Business of Software Blog

How to make giving project feedback easy

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In a post last week, Seth Godin explained a problem with giving people feedback about their work. In essence, what happens is this. You say ‘I don’t like your logo / artwork / project plan*’, but they hear ‘I suck’ since the work people do is so tied into who they are.

There is a neat way round this though. It’s a trick I learnt from Bill Buxton’s excellent book about sketching, but it applies to much more than just product design.

Rather than asking for a single outcome (‘Tell me how you’re going to market X’), ask for options (‘Give me three serious ways of marketing X’**).

At this point, the person who’s done the work has no motivation to defend their sole proposal beyond all reason. The conversation stops being an argument of “I’m right / you’re wrong” and, instead, becomes a de-personalised deliberation of “here’s a bunch of different ideas; let’s discuss, together, the pros and cons of each one.”

It works, really. Try it.

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*Of course, you try to be constructive about this, but the message is the same

** Note that the ways need to be serious – not two obviously bad ideas and one good one that they guide you towards

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Crossing a river by feeling for the stones

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Running a software business is like crossing a river by feeling for the stones. You take one pace, and then a second, and then you search around with your toes for the next stone. You lean on it gently, testing its smoothness and seeing if it wobbles. It it’s a good stone, you slowly shift your weight across and then seek the next step. If it isn’t, you search elsewhere.

You always have your eye on the far bank of the river, but your path zigs and zags, you hit dead ends and you back track, but eventually – hopefully – you make it across.

If this metaphor holds – and I think it does – then what’s the point of a business plan? First of all, here’s one thing a business plan does not do:

A business plan does not give you a precise set of instructions for how to cross the river. It does not tell you where each stone lies, and how to move from one to the next. It does not give you a mechanism for tracking your actual progress against your plan.

Instead, the point of a business plan is to answer a handful of fundamentally important questions:

Can the river theoretically be crossed? How fast does it seem to be flowing and how wide does it look? Would even tempting a crossing just be a dumb-ass thing to do?

Is it worth crossing? What’s on the other side? Do you really want to get there?

Where are the crocodiles? If you slip, will your feet get wet, or eaten?

Are you crossing it from the correct point? Or should you move a few hundred yards downstream? Maybe somebody’s already built a bridge there.

Where is the first stepping stone? And can you reach it, and will it bear your weight?

Of course, all these are essentially calls of judgement. Do your best to answer them, then reach out your foot, open your eyes and make that first step.

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What are you *really* good at, and who cares?

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Last week, Wil Harris spoke eloquently and convincingly about how ChannelFlip launched. Off the shelf software, string, sticky tape, some CSS, plenty of tea and a spare afternoon* was all it took to create and get this top-notch video magazine off the ground.

That anybody can launch a successful web site or business is a common message. Just release early and often, and be embarrassed by version one, and you’ll surely succeed. But I find it hard to reconcile this with my experience that writing software is hard, dirty and time-consuming. Our Exchange archiving tool took an awesome team of fine people well over a year to build. How come?

There are a number of reasons – ChannelFlip launched into a market with few competitors; if they screwed up they had no existing customers to disappoint or brand to stain; what they were doing wasn’t technically difficult. I doubt these are accidental though – they’re the results of extremely smart choices that Wil and his team made.

But I think these reasons miss the point. ChannelFlip succeeds not because of the technology, but because of the videos. What distinguishes ChannelFlip from competitors current and future is content, not software. And like most companies, they have constraints. Every hour and dollar spent creating video is an hour and dollar less spent on technology. But – for now – the benefits of spending on content outweigh the costs of scrimping on technology.

If you think you’re in the business of software, here are some questions worth asking about your company or product:

• Of all the things you do, what really matters? What will delight your customers? What will make you damn hard to compete against?
• Of all the things you do, what doesn’t matter?
• Where are you focussing?
• Are you any good at what matters?

Maybe the answer to the first question is software – its quality, technical excellence or performance. But maybe it’s something else.

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* OK, so I’m exaggerating a bit

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