Teague Hopkins

Mindful Product Management

Teague Hopkins

Culture Camp DC Recap

Culture Camp DC was this weekend. We had an amazing group of attendees, fantastic sessions, brilliant ideas, and some great discussions.

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Photos

Photos from the event are available on Google+.

Blog Posts

In keeping with the spirit of an unconference, we’ll leave it to the attendees to tell you what they thought of Culture Camp DC. Here are two blog posts about the event written by our attendees.

Creating a vision or aspirational model for what you want your organization to be like as a persona by Paul Boos

Culture Camp DC: Innovation, Tinker Toys, and the Downside of Early Success by Brenna Cammeron

Twitter

You can also find discussions and live tweets from participants under hashtag #culturedc or by following @CultureCampDC on twitter.

Thanks to Motley Fool for hosting; Chad, Elliot, Paul, and Leah for helping put the event together; and to all our attendees for making the day great.

6 Smart Ways to Innovate Inside Your Corporate Culture (Guest Post at TLC Labs)

I’ve written a guest post for TLC Labs titled 6 Smart Ways to Innovate Inside Your Corporate Culture (originally at http://tlclabs.co/?p=734). I invite you to check it out, along with the rest of their fantastic blog about adopting lean startup methodologies and fostering a culture of innovation inside a 40-year old corporation.

 

Attracting and Hiring Talent

You’re trying to hire highly talented individuals to bring your dreams to reality. You’re trying to set up some kind of process so that you won’t spend a de-motivational amount of time sifting through resumes full of typos, doing preliminary technical interviews with folks who can’t FizzBuzz their way out of a paper bag, and pulling your hair out.

While you’re setting up your forms and tests and screens, it’s worth considering what kind of hiring company you want to be. Once potential employees get to the interview stage, you can be as selective as you want, but what I’m talking about here is the process leading up to that final interview. You have 2 options.

Photo by sebastien.barre

Option One: Make your process hard so that only people who want to be there will make it through the process. The only ones you’ll actually have to deal with are the ones who are thrilled to be there and willing to go through the gauntlet to get to you.

Option Two: Make your process straightforward and easy so you don’t turn off those really talented people who won’t bother to apply if the process looks arduous (e.g. passive job seekers). You’ll end up with a lot more folks at the interview stage, and some of them might be extraordinary talent.

There’s not a right answer, of course. The point is that you’re better off making an intentional choice than haphazardly falling into one bucket or the other. Think about it.

Good Enough Technology

Most people don’t need the cutting edge. If you do audio production, you might need top-of-the-line monitor speakers or pro headphones, but most people are content with the earbuds that come with their iPods. If you make your living trading stocks in real time, you might need a blazing-fast and redundant internet connection, but most people are perfectly happy with their garden-variety DSL or cable internet connections. If your business is large-format photo printing, you probably need to invest in the best printers you can afford, but for most people, a standard inkjet or laser printer is all they need.

What You Really Need

So what do you need for those activities that are not part of your core? If your business is feeding the homeless or providing a safe space for victims of domestic abuse, you still have office needs. You still need to coordinate your team and file your paperwork. You could invest in high-powered ultraportable notebooks, a dedicated server, and a fat data pipe. In fact, some technology consultants will tell you that these investments will pay for themselves in increased productivity. They may, but that doesn’t mean they are the best investment for your organization.

Pareto principle

Photo by Mary-Kay G

The Pareto Principle, named for Vilfredo Pareto, and nicknamed the 80-20 Rule, states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. 80% of your profits come from 20% of your customers; 80% of the world’s income is controlled by 20% of the world’s population; 80% of healthcare resources in the USA are consumed by 20% of the patients.

How to Leverage Pareto

If the Pareto principle holds true for technology spending (and in my experience, it is close enough to be a good estimate), it follows that your organization can have 80% of the existing cutting-edge technical capacity for 20% of the potential cost. Cloud hosting services, Google apps for business, and internet connections that are fast enough for almost all organizations can all represent significant savings for you and help focus on using your resources to serve the organization’s mission.

What will you do with the 80% of the cost that you have saved? If technology is not core to your business there is probably a much more powerful point of leverage for that investment. Get your good-enough technology, and put the rest of your investment towards your organization’s core mission.

Measuring Productivity

When you zoom out, the measure of productivity often changes.

Photo by Neys
  • For a single-minded programmer, productivity might be lines of code committed.
  • For a development team, productivity might be working code.
  • When you zoom out to a product view, working code that implements a feature no one uses is waste, but implementing features that people use is productivity.
  • Zoom out further to a business level, and it’s not just about using the feature, it’s about that feature making the customer more likely to pay for your service or product.
  • Zoom out again to an ecosystem (or, for you MBAs, value chain/system) level, and it’s not just about what people will pay for, but what adds value to their lives. And not just any value, but adds more value than the cost of providing said value. (N.B.: people are not rational actors, and will sometimes pay for things that don’t add value to their life.)

Now we’re in the realm of things that are hard to measure. And zooming out once again to a global level doesn’t make it any easier. What does productivity look like on a global scale? Even if we are creating value for people at a direct cost lower than the amount of value produced, are we factoring in the negative externalities to our productivity? If we are introducing pollutants, or stress, or social inequality into the world, are we truly being productive?

I don’t have the answers, but I’d love to start a conversation.