Web Strategist Lab

Today’s definition of frustration: I brought a proposal to a client, one they didn’t expect but achieved everything they wanted to achieve, using a technology they hadn’t considered before, for a cost that was dramatically different than they expected to pay (how dramatic, they were putting a proposal to ask for $50k to hire a company to build a magazine site from scratch, and my propsal costs less than $1k to use WordPress).

You’d be thrilled, wouldn’t you? Like a fairy godmother had stepped in from out of nowhere to bring you a super-cheap solution to your problem (for the record, I don’t think I look good in a tutu and magic wand)? Maybe you’d even thank them for solving their problems.

Nope.  In this case, you’d be pushed aside to allow print designers and print managers pretend to know how a web project worked, how to design for function not for look, how to plan for a steady stream of different types of content but stil have a cohesive look and feel.

And when you mention that no one on the project has more than 6 months of web design or web thinking experience, and that you have 12 years, you will be marginalized and mocked.

I’m not sure what I expected when I brought this project to the client, but I can assure you it wasn’t this.

Maybe I’m just from a Smiths-loving generation that rewards self-doubt and angst, but I had a great idea last week and it’s kind of a weird feeling.

Most of my good ideas work. They aren’t bolts of genius out of the blue, but a feeling that comes from years of doing this.  They’ve been “I’ve worked with wood all my life to I know how to use this piece of wood” crafts-level kind of good ideas.

But last week, we were in a hole.  We were converting 36,000 email accounts from an old HORDE-based system to a Gmail-based one.  Our users are not always the most tech-savvy, so there was a lot of concern that switching from one system to another would be a support nightmare, along with looking like we didn’t care enough about the user when we switched.  A technical issue popped up and we dealt with it, but in so doing, it caused us to stop and talk seriously about delaying the launch.  We did our pros and cons lists of all the different options available but the process of talking it all out stopped marketing efforts because we might delay.  It felt like runnning, hesitating for a step and not being able to break back into a run.

But there, in the middle of things, I had the idea to not delay the launch, but to keep the systems running concurrently for a month.  The idea solved a lot of problems, top among which was that people wouldn’t panic if they knew they could access their email for an entire month in the old system. It would let us keep out launch date, decrease customer service needs to something very managable, and look like we were trying to put the customer first.

The more I explained it to people, the more I knew this was a silver-bullet solution perfect for what we wanted to accomplish. And it felt a little weird to feel proud of it (it’s my job to manage these things, right?). I was also feeling weird that I assumed that no one would know that it was a hell of an idea (though obvious in hindsight) and that it was mine.

But today, my boss mentioned in passing that it was a heck of a solution, so there you go.

It it feels good that I was able to pull all this off.

Tomorrow or the next day, I want to do a “Give It Away” about a plan to build a rogue site for work, if that appeals to anyone.

Depending on when you ask, I either love or hate job interviews.

Everyone hates job interviews, right? Even most HR reps will probably tell you how much of a pain they are and how little they reveal about potential candidates. I mean, how many times has a potential employee been asked, “Can you tell me about a time when you were part of a team?” or “What are your biggest weaknesses?” and has planned an appropriate (or rather, interview-appropriate, which means, ‘a safe answer that keeps us from removing you from the applicant pool without giving us anything real.’) response.

A year ago, I was tired of asking the same silly questions that meant nothing, so I went looking. I found an idea on how to rethink the process. Joel on Software says that one you’ve gone through the general “does the candidate have a criminal record or two heads?” screen process, really, there are only two things you need to know about a potenial hire: are they smart and can they get things done?

So simple, because isn’t that what we all want? Someone who can get things done? That says so much without having to be specific.

What does “getting things done” really mean? It means being able to see the broad strokes and the details it takes to make it happen. I means being able to put your ego away and find out the best way to make it happen. It means being smart enough to know what you don’t know and smart enough to know how to get the information you didn’t already have. It means being able to speak up to lead and when to carry the water.

To that end, I came up with some new interview questions.

1) Tell me about a time when you really screwed up. Why? I want someone who is honest to speak up and be more real in an interview. I want someone who knows when they screwed up (is there anything worse than someone who doesn’t even realize they messed up?). I want someone who can also show me how they responded when things went to hell.

Also, this really messes with interviewee’s heads. It lets them know they can be honest and stop trying to spin everything. I’ve seen some people almost refuse to answer the question because it goes against everything every interview books says about turning everything into a safe positive.

2) What are you passionate about outside of work? This is a great way to get a “level” and see what this person looks like at their best. Tom Peters always jokes about how we spend billions collecting, training, motivating, managing people, but then we ask them to leave their personalities and passions at the door. I want to see what someone looks like when they are in love, so to speak.

3) How many AA batteries are in use right now? Yes, it’s one of those “Microsoft” questions where they ask you an impossible question to see how you respond. I want to see the work. I want to know why they picked that answer, what the thought process was. Its a glimpse into their head. Also, I might ask how they would design a museum for a dog.

So I’m in the middle of something right now. In the middle of taking a project I let… drift (yes, that’s called spinning the situation. The real situation is that I let my lack of knowledge of web development turn into a situation where I was told things that weren’t true and believed them. Things I was told were happening were in fact not happening, and I didn’t push for proof despite my fears that they really weren’t happening).

Anyway, things drifted and right now I’m about to put things right and re-launch this project.

I will admit to being afraid about this before this week. I was concerned that my mistakes would translate into key people thinking I was unable to do this job and manage this project well. The truth is, I can do this job really well, I just got my butt handed to me in an all new way.

But I seem to have backup — my boss seems to see this as a one-off mistake and is going to help me make things right. The question I might have is, “How do I move forward?”

I have a sister-in-law who is 15 and is having some trouble in school. She’s smart and pretty motivated (probably more so than I was at the time), and she wants better grades to get into a good school. Ask her how she gets good grades and you get the answer you expect: “study harder.” But I don’t know what that means. Read slower? Read more? For the most part, I don’t think school does a good job teaching you how to learn, so we end up figuring it out for ourselves. So this kid might have to struggle a little while longer until she figures out what “study harder” means.

So how do I get this project back on its feet? “Work harder?” Am I back to that? Muddling through until something starts to make sense?

No. I’m going to figure out how it is I am going to learn to fix these things. I’m going to start but putting the right people in a room and asking a simple question — “Where are we going?” I don’t what to worry about what happened (outside of making sure the same mistakes don’t get made), but I want to know how to we get to where we want to go. The group will help me find the path to what’s next.

That’s the plan.

Otherwise, I’m not scared about this anymore. From this point, I can turn a bad beat of a project into something that works and does what its supposed to do.

It makes me nuts when an organization acts like a sugar-riddled three-year-old in terms of its focus. I’m not talking about companies creating new products every week (which is usually good), but about companies who have so much to do and are so behind the curve that they feel the need to focus on something virtually worthless (usually internally) and spend dozens or even hundreds of man-hours on some silly thing.

Take  (he says in a hypothetical tone but really means this is a real example) for instance, the staff directory. We have one. You have one. We all have them (They’re like belly buttons!). Did you spend more than an hour developing the code for your staff directory? Probably not. It’s a simple thing: here are our people, here is how to find them. The biggest question is whether or not to make the directory publicly accessible.

So, we have a directory. We used to have a paper directory. Yes, it was a total pain (and not the best use of money, I’d wager) to reprint and distribute it every time we hired someone (which, with a staff of upwards of 200 people, it was not infrequent). So, we figured we’d put the directory online, primarily because it’s 2006 and the modern browser is 11 years old now). But, because this organization is filled to the gills with people who are scared of their computers, people printout the staff directory, which ends up being more expensive for the organization than printing and distributing the staff lists like we used to do.

So, one of our programmers decided to spend an hour and tweak the online directory so that you could print a nice clean list. It was a nice idea (personally, I think if your division went out and got you a nice new 3.2 Mhz Pentium 4 machine, you should learn how to use it and not rely on a piece of paper that’s a year out of date, but that’s just me), but it has lead to much hand-wringing and questioning by two department heads and the director of the organization. If I bothered to try and calculate the cost of everyone’s time discussing this silly issue, it’d be almost $1,000. For a staff directory.

So, rather than deal with issues that have a real impact on the organization, everyone acts like a child shown a sparkly toy (“oooo… shiny….”) and are distracted from what they should be doing.

Is it a function of focusing on things they think are potentially fixable rather than deal with the big, real, scary issues?  Polishing the brass on the Titanic.

There’s a great “Kids In The Hall” bit where there was an arguement that Rock died in the mid-1970’s. When Jethro Tull started to add the flute to “rock albums” it was all over. As proof, the protagonist said, “You’ll probably start to like jazz now…”And I kinda do. Sorta. A little. In limited quantities. But I prefer pop/rock/alt because it has a structure. Not necessarily the “Verse Chorus Verse” structure, but that it tends towards songs less than five minutes long, it has a melody, and has a beginning and ending. Even Nine Inch Nail’s messiest stuff (and I’m speaking specifically of his beautiful instrumentals) has a melody buried in there somewhere.

There’s a bit in Sting’s “Bring on The Night” where he postulates that jazz musicians, while being some one the most technically proficient and creative of all musicians, need a few minutes of a song to warm up, whereas rock muscians “need to burn from the first bar.”

It takes Coltrane or Monk, or any of the greats time to warm up (to a lesser extent Miles Davis, but that may because of his time spent in the rock/funk world in the 1970’s). It sounds like (I hesitate to say it) noodling. It sounds like yadda yadda yadda. It drives me up the wall. You’re a genius? Great. Get to the point already.

Thus, I end up listing to jazz musicians covering rock tunes. The Bad Plus covering Nirvana’s Smell’s Like Teen Spirit? Perfect. Their non-covers are cool, too, but they reside in that world of “We have 4 minutes to make a melody and turn of phrase get to the point” rock or pop. “Anthem for the Earnest” is an original, but it sounds like it could have been a cover. (I’d kill to hear The Yeah Yeah Yeah’s cover it.)

Brad Mehldau is the same way. His covers of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” and “Knives Out” are stunning. Its a frame work for him and his band to play some amazing bits withuot sounding like, “Hey everybody! Look at me play some cool stuff!”

All just end this by saying that design likewise lives within limitations and needs to embrace them. I mean, which would you rather have? Sting doing 10 minutes of bass work on a cover of a jazz standard, or a jazz trio doing a three-minute cover of a Police song?