Tag: growth

No idea

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While everyone talks about Salesforce buying Slack, it is interesting to look at how Slack came to be.

Its founder Stewart Butterfield really wanted to make a great video game. He first tried with a game titled Game Neverending. You have never heard of it, because it failed, but putting together a bunch of features they had developed for that game, Stewart and colleagues came up with Flickr. Which you might have heard of, and sold to Yahoo! for 20 something million dollars. Later on he tried again, this time with a game titled Glitch. Fortunately for him, that did not work either, and while developing the game, Stewart and colleagues had put together a funny tool for internal communication, that later became Slack.

The point is, Stewart had no idea. He did not have any great master plan to build Slack (or Flickr), any recipe for the success of his video games, any routine or ritual that would make him smarter, faster, eventually richer.

He was lucky.

And he was (probably still is) in the habit of doing.

Now you can go and read “The 3 steps to make your startup successful”, or “Rich entrepreneurs typically do these 5 things (first thing in the morning)”.

Or you can start shipping. You already know what and how.

[…] this, by the way, I think is the greatest software development methodology that’s impossible to replicate, which is, don’t think about what you’re doing, have no ego. There’s no speculation, there’s no, “I can imagine a user would want to.” To spend a minimum number of minutes addressing the most aggravating problems that you have, and just use it, and then see.

Stewart Butterfield, Masters of Scale

Culture

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I made a list of the happiest periods in my life, and I realized that none of them involved money.

We believe that it’s really important to come up with core values that you can commit to. And by commit, we mean that you’re willing to hire and fire based on them.

The ultimate definition of success is, you could lose everything you have and truly be OK with it.

People may not remember exactly what you did or what you said but they always remember how you made them feel, that’s what matters the most.

Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us through word of mouth.

Our belief is that a company’s culture and a company’s brand are just two sides of the same coin. The brand is just a lagging indicator of the culture.

Tony Hsieh

Productivity score

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There is no evidence correlating longer hours with increased productivity. If anything, there is evidence that after a certain threshold (that might depend on the type of job), your productivity goes down (some evidence here and here). Sure, you still get something done on your 60th, 70th or 80th weekly hour of work. It is just not worth it.

And so, it is strange to see Microsoft launch a service for companies called Productivity Score. A service that tells employers how staff uses Microsoft apps, essentially measuring for how long certain apps are used, or how many interactions there are with a certain shared document.

There is a huge discussion about whether or not Productivity Score is a violation of employees privacy. But from a marketer perspective, I would argue that the biggest mistake Microsoft did was naming the service as it did.

In the article linked above, Jared Spataro (Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365) says that Productivity Score is “about discovering new ways of working, providing your people with great collaboration and technology experiences”. Elsewhere, Microsoft argues that employers can use Productivity Score to ensure their investment in technology goes to fruition: for example, by signaling that certain areas of the business (or certain employees) spend less time on emails or Teams, the company might want to organize specific training to increase adoption.

That is all great, but that is not productivity.

Productivity Score is a wrong name, a misleading name, a lazy name. It suggests a link between usage (mainly in terms of hours) of Microsoft apps and productivity that is non existent. Microsoft itself cannot make that link, and in fact here is the closer they get to it in one their blog post introducing the service:

Indeed, in a survey of more than 2,000 customers globally, those with the most complete adoption and use of Microsoft 365 had 66 percent higher confidence in their organization’s ability to adapt and thrive amidst uncertainty than those less far along.

Again, that is not productivity.

Names are sticky. They are the first chapter in the story of a product, a service, a feature. They create expectations and often guide the way users will use (or not use) what you offer.

Names need to be picked carefully.

What you must look for is a name that begins the positioning process, a name that tells the prospect what the product’s major benefit is.

Al Ries, Jack Trout in Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind

Third kind

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Some companies decide to keep things loose. They have little hierarchy, initiatives can come from a variety of places as a response to a variety of inputs (customers, markets, intuition, experience, data, trials, mistakes, etc.), and the flexibility of the company makes it so it can adapt to changes and decisions fairly quickly without a lot of guidance.

Other companies decide to put structure around things. They build a clear hierarchy, initiatives often come from the top as a response to a limited amount of inputs (often gut feeling and previous experience), and the rigor of the company makes it so it will adapt to changes as quick as an heavy amount of guidance is deployed through its rank.

There is no right or wrong, you just have to figure out what works best for you and for the people that work with you and around you.

There is also a third kind of company. It is the company that puts structure while still wanting to keeping it loose. The company where decisions come from the top with the expectation that people will accept them just because. The company that pays lip service to the importance of its people while at the same time keeping them limited to tasks and urgencies. The company that struggles more than the others to adapt and change, just because nobody has a clear idea of what the hell is going on.

There are more company of the third kind than there are of the first and second combined.

You do not want your company to be of the third kind.

Eager

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It is great to be excited about something, to be enthusiastic, to be waiting for it, to prepare and make sure everyone gets the best out of the experience.

It is way less great when the attitude gets past excitement and shifts to eagerness. Eager as in sour, bitter, rough, forceful, pungent. It is when you do not leave others space. When you cut others short to make a point. When saying what you think to know is more important than letting others tell of their experience. When you make decisions without consulting, when you change the work without informing, when you demand agreement without explaining, when you take the spotlight without elevating.

Enthusiasm is contagious. But if you are eager instead, you will go alone.