The Distributed Team Test

A distributed team is one that’s spread across geographical boundaries and time zones. The key difference? Most people will be based in different cities and don’t often physically work together.

If you’re not sure if you fit into the category of distributed or remote, take this quick test:

The Difference Between Remote and Distributed Teams

To be clear, the trend that’s currently being set in the startup world is around distributed teams. That’s because being distributed helps teams to:

• Utilize global talent
• Cover multiple time zones
• Communicate effectively
• Increase software quality

Hubstaff’s Distributed Team

On the other hand, remote teams operate much like co-located teams. Most of the members in a remote team meet up at the ‘office’ on a regular basis. However, some (or all) team members can work from home for part (or all) of the working week.

Being an effective Distributed Team

With technology, it’s only becoming easier to be an effective distributed team. To get your team there, you can employ:

1. Communication tools (& asynchronous comms, e.g. Slack, Hangouts, Skype)
2. Effective email (short and to the point, e.g. Gmail)
3. Mastery of time zones (e.g. Homeslice)
4. A focus on ‘why’ (e.g. jobs-to-be-done and job stories)
5. Regular retreats (e.g. Buffer’s retreats)

Examples of awesome Distributed teams

These companies are already effective distributed teams:

• Automattic
• Buffer
• Zapier
• Groove
• Baremetrics
• InVision
• Help Scout

Buffer Team Retreat

We can all learn how to be more efficient in our own teams by looking at how distributed teams work. These teams use asynchronous communication and their dispersed time zones as  a competitive advantage.

Is your startup a distributed team? We’d love to know how you run yours!

The post The Difference Between Remote and Distributed Teams in Startups appeared first on Blossom.

1. Autonomy → Increases Productivity

In a remote team, you simply don’t have an option to micro-manage your team.

Why? Because you almost certainly won’t be in the same time zone as every person and, even if you are, you probably won’t be in the same room.

But, more important than not being able to micro-manage, is realizing you shouldn’t.

Enable and empower your team to work towards their goals as well as your company’s goals, by using autonomous systems like:

• OKRs (e.g. Google)
• Holacracy (e.g. Zappos)
• Natural hierarchy (e.g. Buffer)

You’ll find more work gets done and your team members are more happy. It’s win-win.

“77% of workers say remote working boosts productivity” — Remote Worker Survey by ConnectSolutions

2. Asynchronous Communication → Company in Sync

Why asynchronous communication? Transparency and flexibility (plus Github think it’s awesome!).

A unique challenge of being in a remote team is that face-to-face conversations aren’t as easy to have. This is because you have time zones and work environments that get in the way (e.g. coffee shop chatter).

But…

This ‘challenge’ naturally drives teams towards communicating asynchronously and, when executed properly, can lead to an overall higher quality in team communication.

Take for example, integrating an instant messaging tool with your project management tool (e.g. Slack and Blossom). Every update on your project board can be sent straight through to your instant messaging tool, so no matter what time zone you’re in, you can see what everyone is up to.

3. Identify Bottlenecks → Visualize Work

• If a task is blocked, how do you fix the dependency? Write down the blocker and stamp the card on a kanban board.
• If a task took too long to complete, how do you know what held it up? See what stage in your workflow held it up with a time-in-process chart and cycle time.

Visualizing work helps teams identify bottlenecks. The great thing about remote teams is that they need to use a tool to manage their work. And most modern project management tools provide useful insights like the ones mentioned above above.

It just makes sense.

4. Global Talent → Timezone Coverage and Skill-sets

Unless you’re in an industry specific hub, like San Francisco for tech, the best talent is probably not at your doorstep, or even in your country.

The ubiquity of technology and the scalability of startups makes it possible to hire globally and for people to work from anywhere. This result of this is two-fold:

1. You can find the best people for your company by leveraging a global workforce.
2. You’re running a 24/7 company in terms of your global team’s time zone coverage.

5. Manageable Code → Source Code Management tools

Imagine your product development stopped because a specific team member was away for the day. Not too great, is it? Let’s multiply this ten-fold by adding geographical barriers. Eep…

Remote teams use agile software processes such as continuous integration and continuous delivery to ensure code can be tested and deployed to customers, automatically. To boot, this shift the power of testing and delivery to developers. And the glue that holds this all together is source code management. That’s because it makes an otherwise messy process, quite simple.

Let’s look at an example process.

• You have a team of 4 developers, each living in a different country and working in different timezones.
• Once a continuous integration and delivery process is set up, it’s just a matter of checking out code from the source code repository (using a tool like Github), developing code, checking it back in, and running a deployment script if the build was successful to ship it to customers.
• It doesn’t matter who does it, when they do it, and it takes no time at all.

This enables teams to ship software to their customers multiple times a day, wow!

As you can see, a well formed remote team can perform better than most co-located teams out there. And not only that, your software quality will benefit from it.

The post 5 Ways Remote Teams Increase Software Quality appeared first on Blossom.

You can take a look at the incredible lineup of speakers that were at the conference here.

Culture wins every time

Chamath Palihapitiya kickstarted the day by sharing his personal lessons learned from leading Facebook’s Growth Team. An interesting point he emphasized early on was that culture trumps everything else.

“Culture wins every time. What you value is what you will achieve.” @chamath #ghconf #startup

— Hiten Shah (@hnshah) October 26, 2012

Chamath was very careful about picking the right people for his team. My personal highlight of his session was when he shared the checklist of values that he is looking for when hiring people.

• Very high IQ
• Strong sense of purpose
• Relentless focus on success
• Aggressive and competitive
• High quality bar bordering on perfectionism
• Likes changing and disrupting things
• New ideas on how to do things better
• High integrity
• Surrounds themselves with good people
• Cares about building real value over perception

Establish a dead-simple Framework

To make it easier for everyone to understand what to focus on and why it matters Facebook’s Growth Team started out by establishing a very simple framework of things to measure and improve on.

• Acquisition – Get people in front of your product …
• Activation – Provide a great initial experience …
• Engagement – Keep people engaged, deliver value …
• (Virality) – Get people to recommend your product …

This reminded me a lot of Dave McClure’s Metrics for Pirates and it was no surprise to learn that ebay was using a similar framework for measuring product engagement as well.

I think the key message here is to boil the abstract concept of “working on growth” down to a few simple concepts that everyone understands. That way it is much easier to align efforts, decide on trade-offs and to understand what you are actually doing.

That said, Chamath made it very clear to not waste time on virality. It actually never was a major topic at Facebook’s Growth Team. Virality will happen as a by-product if you make progress on acquisition, activation and engagement.

Initial User Experience is Key, front-load Aha! Moments

Another pattern at the conference was the importance of great initial user experience. Similar to meeting new people the first impression people get about your product is key.

Hiten Shah of KISSmetrics shared that it payed off for them to provide three different optimized onboarding flows for their analytics product: Fast, advanced and “talk to us”. Spend time to think about the first thing you show new customers. It is worth it.

Sean Ellis of Qualaroo recommended to identify the must-have experience of your product and to look for ways to front-load that experience. The sooner your customers experience the value of your product the better.

Surveys and other qualitative methods like customer development can help you to identify what that means for your product. Sean recommended survey questions like the following.

• What would you do if you could no longer use this product
• What was the primary benefit you received by using this product
• Would you recommend this product to someone else? Why?

Resurrecting lost Users is hard

ChenLi Wang of Dropbox shared an interesting lesson about re-activating users.

It is very hard to resurrect people that you’ve already lost without coming across as being pushy. But if done right emails, notifications and app store updates can do wonders for getting people back into your product.

ChenLi recommended to closely monitor engagement and unsubscribe rates of messages before you send them out to everyone. Make sure to focus on headlines, clear calls to action and a pleasant look & feel of the messages that you are sending out.

Double down on what already works

While all sessions were incredibly insightful I especially enjoyed Elliot Shmukler’s lessons learned while growing LinkedIn from 13 to 175 million users.

Elliot emphasized that when you have limited resources and therefore don’t have the time to work on everything you’d love to improve it becomes very important to focus on the right things. One hands-on example he gave during the presentation was about sign up conversion rates.

What caught me and the majority of the audience off-guard was the idea to focus on parts of the funnel that already perform well.

At first that sounds a bit counter-intuitive because you might think that it is easier to improve on a lower conversion rate like 4% compared to a conversion rate that is already performing incredibly well at 40%.

It’s easier to focus on a strength than to improve a weakness — Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn #ghconf

— Thomas Schranz (@__tosh) October 26, 2012

Here are two example channels for LinkedIn signups that they’ve decided to improve in 2008.

Email Invitations: 4% 25.000 ->  7% 44.000 (+19.000) took 2 years
Homepage Views:   40% 50.000 -> 50% 63.000 (+13.000) took 4 months

Another insightful observation of Elliot was that it is way easier to increase engagement of active users compared to people who are inactive. One example he gave were retention emails that show you who looked at your LinkedIn profile. That’s why they ended up optimizing wording and design targeted at active users instead of inactive users.

It is easier to get an active user to do a lot more than to get an inactive user to do anything. — Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn #ghconf

— Thomas Schranz (@__tosh) October 26, 2012

It seems like there are many different reasons why people are inactive whereas the group of active users share many of the motivations that make them stick around.

If you want to read more about Elliot’s session make sure to check out Sandi MacPherson’s notes over at the Quibb blog.

Use HTML5 to iterate faster in native apps

During the Growth on Mobile panel a lot of the questions circled around how to do A/B testing and fast iteration cycles in native apps.

Eric Florenzano, Growth Engineer at twitter had a great pragmatic answer. If you want to move as fast as possible use HTML5 for components of your app that you are not yet sure about and only implement parts natively that you’ve already nailed.

If you are involved in mobile app development make sure to check out clutch.io, an A/B testing framework for native apps that takes exactly this approach. Clutch recently got acquired by Twitter and was then open sourced just a few days ago.

Product Manager’s Renaissance

My main takeaway of the conference was that we are in a renaissance of product management.

With the possibility to iterate on your product and marketing efforts faster and faster the product manager’s role more than ever builds the backbone of a product’s competitiveness and success.

Decisions need to be made faster and have more impact. Breaking up silos between design, engineering and marketing is no longer only a good idea, it is essential.

The post Growth Hackers Conference: Lessons Learned appeared first on Blossom.

A Lean Melting Pot

For me the main benefit was having people with very different backgrounds in one place. That way it was easy to get out of groupthink and into hands-on discussions about how to build better products and how different disciplines approach that idea. Therefore the sessions were quite diverse, covering areas such as

• Lean Startup
• Visual Thinking
• Design Thinking
• Business Model Innovation
• Agile & XP
• Customer Development
• Lean UX
• Customer Journey Maps
• Interaction Design
• Visual Note Taking
• Flow
• Financing
• …

It was fascinating to observe a common language emerge as everyone shared their background and their lessons learned about continuous improvement and feedback loops. Many discussions circled around how …

• … different disciplines affect the overall outcome of a venture
• … to assess risk and value across them
• … to use visualization & communication to break up barriers between them

We’ve took a ton of notes and will try to write up our thoughts, conclusions and lessons learned over the next few days.

Fishbowl with Eric Ries

Not surprisingly “breaking up silos of different disciplines” in product development also was a topic in the fishbowl interview with Eric Ries. You can watch the recorded session below:

http://vimeo.com/35154582

Some Highlights:

• How do internal Startups differ from Garage Startups?
• Your Science is only as good as your Hypothesis
• You will be embarassed by Version 1 so get it over with
• Pivots: what do I really care about and what is just a Way of getting there?
• What we need to do is: Unite the Clans
• Isn’t this just the stuff we’ve been doing all along?

Session: Metrics Lessons Learned

Andreas Klinger of Lookk and Dan Hill of CrashPadder held a session about their journey to actionable metrics. It was a fun talk and at the same time very valuable to see what they learned from focusing on fewer but far more meaningful user engagement metrics.

http://www.slideshare.net/andreasklinger/metrics-lessons-learned-leancamp-london-2012

Some highlights:

• Focus on Retention
• Retention = ƒ(User Happiness)
• Beware of Dataschmutz
• Metrics need to hurt

Talkaoke

Additionally to the sessions there was an ufo-like table in the lobby with a mad talkshow host sitting in the middle. The guy moderated ad-hoc conversations on various topics by inviting onlookers to chime in. Apparently the format is called “Talkaoke” and a great way to facilitate knowledge sharing in open space events.

Leancamp on Lanyrd

If you want to re-connect with participants you met at the event or just want to get in touch with people who care about lean product development, check out the Lanyrd profile page of Leancamp London #2.

There you’ll also find a ton of coverage material such as tweets, slides and photographs.

The post Leancamp London appeared first on Blossom.

Empathy

We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.

Focus

In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.

Impute

People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.

— Mike Markkula January 3, 1977

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The post Bootstrapping a Software Product appeared first on Blossom.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?*

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

The post Connecting the Dots appeared first on Blossom.

A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to attend a master class by Fred Destin on the “Startup Lifecycle”. He is on the board of Seedcamp, a
european startup accelerator comparable to YCombinator. Fortunately
his talk was filmed and recently put on the web for everyone to watch.

Seldom have I seen a presentation that was both exciting to watch live
and still so informative to go through later on. Fred’s prezi
is packed with references for further reading.

But enough of the prelude, here are the main take-aways in bullet point style:

Start

• Pick the right co-founder
• Do reverse vesting — It’s founder friendly
• Borrow & steal — minimize cost, more time for product/market fit

Launch

• Be Lean — The Lean Startup, Running Lean, Business Model Canvas
• Focus on providing value to your customer
• Use validated learning, pivots & iterations to achieve product/market-fit ASAP

Build

• You can’t manage what you can’t measure
• Initially focus on activation and retention (funnels, KISSmetrics, …)
• Be data informed, not data driven. Brush up on your statistics skills
• Use your intuition for important decisions (see the big picture),
  use analytics to optimize

Chasm

• Aggressive investment before product/market-fit can be dangerous
• To grow you need to cross the chasm from early adopters to the early majority
• Read Crossing the Chasm and/or Inside the Tornado by Geoffrey A. Moore

Scale

• Build a repeatable customer process
• Build a solid infrastructure for billing & deployments
• Fight organizational creep and automate stuff
• Grow the team and company culture

Startup Lifecycle Prezi

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