cek.log : Geeky rants from Charlie Kindel...

Have a Plan (With Dates)

April 18, 2019

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I’ve written a lot on the importance of having a plan. This week’s Leadership Principle tip doubles-down on that.

Consider a status update:

Bad: “The team will investigate the issue.”

Good: “The team will complete the investigation of the issue by Tuesday afternoon and will share a plan for how to fix it by Thursday.”

The Good version of this does a few things:

It enables accountability on the next steps.
It conveys the appropriate sense of urgency.
It ensures the work to investigate the problem is not open-ended, further enabling accountability.
It conveys ownership.

My good friend Dwight D. Eisenhower was famous for saying “No battle was ever won according to plan, but no battle was ever won without one.” I’d like to be famously known for saying “A plan without dates is fantasy.“

By putting in just a *little* more effort & being planful (with dates) you enable the entire organization to have confidence the right things are happening. This leads to better delivery of results and earns trust.

April 18, 2019

Clarity of Thought, Leadership, leadership-principles

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How Meeting/Not-Meeting Goals relates to Earn Trust and Insist on Highest Standards

April 12, 2019

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This week’s Leadership Principle tip is about how setting goals, and holding yourself accountable, relates to Earn Trust and Insist on Highest Standards.

At Control4 we set goals each year a part of our annual operating plan. One goal I took this year was for every program in my org to fix three Broken Windows each quarter. Broken Windows are defined as:

A bug, defect, or missing feature directly impacting the customer experience that won’t normally get fixed due to resource constraints. The best examples of Broken Windows are things “we’ve known about forever, but just kept pushing down the priority list.” Broken Windows exist in products, code, our bug database, our knowledge management system, etc… The idea is to take pride in fixing them so the neighborhood is a great place to be. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory

We ended Q1 last week I had to set the status on this goal. We didn’t meet the goal so I had to set it to “Did Not Meet” (which always means RED as well) was painful for me. I have a pit in my stomach seeing a big RED blob in my list of 2019 goals. I’m going to see this every week for the rest of the year. It is awkward and embarrassing.

The reality is the organization came really, really close to hitting this goal. All but three teams met the goal, and those that missed only missed by one fix! Plus in some cases we fixed far more than three! The goal was clearly defined, and *I* did not meet it. So I have to set the status accurately.

I could have done more in the last few weeks of the quarter to drive the team to be more buttoned up on their goals that roll up to this one. I could have pushed PMs to take a hard one off their list and add an easier one. I also failed to fully document the Quarterly Broken Window Goals mechanism and thus there was some confusion about what it mean to fix a BW (the BW must be fixed from the customer’s perspective). See how this relates to Earn Trust with the italic-bold below?

Earn trust – Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders do not believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.

I will only feel bad about this goal result until I’ve taken the steps to ensure I CAN’T feel bad about it NEXT TIME. This morning I spent 20 minutes creating the Broken Window “user’s manual” wiki, for example. This way, when we hold the Q2 Broken Window review meeting, I will be reminded to ask more questions and audit teams’ goals in such a way that we hit the goal.

Insist on Highest Standards – Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

I hope this helps. Please feel free to comment if you have thoughts or questions.

April 12, 2019

High Standards, Leadership, leadership-principles

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Dive Deep != Micromanaging

March 28, 2019

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You’ve said it. You’ve heard others say it. You are not quite sure how you feel about it.

“So-and-so is a micro-manager. He/she’s always in my shorts and doesn’t let me just do my job.”

This week’s Leadership Principle tip may help you navigate this common meme more effectively.

The following has been my pinned tweet for the past year:

“The more details you know, the better questions you can ask. The better questions you ask, the faster everyone gets clarity of thought. Better clarity of thought leads to better decisions. By everyone. Essentially.”

@ckindel

Great leaders know the details. They are willing to roll up sleeves, dive in, and get their hands dirty. Folks confuse dive deep with micro-managing. This is not accurate.

Diving deep is about understanding the details which enables robust debate, articulate questions, and clear thinking. Better debate, people asking great questions, and clear thinking mean better decisions that stick.

Diving deep is about setting up auditing mechanisms where leaders can be closely connected to the details without being overwhelmed and without needing to control minutiae. Auditing is a skill where leaders who exemplify dive deep test assumptions then step back to let owners own what they own.

The Dive Deep LP is highly coupled to Ownership. Leaders who demonstrate strong Ownership are great at proactively helping peers and managers dive deep into areas. Instead of saying “you’re micromanaging me” a strong owner says “let me figure out how to get you the details you need”.

So next time you find yourself feeling like someone is micro-managing you, consider how you can dive deeper into the details that matter to the areas you own and pro-actively helping the “micro-manager” get those details.

March 28, 2019

Leadership, leadership-principles, Organization & People

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Just Right Porridge and Leadership Principles

March 21, 2019

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Last week I wrote about Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit. This week the topic is about how to get the balance right when living Leadership Principles.

Just as it is possible to not live a leadership principle (under-index), it is possible to over-do them. The key is to find the balance and be like mama bear’s porridge: Just Right.

“Moderation in all things” ― Aristotle

Yes, it is possible to over-do even Customer Obsession. A great way to be thoughtful about this is to apply a “Just Right/Over/Under” taxonomy. Consider this example for Customer Obsession:

Making decisions:

Just Right: You are dedicated to meeting and exceeding customer expectations. You seek customer feedback and use it to make improvements.
Over: You make too many exceptions to best practice processes based on individual customer feedback.
Under: You don’t consider customer needs in decision making, instead focusing on technology, strategy, or internal operations. You fail to put the customer experience first.

Designing products or features:

Just Right: You focus on articulating the optimal customer experience early and then work backwards from that to determine how to make it true. You deliver value in increments and regularly assess how the product delighting customers.
Over: You over-engineer the product, trying to make it meet all customer demands at once.
Under: You build something hoping customers will come. You fall in love with a programming language, technology, or process.

As an aside, the internal Amazon wiki has an amazing set of pages for each Leadership Principle that gives a dozen or so examples like the above for each LP. The examples above are from my memory. Last year I sent Jeff Bezos an email requesting that he publish those pages publicly. I mean, if he really is serious about enabling other companies to copy the Amazon way as he’s publicly said, this would be a great step. I never got a reply.

March 21, 2019

Leadership, leadership-principles, Uncategorized

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Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit

March 13, 2019

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We’ve decided to adopt Amazon’s Leadership Principles at Control4. For a while we debated creating our own, or modifying Amazon’s, but in the end we decided just running with Amazon’s as-is would work best.

Last week I sent a mail to my org pointing out some bar-raising behaviors for “Hire and Develop the Best”. I got several replies from employees encouraging me to share more ‘tips’ on LPs. So I’ve added a reminder to my calendar to write an internal blog post each week. This week I wrote a post on what it means to Have Backbone, Disagree and Commit.

After posting it, I decided to share it here too. So here you go.

The actual Leadership Principle reads:

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

This Leadership Principle actually combines two principles that go hand-in-hand. First there’s the “Have Backbone” part and then the part about disagreeing, but committing anyway.

Having backbone: We all find ourselves in situations where we don’t fully agree with a proposed plan. In these cases, we should think like an owner (see the Ownership LP) and argue (ideally with data and strong anecdotes) our point. If we are unable to affect the decision, the next step is to meet with other stakeholders. We need to ask questions so we truly understand the problem and be open to the possibility that we may not have all of the information that went into the decision (e.g. highly confidential info). We must listen to the other stakeholders’ points of view and share ours openly and respectfully.

After considering the data and other points of view, if we still have concerns, we can escalate. Deciding whether to escalate or not should be what I call ‘a highly considered decision’. Over escalating is a sure way to demonstrate we have poor judgement (we’re not Right A Lot). We escalate only if we truly feel the decision is not in the best interests of the company. We use data, facts, and strong anecdotes to support our opinions before we escalate. Escalations are not effective unless they include alternate proposals; we must be solution-oriented.

It’s hard to know when to give in. This is what good judgement and wisdom are
all about (see the LP Are Right A Lot). Sometimes you just need to fold like a cheap lawn chair. Other times you need to keep fighting. The trick is getting good at judging the situation. I wrote a blog post long ago titled “90% of the decisions you make don’t matter” that might help you figure out whether to “stand or fold”.

But once a decision is made by the group, we are all expected to support it wholeheartedly and commit 100%.

This is where Disagree and Commit comes into play. D&C is what happens after a decision has been made. Even if we originally disagreed (and may still disagree) we all get behind the plan and commit to it.

People who raise the bar for Disagree and Commit openly show support and commitment to the plan, even though they may not have originally been aligned with it. They avoid statements like “I’m only doing this because I was told to”, “I did not agree with this and tried my best to convince folks otherwise”, or “management said”. They regularly get everyone aligned with the decision and then re-enforce their commitment to the plan (even if they still disagree).

Disagree and Commit applies to everyone, including individual contributors and
managers. Exhibiting this principle is particularly important for people managers because they are responsible for effectively communicating and streamlining information from their team to upper management and vice-versa. As a result, you need to be cognizant of how you communicate these decisions to your team. As a people manager, what you say or write, carries additional weight and it is your responsibility to exhibit conviction in your communication. If you don’t disagree and commit, your employees will lose trust in you and won’t execute effectively.

If you have questions or comments about this topic, please feel free comment below.

March 13, 2019

Business, Customer & Product, Leadership, leadership-principles, Organization & People, Technology & Execution, Uncategorized

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Kindel’s Law

December 21, 2018

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I’m not sure how this law thing works. But I’m jealous of folks like Moore, Atwood, and Shannon. I think everyone should have a law named after them.

Everyone should have a law named after themselves. Matt just entered the club with "Blaze's Law". https://t.co/ZeLdmBCFNW
— Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) December 21, 2018

In 2013, when I was tasked with build Amazon’s equivalent of ApplePay I had an epiphany. After studying all of the payment systems going back to the invention of currency up to credit cards, Amazon’s payment products, Bitcoin, PayPal, and so on, I noticed they all ended up being far more about defending against fraud than anything else.

This was certainly true at Amazon where the largest amount of resources, the most energy in reducing costs, and the place where the highest IQ was applied was on fraud.

So I coined Kindel’s Law:

Every payment system eventually becomes an anti-fraud system.
-Charlie Kindel, 2013

So there you go. My law is now on the Internet. It must be true. Someone please write a Wikipedia article.

December 21, 2018

Business, Kindel

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A FAQ About Frequently Asked Questions

November 18, 2018

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1. What’s a FAQ?

A list of questions with answers written in English are a great way to drive clear thinking on all the stuff that surround the central idea presented in a narrative. This ‘stuff’ includes things like strategy, execution, technology, business, and resources.

The main text of any narrative should be so clearly written that FAQs are unnecessary. To accomplish this, make a list of ten questions a reader might ask. Answer them. Then determine if those answers should be integrated into the main text or handled verbally in the review meeting. Put the answers that don’t belong in the document but might be needed during the meeting (verbally) in a back-pocket appendix. Repeat. By doing this, the author is forced to do the critical thinking to generate more questions and answers.

As the author does this, she or he will find questions that simply can’t be answered cleanly in the main document or are too critical to leave for the back-pocket appendix. These become FAQs in the FAQ section of the narrative.

2. Where should FAQs appear in a document?

FAQs should generally come at the end of the document, after the prose.

3. Should FAQs be numbered?

Yes, you should number them. Numbering FAQs makes it easy for readers to call out which FAQ they want to make a point about. If there are multiple sections of FAQs in a document (e.g., a Customer FAQ and an Internal FAQ), make sure the numbering is continuous across all sections. This way readers can precisely call out a specific question. (The FAQs in this wiki would be numbered if confluence made it easy to do so. It doesn’t).

4. How many questions can be asked and answered in each FAQ? What if the question is complicated?

Every FAQ should be comprised of a single question with a direct answer to that question (and only that question). Ask and answer only one question at a time. For example, the question I’m answering right now is a horrible example (intentionally), because it asks two questions. The second question (what if the question is complicated) makes writing a simple answer impossible. Figure out how to simplify the questions so there’s only one question, or just make two FAQs.

5. Is a FAQ a required element of a narrative?

A perfect six-page narrative would answer all the readers’ questions in the main body prose. However, often there are aspects where the FAQ format is the only way to simply and clearly answer a question.

In fact, over-using FAQs can lead to sloppy writing, which results in less clear thinking.

Some narrative forms (e.g., Working-Backwards (WB) narratives) have a set of required FAQs.

6. What’s the trick for identifying good FAQs?

Here are a few tips for identifying good FAQs:

Seek the truth: Ask yourself what questions about the topic would you least like to answer verbally. Anything you come up with is likely a good candidate for a FAQ.

Imagine the most hostile (or rude) thing a reader might ask. A classic is “Why are we wasting time on this idea?”

Consider the obvious or negative cases. For example, if your narrative describes a new product and target customer segment, a FAQ might be “What customer segments will this product NOT be attractive to?”

Sometimes there is a set of standard FAQs that every narrative of a type (e.g. a WB narrative) must answer (e.g. “What geographies will this product be launched in?”)

7. What tips will help keep the questions simple?

Less is more. The fewer words in your question, the better. Long questions are hard to parse and read.

Ask the question. Seriously. If you find you are having trouble phrasing the question simply, find another human and verbally ask them the question. Often this will cause you simplify how you ask it.

8. Is there a trick to answering only one question at a time?

The trick is to only ask one question at a time (I added this because I have found it incredibly common for writers to stumble on this obvious point).

Should questions and answers use proper English (grammar, spelling, and punctuation)?

Yes. It is important both the question and answer use proper English to accurately and concisely answer the question.

9. Does the order of questions in a FAQ matter?

The order in which things are presented always indicates an order. We wouldn’t use the word ‘order’ if there wasn’t an ordering. More important things should be presented before less important things. Related questions should be kept together. If you have another heuristic that would determine the order for your FAQs then use it (but you better explain it explicitly and clearly to the reader).

10. How many questions can be in a FAQ?

There is no limit to the number of questions in a FAQ. A well written six-page narrative (with included FAQs) can be read by most careful readers in 20-30 minutes. For a 60-minute review meeting, this leaves 30 minutes for discussion. Six pages is the maximum, not the ideal. A one-page document that describes a simple solution to a complex problem clearly is vastly superior to a six-page document that does the same thing.

Start with a goal of having no more than ten FAQs works.

11. Can an entire narrative be structured as a FAQ?

I’ve seen it work for narratives that explain a technique, like in a blog post describing how to write great FAQs. However, FAQs are not a great way to describe a concept such as a new customer experience or product plan. For those, actual narrative (words in sentences that make up paragraphs that flow from beginning to end) is far more effective primarily because writing actual prose is what forces the writer to really think clearly.

12. When reading a FAQ, should I carefully read the questions?

The author of the document wouldn’t have written the question if they didn’t think it was important. So, yes.

13. What’s a FAQAFAQ?

A FAQ about Frequently Asked Questions. Of course. Credit @ctpierson.

November 18, 2018

How To, Writing

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I’m Betting on Control4

August 2, 2018

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Previously I blogged about revamping the home control and entertainment system in my home. I decided to go with Control4. I mean REALLY go with Control4.

First, I’ve been having a professional premium smart home installer (Wipliance) completely revamp my home with Control4 products.

Second, I’ve decided to join Control4 as Senior Vice President of all their products and services. See the press release here.

The home project is almost complete. All that’s left for Wipliance to wrap up are a few edge-case devices and some programming. Oh, and the theater isn’t done as we decided to replace the carpet at the same time, and part of that install got goofed up (my fault).

I went with 148 intelligent lighting loads controlled by Control4’s panelized lighting, 52 Control4 keypads, five rooms of Multi-room 4K video including an Atmos home theater setup, 10 zones of Multi-Room audio using Triad amplifiers and speakers, two Control4 door stations, 15 Pakedge cameras, 9 Control4 smart thermostats, five Pakedge wireless access points, a host of Pakedge gigabit switches, and more. My fireplaces and the air compressor in my garage are all controlled by Control4 too. My network has 98 IP devices 58 Zigbee devices.

Via Control4’s fantastic Alexa skill, Alexa can control 157 individual lights and 41 scenes. We can use touchscreens, phones, and voice to control all 15 (10 audio, 5 audio and video) media zones (“Alexa, turn up the volume on the patio”). My wife can use voice to raise the temperature in 9 spaces. Control4 doesn’t yet support the Alexa Smart Home Camera Skill API, but I suspect that will change <g>.

In case you are not familiar with Control4, the company’s mission is to be both the solution and platform-ecosystem leader for premium automation and networking for the connected-home market. Control4 builds and sells over a hundred products under three brands: Control4 (Intelligent Lighting, Multi-room video distribution, A/V Communication and Intercom devices, and automation controllers), Triad (Premium multi-room audio amplifiers, switchers, and speakers), and Pakedge (professional-grade routers, switches, wireless access points, and network management).

I’m excited about all this (both my kick-ass home and my new job). The team is amazing and I’m looking forward to learning how to get stuff done at a much smaller public company. I’m also intrigued and a little scared to be taking on such a broad portfolio of products. I’m known for building and shipping more singular products and platforms. In this role I’ll be responsible for dozens of products across multiple domains.The company is firing on all cylinders with 16% compounded growth rate over the past 5 years. It’s profitable and public for five years with no debt. The average Control4 home orchestrates more than 42 connected-devices, with the top 10% of home orchestrating more than 180.

Control4 stands out for its continued growth because our solutions and platform enable reliable, useful, and compelling smart home experiences – from a single room, to the most luxurious and comprehensive of homes, as well as tens-of-thousands of guestrooms at premium hotels (Cosmo, Montage, Aria).

During my time at Amazon, I witnessed the explosive growth in the Smart Home – voice, the most natural interface for the home, has driven consumer demand and acceptance. The problem is, getting all those individual products to work together – throughout the entire home is work typical home owners just don’t want to do. There’s too much fragility and complexity for normal folks to deal with.

For the past 16 years I did everything myself: multi-room audio, smart lighting, smart sprinklers, whole home security, and automation. Even for me, it was a second fulltime job to make all that really work. I’m absolutely convinced that the only way normal people will be able to really enjoy the benefits of a whole-home smart home is with professional help (see my blog post from earlier this year titled Concierge Home Technology).

Control4 has a full line of premium smart home products designed to work together and 5000 independently dealer/integrators who take the hassle out of design and installation of personalized solutions (like my home). The platform works with over 12,000 3rd party products and I believe the Control4 ecosystem is the most expansive in the premium smart home industry. Along with a culture of customer obsession, these assets combine to make having a true smart home easier than anyone else – and more comprehensively simple.

I am also excited about the opportunity to deliver new experiences to the Control4 dealer. I’ve recognized the importance of the professional integrator and his/her role in delivering reliable and compelling experiences for homeowners. I’m keen on empowering an expanding number of Control4 dealers with new tools and products to help drive experience, efficiency, and business profitability. I have very relevant experience building customer and developer communities at both Amazon and Microsoft.

Control4 is growing and we have many great roles open. For example, I’m immediately looking to hire a Head of Hardware Engineering and a Software Development leader for mobile and GUI. We are also hiring a Sr. Director of Product Management for Lighting. Click here to see what other roles we’re hiring for.

Now that I have pros configuring and managing my home systems, I plan on spending more time blogging about how we USE our home. Check back!

August 2, 2018

Uncategorized

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Tools to Achieve Clarity of Thought

July 8, 2018

2 Comments

This post inventories the tools I use from my toolbox when I need to drive clear thinking in product development. I was inspired to write this based on a Twitter conversation in March:

The more details you know, the better questions you can ask. The better questions you ask, the more everyone gets clarity of thought. Better clarity of thought leads to better decisions. By everyone. Essentially.

— Charlie Kindel (@ckindel) March 30, 2018

Charlie’s Clarity of Thought Toolbox

Write Down The 5 Ps. Purpose, Principles, Priorities, Plan, and People. Detailed here: The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor.
Dive Deep. Do the hard work required to actually know the details at the deepest level. The more details you know, the better questions you can ask. The better questions you ask, the more everyone gets clarity of thought. Better clarity of thought leads to better decisions by everyone. So, read the actual source code (or even better write some code). Use the product until it fails. Read every Jira. Do the math yourself. Write the document that explains it to everyone else.
Be a Great Reader. Read. Every. Word. Carefully. I wrote a blog post on this topic here.
Audit Mechanisms. An audit mechanism is a system or process that forces details to be surfaced regularly. For example, in a weekly operational excellence review, use a wheel-of-fortune style wheel to randomly select a project each week where the lead must explain their metrics dashboard. This forces every project to be prepared, but scales because not every project has to be reviewed each week.
Seek the Truth. Question everything.
Write Narratives. As Jeff Bezos said “It is impossible to write a great 6-page narrative and not have clarity of thought.” If you are tackling any hard problem take the time to write a short (no longer than 6-page), narratively written, memo presenting the problem. See some of my posts on writing here. Also make sure you read Jeff Bezos’s 2017 Letter to Shareholders.
Ask and Answer Great Questions in narratives using FAQs. See my FAQ About Frequently Asked Questions.
Ask The 5 Whys. No tool is better at getting to the root cause than “The 5 Whys”. Folks often cheat when using the 5 Why’s and ask 5 parallel questions. Don’t fall into that trap. Ask questions that seek the truth and don’t be afraid to have multiple 5 Why threads in parallel. Write it down.
Taxonomy and Lexicon. Develop a strong taxonomy with clear entity names. Create three buckets and put parts of the problem in them. Give each a name that logically makes sense. Don’t be afraid to get out the dictionary and thesaurus. Think hard about the meanings of the words you choose. Make it pithy. Write it down. Take a look at these blog posts for examples of taxonomies and lexicons I’ve developed: Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO), The 5 Ps: Achieving Focus in Any Endeavor, and The Market Sides of the Mobile Ecosystem.
Invent or Steal a Mental Model. Ask yourself “what is a real-world analogy for this topic?” Startup folks are often great at coming up with “Uber for avocados” mental models. Don’t be afraid to steal mental models from others. Write your mental model down. These blog posts cover mental models I’ve stolen from others and might help you understand how mental models work: Attention is the Currency of Leadership and Merit Badges.
Structured Brainstorm. It is amazing what can happen when a group of smart folks get in a room for a structured brainstorm session. The funny thing about structured brainstorm sessions is how they are better the less organized they are. Levity is key.
Do something monotonous and un-related. Wax the car. Power wash the driveway. Plant petunias. Bake cookies. It is ok to procrastinate (you can tell ‘em I gave you permission). Focusing on repetitive, monotonous, and unrelated tasks enables the subconscious to work magic.

Do you have other tools you’d like to share? Post them as a comment please!

July 8, 2018

Clarity of Thought, High Standards, Leadership, Writing

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Let Word Work For You

June 4, 2018

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One of my biggest pet peeves is when I have to edit a document someone else has written and they’ve manually messed with the formatting.

Microsoft Word has an incredibly flexible style system that makes creating docs that look great easy. It also makes easy for others editing the doc can keep things consistent.

This isn’t to say Word’s style system is perfect. Far from it. Many of the same styling bugs that existed in Word for Windows 7.0 appear to still be in the most recent version. For example, styles involving numbering and hanging indents are just wonky. But working around these is still better than trying to keep a document formatted consistently by hand.

Do not change the formatting of a paragraph, header, bulleted list, numbered list, or any other element smaller than a sentence directly. Instead either edit the current style or create a new style an apply it.

June 4, 2018

Writing

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Ownership

May 27, 2018

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A strong bias towards ownership is important in org culture. The problem is, folks often over index on ‘I own this area, so I’m going to nail it!’ vs. ‘I am an owner on behalf of the entire company and need to do the right thing for our customers!’. The key is to balance these.

Amazon’s definition tries to make this tension apparent by explicitly stating ownership is broader than themselves or their team:

Ownership

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job”.

Owners drive results and feel deep responsibility for them. If things are late, the numbers are weak, or a failure occurs, owners never blame others. Owners focus on finding out what went wrong and how to ensure the date gets pulled in, the numbers improve, or the failure can never occur again.

Owners are expert at delegating. There’s a big difference between telling people what to do, and helping people know what the right thing to do is. Great owners are expert at the later. Great owners scale by bringing others along with them.

Owners get their hands dirty. And elbows. They pitch in and do the grunt work when necessary. They lead by example, demonstrating no task is beneath them.

Owners don’t lick cookies. If they assert they are going to build something or deliver some result, they do it. The corollary of this is, owners are effective at managing their time and thus frugal at taking on new responsibility.

Owners pay attention to the details (because details matter) and they hold others accountable for getting the details right.

Owners get direct satisfaction when the product has high quality and feel personally ashamed when there are quality problems.

Owners avoid saying “they or them” when referring to other teams. Instead they realize it is their own responsibility to build the bridge with the other team.

Owners recognize their management can’t know all the details, but needs to and they proactively educate ‘up’.

An organization with a strong culture of ownership enables leaders to do more, faster, independently.

May 27, 2018

High Standards, Leadership, leadership-principles

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Concierge Home Technology

May 24, 2018

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I had written the following in my blog post announcing my departure from Amazon:

I am hiring a CEDIA-level installer to completely refit my home automation system and I will project manage that.

A few weeks ago someone at Control4 tweeted the following, which I replied to with a tweetstorm. This post expands on the idea I presented in that tweetstorm…

Even Charlie Kindel who brought Amazon Alexa to market, with all his technological experience and resources, he's still underwhelmed with the way his smart home is functioning today. Give #DIY a rest! #C4Yourself what real #smarthome #luxury looks like. https://t.co/tU8fuvLbV3

— Control4 (@Control4) May 9, 2018

This is true. Even though smart homes are finally taking off, after decades of fits and starts, I still think most of the do-it-yourself (DIY) smart home products are too hard to use and too fragile to actually depend on. There’s still a HUGE gap between a home professionally outfitted top-to-bottom and a home with a bunch of DIY gadgets cobbled together by the home owner.

Not everyone can afford a professionally designed, installed, programmed, and monitored smart home.

Yet.

If they can afford it today, I recommend to friends they go the “Concierge” route: Hire a professional home technology integrator to just do it all for you, correctly. Life is too short to spend futzing around configuring and programming your home.

This not only applies to useful gadgets like lights, media, and cameras, but to the network infrastructure that needs to be in place for it all to work. Ask yourself this: How much of your own personal time would you budget if you decided to replace your home router? The last person I asked this said “At least a weekend.”

If you react to this by saying “Oh, I use Foo Co’s product and it’s so easy it’ll just take an hour” you are either…

Lying,
living in a one bedroom apartment,
have no idea what it means to have a fully outfitted smart home, or
extremely lucky for now, try adding 10+ more diverse devices.

The infrastructure in my home is dated (we designed and built the house in 1999-2002) and I’m going pay a pro to refit everything in the next few months. By everything I mean home network infrastructure, lighting, whole home music, televisions, security, cameras, irrigation, HVAC, and intercom/telephone. There will be some DIY products involved, but the infrastructure and automation system will be designed, installed, programmed, and monitored by a professional, not me.

I currently have over 250 ‘devices’ controllable by Alexa in my home. 152 of those are lighting loads. 47 are keypads. Some are virtual devices like scenes. Some are devices like the air compressor in my workshop which only powers on when I’m there. We have five TVs with associated media players and speakers. There’s an 8-zone whole-home audio system. Plus the security system and cameras. It took serious work by me to program it and maintain it over the past 17 years, all as a hobby. It works, but not as well as it could and should. Part of this is because some of the tech is old, but it’s mostly because I’m not a pro. I don’t get paid to do this.

I do not want to spend my time programming my home anymore. I want to spend that time on my cars . I’ve lived in homes with professionally outfitted systems, similar in scale to mine, and the stability, refinement, and ease of use really does deliver on the dream many of us in the industry have been working towards for decades.

However, not even the high-end stuff (or industry) is perfect. Some old-school incumbents have intentionally made their products complex to artificially support dealer networks and protect crazy margins. Some do a horrible job interfacing with other companies’ products. There are not enough skilled installers and programmers, which is limiting growth. And it’s all pretty expensive – everyone in the value-chain wants their fair share and the value-chain is deep.

Part of why I want to have a pro do it this time is to see how far away we (the collective smart home industry) are from the ideal. The ideal being a world where anyone can afford a completely connected smart home where professionals design, install, program, and monitor the infrastructure, devices, and system so customers can just enjoy the benefits. I call this “Concierge Home Technology”.

Concierge Home Technology is real today, and is big business. Technology companies like Savant Systems, Control4, Snap A/V, Crestron, and Lutron are the players you’ve probably heard of. They are supported by tens of thousands of dealer/integrators around the world who do the design, installation, programming, and monitoring. If you are considering making your home truly smart, in order to have music everywhere, reliable voice-controlled lighting, great security, and automatic behaviors find a local dealer/integrator and ask them to show you an ‘experience-based’ demo home (Control4 just launched a cool initiative where at least one of their dealers in every major city has a certified showroom).

The Big 5 are all investing big time in smart home products. A few of them are actually making real money at it (finally). Their focus is on DIY products, and they generally believe smart homes can be self-organizing (by software). I don’t buy it. No household of any size, with more than few family members, is ever going to have the level of refinement and sophistication mine has without some custom programming. I’m eager to see how this plays out.

May 24, 2018

Home Automation, Platforms, Smart Home, Vision

6 Comments

Friday was my last day at Amazon

April 30, 2018

10 Comments

The goodbye mail to the Alexa Smart Home team explains it all pretty well:

Date: Apr 27, 2018 3:03 PM
Subject: Smart Home Org Update

Team,

With mixed emotions I share the news that Charlie Kindel has decided to leave Amazon. Charlie has accomplished many things in his time here, not the least of which is the founding and scaling of Alexa Smart Home. Alexa would not be the leader in Smart Home that it is without his vision, leadership, and hard work – he will be deeply missed. Charlie prepared the short FAQ found below to share his thinking with the Smart Home team. In Charlie’s own words…

1. Why are you leaving Amazon?

The pace of the past 5 years has finally gotten to me and I simply need to catch my breath. I’ve recently been joking with folks that “I used to get my adrenaline rush going heli-skiing. Now I just go into work.” I have a car restoration project that is two years behind schedule. My home automation system needs a complete revamp (it’s gotten a bit crusty since it was installed in 2001).

2. Why leave Amazon and not just go on a leave?

I was originally just going to take a temporary leave, but I like the idea of having total freedom of thought to decide what’s next in my life. By making a clean break from Amazon all options (including coming back to Amazon) are still on the table.

3. What are you going to do?

Relax and goof off. I will clean my home office which is a freaking mess and work on car projects. I am hiring a CEDIA-level installer to completely refit my home automation system and I will project manage that. I hope to enjoy the awesome summer we’re about to have in Seattle with my family (both of my adult kids will be living in the Seattle area starting this summer). Professionally, I don’t know what’s next.

I will miss you all! Please don’t hesitate to keep in touch; my personal email is charlie(at)kindel.com.

What are you going to miss the most about Amazon?

I’m going to miss the people. The Alexa Smart Home team is an incredible team that I was blessed to have built from the ground up. I’ve had so much fun watching so many people grow in their careers and it’s going to suck not being able to be around them day-to-day as they continue to flourish.

I’m also going to miss Amazon’s high standards. I’m skeptical I’ll find another environment where the drive for “raising the bar” is so consistent and strong. Wherever I go next, you can be sure I’ll be taking this with me:

Insist on the highest standards

Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high-quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.

— from the Amazon Leadership Principles

What are you going to miss the least?

Leaving the house at 6:00am to beat Seattle traffic and returning home at 6:30pm every day. Although, I have to say, I did enjoy working ‘downtown’ more than I expected.

Will you ever return to Amazon?

Maybe (if they’ll have me). After being at Microsoft for 21 years I promised myself I’d never ‘fall in love’ with a company again. It’s just not healthy. But the reality is there are many, many things about how Amazon operates that deeply resonate with me. For example, the 14 leadership principles all sing to me and I have always been blown away how seriously everyone at Amazon takes them.

Are you available for consulting gigs?

Generally, no. I’m taking a very serious (ha!) break from ‘work’. However, I might be willing to take on some executive and leadership coaching. I am absolutely not available to consult on or discuss things related to my role at Amazon.

April 30, 2018

Career, High Standards, Kindel, Personal

10 Comments

Clear Narratives Show Instead of Tell

April 29, 2018

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This is yet-another-post on the topic of Amazon-style “six-page memos”, aka Narratives. This post focuses on the mantra: “Great narratives show, they don’t tell.”

When writing things you believe to be facts, ask yourself: How do I know? How can I qualify it? Then, qualify it in your words.

Tell (Bad):

The BMW E28 M5 is a rare car.

Show (Good):

Of the 722,328 E28 5-series sedans BMW built between 1981 and 1987, only 2,191 were the rare M5 variant.

When suggesting a course of action (e.g. “we should do x”), follow the suggestion with an explaination of why (e.g. “because of y and z).

Tell (Bad):

We should replace the old blinker fluid.

Show (Good):

We should replace the old blinker fluid because customers have reported 42 cases where old blinker fluid caused flux capacitors to wear out.

Its not uncommon for the data to be weak, but for the team to still be committed to a plan because of wisdom or strong anecdotes. If the data being presented has value, but has holes in it point out the holes. Don’t let (or ask) the reader to find those holes. Make it clear the risks have been assessed.

If you think your data has holes but still has value, point out the holes rather than have someone else do it during your presentation. Use data that both supports and argues against the author’s position. Demonstrate that you have assessed the risks.

Tell (Bad):

I am not going to replace the 5 year-old timing belt because it has less than 5,000 miles on it.

Show (Good):

I am not going to replace the timing belt because it has less than 5,000 miles on it. While this belt is older than the recommended replacement age of 4 years, this car has been stored in a humidity and climate controlled environment and the risk of the belt breaking is very low.

Some literary elements one should never use in narratives (yes, I get the irony of using an Absolute Statement here):

Quantifiers. Quantifiers are a type of determiner which denote imprecise quantity. They modify nouns or pronouns. Many, much, some, a few.
Qualificative or Qualifying Descriptive Adjectives. Big. Small. nice, complicated better, best, and bad, worse, worst.
Predictive Adjectives. Expensive, funny, good.
Absolute statements. All, none, never, always. Nothing is in the absolute.

Finally, here are some other tips that will help you show vs. tell:

Correlation does not mean causation. A strong correlation between two trends is just a correlation, until there is proven causation.

For any data ask “is this common sense”? It’s shocking how many documents contain data that does not pass the sniff test. One mistake like this will ruin an entire narrative. You should always know the exact source of the data (use footnotes!), the timeliness of the data, how the data was calculated, and any assumptions that might not be known to the reader.

Don’t just put more data because you feel you need more data. Only put in data that helps create clarity or drive a decision. Likewise, don’t put data in just because getting said data was hard work.

Don’t TELL me your idea or opinion, SHOW me your idea or opinion. Use data liberally to make your case to the readers of a narrative.

April 29, 2018

Clarity of Thought, Writing

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Be a Great Reader

April 24, 2018

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When an organization has a culture where the written word is valued, being a great reader is just as important as being a great writer. In my time at Amazon, I’ve learned (more like it was beaten into me) to have a very high-bar for my own writing. I wrote a little about this in my post Details Matter. I’ve also learned the importance of being a great reader, and that’s the topic of this post.

In the latest Amazon Shareholder letter Jeff Bezos wrote more about Amazon’s famous ‘six-page narratives’. He used the process of writing a great narrative as an example of what it means to have relentlessly high-standards.

We don’t do PowerPoint (or any other slide-oriented) presentations at Amazon. Instead, we write narratively structured six-page memos. We silently read one at the beginning of each meeting in a kind of “study hall.”

– Jeff Bezos, Amazon 2017 Annual Letter

The “narratively structured six-page” mechanism at Amazon is not about the document itself. Instead the ‘six-page memo’ mechanism creates a virtuous cycle that results in ever-increasing clarity of thought. The major components of that cycle are great writing, great meetings (“study hall”), and great reading.

It turns out that not everyone is a great reader (including those like me who have always read a lot)! Great reading is a skill that requires focus and training.

Understanding is key

I am not a speed reader. I am a speed understander.

– Isaac Asimov

I finish novels in a fraction of the time it takes most people because I learned as a kid how to skim and cluster (two of the primary techniques used in speed reading). For novels this is fine. But for Amazon-style narratives and technical papers speed reading is bad. Understanding is key. I had to train myself to slow down and focus on understanding to be a valuable participant in document reviews at Amazon. I am still working on it.

Learn how to understand first, then apply skills for efficiency. I see two modes to reading: Novel mode and study mode. These modes are related only because they both involve eyes seeing words on a page; otherwise they are diametrically different. In reading a novel, efficiency is key so skimming the boring bits is fine. Inventing character or plot details that were glossed over will not ruin the story.

But for narratives every word, every element of grammar, every punctuation mark, and every number were carefully chosen by the writer. Thus understanding is key. Skimming and clustering are anti-patterns to reading narratives well because if any detail is missed, the entire point of the memo may be missed.

I’ve become a better reader by training myself to be an active reader. Active reading means being 100% focused on the document at hand and scrutinizing every word, every punctuation mark, and every bit of formatting. It means checking the math. It means reading slowly and pausing regularly (like every time there’s a period indicating the end of a sentence or whitespace indicating a paragraph break!) to think critically about what the writer wrote. Great active readers can identify omitted “obvious” details the writer left out, but others miss.

Contrast this to passive reading, which is when the point is just to be entertained.

Tips for Being a Great Reader

Be an active reader.
Have a pen in hand. Use it. I find having a pen in hand when I start reading helps put me in Active Reader Mode.
Pause on numbers and do the math yourself. Don’t trust any number. If a number seems hyperbolic, find the place in the doc where it was justified.
Pause after each sentence or paragraph and restate it in your head. Pausing between paragraphs allows the brain to digest details and make connections.
Stop if you find yourself reverting to speed reading. Go back and read what you skimmed again.
Don’t let document author cajole you into hurrying up. If they made the doc too long, or so confusing that you’ve had to re-read parts of it, that’s not your problem. Insist they give you more time.
Hold the writer to a high standard. If the doc is confusing, say so. If, after reading, you are hungry for more details on something, insist on more details. Writing, reading, and the review meetings are part of a complete mechanism that is intended to give everyone involved clarity of thought on a topic. There is nothing wrong with going through a loop multiple times, and until the topic is presented as simply and clearly as possible, your job as a reader is to help the writer come back next time with an even better version.

What tips and techniques have you learned for being a better reader?

April 24, 2018

High Standards, How To, Writing

3 Comments

Customer, Business, Technology, Organization (CBTO)

April 21, 2018

3 Comments

CBTO is a mental model for driving clarity of thought in product development. It simply asserts there are four perspectives: Customer, Business, Technology, and Organization.

Sometime near the end of the last century, J Allard coined the term BXT at Microsoft. As Robbie Bach notes in his book Xbox Revisited:

BXT = Business + eXperience + Technology

I used the BXT mental model for many years to get clarity on organizing product teams, hiring leaders, and in mentoring others. However, several things about the BXT model always annoyed me.

I hated that B (Business) came first. The Customer ALWAYS comes first, not the Business (or Technology).
While the “X” was cute and sexy in an Xbox sort-of-way, the word “experience” fails to capture the most important thing: The Customer. Building experiences is not the end, but a means to the end.
BXT doesn’t factor in another critical dimension of building great stuff for customers: The people who build and how they are organized.

This led me to inventing a framework addressing these issues I call CBTO. The name is certainly not as sexy sounding as BXT, but it is still easy to remember.

CBTO = Customer + Business + Technology + Organization

Customer

Who is the customer? How do we segment customers? How many customers are there? What do customers want? What pain do customers currently feel?

The customer perspective is also the product perspective. What is the customer experience we are working backwards from? What is the product? What features are important? How are those features crafted and prioritized?

Everyone in the organization needs to take this perspective, but generally folks who consider themselves Product Managers and UX Designers tend to index very highly on this perspective.

Business

Why are we doing this? Is there a new strategy, or does what we are doing accrue to an existing strategy? Is there money to be made? If so how much and when? What deals do we need to make to deliver the customer experience? What our our inputs and outputs for the business? How do we measure success?

The Business perspective is also the industry perspective. Who can we partner with? What are industry trends? Who are our competitors?

The Business perspective is typically where folks with business backgrounds (e.g. MBAs) are the strongest.

Technology

How are we going to execute? What do we need to invent to make the proposed customer experience true? What shoulders of giants do we stand on?

The technology perspective is also the execution perspective. What’s our execution model (e.g. agile or waterfall)? How do we operate our services? How do we ensure operational excellence?

The Technology perspective is usually the strongest with engineering leaders, like SDMs or Technical Program Managers. Generally engineering is where the center of gravity in most high-performing organizations is, simply because engineers are the only people who actually do work that directly impacts customers.

Organization

How are we organized? Functionally? Or single-threaded? How will we recruit and hire the best? How do we ensure everyone is setup for success in their careers? What’s our compensation and reward system?

All managers must index high on the organizational perspective.

How to use CBTO

You can use the CBTO mental model to gain clarity on a broad range of topics. For example:

If you are designing an organization you can use it to determine if you have the right balance of leadership in place to be successful. The best product organizations have a balance excellence in across all four perspectives.
When reporting on status (e.g. a weekly status report), use CBTO to add structure to your report. What did you do this week focused on defining the product experience (C)? Meeting with external partners (B)? Progress towards shipping (T)? Being a manager or mentor (O)?
When considering a career move, ask yourself where you are strong, and where you are weak relative to these perspectives. Then decide which of them you’d like to be putting more energy into in your next role.
When interviewing leaders, ask them to stack rank their relative strengths and weakness across these four perspectives. If you are hiring someone to be an engineering leader and their stack is “BOCT” then they probably won’t make a very good engineering leader.
I’ve used CBTO to categorize many of the posts I’ve written on this blog over the years. These links take you to those that focus on each perspective: Customer, Business, Technology, Organization.

Frameworks and mental models like BXT or CBTO can help create clarity of thought. There’s no perfect framework, but I have found CBTO to work pretty well for me. What do you think?

April 21, 2018

Business, Career, Clarity of Thought, Customer & Product, Experience, Leadership, Organization & People, Technology & Execution

3 Comments

Details Matter in Presenting Narratives

April 18, 2018

1 Comment

Narratives are written documents used to present clear thinking. Narratives enable readers to quickly understand the author’s ideas in order to drive robust conversations and decisive decision making.

Details matter when it comes to printing narratives for others to read. Sloppy presentation of the written word detracts from content and shows the author lacks obsession about his or her customer (the reader). Authors must apply a very high standard for making it easy and pleasing for the reader to understand ideas. This post contains tips for ensuring written narratives are well read when printed.

Using overwrought presentation style in narratives is the same as using hyperbolic adjectives: Fancy styling is a sign to the reader the document may lack substance and clarity of thought. It distracts versus illuminates.

Minimalist and consistent formatting makes documents easier to read. Less formatting allows the reader to focus on the words. Consistency throughout the entire document reduces the readers’ mental burden. Here are some specific tips:

Use a single typeface and size. Text should be big enough so that readers don’t have to squint; nominally this means a font size no smaller than 10pt.
Do not use color. Well written words do not require color, and if graphics are required to explain the idea, the idea hasn’t been simplified enough yet.
Use whitespace between paragraphs and sections to separate ideas. Horizontal indenting can be effective in guiding the eye, if simple and consistent. Two spaces after a period are not needed; all modern typography systems do the right thing with a single space.
Page margins should be no smaller than .75″. Do not make the margins smaller in an effort to make the document seem shorter. The reader will not be fooled and reading extra long lines is more work than short lines.
Make sure the document title, the date of last edit, any relevant confidentiality notices, and the page number are in the headers and footers of every page.
Numbers in narrative form should be consistently presented. Numbers less than 10 should we written out (e.g. nine). Numbers above that should be in numerical form. Use commas (e.g. 34292 is harder to read than 34,292). Be consistent on how you abbreviate orders of magnitude (e.g. pick either M or MM for million as in $10M).
Date formatting should be consistent (e.g. don’t mix “September 10, 1996” and “9/10/66” in the same document).
Use Word’s line numbering feature as it makes discussing the document easier. Change the line-numbering style to use a lighter shade of gray than normal text to make the line numbers less distracting.
Likewise, numbered headers (e.g. FAQs) should be numbered continuously through entire doc; this way when discussing the document readers can refer to those numbers without ambiguity.
Be diligent in ensuring you have no spelling, grammar, punctuation errors, or inconsistencies in the document. Readers will appreciate not being distracted by sloppiness. For example, read every sentence and every word out loud, have someone else proof-read the document, and always do a test printing before final print.
The ideas presented in a narrative document matter more than anything, even the details discussed in this post.

Much has been written about Amazon’s culture of the written narrative (aka “Jeff Bezos outlaws PowerPoint” and “The Beauty of the Amazon 6-pager”). This post is not about why narratives are so powerful, nor is it about how to actually write well. But it does provide tried and tested tips on how to ensure the narratives you write meet a high standard for readability. Maybe someday I’ll write up my own thoughts on why the written narrative mechanism is so powerful, but for now I’m going to assume you have already drunk that particular flavor of Kool-aid.

UPDATE: Literally the day after I posted this, Jeff Bezos posted the 2017 Letter to Shareholders. In it he used narratives as a way of illustrating what it means to have high standards. It’s a great read. I did not know this would be the topic of the shareholder letter when I wrote this post (really!).

April 18, 2018

High Standards, How To, Leadership, leadership-principles, Writing

1 Comment

Merit Badges – A Mental Model for Success

April 1, 2018

6 Comments

Today I celebrated my 5th-year anniversary working at Amazon. Woot! It’s also the 5th anniversary of me announcing I was going to Amazon as an April Fool’s joke. Tee-hee.

(Yellow Amazon employee badges indicate 5-year tenure)

This milestone given me pause to reflect on my career. In doing this reflection, I utilized a mental model a long-time mentor of mine, Chris Phillips, taught me: The Merit Badge mental model. This mental model has given me clarity and peace of mind over the years when navigating big career decisions. I seems to resonate with folks I’ve shared it with. I figure I’m overdue taking the time to write it down and share it with others.

What’s the Merit Badge mental model for measuring success?

The concept of a Merit Badge comes from the Boy Scouts. The idea being a scout can only earn a particular merit badge (actually a patch that gets sewn onto a vest) by demonstrating mastery of the skill or ability defined by the badge. For example, a scout would only receive the “Firemanship” badge by clearly demonstrating, repeatedly, the ability to start fires without matches.

(the Boy Scout Firemanship Merit Badge)

Merit Badges can come in all sizes. You can earn a small Merit Badge for something like “Touch typist.” You can earn a big Merit Badge by demonstrating you “Can repeatedly lead startups to successful exits as a CEO.”

I’ve collected a bunch of Merit Badges throughout my professional career. They range from “Can learn any technology” to “Expert at ideating and launching V1 products.” Other examples of my Merit Badges are “Quickly hire senior talent”, “Can fumble through using git”, and “confidently presents to 1000+ people audiences.”

My landing a role at Amazon in 2013 was sort of accidental. I left Microsoft in 2011 because I couldn’t identify any big Merit Badges I wanted to earn there. All the big ones seemed to be outside Microsoft, like “can bootstrap a tech startup.” So I went after that one and while the startup I bootstrapped is still cranking I don’t claim I’ve earned that Merit Badge (Freebusy.io is run by my former co-founder Stefan). I can’t claim the Merit Badge because doing something only once does not prove you can do it repeatedly. No demonstrated ability to do it repeatedly, no Merit Badge! No soup for you!

As I was trying to do the startup thing, I discovered people were willing to pay me to consult for them. I had no idea how to ‘do consulting’ so I set in my mind the goal of earning the “excellent at management consulting” Merit Badge. I said “If I can land three consulting gigs, and deliver the results promised, I get the badge.” I read books, I asked others how they did it (thanks Marc and Fabrice!), and I dove in. This was how I kept cash-flow coming in while trying to do startups. I did five consulting engagements in those two years and my customers were happy with the results. Badge earned.

The last of those consulting gig was with Amazon. I won’t bore you with the details here, but the gist was a very smart lady at Amazon realized if she could get me to see the ‘inside’ of Amazon, I’d probably love it and want to work there. She broke all of Amazon’s rules of paying ‘consultants’ and gave me a contract. She was right and after completing the consulting project, I started full-time at Amazon on April 1, 2013.

At the time, I had not finished earning the “can bootstrap a tech startup” badge. To go to Amazon I had to give it up. Maybe some day I’ll get back to it. Or not. The point is, this mental model gave me clarity of thought in making a career decision. It was super clear to me what I was giving up.

I was clear on what was next too. I saw a large number of potential Merit Badges I could earn at Amazon. A primary one I choose (and wrote down in my post describing the Job Decision Matrix) was “Succeed at > 1 Big Company.”

Which brings us back to what motivated me to write this post: I clearly (in my own mind, which is what matters) was successful at Microsoft. I shipped some really great stuff for customers and had a blast doing it. Now that I’ve survived Amazon for 5 years, and absolutely loved the work I’ve done to help make Echo and Alexa so loved by customers, I look in the mirror and am able to say to myself “yep, I’m successful at Amazon.”

Yay for me! One more big Merit Badge I can sew onto my vest! This gives me personal satisfaction and confidence. I was pretty scared of Amazon when I joined. What the eff did I know about anything EXCEPT how Microsoft worked? The inventory of the Merit Badges I had earned at MS gave me the confidence I needed to get started.

Are Merit Badges useful outside of work?

Merit Badges don’t have to apply only to your professional career. For example, it gives me great joy that I’ve earned the merit badge of “engine builder.” I had no idea how to build a car engine when my son & I decided to build a new engine for my classic BMW. But I did it and the damn thing worked (and is still running flawlessly after 25k miles). But one engine build does not prove mastery. Two does (in my opinion). So recently I completed my second motor for a different car. This one works too (knock on wood). I’ll probably never build another engine (I can, thankfully, afford to pay others to if I have a project that requires one) because, for me, all that really matters is I’ve proven to myself that I could.

**How do you know you’ve earned a Merit Badge?**

I use a couple of tests. There are probably others.

When setting out to earn a Merit Badge, if I can, I’ll write down objective criteria. For example, I told myself I’d only get the “Succeed at > 1 Big Tech Company” badge if I was at the big company for more than 3 years.
I ask myself “would I add this to my resume, knowing an interviewer might ask me for examples and details?” (Advice from someone who has hired a lot of people: Putting something on your resume you don’t really know how to do is just about the stupidest thing you can do. It’s almost as bad as misspelling your own name; which I’ve actually seen!)
I ask myself “can I look myself in the mirror and say ‘Yeah, I effing earned it’?” Of course if you are delusional this may not be enough. But if you are delusional, you probably don’t realize you are delusional, so it doesn’t matter anyway.

What else have you written on managing careers?

I wrote a post long ago about how most people think about their careers in the wrong way (You are Thinking of Your Career Trajectory Wrong). The Merit Badge mental model is very complimentary to the idea presented in that post. It’s complimentary because Merit Badges give you a way of measuring your success in your own terms versus things like ‘how many people work for you’, money, or title.

I’ve also found that Merit Badges are aligned with using another tool I’ve written about, the Job Decision Matrix, that helps drive clarity on what’s really important to you (and what’s not) as you make career decisions.

This link will show you all of my career related posts: Other career related posts.

The name “Merit Badge” and the concept resonates with me because I’m wired such that my self-worth is centered around my talents, the effort I put in, and what I’ve achieved. It also works for me because, for some reason, I’m absolutely addicted to finding things I’m clueless about and then trying to master them. Not everyone views the world as I do so this mental model may not fit everyone. Try it and see. As usual, feel free to let me know what you think in comments or on Twitter.

April 1, 2018

Career, Clarity of Thought, Leadership, Mentoring

6 Comments

My Apple ][ Tribute

April 17, 2017

1 Comment

It’s safe to say that the Apple ][ personal computer had a great an impact on my life as any other factor, short of the fact that I was born.

This is my tribute to the Apple ][ on it’s 40th birthday.

In 1978 I spent a day at my cousin’s factory in Grand Rapids, MI. I was 11 years old. I had never touched a computer beyond the Atari Pong my family had. After a tour of the factory, I think to get me out of the way, my cousin sat me down in front of his Apple ][ and fired up the game “Artillery”.

I was entrenched. For a few minutes anyway. Then I got bored.

Then I noticed The Applesoft Tutorial sitting there…

Shortly, I had figured out you could press Control-C to break out of the game in the the “Monitor”.

I learned I could type LIST and see the BASIC code for the program.

I learned I could change any line in the program by simply re-typing it with my changes. E.g. I could change

10 PRINT 2+3

to

10 PRINT 2-3

I learned I could then type RUN and the updated program would execute with my changes.

“OH MY GOD. THIS IS POWER.”

Never being one to actually, really, read instructions I dove in. I started changing things to see what would happen. I made Artillery my own.

Eventually I broke something and the Artillery game would no longer run.

In a panic, I shut off the Apple ][ and left to tell my cousin I was ready to leave.

From that point forward, my life’s direction was set. I wanted that power.

Later that year I conned my dad into buying a home computer so he could use VisiCalc for “business”. We visited the computer stores in the Phoenix area. One was a RadioShack and another sold Apple’s. My dad was leaning towards the TRS-80. I convinced him the Apple ][+ was better. I don’t remember why I thought so, but I ended up winning. He shelled out the dough for an Apple ][+, a Rana 5.25” floppy drive, and a color monitor. And VisiCalc.

For about 6 months the computer resided in my dad’s office (which was really a shared family room). He never really used it. I sat there for hours on end teaching myself BASIC by typing in programs from books and magazines.

Eventually the machine migrated to my bedroom, and as they say, the rest is history.

I had that Apple ][+ through high school, eventually adding a Microsoft Z80 Softcard to it. I had ‘graduated’ from Apple DOS to CP/M and from BASIC and 6502 assembly to UCSD p-system Pascal…and then Turbo Pascal.

When I got to college I upgraded to an //e (with a home-built external keyboard!) and put a 4MB memory card in it, which I used as a RAM disk for CP/M, Turbo Pascal, and my dear friend WordStar.

Eventually an IBM PC XT clone entered my life and I saw the writing on the wall w.r.t. Windows so I left the Apple ][ behind.

I still have all the old programs I wrote for the Apple ][ both on 5.25” floppies (that probably can no longer be read) and printed out in a set of 3-ring binders. Maybe I should crack open an emulator and get ‘em to run…

Thanks Steve & Steve for creating such a magical experience and setting me on my way.

April 17, 2017

Kindel, Passions, Personal

1 Comment

What it Means to Be Great Product Manager

June 18, 2015

1 Comment

A Tweetstorm of mine from earlier in the week:

https://twitter.com/natbro/timelines/611337333711843330

Piling on a comment @natbro made about PMs:

Besides customers, there are two groups of people involved in building tech products:

Engineers and everyone else. Only the engineers actually produce anything for the customer.

The job of everyone else, especially PMs is to generate clarity and commitment to a purpose so that the engineers can create magic.

Bad PMs don’t get this and think the product and business revolve around them.

Great PMs have no ego in this regard and understand the reality: That the only work that truly matters is that of the engineers.

That said, it is also true that left to their own devices, engineers will do two things: 1) the most complicated thing, 2) the thing they think is fun. Therefore, do not confuse the fact that a PM’s job is to enable (and influence) engineers with the idea that PMs are not needed.

On the contrary, when done right, great PMs free engineers to focus on what they are best at: technical invention and execution. They do this by creating clarity around who the customer is, where the customer is, why the customer cares, why it’s important for the business, and when it’s relevant.

Oh, yea: I have more open PM roles on my team. Join me in enabling engineers to create magic for customers. See this link.