Gain real-world ideas for markedly improved productivity from an industry expert and passionate speaker who always inspires SXSW audiences.
*DIIA’s Amy Miller took lovely photos of this presentation, which you can see here. Might help make more sense of the post below to see the graphics.
Where do you want to be? Or your product, idea, business. You > (wall) > goal.
Ways to get through the many milestones. Incremental vs. breakthrough. Breakthroughs are necessary to break through the wall.
Incremental doesn’t always work. Incremental = arms race. Marketing, Whuffie, Viral arms race.
You can’t get there from here. Breakthoughs: *ideas, *performance. Your USERS need breakthroughs. 15 different ways to make breakthroughs.
How to be an expert: Ability x time. Move from the Suck Threshold to the Kicking Ass Threshold. WOM (word of mouth) vs. WOO (word of obvious). Being better is better than saying you’re better. Are your users stuck in “P” mode? Can’t get better photos if you’re in “P” mode. Anyone can compete. Don’t necessarily have to change your product, just need to help your users make the breakthrough.
How to know someone: 1) iPod playlist and..
Flight vs. Invisibility–which superpower would you choose? Pick one. Defend your choice to the person next to you who made the other choice. Ask: what superpower do we give our users? What do you provide for them as a superpower. Picture it on the suit. “Photoshop Channels Guy.” Feels like a superpower when you realize what it can do. You get a big jump in capability. Some companies frame themselves through superpowers, whether they can deliver it or not.
“Twitter Man.” Sierra is a Twitter convert. Twitter is a superpower. “because it’s good for you…” boring! “Productivity Man.” If productivity is the broccoli, what’s the chocolate?
2. Superset Game–what are the bigger things you and your competitor are a part of? Force yourself to think there’s something bigger. Sometimes it’s more interesting. Or you can ask yourself “what COOLER thing” do I have or do I want to look at? You can promote the same product, just in a cooler way. The worst thing to blog about is your own company.
“Outlyers” book says it takes 10,000 hours to make anything good. 2 ways to shrink the 10K hours? Learn the patterns, shorten the duration. In some cases there are actual shortcuts. Think about ways to use the patterns.
3. Deliberate practice. Kicking ass in <1,000 hours if you do specific practice. After 1-2 years, experience is a poor predictor of performance/expertise. Tiger Woods pop quiz: how much practice time on his strengths vs. weaknesses? 80% practice his strengths. Offer exercises, games, contests, tutorials that support deliberate practice of the Right Things. Everyone expects musicians to go into practice rooms and practice by themselves. Noone expects coders to do that–they call it “beta” or “alpha.” Assumptions need a “sell by” date. Google results could be outdated. Find out what’s gone bad and get it out.
4. Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard. Make it easier for users to have a breakthrough than to stay where they are. Treadmill gathering cobwebs in the corner? It’s not in the corner because you don’t use it, you don’t use it because it’s in the corner. Take all the chairs out of your media room, throw in some exercise balls. They’ll start exercising.
5. Get better gear (and offer it). Sometimes expensive equipment is more effective because it does the job better. Bought an expensive saddle, performance went way up. You want larger monitors. You think: you will be a god-like hacker. The problem is that your boss/sponsor will think it’s just a way of playing more games. Reality: you’ll see more pixels, can do your job better.
6. Ignore ???
7. Total Immersion Jams. Think about what it would be like 16 hours over 2 days vs. 16 hours over 2 months. Ad Lib Game Development Society. A group of developers working for huge companies. Would get together for the weekend and build games. Goal was not to be good, but to get things done. “The surest way to guarantee nothing interesting happens is to assume you know exactly how to do it.” Less *Camp, More *Jam.
8. Change your perspective. Don’t make a better x, make a better user of x. A better book could be more content, denser, more complicated. You haven’t helped the user, you’re only helping yourself. Who are your user’s allies and mentors? You tech support? Your company is to your user as [blank] is to Frodo. Exercise: What movie are your users in? What movie do they WANT to be in? If you can figure it out, you have a business plan. Software: theme song.
If you want to make incremental improvements, ask your users. If you want to make breakthroughs, do this stuff. Listening to users: what they say they want vs. what they really want. Don’t ask your users if you’re trying to make a breakthrough. Featuritis curve. Breakthrough: ask OTHER people’s users.
12. Be brave. Death by risk aversion. Ease of use police step in, we give them something that’s not good at all. Don’t shy away from things that are different and challenging.
13. Rethink Deadness. Henry Ford: If I’d asked my users what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. The assumption is that faster horses = more money. Reexamine things you’ve sent to the dead pool. Horses were declared outdated. Now they’re a $40 billion industry. Look at things people consider dead or obsolete, look for new ways to make them fascinating or unique.
14. Change the EQ (equalizer). Incremental: move the sliders. Breakthrough: add sliders that fit that product. Equalize for your product. Combined sliders from one domain to retail store, come up with new initiatives. “Sierra Sliders” can add what you want to the lables, move the sliders, take screen shot. Gary Vaynerchuk “Wine TV.” He talked about wine from the heart, which noone else in the business is doing. Look at someone who has had a breakthrough and figure out what the labels are on the sliders.
15. Don’t mistake narrow for shallow. lolcats+translation: 52000 Google hits. If user A can out[whatever] user B, do it. Passive/Aggressive Notes. Send in photos of their statements.
16. Be amazed. Even in tough times. Everything’s amazing now, and noone is happy. Who’s awesome? You’re awesome!
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