Agile Marketing #9 – It’s your job to make yourself better

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/jakeandlindsay/

This is the 9th in a series of posts on Agile Marketing – the working definition of which is to “Create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing consumer (or business) in an always-changing market with an always-changing product.” (see the original post here.) Another tenet of your Agile Marketing strategy should be you – how are you making yourself or your team better, so that you are changing along with the conditions and market around you?

Principle 9: It’s your Job – be good at it.

The best measurement or yardstick of your success is going to be your own assessment of progress against your own goals (so, you should have some goals.) These might not be the traditional goals of money, promotion, things, or success – they might be moments in time that you can identify that will consistently make you happier – and the rest of the world might not know when you achieve them. Living well is your job, so get better at it.

Here are a few ways to measure how you are making yourself better:

• Identify individual moments of excellence that you can prototype today, solidify tomorrow, and cement through practice and process.
• If external validation is important to you, observe what sorts of behaviors get external validation, and practice those behaviors
• Don’t be too hard on yourself – failure is a sign that you are calibrating your goals high enough so that you don’t meet them constantly

Everyone’s had that “a-ha” moment – you might experience it in the doing, when you experience a state of flow or a runner’s high – or realize it afterwards, when you solve a problem that’s important to you. These individual moments of excellence might be big (running a marathon, completing a big deal, or understanding a difficult concept) or small (realization that you can take the afternoon off, eating pie for breakfast, or instantly nailing a problem on the first try.) If you catch yourself doing something right, make sure to recognize that event as a prototype, and think of ways that you can repeat it and solidify that feeling or action.

Give yourself bonus points if you can determine a way to practice that feeling and develop a process around it. Your practice and process might only enable you to set up a condition where the success might occur again (think going to the batting cage to practice your swing so that the next time you see a curve ball in a game you’ll really be able to pull it down the line) or might be the exact copy of your success (remembering to stretch each morning so that your muscles don’t get sore.)

The things that make you better might not be the things the rest of the world cares about or for which it offers external validation. So if it’s important to be recognized by the outside world (where you measure that in money, fame, awareness, or generalized success) go watch successful people and see how they behave (or how they portray their behaviors in the media. There are many ways to learn about successful people online and to examine the things that they write and the way that they interact with their public through social media. Just like professional ballplayers don’t hit a curve ball overnight, many successful people that you meet are the product of years or decades of learned or intended behavior. So the tiny habits they start today are likely to be the trends tomorrow (or months or years from now.)

And, don’t be too hard on yourself. Failing is a sign that you are setting your goals high enough so that the success can be meaningful and not just the result of showing up. Yet, paradoxically, the just showing up is a necessary and not sufficient component for success. It’s your responsibility to make yourself and your team better, and you should be working at that every day.

 

One Step Forward

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/kirtaph

It’s easy to think that the next thing you’re doing might not be the right thing. It could be the wrong thing. It could be a sideways thing. But taking a step forward gets you somewhere.

One step forward gives you the ability to look back and see if your assumptions were wrong.

One step forward gives you a bit of new perspective.

One step forward allows you to go before you are ready.

One step forward demonstrates who will follow you.

One step forward promotes leadership, even if it’s in the wrong direction.

One step forward removes the possibility that you will do nothing.

One step forward might mean you’re about to take two steps back.

One step forward opens the ability to do a new thing. A really new thing.

So what are you waiting for? Take one step forward.

 

When you can listen to any music, how do you choose?

I’m listening to Spotify today (Head and the Heart, if you’re wondering), and I realized that the explosion of music choices (in a day, I might listen to Pandora, Turntable, Grooveshark, KEXP Radio here in Seattle, or any one of a number of sources of music) hasn’t made it much easier to pick what I’d like to listen to at the time I’d like to listen to it.

True – the recommendations of friends and the ability to pick almost any song or album at any moment has given us an almost infinite ability to listen. And it has also given us an almost infinite menu of choices. I’m late to the party on this one, and I’m really enjoying the combination of Spotify when combined with Last.fm to curate music I might like based on my choices. It leads me to believe that the next step in app development and service development overall is the shift from mass customization to real personalization based on behavior.

Why should we care? Because too much choice can be paralyzing and prevent you from acting. Barry Schwartz is a psychologist who studies the effect of choice – here’s his TED talk on the effects of too much choice on our overall happiness.

 

People Engage with Applications, Not Users

Seth Godin asks a wonderful question: “Do you have a people strategy?” It’s a quick read dedicated to reminding us that people, not users, engage with applications and services to make their lives better. If you can make people’s lives better with your application or service, they’ll come back. If you create a new need where there was no perceived need before, you might have created a billion dollar opportunity.

So why is it that so many of our product cycles are devoted to “users” who can learn new “features” that will allow them to “achieve their goals” instead of understanding better what people need by listening to them?

Every Designer’s Fear of the Customer

When you talk to a really good designer, one of their great fears is that a simple, elegant design might be ruined by incessant demands from customers who want lots of capabilities that they will never use (and in fact, don’t really need.) A good example is this concept video by designer Philip Pauley of his “helicopter-boat-plane”: it sounds cool, but the market demand seems to be … underdeveloped as of yet.

Even if the customer is not always right …

Customers (or prospective customers) give you valuable signals when they ask you for things that they want. I agree with the idea that the customer is not always right, but they always feel that they are right. So the more of their helicopter boat plane ideas that you can build (quickly, without a lot of extra frills), the more you will be able to test to see if the idea of one customer actually fosters a habit that other customers might follow.

You can get closer to the customer’s actual (or perceived) need by asking them for only one change: “If you could choose anything to change about this product to make it better for you to use more often, what’s the one thing you would pick to change?”

Gain credibility by delivering some of the things they ask for.

As a team, if you make a list of these “one thing items,” periodically deliver some of them, and highlight the customer who asked you for this change, you will win brand advocates, customer evangelists, and generally understand who your “hero users” are. This will not necessarily translate into market success or market validation. But it will give you much more room and capability to try to build an everyday product that real people use, instead of crafting an application that is utilized by users.

 

Standing Desk: Two Weeks Later

standing desk

I’ve been standing at my desk now for two weeks. I wanted to provide an update on my original post about using a standing desk for a couple of different reasons:

• the overall response has been overwhelming – I know the old adage about “when the only tool you have is a hammer, all you see is nails” but I do believe that both the interest in and information about standing desks is really gaining momentum – and more of my friends are using one and commenting about it
• there is new research suggesting that the more hours you sit, the higher the likelihood you will die prematurely
• I think (anecdotally) that standing makes me more effective, gives me more energy overall, and makes me more effective

It turns out lots of people use standing desks

The most amazing thing about the last two weeks has been the process of finding out how many people I know are either using or considering the use of a standing desk. These people have made the choice for a variety of reasons – many, to resolve back issues – and the constant theme among their comments is that they feel better, get more work done, and that it has been a habit that they’ve been able to maintain.

The discussion spanned people from all walks of life. I thought that this was mostly a trend for geeks, and found that it’s much wider than that.

The other interesting observation about the people who use standing desks is that they are among the most productive and successful people that I know. I don’t think there is a correlation here yet – but it’s still interesting – and worth more thought in the future.

The media is starting to pay attention

For the average person, the standing desk probably seems like a weird fad that will fade. But the media is starting to pay attention to the possibilities raised by the long-term effects of sedentary behavior. So what? It means that whatever you can do to reduce the amount of time sitting is good – either taking a brisk walk once a day, making sure that you do your household activities in a burst of activity so that you are standing for a longer period of time. Note: there is definitely a segment of the population that can’t exercise this way – and it would seem that other low-impact activities like swimming might be a great substitute.

It still feels great to stand

I was really tired the first week of using the standing desk. I’m doing better now, and still feeling the same benefits of being intentional, feeling focused, and getting good amounts of work done. I look forward to seeing how I feel after a few months of this activity, and whether anything else has changed.