Product – Page 3 – Sledgeworx Software

2020 Age of the remote conference

At this point, in person conferences with 1000s of attendees are done for the year. Lockdowns are easing in general, but most people won’t be comfortable going to a massive conference with 1000s of people from all over the world anytime soon.

We are likely to be disrupted by this pandemic until spring 2021, by when travel is hopefully back to normal. I’ve been working from home for months now and will be doing so officially until October.

The thing is conferences bring a lot of value to engineering. It is a great way to keep up with what people are doing in industry and to share your experience. I’ve attended some great conferences and enjoyed diving into the technical depth available at a conference devoted to Spark or Kubernetes.

For 2020 these kinds of tech talks and presentations have to move online to Youtube and Zoom just like our work has. Fortunately, there are some benefits to running a tech conference remotely.

A remote conference can be a lot more affordable. You don’t need to rent a big conference venue to host the talks, and attendees save money by not flying to a different city or renting hotel rooms.

You also can save time because you aren’t traveling. Just like we don’t need to commute to the office, you don’t need to travel to the conference. The conference is wherever you are.

The technology is also good for presentations and Q&A sessions. Teleconferencing shines in situations where you want to share screens and only a few people need to speak at once. Where it really breaks down is when you want to have a group discussion, it is much harder to interleave speakers. But if we focus on activities with a single presenter or a Q&A where someone asks a question, then stops talking, teleconferencing is almost as good as being in person.

I think in 2020 we will see a lot of remote mini-conferences. They are really economical to host and the timing couldn’t be better. I like the idea so much I have decided to adopt the TinyConf I was planning for this year into a remote conference.

Expecting end users to customize the experience is madness

Don’t do it to yourselves

Don’t do it to customers

Do the work to make a good product

Enterprise software sucks. Its not bought by the people using it, but by a guy wearing a suite on the 37th floor the day after eating a fabulous steak dinner paid for by Oracle sales guys. By the time you start using it, it is bought and paid for. Suck it up and learn how this pile of code works.

Internal enterprise software is another beast. Constantly underfunded, built by interns that just learned object oriented programming, and designed by the CEOs cousin, it is not the greatest.

Know what will ensure that your internal software is never improved in a meaningful way? Make customizing it the default workflow. Just have every engineer at the company load up a GreaseMonkey script that adds in the features that PAAS should have by now.

The problem is fixed for the graybeards. Sure, every new employee will spend six months realizing that all the people who are getting anything done have customized the UI so extensively its not recognizable as the same product.

When they said go use ‘deployment ladder’, they meant use ‘deployment ladder’ with 12 GreaseMonkey scripts installed. Where are those scripts? You might ask, the answer is always ‘in the wiki’. Searching for the name of the thing in the wiki does not result in finding the thing, like it would in google for an open source project.

Having everyone customize the software does not result in a good product. It papers over a shitty UI by fragmenting it even more. After a while no one with any power in your organization realizes there is a problem because they have 50 GreaseMonkey scripts installed, and haven’t looked at the actual ‘base’ UI in 5 years.

Save yourself millions in on-boarding. Invest in good tools. Put the work into offering a great default workflow. Don’t end up in a situation where the graybeards can’t even understand the workflows the new hires are dealing with.

Everyone uses (failing) software all the time.

Because you use it all the time at least one piece of software is broken for you at all times.

I stopped using Facebook after my freshman year of college, but recently got pulled back in by a Facebook group. As a result I now have the pleasure of enjoying a 10+ second loading phase every time I open the homepage.

Recently, I tried to buy a CODE mechanical keyboard on the wasdkeyboards.com website. But every time I submitted my order it failed. I tried different browsers. I had to look into the console to find out that a http request was failing to find a paypal advertising domain that my PiHole blocks on the network. To buy my keyboard I had to tether wifi from my smartphone. A non-technical user wouldn’t have been able to find out why the order failed because there was no error message. There was a spinning symbol that just disappeared after a while without a message to the user.

Everyone uses software all the time now. We have smartphones, smart TVs, smart refrigerators and smart homes. If you use 100 programs a day, 99% uptime means one program is down for every person. If every application manages 99.9% uptime, one out of a hundred people is experiencing software brokenness everyday.

Then realize that billions of people have smartphones now.

99.99% * 1,000,000,000 = 100,000.

If your software has a billion users and works 99.99% of the time, its down for 100,000 people all the time.

Sorry, we didn’t mean to break that for you! But we aren’t going to fix it.

Using Business to Consumer SAAS means getting your UX broken all the time.

Sorry, but we are moving the product in another direction. We have changed the interface to a whole new design. Yes, we don’t have feature parity with the old experience, but we will get there soon. Soon in this case means in six months, after we finish the international rollout we will start to fill in the missing features.

Do you remember the drama around Windows 10’s new UX? It was and is obviously worse for power users, but Microsoft didn’t care. How about when Microsoft Office added the new Ribbon UI and no one could find anything anymore? B2C software doesn’t care about power users. If you buy one copy of Office and use it 100x as much as the average dude, a business analyst is thinking about how to get you to buy 100 copies.

Then there was the years where new versions of Mac OS were so bad that they had to stop charging for OS updates because no one would buy them anymore. Customers don’t like UI updates in general. Every UI update means learning a new set of commands. People don’t want to take a tutorial the first time they open an app. Getting people to redo the tutorial every time you release a new update is basically impossible.

A UX update on a product I worked on broke the application for a bunch of our power users. Developing the MVP version of the new UX took several teams months. We had been maintaining a blacklist of users while we worked on the new User Experience. Once the new experience was released and stable we decided that we were ready to launch the new experience to everyone and eliminate blacklists. This led to a flurry of customer service calls by customers who no longer could use the application for its basic purpose.

Customers probably don’t want a UX break unless it’s at least a 10x improvement on whatever you had before. If find yourself releasing a new experience that is LESS functional than the current experience. STOP.

Rework book review

I read REWORK by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson the founders of basecamp. The book is a series of short 200-500 word ‘sections’ that elaborate on a point. No wasted space or pages full of empty words where the point has already been made. As a result the book flows incredibly well. It is a quick and light read. The ideas in the book are commonsense lessons learned from running a successful small business. A lot of the ideas are shared with agile and the ‘lean startup’ schools of thought. But REWORK is a superior book to the ‘The Lean Startup’. Comparing the two books its clear Hansson and Fried understand the space better.

A few points from the book stuck with me so I will go over them.

Don’t write it down

The top customer complaints will come up so often you will never be able to forget them. You shouldn’t need a long list of customer issues, if you are listening to your customers regularly you won’t be able to ignore the top issues. If you get ten customer complaints each day and five of them are the same issue, you know what to work on.

The myth of the overnight sensation

“And on the rare occasion that instant success does come along, it usually doesn’t last —there’s no foundation there to support it.” — page 196.

I liked this phrasing of the overnight sensation. These days social media constantly spams us with success stories and lavish lifestyles we could be living. But if you are relying on luck to succeed it might not come a second time, and then you don’t have anything left.

Don’t scar on the first cut

Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. You create a policy to make a common problem easier to solve. Without a policy you have to rely on judgement and escalating up the chain of command. That is expensive, but having a policy takes all the flexibility out of the situation. Don’t create policies unless its obvious that the issue is common and thinking about it is wasting people’s limited time.

Four letter words

Don’t use the words “Easy”, “Fast”, etc. Things are rarely done fast or easily. If they could be we would have done it already. Using those words implies things that we probably don’t know.

Inspiration is perishable

If you want to do something, you have got to do it now. You can’t do it later because you won’t be inspired to do it later.