Rework Principles
In the previous two articles, I wrote about the book 37signals "Getting Real". This is a kind of philosophy and successful approach to software development. I have seen reviews that all these principles will not work, however, neither in the first book, nor in the second did I find a single contradiction. In the second book there are many repetitions from the first one, but still it makes sense to read both books in the original. Below, I brought in ideas for Rework that are not described in Getting Real.
If you have ever heard that in the real world your idea will not work, then you know what it is about. A lot of your friends will say that all you have in mind is a utopia and that it will not work. But you need to forget about it. Indeed, in the real world you can not have a dozen employees, distributed in eight different cities on two continents.
The real world is not a place, but just an excuse not to act. It has nothing to do with you.
For some reason, we have decided that being a workaholic is good. For a workaholic, any amount of work can not be large. Such workaholism is stupid and harmful. If you work more, it does not mean that you bring more benefits. It just means that you work more.
')
As a result, workaholics create more problems than they solve. Workaholics surely burn out and the consequences can be very serious. The workaholic tries to solve the problem simply by spending more time on it, i.e. compensating for intellectual laziness with brute force. These people are not trying to be effective.
All normal employees who do not have the habit of staying up late have a feeling that they are not working on it. This brings poison to the team.
If suddenly the task takes you not 2 hours, but 16, it is quite possible that you are doing something wrong. Invite colleagues and discuss this issue. No need to waste time; it demotivates and deprives you of enthusiasm.
Go to sleep
Working at night is a bad idea. We usually like to work at night or in the early morning or on a day off. Why? Because nobody distracts us at these moments. This can be avoided if you arrange half of your working day in such a way that nobody distracts you. You are not a slave to your phone, skype and mail.
Bad sleep causes the following effects:
Some people even brag about this fact: I didn’t sleep all night and did this. There is nothing to brag about: this feat still comes around in the further support of the product.
Everything that you plan does not come true. You do not know how much this or that task will take in reality. You do not even know how long your shopping trip with your wife will take. What to say about the six-month project. So there are double budget overruns. To really evaluate a project, you can break it down into as small subtasks as possible. In this case, you still make mistakes, but the error will be much less.
Break the 12-week project into 12 separate projects for 1 week. Personally, for myself, I decided to build work on page iterations. We take one page and make it a week. At the same time, this page is simultaneously occupied by everyone who takes part in it. This solves a frequent problem when the front-end programmer asks the programmer what the API wrote, how this or that function works and offers to rewrite it. The backend programmer can enter the context for a long time.
Long to-do lists are demotivating. Remember how you made a long list of cases, crossed out the first couple of points and forgot the list. Or they crossed out insufficiently well done cases from the bottom of the list.
Break the list of 100 cases into 10 lists of 10 cases. Then every time you will not do 1% of work, but 10%. You can assign tasks to priorities, simply by allocating space for important tasks at the top of the list.
Make small decisions
Large and responsible decisions are difficult to make. Once you make such a decision, you will be forced to follow it, although this decision may be wrong. Instead, make many small decisions. Let them be tiny, but they are easier to make changes.
Of course, you will be copied. Therefore, you should put something into the product that will set you apart from the rest. Put your attitude, your service and your philosophy in it.
Along with this, do not copy yourself. Copying can be seen as a learning strategy, but in the business world it looks mean. In addition, there is another problem: when copying, you miss the stage of understanding the underlying mechanisms by which the business grows. When imitating blindly, you see only the top layer and the tip of the iceberg. What is under water you do not see. In addition, the simulator is always behind. He does what is already out of date, then when the author of the original solution has already figured out how to improve it and is working on this improvement.
Get under the influence of others, but do not copy.
Competitors can be challenged. If you have someone to oppose yourself - tell us about it. Such opposition can rally people around your product. This is used by global brands such as Audi, Apple and 7up. Conflict inflames people and forces them to take sides. If you are convinced that you are on the light side of the Force, then act.
Do less than competitors. Let them do difficult and unpleasant tasks, and you solve simple ones. Concentrate on yourself, not on them.
You are starting a new product in the shadows: no one knows about you yet and that is very good. You can make mistakes, mow down and the whole world will not hear about it. If this was your first public appearance, which audience would you prefer: 10 people or 10,000? There is no point in drawing everyone’s attention if you are not yet ready for this. The more popular you become, the less risk you can afford. When you become famous, you will find that your every action is examined under a microscope.
Some companies have customers, some have supporters, and the most successful have audiences. These are the people who regularly read you and like what you do. Create your audience. Tell, publish, blog, tweet, shoot video ... anything. Share valuable information; slowly but surely you will definitely create a loyal audience. When you need to be heard, the right people will hear you. Teach your audience: conduct seminars, trainings, video tutorials, etc. This is a completely different type of communication than sales and service.
What is the name of the letter you sent to 150 unfamiliar journalists? The correct answer is “spam”. To be noticed and to stand out is not enough to send a letter, because so do everyone else. You need to call or send a personal letter. Then you can count on a human attitude. Most likely you will not be noticed by a journalist from Forbes, however, as 37signals say, you don’t need him. The fact is that on thematic sites you will be noticed with a greater degree of probability than in non-industry publications. Yes, when you were placed on the cover of Forbes it is really nice, but this does not affect the attendance curve and the sales curve. At the same time, publishing on thematic resources gives a sharp jump in traffic and sales.
Marketing is not only responsible for marketing. Marketing is not a department, but a lifestyle, and this is what all of your company's employees do 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. What it is:
Marketing is a collection of all your actions.
Never hire anyone until you try to do it yourself. You will be able to understand the nature of this work and understand how its good result should look. Then you can give a realistic description of the work and formulate questions that you will ask at the interview. 37Signals did not hire a system administrator until one of them spent the whole summer setting up a bunch of servers.
From time to time you will feel that your batteries are running low. This is normal and you can get out of this situation in two ways: hire people or use this opportunity to learn.
By doing the work yourself, you gain wisdom, delve into all aspects of your business. Otherwise, you will sooner or later find yourself in a fog and entrust your fate to other people.
When it becomes unbearable - hire. And do it solely to relieve a headache. No need to hire for fun. Can you solve the task without hiring? Hire only when you can not.
Do not hide your shoals, because about them will still be known. Do the opposite: admit your guilt and ask for forgiveness. Just do not need to write a formal apology like "we regret that it upset you." This apology involves accepting responsibility. There is no room for the conditional mood and the word "if."
You must give the main details of what happened and the measures you are going to take so that this does not happen again. And, of course, the measures that you are going to take to correct the blunder.
Remember that “forgive me” sounds much stronger than “we are sorry”.
You cannot artificially create a culture. Artificial culture is like artificial flowers: it looks good, but nobody likes it.
Culture is a side effect of a certain behavior. If you encourage people to share ideas, then co-creation will become a culture. If you reward trust, trust will become part of your culture.
Culture is actions, not words, and these actions are formed over time. What actions you encourage, that culture will be established in the team.
Remember that your employees are not 13 years old. They are adults, but if you treat them like children, you will get childish work done. A work style in which any action requires approval engenders a culture of thoughtlessness.
Each of us have ideas. They are, of course, good, but inspiration is not forever. Take advantage of the moment when you have inspiration. If you have the desire to do something, you need to start this immediately. If you postpone the implementation for a couple of weeks, the inspiration may not return. During the tide of inspiration, you can do as much in 24 hours as you would spend a couple of weeks.
PS: For an article to benefit, you need to start using at least a couple of points. Personally, I will start with the item on workaholics and reducing the list of cases.
Ignore the real world
If you have ever heard that in the real world your idea will not work, then you know what it is about. A lot of your friends will say that all you have in mind is a utopia and that it will not work. But you need to forget about it. Indeed, in the real world you can not have a dozen employees, distributed in eight different cities on two continents.
The real world is not a place, but just an excuse not to act. It has nothing to do with you.
About workaholics
For some reason, we have decided that being a workaholic is good. For a workaholic, any amount of work can not be large. Such workaholism is stupid and harmful. If you work more, it does not mean that you bring more benefits. It just means that you work more.
')
As a result, workaholics create more problems than they solve. Workaholics surely burn out and the consequences can be very serious. The workaholic tries to solve the problem simply by spending more time on it, i.e. compensating for intellectual laziness with brute force. These people are not trying to be effective.
All normal employees who do not have the habit of staying up late have a feeling that they are not working on it. This brings poison to the team.
Do not focus on one task.
If suddenly the task takes you not 2 hours, but 16, it is quite possible that you are doing something wrong. Invite colleagues and discuss this issue. No need to waste time; it demotivates and deprives you of enthusiasm.
Go to sleep
Working at night is a bad idea. We usually like to work at night or in the early morning or on a day off. Why? Because nobody distracts us at these moments. This can be avoided if you arrange half of your working day in such a way that nobody distracts you. You are not a slave to your phone, skype and mail.
Bad sleep causes the following effects:
- Stubbornness. It seems to you that it is easier to continue; the finish line seems like a permanent mirage.
- Loss of ingenuity. In a sleepy state, good ways of solving problems do not come to your head.
- Lack of drive. When tired, your brain will not want to take on complex tasks, but will want to perform simple ones.
- Irrationality. In a sleepy state, you can cause moral harm to people around you.
- Bad decisions.
Some people even brag about this fact: I didn’t sleep all night and did this. There is nothing to brag about: this feat still comes around in the further support of the product.
Assumptions and plans do not work
Everything that you plan does not come true. You do not know how much this or that task will take in reality. You do not even know how long your shopping trip with your wife will take. What to say about the six-month project. So there are double budget overruns. To really evaluate a project, you can break it down into as small subtasks as possible. In this case, you still make mistakes, but the error will be much less.
Break the 12-week project into 12 separate projects for 1 week. Personally, for myself, I decided to build work on page iterations. We take one page and make it a week. At the same time, this page is simultaneously occupied by everyone who takes part in it. This solves a frequent problem when the front-end programmer asks the programmer what the API wrote, how this or that function works and offers to rewrite it. The backend programmer can enter the context for a long time.
Reduce to-do lists
Long to-do lists are demotivating. Remember how you made a long list of cases, crossed out the first couple of points and forgot the list. Or they crossed out insufficiently well done cases from the bottom of the list.
Break the list of 100 cases into 10 lists of 10 cases. Then every time you will not do 1% of work, but 10%. You can assign tasks to priorities, simply by allocating space for important tasks at the top of the list.
Make small decisions
Large and responsible decisions are difficult to make. Once you make such a decision, you will be forced to follow it, although this decision may be wrong. Instead, make many small decisions. Let them be tiny, but they are easier to make changes.
Competitors
Of course, you will be copied. Therefore, you should put something into the product that will set you apart from the rest. Put your attitude, your service and your philosophy in it.
Along with this, do not copy yourself. Copying can be seen as a learning strategy, but in the business world it looks mean. In addition, there is another problem: when copying, you miss the stage of understanding the underlying mechanisms by which the business grows. When imitating blindly, you see only the top layer and the tip of the iceberg. What is under water you do not see. In addition, the simulator is always behind. He does what is already out of date, then when the author of the original solution has already figured out how to improve it and is working on this improvement.
Get under the influence of others, but do not copy.
Competitors can be challenged. If you have someone to oppose yourself - tell us about it. Such opposition can rally people around your product. This is used by global brands such as Audi, Apple and 7up. Conflict inflames people and forces them to take sides. If you are convinced that you are on the light side of the Force, then act.
Do less than competitors. Let them do difficult and unpleasant tasks, and you solve simple ones. Concentrate on yourself, not on them.
Promotion
You are starting a new product in the shadows: no one knows about you yet and that is very good. You can make mistakes, mow down and the whole world will not hear about it. If this was your first public appearance, which audience would you prefer: 10 people or 10,000? There is no point in drawing everyone’s attention if you are not yet ready for this. The more popular you become, the less risk you can afford. When you become famous, you will find that your every action is examined under a microscope.
Some companies have customers, some have supporters, and the most successful have audiences. These are the people who regularly read you and like what you do. Create your audience. Tell, publish, blog, tweet, shoot video ... anything. Share valuable information; slowly but surely you will definitely create a loyal audience. When you need to be heard, the right people will hear you. Teach your audience: conduct seminars, trainings, video tutorials, etc. This is a completely different type of communication than sales and service.
Press releases are spam
What is the name of the letter you sent to 150 unfamiliar journalists? The correct answer is “spam”. To be noticed and to stand out is not enough to send a letter, because so do everyone else. You need to call or send a personal letter. Then you can count on a human attitude. Most likely you will not be noticed by a journalist from Forbes, however, as 37signals say, you don’t need him. The fact is that on thematic sites you will be noticed with a greater degree of probability than in non-industry publications. Yes, when you were placed on the cover of Forbes it is really nice, but this does not affect the attendance curve and the sales curve. At the same time, publishing on thematic resources gives a sharp jump in traffic and sales.
Marketing is not a department
Marketing is not only responsible for marketing. Marketing is not a department, but a lifestyle, and this is what all of your company's employees do 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. What it is:
- answer a phone call or send a letter
- every time someone uses your product
- every word you write on your site
- every error message in your program
- each invoice
- every personal conversation and meeting
Marketing is a collection of all your actions.
Recruitment
Never hire anyone until you try to do it yourself. You will be able to understand the nature of this work and understand how its good result should look. Then you can give a realistic description of the work and formulate questions that you will ask at the interview. 37Signals did not hire a system administrator until one of them spent the whole summer setting up a bunch of servers.
From time to time you will feel that your batteries are running low. This is normal and you can get out of this situation in two ways: hire people or use this opportunity to learn.
By doing the work yourself, you gain wisdom, delve into all aspects of your business. Otherwise, you will sooner or later find yourself in a fog and entrust your fate to other people.
When it becomes unbearable - hire. And do it solely to relieve a headache. No need to hire for fun. Can you solve the task without hiring? Hire only when you can not.
If something happens, apologize
Do not hide your shoals, because about them will still be known. Do the opposite: admit your guilt and ask for forgiveness. Just do not need to write a formal apology like "we regret that it upset you." This apology involves accepting responsibility. There is no room for the conditional mood and the word "if."
You must give the main details of what happened and the measures you are going to take so that this does not happen again. And, of course, the measures that you are going to take to correct the blunder.
Remember that “forgive me” sounds much stronger than “we are sorry”.
Culture
You cannot artificially create a culture. Artificial culture is like artificial flowers: it looks good, but nobody likes it.
Culture is a side effect of a certain behavior. If you encourage people to share ideas, then co-creation will become a culture. If you reward trust, trust will become part of your culture.
Culture is actions, not words, and these actions are formed over time. What actions you encourage, that culture will be established in the team.
Remember that your employees are not 13 years old. They are adults, but if you treat them like children, you will get childish work done. A work style in which any action requires approval engenders a culture of thoughtlessness.
Inspiration is not forever
Each of us have ideas. They are, of course, good, but inspiration is not forever. Take advantage of the moment when you have inspiration. If you have the desire to do something, you need to start this immediately. If you postpone the implementation for a couple of weeks, the inspiration may not return. During the tide of inspiration, you can do as much in 24 hours as you would spend a couple of weeks.
PS: For an article to benefit, you need to start using at least a couple of points. Personally, I will start with the item on workaholics and reducing the list of cases.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/290254/
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