Teague Hopkins

Mindful Product Management

Tests

Stop Celebrating Failure

One of the big challenges with doing innovation in any setting is that most people are afraid of failure, and when you’re afraid to fail, you don’t take the risks that are necessary to keep creating and innovating.

Photo Credit: AlmazUK cc
Photo Credit: AlmazUK cc

Most professionals have had the idea that “failure is bad”, “failure is not acceptable”, or “failure is final” drilled into them through 16 years of schooling by the time they enter the workforce. We take tests in school and only get one shot to get it right, which is not usually how it works in the real world.

Recognition of this disconnect has led to a sort of “counter-cultural movement” among entrepreneurs of celebrating failure. While I understand how we got here, I think it’s an over-correction. We’re trying to balance one extreme out with another.

The problem with celebrating failure is that, unless you’re learning something, it’s still just failure.

We need to stop celebrating failure indiscriminately, and instead celebrate the learning that can come out of failure (and sometimes out of other things). Failure might be a necessary cost, but it’s the learning that helps us improve our creations and make the next ones better.

One Simple Trick for User Centered Design

How often has your company run a focus group or usability test and generated big fat report that just sits on the shelf somewhere full of great ideas the never get implemented?

You can do all the research you need, but if you don’t use it in your decision-making process, you’d be better off not having done that all.

In order for that data in the report to get used, it must be highly visible and personally relatable. We all know what happens when the team has to seek out the results and can’t see how they relate to their work.

Enter the Information Radiator

[box type=”info” style=”rounded” border=”full”]An information radiator is a large, highly visible display used by software development teams to track progress.[/box]
Photo Credit: hugovk cc
Photo Credit: hugovk cc

One of the best approaches I’ve ever seen to achieving salience like this is a variant on the information radiators used for things like bugs fixed, bugs reported, or server uptime.

After conducting a series of recorded usability session with end users, one particularly clever usability expert I know convinced the team to let him put data from the sessions on the information radiators in the office (in this case, large monitors). Rather than reduce the users to a set of charts, he compiled the recordings of each session, edited them down to the biggest pain points, and played this highlight reel of ‘users having difficulty’ in a loop on the big screens around the office.

Every time people came in the office, they saw the endless loop of users trying and failing to use the website. Having those results staring at them every day was a great way to motivate the team to fix the confusing spots, empathize with the user, and raise the salience of usability problems to a level normally reserved for technical errors.

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.