Becoming a doer: 4 practical questions to get stuff done
It’s not what you know, or what you say you’ll do, it’s what you’ve done. For a dreamer like me, this has been an important lesson to learn, and a journey. My INTJ personality tends to strategize and to make big plans. It also gets easily distracted. Asking a few questions about my work, over and over, has helped me get more things done.
- What are the options? If I’m facing a challenge, or a project, I first use my imagination, I role play, I try to visualize how the situation would look if it was completed and ask myself: what are the options to get this done? Generally speaking, I find that a few minutes of creating alternatives can save tens or hundreds of hours later by pursuing the wrong path. For example: can I hire somebody to do this? can I subcontract it? Outsource it? Can I convince a partner to take it on? Even deeper: do I really need to do this? What happens if I delay? Can this problem go away or become irrelevant?
- What is the most practical choice? OK, this would be the ideal way of doing it, but this other way, which takes half the time, gets it done. I wish I did it this way, but it turns out that I need to learn this or that. Instead, I’m going to chose the dirty or tedious approach. Because the value of getting it done now far outweighs the value of getting it done incrementally better, but later.
- Is this the most important thing right now? Probably the #1 lesson from the 4-hour workweek is that. Find the most important thing that you can get done today, then do it. For an INTJ it’s so deceptively easy to see a tangent and take it. (And many other things too) So on the path to becoming a doer, there’s many things that I leave undone, because they matter less.
- Is this work worth my hourly rate? Many knowledge workers tend to implicitly value their time at minimum-wage salary levels. They simply focus on things that somebody else could be doing much more cheaply. This question is an extension of #3. Because, many times, faced with the choice of shelling out actual money to get somebody to do something for us vs the hypothetical expenditure of our own personal time to get it done, we back away from the actual expenditure. Even though it’s not the rational choice.
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CTO
The job of a CTO is to translate R&D dollars into long-term sustainable competitive advantage for their organizations. It’s not to code, to evangelize, to make technical decisions or to attract top technical talent, although it may involve all of that. Those are inputs. The output, though, is innovation that creates differentiation. If you can do this, you will be richly rewarded and have a long tenure. If you can’t, you will get relegated.
Here is an excerpt of an interview with Nathan Myhrvold, CTO at Microsoft:
BROCKMAN: What’s a CTO?
MYHRVOLD: Hell if I know. You know, when Bill and I were discussing my taking this job, at one point he said, Okay, what are the great examples of successful CTO’s. After about five minutes we decided that, well, there must be some, but we didn’t have on the tip of our tongues exactly who was a great CTO, because many of the people who actually were great CTO’s didn’t have that title, and at least some of the people who have that title arguably aren’t great at it.
My job at Microsoft is to worry about technology in the future. If you want to have a great future you have to start thinking about it in the present, because when the future’s here you won’t have the time.
Convention
There are some interesting stereotypes about CTOs: the founder who could code, a sales engineer with gravitas, the mad scientist, the evangelist. Although you’ve surely encountered some CTO who fits that description — and it’s quite the case that many CTOs don’t know how to manage people, these stereotypes are just that, caricatures of reality.
A great CTO can do these things, but above them he/she can see the future and how technology can shape it, then gets to work turning those ideas into a product or service reality and explaining to its audiences how life is about to change.
He persists through all difficulties to see the company’s vision go out the door embedded in those products and harnesses the R&D resources to execute.
An example of a great CTO
One of the people I look up to is Steve Trundle. Steve was the original CTO of Microstrategy, from ‘92 to ‘01. Steve then went on to become the CEO of Alarm.com, where he is doing an outstanding job of growing the business. While at Microstrategy, Steve managed some of the most significant milestones for the business. Within the organization, he is widely credited with being a leader of technical people, and for setting the foundation for Microstrategy’s multi-decade technical dominance of the Business Intelligence industry. He didn’t do it by coding, or by doing great demos, but by aligning people with goals and removing obstacles for them to solve long term challenges. In other words, plain old execution. The fact that he so successfully transitioned to a CEO role is an indicator of how he understood the importance of creating value.
Cream of the crop posts on the job of CTOs:
- Eric Ries proposes 5 key contributions of CTOs: 1) platform selection and technical design, 2) macro and micro picture at the same time, 3) generating options, 4) finding the 80% of user value that can be built for 20% of the cost and 5) growing technical leaders
- Ben Brinckerhoff has some draft notes and he draws good distinctions between a CTO, a VP of Engineering and a Chief Architect.
- Tom Berray proposes 4 stereotypical roles for CTOs in a well written white paper.
The 4 stereotypes of CTO at large organizations
- The CTO to CEO transition stresses the central tenet of this post, that a CTO needs to focus on applying technology to the generation of revenue.
CTOs are not…
- CIOs. CTOs produce technology, CIOs consume technology. CIOs make the company productive and keep its data safe. More on CTOs vs CIOs.
- VPs of Engineering. VPoEs focus less on strategy and more on execution. “They are process / management gods (and goddesses) – totally focused on building and shipping products. Most of them are “medium technical” – strong enough to stand up to the engineers they manage, but not necessarily the best coders on the team.” says Brad Feld
Mid Atlantic entrepreneurs unite!
Washington-Baltimore is the same size as Silicon Valley
I find it ironic that Washington and Baltimore are seen as two completely different tech scenes while Silicon Valley is one tight construct, when in fact Balt-Wash is about the same size.
SEO 101
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s the process by which you learn to make a website that is highly compelling to your prospective visitors; one that can be easily found via search engines. That is different from a pretty website.
I just finished reading the excellent introductory SEO manual Quiero que mi empresa salga en Google, written by Sico de Andres. Since there are low chances that it will be republished in English, here is my summary of the things I learnt. I think this knowledge would be very useful to anybody who isn’t a marketing specialist, either in guiding their efforts, or in having an intelligent conversation with an SEO marketer. I highly recommend the book. It’s very practical, well written, and comes from somebody with years of experience. The one criticism I would point is that it could offer more statistics. I found the links section at the end an excellent research tool for further study.
The golden rule of SEO appears to be: write exceedingly interesting content. The rest will come. That is your biggest lever.
User behaviors when it comes to search
- Roughly two thirds of web users only click on the first few links or within the first search results page, as per this iProspect study (PDF) Full study PDF.
- Eye tracking studies show there’s a golden triangle delimited by the first and fifth Google search results which is where the bulk of eyeballs stay
- As time goes by, users are getting more conditioned to “reformulate and narrow down” rather than page through search results as a more successful search heuristic.
- The typical search query is composed of 2 to 5 words
- While Google has incredible penetration in most countries, in some countries such as Japan, China or Russia, others are the search leader. (e.g: Yahoo Japan, Baidu and Yandex respectively)
Website basics
- This may seem obvious, but if a search bot can’t see your pages they won’t appear on that engine’s results. To find out what part of your website is being indexed you can Google: “site:www.yourdomain.com” and count the pages. If you haven’t done so already, submitting your site to Google, Bing and Yahoo webmaster sites will give you ways to track some useful stats.
- A search engine bot sees your website very differently. Try SEO Browser to get a taste. Or google: “cache:www.yourdomain.com” and then click on “Text only version”
- Navigation: a) don’t use frames of any kind, b) don’t make javascript menus, use CSS instead, c) stick to very simple nav.
- Wait times: if the page doesn’t load under 2 seconds you will lose users. Check load times at Pingdom.
- Flash: if you’re going to use it, make sure it is under a correctly formed web page. Use sparely.
- Robots.txt: this file, which should be findable under the root of your website, provides a search map to the bots about what you would like them to index. Find out more at Robotstxt.org
Keyword catalog — a set of search terms you need to keep
It’s a good idea to maintain a spreadsheet of search phrases that your customers would use to get to your website.
- Brainstorm initial list. Do some research with your customers and prospects. The goal is to brainstorm the first 2-4 words that come to their mind when they want to find about your product or service.
- Then, expand your list with a keyword suggest tool
- Consider misspelling the search terms
- Add your brands and trademark
- Rank your keywords taking into account popularity, competition, conversion effectiveness and relevance to your content.
- Popularity refers to how frequently search engine users enter that keyword in the search engine. You can get an approximation using the Google Keyword Suggest tool and trends with Google Search Insights.
- Competition refers to how many results a search phrase produces. The less results the easier it will be for your content to stand out.
- Conversion effectiveness is a measure of how good a predictor of conversion from visitor into customer a given search phrase is. KEI or Keyword Effectiveness Index. KEI = (search volume)^2 / competition . Generally speaking you’re going to get high KEI on highly specific search terms with a low search volume.
The SEO spreadsheet. – the key instrument in organizing your efforts
Put together a table. In each row you list one document from your website. For each document, track:
- A target search phrase as its primary optimization objective.
- The page title. This is the #1 optimization opportunity. Make it short, highly descriptive of the content, attractive to the user, truthful, unique within your site, and must include your target search terms.
- The description. This goes under the <meta name=”description”… tag in the HTML <head> section. Pack originality within 165 characters and make it stand out from what the other descriptions state in Google.
With this information, you have a lot of the internal optimization covered. The other page stuff:
- The body of the text. Be natural. Try to keep keyword density between 3 and 5%. Practice good SEO copywriting.
- About formatting: one <h1> per page. Go easy on bold. Use <h2> to split your paragraphs. You’re going for high HTML Code to text ratio.
- Make sure there is only one copy of the content on your site. If there are more than one (e.g. multiple domains pointing to the same content), use <link rel=”canonical”.
- Use friendly URLs
Off-page optimization
- PageRank is how important Google thinks your content is. A measure of the importance adscribed to the content by measuring the importance of the content linking to it. The PageRank of a page = (1 – 0.85) + the sum of all the transmitted PageRanks of the links pointing to the page. Transmitted PageRank = .85 * PageRank of page / number of links.
- PageRank is a logarithmic scale. Obtaining a PageRank of 3 is relatively easy. It takes effort to get to 4. Months to get to 5, and you may never get to 6.
- PageRank sculpting is the process of carefully deciding how to transmit PageRank within your site.
- Link Building is the process of getting others to link to your content. The best approach to accomplish this is to be an outwardly social organization engaged in conversations with its constituencies. The wrong way is to buy links.
SEO and social media
- Make a Facebook page for your business. Better still, make a Facebook application.
- Make a corporate blog
- Do some twittering
- Make interesting, non-gimmicky videos about your product, how to use it, and research about your areas of expertise.
Measuring on an ongoing basis — some key metrics to track on your SEO spreadsheet
- Saturation – % of your documents appearing in searches
- Popularity of incoming links to your site
- Pagerank of each page
- Position in search results of each page
- Unique visitors to each page
- Pages viewed per visit
- Bounce rate — people who leave your site from the page they entered
- Main entry points
- Main exit points
- Sources of traffic
Further reading
Feature requests from Sales
Found via the Productmarketing.com
A simple Mac backup strategy
Vault by mbrand @ flickr
They say there are only two kinds of people: those who have lost data and those who are about to. I find that a lot of very sophisticated people in software are in the second category. I am in the first. I thought I’d share my very simple Mac-based backup strategy that I’ve been using for a while. It would be a great new year’s resolution to follow. It follows two important principles:
- It’s incremental. If you only have time for one thing do item 1. More time, do item 2, etc.
- It’s automatic. You don’t have to do anything for it to work. Maybe a sanity check every once in a while
I have to say that this strategy is optimized for people with more money than time. You can find much cheaper ways out there, if you value your time really low.
So here it goes:
- Sign up and configure a general purpose online backup service: I use Mozy, but they abound. Don’t waste too much time, though. Mozy costs $50/yr, works well on Mac (despite some higher CPU craziness every once in a while), and most importantly, there is a huge company behind it, EMC. I trust that my data won’t be lost or stolen. In my setup, I use Mozy to backup documents, mostly. Under my Home/Documents/ directory there is a n “Archive” and “Archive NOT” folder, and anything that is under “Archive” is in Mozy. The implicit contract is that if it is under Archive, it is safe, otherwise, it’s not.
- Buy an external Firewire drive and set up SuperDuper: This little Mac gem makes it a breeze to clone your computer’s hard drive. An exact mirror. You use a Firewire connected-drive because it’s the simplest way to get back on track. If your laptop drive fails, you simply hold the ALT key, then select your external drive. If you no longer have your laptop (e.g: you left it on a plane), you get a new laptop and boot in Firewire Target disk mode. In this second case, you would probably worry as much about who has your data now and the answer to that problem is FileVault, but I don’t recommend messing with it unless you’re ready for complexity at recovery time.
- Set up Time Machine. Time Machine is great for recovering versions of documents, and for managing complex files, such as the iTunes and iPhoto libraries. For me, the key to a simple Time Machine set up is to exclude a ton of useless directories from it and focus on the documents you will want to recover. In addition, I recommend backing up with Time Machine over wi-fi. This makes it super-easy for Time Machine to do its best work of having very recent versions of your documents. I like Time Capsule and Drobo with Drobosharefor this very reason.
- Create custom backup strategies for specific types of data. I use Soocial and Google Contacts for contact syncing, a plain-old network share and some Chronosync jobs for copying iPhoto and iTunes libraries.
One final observation: there is a perillous time in the life of a new document, before you save it for the first time. I have lost more documents in this manner than in any other way. The best advice I can offer about this is to a) avoid bad document editors such as an HTML form, or an outdated blog editor such as Ecto, and b) stick to quality editors that will save your work as you progress, such as TextMate
From elsewhere
- The 6 Day Week by Carlos Varsavsky
- Great products are triumphs of taste
- Misstatements during contract talks might cost EDS an extra $270 million
- Who will save us?
- Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person's mistake
- "The engineers and I handle customer support. When I tell people that, they look at me like I’m..."
- There are always more than two options
- Time for Device Independent Data Plans
- Expect Rapid Evolution of the Branded Support Community
- "Ultra-light" Entrepreneur Toolkit
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