Gary Murray – Product Lead

Thoughts

  • Build the company you wouldn’t sell

    I watched this talk ‘Build the company that you wouldn’t sell‘ by Zach Klein and it aligned well with this talk I watched by David Hieatt around the concept of doing one thing well.

    It seems as though the norm these days when building a company is to start building it with your exit strategy in place before you even start thinking about your product or even your customers.

    It would be interesting to be able to fast forward a few years and see where most of these products are – or maybe we should look back at some examples of companies or products that have been sold or acquired and see how many of them still exist or are continuing with the original vision – or was the product they sold in fact their customer base – rather than the actual product their customers bought?

     

  • One size does not fit all

    While spending a rather large amount of time in airplanes recently, including one rather uncomfortably long flight from Dubai to Chicago it got me thinking about the idea of one size fits all – and it’s application to the airline industry.

    Unless you fortunate enough to be able to fly business class (never mind first class) and you are tall you will know the discomfort I am talking about. We (us tall people) have to make do with economy class – which sadly just adopts a one size fits all approach to passenger comfort. It amazes me that no airline has taken the opportunity to create a custom option for taller passengers in economy class. I know that you can try book a seat at the emergency exits to try gain some extra leg room – but getting one is still very much based on ‘luck’. I would happily pay a little extra for my economy class ticket if an airline would include one or two rows with seats that are larger and have more legroom, which could be set aside for taller passengers – surely this is not something which would decrease overall revenue but rather increase it through slightly higher ticket prices combined with greater customer loyalty?

    Or are all people over 6 foot ‘rich’ and able to afford business or first class? Or is it that the demand for tickets is just so high that they don’t actually have to care?

    _

    Update: Since writing this I have found that both British Airways and Lufthansa offer a premium economy option as well as a few other airlines. Seems I was unlucky in my choice of airline!

    _

     

  • Emotions and design

    I read this post by my colleague Jesse Friedman at Automattic during the week:

    Don’t become emotionally invested in your design until the people who use it do.

    I often feel that most of my time studying design was spent learning to disassociate my personal emotions from my work and be able to look at it objectively and from the perspective of the customer – and it’s something I think as a designer one has to continually fight against. It’s very easy to just open up a new canvas and start designing something that looks great vs designing something that people will use – and don’t get my wrong – I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive.

    Just this week at WooThemes, we put out a ‘small’ additional page needed on the site – and that quote was very relevant. The success of the new design was enabled by the fact that no-one on the team involved tried to over-control their specific role or contribution. Everyone was open to input – or as Jesse said – no-one became emotionally invested in their specific contribution.

    I think the same could be applied to MVPs as I wrote about last week – the more time you spend working on something – especially in isolation – creates a greater chance that you will become emotionally ‘over-involved’ in your design or product. Rather involve others, get feedback and stay open to criticism.

  • Mountain biking and MVPs

    So it seems spending time exercising gives me time to think about what I’m going to write about. I spent some time this week reading a few varying views on Minimum Viable Products. One of my own personal favourite descriptions of this term has been Josh Longs Smallest Viable Product from his book Execute. But it still gets tricky to decide what is minimum vs loveable vs smallest – and that’s where my afternoon ride gave me some personal clarity on this topic.

    It’s nearly one year to the date that I won my first mountain bike race – now you may be asking what has this got to do with MVPs, MLPs or SVPs for that matter? Let me explain my view.

    Last year (2014) I had been doing a ‘reasonable’ amount of training again after spending nearly 4 years off my mountain bike after an injury. By nature, I am competitive, and so using Strava enabled me to quickly see where my fitness levels were when compared to other riders in my city and area.

    So when I saw this race – close to my home town – I knew that my Strava logs over the same distance in training were comparative to the winning times of the previous years race – bar a few minutes or so. At this time I considered entering – but still thought that maybe I was not quite ready yet to race – so put it off. Finally on the day before the race I thought, Ah – why not – so I entered (late entry fee and all). I drove up early in the morning to take part in the race – with a strategy of starting from the back (literally) to not get caught up in any early racing and rather ride the race at my own pace and just see what happened. To cut a long story short, it did not take me long to pass most of the riders in the race – with most bombing on the first big climb and I progressively caught the remaining few riders, and finally the race leader with about 3km to go before the finish where I out sprinted him to win the race.

    So as I was riding today and remembering that race it made me think of this term MVP, and what does it mean to me – and that’s where my race comes into it. Eventually, I had to make a decision to go ‘race’ – I could not continue just training and using my Strava times to work out if I could have won that race or not had I entered. I had to actually put myself out there and take a chance and see what happened in the ‘real’ world. I think this is much the same for MVPs – there comes a time where trying to push the design just that little but further or including that latest feature you’ve thought of stops you from getting your product out there and seeing how it compares. You are never going to know just how fit or strong you are – or in the product world how good your product is or if it answers an actual user need unless you ‘put it’ out there – or as our industry likes to say – ship it.

  • Walking the hills

    This past Sunday I went for what was probably my first run in nearly ten years. I blame my company perk Fitbit! I thought; how hard can it be? I could easily have climbed on my mountain bike and gone for a 100km ride without any real sweat – but was I in for a surprise!

    As I made my way up what must have been the steepest hill on my 4,4km (only) run I remembered how running used to be a naturally easy thing to me and that once I was actually pretty good at it and I thought there must be some kind of lesson I can learn from this.

    I wished I could have gone back a few years and maintained some level of consistency rather than finding another reason why I could no longer jog. Then over the weekend my colleague Joel wrote a post titled There is No Reset Button and it struck me – there really is NO reset button in life.

    We only get one chance to do something the first time.  Thereafter we choose to continue or choose to stop. If you consistently work at something you will only get better at it – it’s inevitable. But if you are consistently doing nothing – then well – you going to do nothing – and something which seemed easy, even second nature a few years back is going to seem harder and more challenging the next time round.

    So the next time you get to start something for the first time, keep at it, even if you have to walk the hills.