommend usertesting.com to test integration features before they go live.  I've also started investigating userfly.com for live site video sampling

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The slowdown...

As the startup I'm involved with has grown from 2 to 20 to 40 people, I've noticed that decisions take more time than they once did.  This has been a positive change.   There are a few legitimate reasons that we've become more deliberate:

1. We have more data available than we used to.  It used to be that a lot of our decision were based on intuition and speculation.  This worked pretty well because the people involved were experts in most of the decisions we were making.  This doesn't work too well anymore.  For example, how can a person know if moving a button 10 pixels will increase revenue on a website?  You might be able to guess, but the only way to know is to do an A/B test.  It used to be this kind of stuff didn't matter as much. Which leads me to the next point:

2. Decisions have bigger impacts than they once did.  A 5% increase or decrease in conversion rate has a much bigger absolute revenue number associated with it.  So, while we can still be bold about choices, we need to examine the impacts more carefully. There are more mid course corrections and final tweaks. This means that a decision is takes longer to become  "final".

3. More cooks in the kitchen.  We've hired a lot of talented people. So, we naturally have more ideas to sift through. More opinions to evaluate. More priorities to juggle.

4. More users for our product.  A human acts one way. A group of humans acts in a totally different way.  Making changes to our product offering can have very negative impacts even if the change itself is judged as better.  So, we take more time to evaluate our customers reactions *before* changing everything.

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I'm running NYC and Chicago Marathons for Team Hole in the Wall

I'm running the Chicago (Oct 12) and New York City(Nov 1) marathons to raise money for Team Hole in the Wall. This very deserving organization provides a great camp experience for seriously ill children.

I've had the good fortune to be able to discover and enjoy running as an adult. Its not something I really ever did before finishing grad school. Over the last few years, I've come to really appreciate the satisfaction and peace that comes from a great run.

My hope is that some of the kids that I'll be enabling to go to camp will be able to enjoy nature the same way I do when I run. Please join me as I run Chicago and New York Marathons to support this worthy cause!

My goal is to raise $10,000 for this charity!  Help me out!

Find out More and Make a Donation Here!

i.c. stars

I had the pleasure of going to the offices of i.c. stars yesterday to address a group of about 20 up-and- coming professionals about entrepreneurship. The Chicago based organization aims to develop adults with a high school diploma or GED into community leaders.  Participants learn a wealth of information about technology skills, personal development and leadership.

I was thoroughly impressed.   If I have one pet peeve of community based non profit organizations is that they lack professionalism. Or worse, that they confuse stuffiness and formal dress codes for professionalism.  Not so at i.c. stars. . As I was introduced to each member of the current cycle, I saw a sense of pride in each others accomplishments and satisfaction of a shared journey towards a common goal.  Here is a group of people with a palpable hunger for learning and self improvement.

The Q&A session blew me away.  They asked more insightful questions than any group I've ever spoken to.  Here are 3 of them (and my answers):

How do you pick the ideas worth working on from the huge set of possibilites?

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.  The natural inclination is to try to do every good idea.  Instead, pick a single idea and follow it through to fruition. 

How do you prioritize with so much going on?

Do less. Keep your to-do list to 2 things for any given time frame.  Don't focus daily to-dos. Try to keep it at the weekly level at a minimum.  You'll have different to-dos for different time frames.  What 2 things do I need to get done this week. What 2 things do I need to get done this month.  What 2 things do I need to get done this year, this 10 years, this life. 

I feel very nervous about the new technology I'm learning. Will I ever feel confident? 

I got a masters in Computer Science from MIT and worked for 3 years as a programming consultant during school.  Yet, I felt like a total impostor for the first 4 years of work.  Conscious incompetence is the ideal mode of operation.  That is the best union of learning and execution.  If you are comfortable, you aren't challenging yourself.