1. Navigating Chrome tabs with the keyboard

   I’m almost embarrassed to publish this, but I just learned to navigate tabs in Chrome with keyboard shortcuts thanks to this Google Group post. From the post:

   • Next tab (from current): CTRL + Tab (mac) / CTRL + PgDown (Win)
   • Previous tab: CTRL + Shift + Tab / CTRL + PgUp
   • Specific tab: CMD + 1 to CMD + 8
   • Last tab: CMD + 9
   • Open previously closed tab: CMD + Shift + T (thanks, @willia4!)

   This will literally save me hours over the next few years of my life. Can’t believe I hadn’t Googled it until today…

   No Comments

   Categories: Productivity.

   By Jay

   — February 19, 2013 at 1:39 pm

2. The most important question I’ve ever been asked

   A year into my new role as a product manager, and I was in a funk. Things were getting done, but I wasn’t making an impact. My product roadmap was was full of must-fix issues and critical gaps, and it felt like my agenda was being written for me as opposed to being the CEO of my product.

   I was preparing for a regular one on one meeting with my SVP and to communicate my product strategy and roadmap, I prepared a ~20 slide power point which I would walk her though (one ingrained myth from my prior decade of professional services management was that slides were the most effective way of communicating with execs, even one on one).

   I showed up for the meeting not particularly enthusiastic about what I had to share, but intent on keeping the lines of communication open.

   We talked for a while then I launched into my slides, diligently reviewing the content of each. About halfway though, she stopped me and asked the following question:

   This is all good, but what on your list are you most excited about?

   Excited? I’d never been asked a question like this, and my planned discussion points clearly didn’t reflect excitement. If I had answered the question honestly I wasn’t particularly excited about any of it. But instead I quickly rattled three items from my list in no particular order.

   The meeting ended uneventfully, but the question rang in my ears for days “… what am I excited about?”

   Over the next few weeks I had the opportunity to visit with customers with this question now seered into my subconscience, and something interesting began to happen. I started to see problems worth solving. Even better, I could see which ones were important to solve first. Seeing these opportunities and knowing there were solutions made me… could it be? Excited!

   It turns out that for me, seeing users’ problems firsthand and helping energize my team around solving them is a real motivator.

   The following are a few reflections on the experience:

   • We don’t have forever. If you desire to make an impact, focus on it right now, where you are. It’s easy to jump ship and go somewhere else, but the funny thing is that you always take yourself with you when you go.
   • Focus on the real problems your customers are facing. Get out of the office and sit with users while they work (seriously, right now. Go.). What is their day like as a result of using your product? Can you find a way to make it better?
   • Start small, make little bets, get little wins. The little wins are bigger than you think, and little wins turn into bigger ones with perseverance and time. Consider dealing with a long-standing bug, a usability annoyance or ship a “Friday afternoon feature.”
   • Prioritize. It’s easy to see all the warts in your own product. It’s also easy to get frustrated that you can’t resolve all the issues at once. But one thing’s for sure, you’ll never succeed unless you take the first step.

   I have to go back and give credit to that one simple question, “… what are you excited about?” If you are manager, ask your people this question, care about the answer and help them do things in their work that also provide personal fulfillment.

   If your manager doesn’t ask, ask yourself, and don’t let “nothing” be your answer. Find something to get passionate about and your work will become your life’s work, not just a job.

   4 Comments

   Categories: Culture, Personal, Product Management, Productivity, Uncategorized.

   By Jay

   — July 25, 2012 at 12:53 pm

3. Learning by Rapid Iteration

   You can read 100′s of books, listen to countless podcasts and read documentation and blogs, but nothing replaces actual doing when learning to program. The repetitive nature of coding -> compiling -> running -> troubleshooting -> fixing and trying again seems to be the key for me in learning new programming languages and platforms. This is how I learned to develop apps for the web over a decade ago, and lucky for me what I learned toiling away in those days is still largely applicable today (i.e. the fundamental nature of how the Internet works has not changed).

   This learning paradigm works well for programming, but it can also apply to other disciplines. The key is to figure out how to iterate often, “debug” your failures and try again. In the same way that consistent weight training builds muscle tone, exercises of the mind have the same effect.

   My son joined the chess club at his school and has (at 6) mastered the mechanics of the game itself; which pieces can move in which directions and the general rules of play. Now he is learning the strategy. To assist his learning, I’ve given him the freedom to “take back” moves as a way to facilitate rapid learning. He makes his move, we play out the scenario together, then he has the option of trying something different once he understands consequences of the move.

   It’s the hands-on experience dealing with small failures that is so important in learning. The more rapidly we can physically see the consequences of our actions, the quicker we can adjust to compensate.

    

   1 Comment

   Categories: Agile, Productivity.

   By Jay

   — March 20, 2012 at 12:58 pm

4. How to Write a Good Email

   The best piece of advice I’ve ever read about written communication, is to spend time reviewing and pruning before sending, specifically when communicating via email. Here are the top 5 things I *try* to do before sending an email:

   1. Write it all first – get all of the thoughts out of your head and onto the screen.
   2. Begin pruning – at a minimum, reduce the size of the email by 10-20%. Check that it is Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive (MECE).
   3. Remove adverbs – Remember your high school grammar class? Most of the times these words end in ‘ly’: slowly, quickly, incredibly, etc. In email communications action descriptors are gratuitous and your point will be cleaner without them. The problem with these words is that they are subjective, a “big problem” might not mean the same thing to everyone in your audience.
   4. Remove font formatting where possible – If you have to use underlined, emboldened or otherwise highlighted text to get your point across you may want to consider a different communication medium, or at least make sure the content of your email is collectively exhaustive (see #1).
   5. Reread from top to bottom – When you spend time pruning, it’s easy to leave behind grammatical errors and sentences that made sense while you were editing but not when your message is read from top to bottom. If you make any significant edits during this process, be sure to repeat this as necessary.

   Remember, as a rule only 10-15% of your intended message is likely to make it to the recipient without the benefit of voice inflection and body language to augment your chosen words. If you have to send an email to communicate keep this in mind and give yourself a chance at an effective interaction.

   1 Comment

   Categories: Productivity.

   By Jay

   — February 16, 2011 at 8:14 pm

5. Dealing with Meetings

   I decided to cancel/decline 12 meetings that were on my calendar for this week. Why? Because I actually want to get some work done. We have all become quite accustomed to frequent interruptions in the corporate environment, namely email, phone and random, drive by discussions, but worst of all – meetings.

   Many have written on the topic before, but here’s my take on how you can take the initiative to improve meetings in your environment:

   • Make decisions – A meeting is an environment where decisions should be made. If this is a meeting to communicate, consider using another medium and cancel the meeting.
   • Prepare an agenda – If there is no agenda for the meeting, it is likely that the time will be unproductive, and the result will be a follow up meeting. Decline or cancel the meeting until the organizer creates an agenda.
   • Prepare background information – Even if you do have an agenda, are there outside sources of information critical to the decisions that need to be made in the meeting? If so, gather and consolidate that information prior to the meeting. If that information must be gathered from individuals, call or email them personally prior to the meeting to gather the necessary info.
   • Eliminate recurring meetings – I cancelled most of my one on ones and have opted out of a number of recurring meetings this year. I freed up over 4 hours a week and I can safely say that I’m not lacking information or interactions that I had when those meetings were on the calendar. Hopefully by next year I can free up another 2-3 hours a week.
   • Limit meeting participants – Just this week, I was in a meeting with 8 other participants for an hour. 9 hours worth of meeting time of highly paid resources adds up quickly. If you can’t share a pizza among meeting participants you have too many of them (credit goes to Jeff Bezos for that concept!). Does this meeting really need to include 9 people, or could 1-2 people work out the details and communicate that to a broader audience via a medium other than another meeting?
   • Schedule shorter time periods - …And stick to the schedule. Why do we only schedule 30 or 60 minute meetings? Because that is what Microsoft Outlook and other calendaring applications do by default. According to Parkinson’s Law, “work expands to fill the time allotted.” In the same way meeting time usually expands to fill the time allotted.
   • Be hyper-aware 0f remote participants - If meeting participants are distributed, consider having everyone participate via phone. When there are two or more people in a conference room and individuals on the phone it can be difficult for the remote participants to hear, causing frustration. Make sure it’s clear who’s speaking at all times. Use a shared whiteboard tool such as typewith.me to take notes collaboratively.
   • Have a scribe – One participant should be tasked with taking notes and promptly circulating them to all meeting participants.

   Meetings fundamentally break up our days into unusable chunks. The human mind thrives when focused on a single activity. Often you must fight to keep contiguous blocks of availability to get real work done. Sure, running from meeting to meeting can create a sense of importance and even provide the illusion of effectiveness, but we should all beware mistaking busyness for getting things done.

   No Comments

   Categories: Culture, Management, Productivity.

   By Jay

   — December 1, 2010 at 8:41 pm

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