Va la segunda parte con 4 personajes más.
Buena selección de textos, algunos relacionados con el laburo de Producto, pero otros más filosóficos:
Jason Fried | 37Signals (ahora Basecmamp)
I don’t use an alarm clock. Lately, I’ve been naturally waking up at 6:38 every morning. I used to wake up at 7:31 every morning, which is actually when I was born. So that was kind of creepy.
I try not to grab my phone and check e-mails first thing. I used to do that, and it’s just not good for you.
I have no idea how many hours my employees work — I just know they get the work done.
I spend most of my day writing. I write everything on our website. Communicating clearly is my top priority. Web writing is terrible, and corporate sites are the worst. You don’t know what they do, who they are, or what they stand for. I spend a lot of time taking a sentence and reworking it until it’s perfect. I love the editing process.
I spend another good portion of my day thinking about how to make things less complicated. In the software world, the first, second, and third versions of any product are really pretty good, because everyone can use them. Then companies start adding more and more stuff to keep their existing customers happy. But you end up dying with your customer base, because the software is too complicated for a newcomer. We keep our products simple. I’d rather have people grow out of our products, as long as more people are growing into them.
I used to handle all the customer service e-mails, but now we have two people dedicated to that.
That’s our philosophy: Build what we like, and other people will like it, too.
Twitter has become an outlet for anger, because the short format is perfect for negativity. It can hurt sometimes. You have to grow some thick skin.
We don’t have big, long-term plans, because they’re scary — and they’re usually wrong. Making massive decisions keeps people up at night — I don’t like to make those. The closer you can get to understanding what that next moment might be, the less worried you are. Most of the decisions we make are in the moment, on the fly, as we go.
I have a garden, and I like to go out back and just look at my plants. I might weed or prune. I like to get my hands a little dirty after being in front of my computer all day.
I bought a stone farmhouse built in the 1850s. It’s in rural Wisconsin. The closest neighbor is half a mile away. I spend almost every weekend out there. I love it. I just bought a tractor. I am really excited about mowing fields. Next year, I want to plant an acre of corn. Or an acre of something, just to see if I can do it.
David Karp | Tumblr
I try hard not to check e-mails until I get to the office, which is usually between 9:30 and 10 a.m. Reading e-mails at home never feels good or productive.
We roll out changes to the site every day at 11 a.m. We stagger out small changes, so we can see what works and what doesn’t. We chose that time because we want engineers around if there’s an issue. Plus, it’s early enough that there’s not much traffic. Basically, everything that was finished the day before gets pushed the next morning. It could be a bug fix or a new language file — say, a feature that was translated into French. Or it could be a new feature that’s dark launched — the public can’t see it, but we have the ability to test it.
For every new feature we add, we take an old one out. A lot of big sites don’t do that, and it’s a problem. Twitter started as a beautifully simple product, but it’s now going the same route as Facebook. The drive to innovate can overencumber and destroy a product. My goal is to keep Tumblr very focused. Sleep is precious to me. I’m very disappointed if I don’t go to bed before midnight. We have a rule: no laptops in the bedroom. Being on computers all the time makes me feel gross.
David Sacks | Yammer
I try to leave a lot of my time unstructured so that I can drill into whatever I think is most important that day.
I’m in a perpetual state of frustration over the product. I want it to be perfect, and it’s not. At least we can always make changes and progress toward that goal.
We do something called Yammer Time once a month. The whole company meets in the common area on the third floor. It lasts about an hour. Different department heads give presentations, or I talk about strategy. We also take questions from the crowd. People are usually interested in where the company is headed or what our competitors are doing. We also answer anonymous questions that come in via a third-party website. Those are often about money. We’ve had a few negative Nellies, but I don’t mind criticisms. I believe dissent leads to consensus. I don’t want to have a company where employees are afraid to say what they think. This meeting gets everyone on the same page and lets me address things that I didn’t even know needed to be addressed.
Disconnecting is very hard for me. I think about work constantly. I wish I had an On/Off switch. My wife is good at bringing it to my attention.
Marc Lore | Diapers.com
We have a 24/7 operation, and we empower the reps completely to take care of the mom at whatever cost. Really, the fewer rules, the better. The concept is just if Mom calls and there’s an issue, do whatever is necessary to make her happy and really wow her. (We got into the habit of referring to all of our customers as “Mom.”)
Still, I think there’s a time to be analytical and there’s a time to make decisions based on things that can’t necessarily be analyzed. How do you analyze the impact of hand-delivering a car seat to a customer who needs it? How do you assess the negative impact to the business of a mom coming to the site and finding the product she wants out of stock? Selection, price, customer service, speed of delivery, in-stock rates, ease of shopping — when it comes to any of those areas, I put analytics aside and work backward. I say, “Let’s work with the most perfect thing we can do, the best possible consumer experience, and then now, analytically, let’s try to figure out how to do that as efficiently as possible.”