Michael Rill – Page 5 – Einfach machen

Collaborative Fund: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

October 15, 2020

by Michael

Asides

Lots of wisdom in this post on the Collaborative Fund blog (which seems like an excellent collection of interesting posts).

The post focuses on two core tenants:

1. It is impossible to feel wealthy if your expectations grow faster than your income.
2. Few things fuel denial and ignorance like luck, randomness, and change.

Each is backed up by fun facts and anecdotes like this one about Stephen Hawking:

In 2004 the New York Times interviewed Stephen Hawking, the late scientist whose incurable motor-neuron disease left him paralyzed and unable to talk since age 21.
“Are you always this cheerful?” the Times asked.
“My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21,” Hawking said. “Everything since then has been a bonus,” he replied.
A useful financial skill, too.
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/obvious-things/

The whole thing is well worth a read: Obvious Things That Are Easy To Ignore

As always, the important question is: What does it mean for you and what will you change?

The dogs won’t eat it – Choosing OKRs well

October 4, 2020

by Michael

Leadership

The concept of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) is deceptively easy.

Objectives are ambitious, qualitative and time bound goals of a team. Each objective is typically supported by ~3-4 key results.
Key Results are measurable achievements that contribute to those goals. They are business outcomes and typically expressed in terms of adoption, engagement, cost, performance or quality.

An OKR describes both what a team wants to achieve and how it is going to measure its achievement. “We will achieve $Objective as measured by $KeyResult1, $KeyResult2 and $KeyResult3.”

At the same time, coming up with good OKRs is hard. One has to identify the few key metrics that really matter and to commit on outcomes (e.g. growth) rather than output (e.g. launching a new feature). That requires judgement, uncomfortable leaps of faith and a willingness to experiment.

Jeffrey Zeldman tells a great anecdote in the context of Marketing that illustrates what happens if you choose your Key Results badly: The dogs won’t eat it.

Hard to discover tips for macOS

September 9, 2020

by Michael

Asides / Tips and Tricks

These days I spend little time on macOS, but I’m still a sucker for tips on how to use it better. Tristan Hume collected quite a few of them:

Inspired by a few different conversations with friends who’ve switched to macOS where I give them a whole bunch of tips and recommendations I’ve learned about over many years which are super important to how I use my computer, but often quite hard to find out about, I decided to write them all down:
Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant

The list features one of my favorite macOS features: “You can drag the little file/folder icons at the top of many windows.” Might sound unimpressive, but it is one of those things that I dearly miss in Windows. Have a look:

Momentum from Day One – Getting Onboarding Right

September 3, 2020

by Michael

Leadership

Creating a good onboarding experience as a manager is tricky at the best of times. It’s even harder when you are forced to work from home against the backdrop of a global health crisis. It is harder to recognize the challenges of new hires and it’s harder for them to ramp up and integrate in the absence of ambient hallway chatter.

At the same time, it is possible and achievable. Looking back at my own onboarding journeys, I’ve learned a lot from the good, the bad and the ugly. Most learnings are transferable into distributed settings.

Let’s look at the bad ones first. Once, my new boss told me in our first meeting that he’s moving teams – I just relocated to the other side of the globe to work with him. That was also the job where I did not have a computer or a phone for the first week – particularly funny as I worked for a telco and had to read printed PowerPoint decks for the first week. Another time, I was put into “stealth mode” … without ever re-emerging. Or that time when I did not have a project to work on for the first two months – it was called “being on the beach” and it drove me up the walls.

But there were also the great experiences. When my new boss walked me through everything by himself – not just giving me the opportunity to ask questions, but guiding me through what he considered important. Or when I arrived at a desk with a brand-new machine including access to all relevant systems. Or the onboarding buddy, who took it as a matter of personal pride to make sure that I had a great start.

First impressions matter. Starting on the right foot and getting momentum is a great confidence booster for every new starter. At the same time, without guidance, new hires have to work twice as hard to learn what they need to be productive. When working from home, it takes a more deliberate effort to give new hires the necessary experiences and exposure for a solid start. Always remember that it is a bigger deal for them than it is for you. They will remember it, one way or another. Your job is to make sure those will be good memories.

Below are a few ideas that I collected over the years.

Nike ad: You Can’t Stop Us

August 8, 2020

by Michael

Asides

We are finally watching The Last Dance. In the nineties, while it was impressive to watch Michael Jordan from Germany and New Zealand, it must have been amazing being immersed in the frenzy up close in the US.

Nike’s brand machinery was a big part. I was surprised to learn that it only kicked into gear with Michael Jordan. Good to see that they still got it:

The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

August 6, 2020

by Michael

Asides

What seemed like a goofy post turned out informative. I learned a lot about principles of interface design, in particular about differentiating and organizing interfaces.

What could cause 400 WWII pilots to raise the landing gear on their B-17 bomber just before touchdown? Catastrophic pilot error, or something more fundamental?
It was the psychologist Alphonsis Chapanis who first suggested that the high rate of crash landings might be the fault of poor interface design. The adjacent landing gear and flap control knobs were identically shaped. The pilots never stood a chance.
His temporary solution was to glue differently shaped strips of rubber to each switch, enabling blind operation by touch alone. This gave rise to the idea of shape coding and a system of differentiation still being followed in aircraft cockpits today.
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels

The Curse of Knowledge

May 28, 2020

by Michael

Asides

Matthias Ott with a great story that starts with him trying to guess songs that his kid claps (spoiler: it’s a losing proposition).

When you have an advance in knowledge over someone else, it can be difficult to recognize this gap and act accordingly. This phenomenon – that we falsely assume that others have the background to understand – is called the curse of knowledge.
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that can be observed whenever people want to convey information. The readers of your article, the students in your class, the participants of your workshop, the listeners of your podcast, the people at your next meetup, the clients in your conference call, the users of your interface – they all don’t know what you know and are therefore missing context. Always. And while you are confidently talking and explaining like a pro, people actually don’t understand you as well as you would hope.
The Curse of Knowledge · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

Even if you know your audience intimately, each conversation should start with setting context. This can take many forms, but it is necessary to establish a foundation from which you make your point. If you don’t start from a shared understanding everything else will be an unnecessarily hard attempt to be understood.

Software is eating conferences – Microsoft Build and the digital transformation of conferences

May 27, 2020

by Michael

Software

May is traditionally the month where the big tech companies host their developer conferences. Google, Facebook and Microsoft all have their gatherings with Apple quickly following in June. When COVID hit, many in the tech scene wondered what would happen to conferences. The traditional format brought thousands of people together in one space to mingle and exchange ideas in close proximity. That no longer works in a COVID world.

All the big tech companies responded differently. Facebook and Google decided to wait this year out and canceled F8 and I/O respectively. Microsoft and Apple decided to go ahead and take Build and WWDC online this year.

Impressions from Microsoft’s Build

Microsoft was the first to come out of the gate last week. Their Build conference heavily leans towards developers. It’s typically held in Seattle with around 7,000 attendees, big rooms, expo floor and lots of space for the community to meet. Within the last eight weeks, this huge event was re-imagined for the virtual space. And it has been an innovative interpretation of an all-online conference: a 48-hour non-stop event with presenters from all four corners of the world. Yes, here and there minor seams were showing, but Microsoft was pushing the envelope and for a 1.0 this was very stable.

Less is more … difficult – writing summaries

May 17, 2020

by Michael

Leadership

Writing is hard and writing a summary is no exception. If you are working on proposals, general research or strategies, at some point you have to summarize your idea. As Pascal once said “I have made this longer than usual because I have not had time to make it shorter.” A summary takes time to get right.

The investment does pay off as it makes your work easier to digest, improves structure and highlights your very best insights. It’s not uncommon that only the summary gets read. That’s actually a good thing. But it raises the stakes to get the summary right and you still need to put in the work – your summary will only be as good as the underlying work. But there are a few tips and tricks that helped me in the past.

In defense of email

May 13, 2020

by Michael

Software

Unpopular opinion: I like email.

I remember distinctly when I got my very first email address. It was a mid-nineties summer in Germany and I finally got my hands on a modem. That was a big deal, as it required me sending a cashier’s check via mail to a business that I didn’t know, wait for seven or eight weeks with no status update to receive a no-name modem with at best spotty documentation. After dabbling in local BBSes and QWK readers, I signed up for a BBS that was connected to Fidonet which meant that my online community was no longer restricted to the local area code. Fidonet provided access to a global network of nodes that replicated messages with each other via dial up. Because of dial up messages were replicated between nodes only a few times per day. Therefore it could take days for messages to travel from sender to recipient, but this was a global network.

Part of that deal was an email address. Admittedly, one that took days to deliver, but one that allowed me to communicate with people on the other side of the world without long distance calls. That left an immense impression on me and I remember going outside to tell the great news to my father who was working in the garden. After all it was summer. I told him about how it was all connected and that I could send emails to people in places like America. He just looked at me, baffled, and just commented that I didn’t know anybody in the US. He was right, but that didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that my English was broken or that my email address was a lengthy and random assortment or letters and numbers. What mattered was the possibility.