Author: Scott Berkun

The future of WordPress: help wanted

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

On May 1st I’ll be speaking at WordCamp San Francisco (registration here), the premier event for WordPress developers, users and fans. Matt Mullenweg asked me to talk about the future of WordPress, which is, as you can imagine, a tall order indeed. Many important people in the WP community and at Automattic will be there, and if I play my cards right, what I say might impact how they think about what they do next.

I think the power to write and publish is a precious thing, and WordPress has done something amazing in the history of publishing: they’ve made the experience of writing and sharing simple, cheap and reliable for many people around the world (If nothing else, it powers the blog you’re reading now). But what’s missing? What doesn’t it do well that the next generation of WordPress users will need? Or that the current one doesn’t know it needs?

If you’re a WordPress developer, or user, either through wordpress.com or your own blog, what ideas, directions, challenges or even features do you think I need to consider for a talk like this? Jane Wells, who leads UX for WordPress, believes as Matt does, the future of WordPress is people. But what should those people be doing? Vladamir thinks WP is slowing down, and as I’ve noted, plugin culture creates problems for users and for corporations. And for some, there’s a separation between what WordPress the platform should do, vs. what it should do for users.

And if you know my work, what general themes do you think I should talk about? Grateful for your thoughts below – I’d love to incorporate good ideas from as many interested people as I can.

And if you’ll be there, leave a comment and let me know. It’d be fun to share a beer (or three).

How do authors earn credibility?

Posted on in mailbag, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

From the mailbag, here’s a question from Emrah on reputation and writing:

I just read the post titled How I make a living: in detail and I was  curious about how an author earns credibility, especially someone  starting from scratch, for the value of the books she writes. It’s  one thing for the book’s content to be good, but another thing for  people (customers,  publishers) to believe that you really have something valuable to  share, right?

Is it less about credentials and more about selling yourself to  publishers and them promoting your book to customers, journalists etc?  I know from experience that some of the most widely promoted/suggested books aren’t necessarily better than other books on same/similar topics.

I agree – there is a big difference between popularity and quality. Plenty of of shlock is popular, and plenty of very good work never gets the recognition it deserves.  There is no law that says the highest grossing author on a subject knows the most about it, writes the best about it, or is even more than mediocre on the subject at hand. S/he might simply be much better at writing marketable books, or or has the financial resources to promote them better than other experts or authors do. A mediocre book on a hot topic, a book everyone knows about, will likely sell better than a better book on the same subject that few ever discover.

It’s a funny thing, but now at parties or bars when I tell people I’m an author, you know what the first thing many do is? They whip out their iPhone, look me up on amazon.com, and tell me how many reviews I have and what the average is. That’s what seems to be the prevailing way to instantly ascertain a writer’s credibility in 2010.

This is part of why, and I write this as an author, you readers have no idea how much your amazon reviews, tweets, blog posts, forwards of links, recommendations to co-workers and friends, nearly anything at all where my work is mentioned matters in my career, or the career of any writer.  So much of what determines my success is out of my hands and largely in yours.  So if you’ve rarely written an amazon review of books you like, or posted on facebook, or told your boss or friends, know there are authors out there desperate for your help, regardless of how successful you think they are. This stuff matters. Unlike promotion and marketing which is (semi)manufactured credibility and happens before people have read the book, your opinions have surprisingly strong weight. It is, by and large, the people who determine how credible or viable an authors career is and how easy it will be for them to pitch their next book, if they can find the courage at all.

People send me email now and then saying “Thanks! I loved your book!” which is awesome and amazing. It always makes my day and gets me going to write more. But at the same time, if they wrote a similiar note to a friend, or coworker, or a popular blog, or on amazon.com, it has more value to me in terms of keeping this all going. It’s crude to call this out, and effectively complain about complements, I get that and I’m embarrassed to do it – but at the same time if the goal is to help any author keep plugging along, it’s the stuff not directed at them, but at others in the world that has the most leverage and few people realize this. And of course, these two behaviors are not mutually exclusive.

The idea of author credibility from the publishers perspective, most of the time, centers on sales-base and the term they use is platform. The word platform means how well known are you among people who are likely to buy the kind of book you are writing. Are you affiliated with a university and teach in the subject you’re writing about? Do you have a popular blog? Are you a leader in a community or event? The term platform is based mostly on sales potential and possible audience, rather than on whether you specifically have something valuable to say (although the former can imply the later). It’s your platform, relative to the book you are writing, that makes it easier or harder to find a publisher. You might have a PhD in mathematics, but if your book is about making obscure variants of Swiss cheese while blindfolded, your math platform is useless. Part of why authors rarely jump across genres is this fear that the platform wont translate across that chasm.

As far as ideas for books, or quality of content, the game is slated towards the masses. The ideas most publishers and most writers are going to be interested in talking to each other about are books with wide appeal and a wide audience (or at least a wide part of the audience the particular publisher has). Publishers are a conservative bunch, and rarely want to be the first to write a book on an unproven topic, which explains why, much like all businesses, there are often dozens of books with similiar titles and themes coming out around the same time.  The trick as an author is to find a way to take a fresh angle on a topic that is deep and interesting, but not too far afield from what others have done so a publisher won’t be afraid to do the dance with you. But like the film, music or theater worlds, despite how creative things are supposed to be, there is a surprising amount of conservatism and insecurity about which bets to place.

This insecurity is well deserved since no one has ever been a reliable predictor of which books will be bestsellers or not (Many claim this after, but never before). There are too many factors involved outside any author’s or publisher’s control, and most are afraid to admit it. The advertising agency world has similiar angst. Plenty of books have huge marketing budgets, and fail to break even, and some have no marketing at all, and do amazingly well. The missing factor, again, are you readers out there. As much as everyone wants to control your behavior, you guys are still in charge.

Other forms of credibility come from reviews and endorsements. This is why the back of books has lists people more famous than the author saying nice things about them and their work. It’s an attempt to demonstrate the credibility of the author’s work by proxy. And it works. I’m not sure where I stack up in your view of authorial fame, but I get plenty of requests for blurbs, and I know many authors who get way more than I do. As far as reviews, it still matters more to the world to get a review from the NYTimes or the WSJ then from a popular blog, but that gap is closing all the time, and there are many exceptions where a blog review generates way more sales then a prestigious newspaper review will.  And let me tell you as someone who has been reviewed by some prestigious blogs and newspapers – reaching high profile bloggers is much easier than reaching reviewers for the NY Times.  Bloggers nearly always list an email address – something not in the culture of most papers and magazines. And if you write well, and thoughtfully, you’d be surprised at who is willing to respond and take a look at your work and consider reviewing it or endorsing it.

At the end of the day the best credibility for writing, as a craft, has no secrets. Write more and write better than other people do. Write online where, at any time, its possible an infinite number of people can see it, so maybe Nancy Pearl will accidentally type in your url, and who knows. Write responses to popular writers online, link to them and email them a link to your response to what they wrote. So much of what’s written, now or ever, is trash, and good writers will recognize good writing and link back to what you did (assuming its as good and thoughtful as your ego thinks it is). But getting to work and putting the hours in is an unavoidable aspect of writing. It’s an unavoidable aspect of promotion. Put together, credibility comes from lots of effort. I have yet to see any other way.

I look at the writing life with the long view. I want to be doing this for a long time and I make my bets accordingly. I don’t need to hit one book out of the park – I just need to continually deliver the goods book after book and let my credibility accumulate. I started from scratch in 2003  – I don’t care about winning the sprint – I want to finish the marathon. Many writers in my categories sell many more books than I do, but I don’t care. I’m making a good living and I’m happy as hell. And this view makes many of the things I do, speaking, blogging (effectively giving away much of my writing), and the rest make total sense. When you take the long view, much of the short term confusion goes away. And when I hear people desperate for shortcuts, part of me knows on that alone they don’t have what it takes.

But perhaps I’m all wrong. What did I miss? Could I be more credible to you, dearest blog reader? Let me know where my blind spots are.

Post #1000: A Strawman for Everything

Posted on in Philosophyby Scott Berkun

Well here we are. It’s post 1000! Surprised to have written so much here.  Thanks for reading, linking, and commenting, as that’s a huge motivator for my prolificity.

For post #1000 it seemed i should try and sum up. Be concise. Get to the point of whatever it is I’m trying to do. Here are five big swings, themes you’ll find in much of my other writing. It’s preachy as hell, but hey, it’s post 1000 .

A Strawman for Everything

  1. We need to ask more questions. I don’t just mean kids. I mean adults. Information is so cheap and easy today, but it’s worthless without good questions to frame it with. The news tells us about the murder in our town, or the unemployment rate, or the fluffy cat saved in the tree, but what are we do about this? Why is it how it is? Who decides these are the best things to tell us and why? From the cradle to the grave we are given information as if it was precious, but it’s not anymore. We’re overwhelmed by it (Information is a form of garbage), and yet oddly addicted to cramming more of it in our brains. The rare commodity is the wisdom for how to think about information, and that starts with asking questions about it. What is a fact? Why was this fact chosen instead of another? The skill of asking good questions is something we are never taught in school (schools being places we’re mostly rewarded for giving the ‘right’ answer). We need to cultivate question asking as a skill, recognize the distinctions between information, knowledge and wisdom, and align our energy in relation to the relative importance of these three different things.
  2. We confuse tech progress with social and personal progress.  The 20th century was the most technologically advanced in history, and had the most bloodshed in history. This doesn’t mean all of the former caused all of the later, but it certainly didn’t prevent it. More recently, the web, for all its wonders, did not prevent misleading information from leading the U.S. into war. New technology guarantees almost nothing. Social progress, more freedom, less cruelty, personal enlightenment, lifetime fulfillment, and more, all depend less on technologies than self-awareness and will. The U.S. Constitution was written on quill pens. The Civil rights movement was fueled by marches and speeches. Buddha, Jesus and Socrates did all their deeds without even the dream of electricity. The Internet, the iPad or whatever comes next are unlikely to be the prime mover in (social) progress as history demonstrates tech is rarely the missing link: our self-awareness and commitment to change often are. Tech can certainly help, but the heavily lifting is always on us.
  3. Integrity is the proximity of your beliefs to your actions, and we need more integrity. It’s very easy to preach from the bible about compassion, or tell tales of the good Samaritan, or about the U.S. Bill of Rights, but somehow we forget these things when it’s inconvenient. Or when we’re personally offended. I wish there was some way to put an integrity score over people’s heads, floating around for all to see. I’m starting to judge people less by my own values, and more by how their actions match their own proclaimed values. Unlike the status symbols of cars and clothes, there is no easy status symbol for ones own integrity (Now that’s a technology I’d like to see). I don’t know how I would score myself, but part of why I write, and why I try to be transparent here is to keep tabs on my own bullshit. I think being fulfilled and happy in life has much to do with integrity, and it doesn’t require money or gadgets to develop more of it. One story of this age, with Enron, Madoff, WMDs, and the sub-prime crisis, is a story of lost integrity. I wonder about how to push things the other way.
  4. There is a downward spiral of empty consumption. When George W. Bush, after 9/11, told us the best thing Americans can do is to buy, something bizarre happened to us. He had the greatest leadership moment of my lifetime in his hands – he could have told us anything at all, plant trees, volunteer in schools, send gifts to GIs, and like WW I and WWII, the country, and some of the world, would have passionately rallied together to work towards a shared cause. But he told us to keep plugging along (to “live our lives and hug our children”) and  to buy for ourselves (“I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy”). I think we all knew there was something missing from this, but didn’t know what it was.  And as a nation, despite our many religions, one kind of faith we share is the faith in buying things. Now, I like buying things. I like the computer I’m typing on, and I like the car I drive, but I don’t have faith that a better computer or better car will making me much happier than the ones I already have (And some research bares this out). Most people I know want more community, friends, love and meaning in their lives, yet spend most of their life energy working very hard to earn more money to buy (or go into debt for) more things they don’t need, things that will never help them get more community, friends or meaning they seek. Advertising convinces us otherwise, and we like being convinced, as we’re terrified of our economy falling apart, an economy dependent (though not as much as we’re told) on  consumption. I don’t know how we get out of this loop, but it seems to be a problem, and as Jared Diamond is fond of saying, this likely can’t last very long.
  5. This is the greatest time in history for creatives. When I talk to groups about creativity and making things, it’s rare to see anyone who notices how its cheaper and easier to make creative work and get it out into the world than ever. If born in our age, Thomas Paine or Thomas Jefferson or Voltaire would have loved to have been bloggers, and to have instant access to the world for their ideas. DaVinci, Michelangeo and VanGogh would have had websites, thrilled to get commissions via paypal from strangers, freeing them from working only at the frustrating whims of popes and kings. Making music, film, books or almost anything at all is cheaper than ever in history, and can be put out into the world without a single person’s approval. We are free! The gatekeepers are gone! There are almost no external excuses anymore. The only reason you are not making the thing you daydream, or support others who do what you wish you could do, is about is you, and how you think about you. Get started here.

As this is my 1000th post, I can’t finish it without saying Thanks.

Thanks for reading, for commenting, for buying my books, for hiring me to speak, and telling others about my work on amazon and elsewhere. I know I’m here because of you.  Its been an amazing ride and I promise you this: I’m just getting started.

(This post was partially inspired by the Lou Reed song, Strawman)

The end of the killer feature

Posted on in Business, design, Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

At The Economist Ideas Economy event Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, in an excellent talk about open source software, proclaimed the end of the killer feature. He asked the packed audience of high profile influentials how many people use Firefox, and how many of them have a plugin installed – and a good percentage of them raised their hands.

He has a point. For many kinds of products, it’s the end of the killer feature. Not everywhere, not for all kinds of products. But the trend is definitely the other way. And the trend has been happening for some time.

There was a day and time when software product launches hinged on features (or killer applications) and how the new features compared to the old features competitors had. The browser wars were perhaps a peak of this kind of guns blazing feature rich marketing warfare between two competitors.  Back then it was expensive to launch products and press millions of CDs, and ship them in boxes.  It took time and money and you needed expensive waves of promotion to propel each release forward.

But today, with websites, iPhone apps, and web browser plugins. new feature additions are cheap(er) and can roll in at any time: the feature set matters, but it matters less. What matters more are the overall user experience and the quality and depth of the plugins/apps available for people to use.

Curiously enough, Apple’s app store is leading the way in 2010, which is an inversion of what happened in the 90s with Microsoft and Apple. The success of Windows 95, in part, was based on the huge platform of applications it had compared to the Macintosh. It didn’t matter than the Macintosh had a better experience, the availability of apps drove the decisions for many people. With the iPhone, perhaps for the first time I can remember, a product has both superior design and a superior 3rd party platform.

But the new plague we have is the annoyance of syncing upgrades and compatibility.  To stay secure, we’re compelled to keep everything up to date. But my Firefox install has a half-dozen plugins, and every time Firefox itself updates, it causes a wave of incompatibility across those plugins.  I’ve had the same problem with WordPress too. I never know now when I upgrade one thing, how it will impact the others, and the more plugins and apps I have, the more of a problem this becomes.  It has happened before that a plugin, or app, is abandoned: , it can’t make the upgrade with me, and suddenly I’m surprised to be without something I’d grown to depend on. I’m dependent on a wider and wider set of people to get the features and things I want, which has its advantages, but its disadvantages too.

Should you pay for an outside speaker?

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

A potential client asked me – we’re not sure it makes sense to pay a speaker to come to us. What’s your argument? And so, I sat down and wrote this.

Clearly I’m biased, since I make a good part of my living being hired to speak.

However, back when I was a manager it was rare I hired someone merely to come talk to my team.  Same for consultants. The amount these people wanted seemed outrageous. I also had the sense I’d failed if I had to bring someone else in to teach, explain, motivate or do whatever it was I’d be paying them to do. I believed I could, and should, do all things and fill all roles as their boss.

I don’t believe this anymore – it’s entertainingly arrogant – but I did back then.

But I do know this. People listen differently to outsiders. Their ears and minds are more open. And if open minds and better ideas are what you seek, bringing an interesting, live, passionate person into your group is one easy way to do it.

Here are my arguments for hiring speakers:

  • People listen differently. The same message you have given 10 times before to no avail, will be heard differently from an outside expert. People listen differently to outsiders and lend their ideas more consideration, or at least different consideration, than insiders. The package ideas come in changes how those ideas are judged.
  • It brings fresh thinking to your world. Whatever I, or other good speakers, say, it’s unlikely to be the strict party line. Part of my value is how many places I visit – I see everything. I’m a trafficker in ideas and I get around. People hear ideas born from a wider perspective, and are provoked to consider new attitudes, questions or ideas than they had before. Even if they disagree, they’ll have more confidence in whatever it is they do believe after hearing a well spoken outsider offer a different view to test theirs against.
  • People are more willing to ask questions and voice opinions. There is a freedom in talking to a visitor. Asking a vistor makes it safer to ask certain tough questions. It can spark conversations that are hard to start, or that people are afraid to talk about.
  • It raises morale. If the speaker is good, or high profile, people feel you care.That you’re interested in continuing their growth and education.  The group, or company, scores morale points simply by you taking the time/money to arrange to have someone come in and talk with them. If you could get U2 to play at your next team meeting, even people who don’t like U2 would feel something positive that you took the time to make that happen.
  • It’s a bargain. If I say something that makes people 1% or 2% more effective in how they approach their work, that’s a big improvement. What else gives that kind of impact in a short amount of time? If the average salary in the room is $100,000, and there are 40 people there, that’s $4 million in annual investment by the company. If I can make them 1% more effective when they return, that’s worth $40k.  (I don’t buy this exact math, but there is a similiar math at work). There is a huge range in what it costs to hire a speaker, but $5k to $10k is in the mid range for a lecture-type experience.
  • It’s cheaper than sending people to conferences.  Instead of sending people out to events, and paying conference and travel fees, bringing a speaker in reverses the expenses. You pay travel for one person, and bring them to your entire group. Your folks don’t get the immersive,  multi-day travel experience a great conference can provide, but they do get a self-contained injection of fresh thinking and different perspectives they can take right back to work with them. They can also choose to spend more time with the speaker if they want, or if they’re bored, go back to their desks. They can self select their level of interest, unlike a conference where they may be stuck wandering through afternoons of mediocrity.

And here are my arguments against:

  • Many experts are lousy speakers. I’ve seen them and so have you. They talk about themselves. They are boring or arrogant. They ramble and wander to places no one cares about. They don’t teach or listen. There is no law that says the higher profile an author or expert is, the better they are at engaging audiences. Many are impractical in their thinking and don’t care about how hard their suggestions are to put into practice.  Many speakers are simply not very good and don’t provide much value.
  • Many are self involved/promotion focused. For many people speaking is solely promotion for other things – their books or their consulting firms. So they don’t see the speaking/teaching as the product, they see it as an advertisement for their real products, despite what you’ve hired them for.
  • Speak and run (in a can). The best teaching happens in smaller groups, but the higher the profile of the speaker, the more likely it is they show up, lecture to a huge crowd, and leave, never learning much about you, your people, your problems. It’s also less likely they’ll be interactive, as they’re fond of giving completely one way lectures. It’s always more fun for me, after the big fancy lecture, to get with a small, fun, high energy group at a whiteboard and make it a confab. See if we can put my ideas into practice, or collaborate on whatever it is they’re trying to do. Not a course where it’s my agenda, but something the students drive after hearing me talk for awhile.
  • Speakers can’t solve the tough problems.  If a speaker is amazing, it’s still only speaking. Speaking and doing are two different things. After the lecture someone has to do something different than they did before, and that’s what a speaker can not do for them. It’s silly to expect the arrival of a speaker to change the bad behavior of a VP, or the dysfunctions of a team, because it can’t, but some guru types promise this and more. I’m the first to tell potential clients about what problems I can and cannot solve. I can inspire, I can give ideas, I can coach and can tell how others have solved problems, but I can’t do it for you. However, a good speaker is one of the few ways to inject some momentum for change into a culture. There is a reason many of our heroes are known for their speeches (JFK, MLK, Lincoln, Gandhi, Jesus, etc.) Good speakers give people something to talk about that’s safe to criticize, or be inspired by, and can be the fuel for progress leaders have been waiting for.
  • Sometimes you can find good speakers for free. There’s no doubt about it – there are great people in every field who aren’t famous, but are just as knowledgeable as those that are, and are better speakers/teachers than the famous people. But for some of the reasons above, they’re harder to find, and they don’t have the same impact on morale that someone well known or famous in some way.

Many authors, today and throughout history, made much more income from speaking to groups than from their books. When it’s done well it has a potency you can’t get from books, or the web, or anything else.

Have you ever hired a speaker to come in to your organization?  If you have, how do your notes compare to the above? If you haven’t, who or what would make you change your mind?

The 22 minute meeting (updated)

Posted on in Managementby Scott Berkun

(Updated: Now with Nicole Steinbok ignite video at bottom)

No one likes meetings and for good reason. In most meetings, most of the time, most people think most of what goes on is a waste of time. So what if you took out all of the stupid, wasteful stuff and left only the useful parts?

Enter the 22 minute meeting. This is an idea from Nicole Steinbok, and she presented it at Seattle Ignite 9. When I saw her speak at Microsoft a few months ago, she gave one of the best short talks I’ve ever seen and I told her to do it at Ignite. Glad I did.

Here’s the poster from her talk (which you can use):

I couldn’t find a write up of the core points, so here’s my take on her ideas from what I remember from her talk. All credit should go her way:

  1. Schedule a 22 minute meeting – Who decided meetings should be 30 or 60 minutes? What data is this based on? None. 30 and 60 minute meetings leave no time to get between meetings, and assumes, on average, people need an hour to sort things out. Certainly not all meetings can be run in 22 minutes, but many can, so we’d all be better off if the default time were small, not large.
  2. Have a goal based agenda – Having an agenda at all would be a plus in most meetings. Writing it on the whiteboard, earns double pluses, since then everyone has a constant reminder of what the meeting is supposed to achieve.
  3. Send required readings 3 days beforehand – The burden is on the organizer to make this small enough that people actually do it. Never ever allow a meeting to be “lets all read the documents together and penalize anyone diligent enough to do their homework”. (note: I think 24 hours is plenty). Remember some great companies, like Amazon, make reading central to how decisions are made.
  4. Start on time – How often does this happen? Almost never. Part of the problem is Outlook and all schedule programs don’t have space between meetings. By 2pm there is a day’s worth of meeting time debt. 22 minutes ensures plenty of travel/buffer time between meetings.
  5. Stand up – Reminds everyone the goal isn’t to elaborate or be supplemental (See Scrum standing meetings). Make your point, make your requests, or keep quiet. If there is a disagreement, say so, but handle resolving it outside of the meeting.
  6. No laptops, but presenters and note takers. If you’re promised 22 minutes, and it’s all good stuff, you don’t need a secondary thing to be doing while you pretend to be listening. One person taking notes, and one person presenting if necessary.
  7. No phones, no exceptions – see above.
  8. Focus! Note off topic comments. If you have an agenda, someone has to police it and this burden is on whoever called the meeting. Tangents are ok, provided they are short. The meeting organizer has to table tangents and arguments that go too far from the agenda.
  9. Send notes ASAP – With 22 minutes, there should be time, post meeting, for the organizer to send out notes and action items before the next meeting begins.

What do you think?

If you like the idea, help it spread. Nicole started a facebook group and a poster you can download (PDF). Pass it on.

UPDATED: Here’s Nicole’s excellent Ignite talk.

Should managers know how to code?

Posted on in Management, Microsoftby Scott Berkun

In a series of posts, called readers choice, I write on whatever topics people submit and vote for. If you dig this idea, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes.

This time: Should managers know how to code?

I see people debate this all over the tech sector, and in tech/web groups in other companies. Even back at Microsoft, we used to argue about this all the time, especially whether program managers (e.g. small team level project managers) should know how to code or not. Sadly, no one ever researched whether it had any bearing on their success or not in this role.

In short, it depends on what you are managing.

If you are A) exclusively a manager of software developers, then yes, you should probably still know how to code and have a programming background. But only a small percentage of your working day (5-20%) should be spent writing code.  The larger your team, the smaller this number should be.  Once you are the boss, your primary job is to do all the things that individual programmers can not do. To fight the political battles no one else on your team can fight. Champion new initiatives or directions. Resolve ugly conflicts. Coach. Arrange for training, budget, skill development and recruiting, so the team continues to grow and get better. Managers who are former programmers are notorious for continuing to be good at programming and entirely sucking and neglecting just about every other task good managers do. The tech sector is filled with these people. It’s sad. In many cases they’d be better off with the kind of people who end up as B.

If you are B) your management role is more general, say a project manager or a team lead, but you do have programmers working with or for you, then knowing how to code is less important. You probably have a background in business, or marketing, or have worn many different hats in your career. What is important are the following:

  • Do you have their trust? And do you trust them? It matters less how you get it, but put simply, do programmers trust you? This can be true or not regardless of how much you know about coding. If you protect your programmers, help them to be effective, keep them out of boring meetings and other forms of stupidity, then you’ll have their trust. And with trust they will be a partner and an ally, and work with you to get the best out of each other regardless of how much you know or don’t know. Oddly, it’s calling bullshit, or to be less confrontational, asking good, smart, tough questions that demonstrate you not only understand, but you care, that often earns trust.  On the other side, leaders have to extend trust first and resist the tendency to micromanage what you don’t understand. Leaving programmers alone with crystal clear goals and deadlines they’ve collaborated on can be a surprisingly effective management style.
  • Can you call bullshit? Part of the conversation with every employee is sorting out whether what they say is hard is a) actually hard b) they are ignorant of how to make it easier or c) it’s just something they don’t want to do. A good leader has have enough understanding of tradeoffs and how software works to ask tough questions and, now and then, call someones bluff.
  • Do you understand morale? There is more to morale than morale events. Someone has to understand what motivates the programming team. What gets them excited and what makes them depressed. I can know more about programming then the 100 programmers working for me, but if I ignore their feelings about their work, never inspire them, or help them understand why the work we do matters, what good is that programming knowledge? Its worthless. A leader who can understand, motivate, inspire, convince, or in some cases merely make people laugh, makes a special contribution no one else can likely make.
  • Do you understand coding concepts? There could easily be a “programming for managers” short course. There are meta concepts that matter: performance, objects, the problems of specifications, APIs, basics of testing, etc. that don’t require hard core programming skills to understand. Even just having some exposure to working in HTML/CSS, Flash, Excel macros,  anything, if taught in the right way, can yield a sense of the concepts involved, and those concepts are what matters. You don’t need to be a geek to speak and understand geek.
  • Can you help programmers make good decisions? Good decision making is good decision making. Any good leader (e.g. a president, executive or parent) is often in situations where they are not the expert, but where they have to work with experts who know much more about something. There is a skill, a communication and thinking skill, for how to maximize the utility of an expert in making a decision. Simply asking a programmer two questions: 1) What are our 3 or 4 alternatives here? 2) What are the tradeoffs between them? frames the conversation so that good decisions are likely to surface just through conversation. Even in listening to the programmer explain the differences forces the programmer to think better about the decision, and simultaneously informs the leader on the context, tradeoffs, and risks that matter without forcing them to become experts themselves. Managers don’t need to be experts – they need to be great at getting functional value out of experts of any kind. Another word for this is facilitation, but people rarely like to admit that the secret of good leadership hinges on a touchy-feely communication word like facilitation.
  • Can you let programmers help you make good decisions? As is often the case, this is reciprocal. Are you capable of taking ideas on design, marketing, or management from the programming team? Just as you have insight into what programmers should be doing, programmers have insight into what you are doing. Another quick way to build trust is to let them see that if they give you feedback or a suggestion and you make use of it, they’ll know you have their ear and treat you differently for it.
  • Can you represent their work well to others. The other functional task leaders have is reporting on, or showing work the team has done to people not on the team. This likely involves being asked technical questions, and the leader has to be able to represent some percentage of these questions and challenges well from a technical perspective.  Typically if a leader is truly involved in the decisions, and understands the tradeoffs, they’ll be able to answer many of the questions about the work. But if they can’t, and must always be surrounded by a crew of programmers to prevent being embarrassed, then they’re not as useful to the team as they should be.

Conclusion: There are so many different kinds of teams and projects where my advice might be different, but on average I’m convinced someone of type B, who can’t code but meets most of the criteria above, will have better results than someone who can code, but meets less of the criteria I listed above.

Disclaimer: Of course there is nothing mutually exclusive between being a great programmer and being a great manager. These people exist. But they’re rare (How many have you met in your career?)

(Related – see: Long comment thread about a similiar question on Stack Overflow)

What have your experiences been like?

Quote of the week

Posted on in quote of the x, Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

It’s amazing how much you miss right in front of your face if you are paid to miss it. And they were paid to miss it. They were paid to ignore very simple facts.

I don’t have any clue [about what’s coming next]. One of the amazing things is that when you write a book about the people who saw the sub-prime mortgage collapse coming, they think you’re saying that you saw the sub-prime mortgage collapse coming.

If you write a book, Liars poker, for that matter, where maybe the point of the book was that if you could ask anyone in the world for investment advice it should not be me, and the minute its published everyone is asking me for investment advice.

I really do feel like I’m at this moment in my life where I walk out my door and I scream, I’m not Jesus, I’m Brian. I’m just Brian (reference to the Python film, Life of Brian).

– Michael Lewis, Author of MoneyBall and  On NPR’s Wait Wait don’t tell me 3/27/2010

The iPad and Innovation Theory

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

I’m not much for speculation – when people guess about how a product will do I think there’s much more luck involved in being right than anyone admits.  I wish all the futurists and prognosticators would keep a table of their bets, and honestly show how often they’re right or wrong. I think they’d be humbler in their bets if they saw their history.

That said, I’ve been asked again and again about my thoughts on the iPad. Rather than give a fairly useless bet, I’d rather teach a smarter way to look at new products and things.

A useful way to look at any new product is to do the following:

  • Pretend all the marketing is true
  • Assume many different kinds of people will buy it
  • Now ask: where will the time people spend using the new thing come from?

This is what I (and probably others) have called displacement theory – or evaluating one thing by thinking about how it will displace/effect usage of other things.  As we all have finite time, if  something new that enters our world the time spent using it will come from somewhere.  If people choose not to spend time with the iPad, even after purchasing it, it will fail. If they do use it, what will they be using it instead of?

This is an interesting exercise for designers and makers – it focuses you on people’s behavior, or how you imagine them behaving, rather than getting lost in the abstract wonders of devices and technologies are capable of, rather than what actual people will do with them (And the wise use techniques like ethnography to see what people actually do today, rather than surveys and focus groups where they merely say what they think they do, or what they think you want to hear) .

Think of all the kitchen / yard / tech gadgets people buy and never use – they failed to displace whatever else it was in those people’s lives they do with their time. They might have had interesting designs, but they were not sufficiently good to displace whatever else they use. Unless, say, it was an iFurnace, and it’s primary function is to work without human interaction.

For most of the people who buy an iPad in the first weeks, the time spent using it will come from time spent on laptops and possibly from books once its e-reader features are fully formed (Not to mention the endless demos they’ll do showing it off to their friends).

Industry analyst NPD listed the following stats based on their research into who might buy one:

  • Income $100,000
  • Age 18-34 (27% expressed interest in buying iPad — compared to 18% overall)
  • Reason for Buying: Time among 18-34 between loyalty and multi-touch screen
  • How They Will Use It: To play music or access the Internet

This isn’t a compelling list of reasons or statistics, and you’d have to read the full report to even have much faith on the accuracy of the data. But it suggests for the young and affluent the iPad is a tertiary device for accessing things they can access elsewhere.

Based on all this the success of the iPad will hinge on three factors:

  • People’s willingness to by a third device for internet access (First two being PCs and phones). The iPhone and iPod were much easier to sell as they replaced existing products with mediocre designs (cell phones and digital music players were awful until Apple entered the fray). It’s not clear to most consumers what exactly the iPad will replace/displace.  Much of this depends on the price point, and for now the iPad’s price and service are exclusively priced. Few people even at $100k in income are likely to bite. The problem to be solved is not as acute or tempting as it was for phones or music. There is a displacement price where the new thing is cheap enough to get people to quit spending time doing it the old way, and buy the new thing, assuming they believe it serves all the old needs and satisfies some new ones.
  • Unique experience benefits that arise from the iPad over laptops or books. Many things are promised, but some simple things like not having to deal with laptop lids, which compared to books, have more ergonomic issues than books or magazines. PC laptops are notorious for unpredictable and annoying on/off/sleep behavior mostly because of lids.  The convenience factors of an iPad on the couch while watching TV, or in the kitchen while cooking, might be some of the strongest user experience arguments. But it’s largely an argument of making passive experiences more convenient, rather than making a substantive improvement in quality of life – a very price sensitive place to be. For many it the choice to buy an iPad will compete against netbooks, cheap simple laptops. Until the price gap narrows, this won’t be a tough choice for most people.
  • The iPad’s ability to influence what competitors do in this space. This can be done without strong sales, as just having a competitor to kindle or tablet computers changes the behavior of competitors( See Google’s Chrome browser, as it’s a similar case).  Many people forget that sales are only one aspect of a successful product launch. If the launch forces competitors to change strategy, or allows for things to be learned for the next product, a “failed” product can be incredibly useful.

In the sense of the last point, the iPad has already been successful. It has already reshaped the conversation and forced every kindle user, or potential future kindle customer, to think differently about what their kindle is supposed to do, or not.

I’m a deliberate late adopter of most things – I care more about the content than the pipes they come on, so I don’t own a Kindle and am unlikely to buy an iPad. My life is pretty damn convenient at this point, so convenience rarely gets me to buy anything.

But I’m convinced these devices are the way of the future – there are too may good arguments for what web based devices can do for people who like to read, and as the price gets lower (would you buy one for $100? $50? $15?) the perception of positives (e.g. for travelers, one device that can carry 50 books is simpler than bringing 50 books)  will outweigh the negatives for many people. We’ll always have books made from paper, but there will be fewer people using them in 20 years than there are now.

How great author events happen (biznik)

Posted on in On Tourby Scott Berkun

Two weeks ago I spoke at a fantastic author event in Seattle run by Biznik. I speak in lots of places for many reasons, but this was one of the best run and most fun events I’ve done in some time. Biznik partners with Kim Rickett’s Book Events, St. Michelle Wine, and Hotel 1000 to make it happen.

We had a sold out crowd of nearly 100 people and I’m pretty sure everyone had a great time.

Here’s the recipe:

  1. Real events, w/food & wine, set people’s expectations to be social.
  2. People in social moods are happier, more open minded and have more fun.
  3. Choice, non-cubicle farm venues changes the vibe / tone for the better.
  4. People gets the book w/admission, preventing speakers from giving sales pitches.
  5. By forgoing slides or canned presentations it’s more intimate and interactive.

Thanks to my photographer friend Shawn Murphy, here’s the story in pictures:

1. The event was held at Hotel 1000 in Seattle, on their 4th floor. There’s a full bar, some snacks, a lounge, and a room that can be used as a small auditorium. The doors opened at 5:30pm and folks could mingle, network and chat.  I was there early (that’s me in the blue on the right) and met and talked with lots of folks.

2. At 6:10, we moved over to the main event, a talk about my bestseller, The Confessions of a Public Speaker, and as everyone who comes gets a copy, I signed a few books right before we got started.

3. For the main event, I went without any slides or formal lecture. I talked for ten minutes giving my story for how I ended up being a writer and speaker, which is enough for a smart, active crowd to find plenty of questions to ask. So we had a lively and quite funny Q&A for over an hour.

4. When you go solo, with no slides or props or anything, it’s always much more intimate. I’m comfortable with this, but often at these Biznik events Warren Ethridge acts as host, sort of like James Lipton on In the Actor’s studio.

5. After the talk, they set up a signing table and helped make things work as easily as possible. People in line were given post it notes to write their name on, so the author (me in this case) can more quickly get the spelling right, and spend more time chatting with people rather than dealing with the mechanics.

5. And then as things wound down, and the wine took its final hold, things got silly and fun.

You can also see a short video about this author series, which includes some short bits of me in action:

Google Wave and Why You Should Care

Posted on in Booksby Scott Berkun

Honestly, I’m not certain yet you should care about Google Wave.

But that actually doesn’t matter.

My friend Gina Trappani of Lifehacker and Smarterware fame has put an entire book about wave on the web, for free. What better way is there to sort out wave than reading her expert point of view and advice?

And even more interesting, she self published the book with PWI, a charity for disabled adults, so if you buy the book, PDF or hardcopy, much of the money goes to good use.

All the details are here, including how to get any, or all three, versions of the book.

Need a word for an interesting idea

Posted on in Creative Thinking, Innovationby Scott Berkun

Was talking today with someone about this:

A movie comes out (Movie X) and is very influential. Many other filmmakers copy the style or the elements of the story, making films Y and Z.

If you see Y and Z first, and then see X, X seems derivative, even though it is the originator of the ideas. If you didn’t know the backstory, you’d think X was a knock-off, even though it’s the source.

Anyone know a term for this? Prestige Inversion? Creative Inversion? Looking for suggestions.

Ada Lovelace Could Kick Your Ass

Posted on in history, Innovationby Scott Berkun

Few people know that Ada Lovelace was likely the first computer programmer in history. She made my list of the top women innovators of all time.

She worked with Charles Babbage, a man who is most famous for making a machine that didn’t quite work. A testament to the role of failure in the making of every success. One challenge she faced is that given that his computer, known as the Babbage engine, wasn’t quite working, so she had to write a virtual program. That’s right. She wrote code for a system that didn’t quite exist yet (To be specific, she translated a paper from French to English and in doing so added notes, which included a program – her actual translation, and notes, are here). Not too shabby.

If you complain about your compiler being slow, or about web standards not being followed, take a humility pill. At least the stuff you hate actually exists.  Try and imagine the conversations she must have had with her friends in 1843:

Friend: So Ada, what did you do yesterday? I went for a horse ride and picked some flowers.
Ada: “Oh that sounds fun. Well, I translated a paper about a lecture, written about a new application of math to make a machine that can do complex computations on its own and just for fun and I wrote up the instruction set to compute Bernoulli numbers automatically on this machine. Which doesn’t exist yet.”
Friend: <silence> That’s nice. Go for a horse ride?

Perhaps if you’re truly an innovator, you often have trouble explaining what you’re doing. Sadly Ada died young, at age 36. The programming language Ada was named after her. One of my favorite quotes from her famous note is this:

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.

She was writing about Babbage’s machine, but boy does it seem relevant to all the technologies we make. Some folks celebrate October 14 (or 16th) as Ada Lovelace day. She was born on December 10th 1815, and died at the age of 37 on November 27th 1852.

quote of the week

Posted on in Philosophy, quote of the xby Scott Berkun

Couldn’t sleep the other night and watched Examined Life, a film about philosophy. Half of the philosophers interviewed in the film were predictably obtuse and stiff as philosophers often are, but the other half all said things that shook me up and rattled my mind.

I’d heard of Cornell West before, but honestly didn’t think much of him from the sound bytes I’d seen (and his involvement with the philosophically muddy Matrix trilogy). But he offered this impromptu monologue in the back seat of a cab and it blew me away. Not just for his eloquence and presence, but for how easy it was for him to clearly make complex points:

It takes tremendous discipline, tremendous courage to think for yourself.  W.B. Yeats said ‘It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield.’  Courage to think critically. Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for an human being. Courage to think. Courage to love. Courage to hope.

[I think of] truth as a way of life, as opposed to a set of propositions that correspond to things in the world. Human beings are unable to ever gain any monopoly on Truth (capital T), we might have access to truth (little t), but they are fallible claims about truth and they could be wrong, and open to revision and so on. So there is a certain kind of mystery that goes hand in hand with truth. This is why so many existential thinkers whether they be religious or secular… have worked to accent our finitude and our inability to fully grasp the ultimate nature of reality and truth about things. And therefore you talk about truth being tied to the way to truth, because once you give up on the notion of fully grasping the way the world is you’re gonna talk about what are the ways I can sustain my quest for truth. How do you sustain a journey, a path, toward truth? The way to truth? The truth talk goes hand in hand with talk about the way to truth.

And scientists can talk about this in terms of producing evidence or reliable conclusions. Religious folks can talk about this in terms of surrendering ones arrogance and pride in the face of divine revelation and what have you, but they’re all ways of acknowledging our finitude. Our fallibility.

Help w/ new edition of Myths of Innovation

Posted on in Books, Myths of Innovationby Scott Berkun

Currently I’m in talks with O’Reilly Media about releasing an updated version of The Myths of Innovation in paperback some time this year.

I have a few obvious things to take care of:

  • Correct these errata
  • Add a chapter on applying the lessons from the chapters to projects

Mind you, this is not a complete overhaul, but I’m happy to update/add/enhance the book with a few new sections as part of the paperback edition and I’d rather base that on what you want, rather than what I think you want.

Here are some questions to help me get what i’m looking for:

  • Was there a question you were left with when you finished the book?
  • Was there a situation you bought the book to help you deal with, and if so, was the book helpful?
  • Were there other myths, or legends, you’d heard of that you hoped the book would have talked about?

Let me know – thanks.

How I make a living: in detail

Posted on in ask berkun, reader's choiceby Scott Berkun

In a series of posts, called reader’s choice, I write on topics people submit. This week, the topic is: how do you manage your business as a speaker, author and consultant.

Some of this is covered in chapter 3 of Confessions of a Public Speaker, which you can read free online here.

My primary business is writing books. It’s writing good books that led to everything else I get paid to do. Oddly, speaking and consulting are more lucrative than writing books, but I’m not driven primarily by money. I make decisions with the primary goal of being able to write books for the rest of my life and live comfortably while I do it.

I’ve been willing to earn much less money to have much more control over my time. I love my freedom of time: I can stop working for a few days, or work very hard, whenever I want, and that is a feature of my life I don’t want to lose and is more valuable than more financial wealth.

The result is I’m one of the freest people I know. I’m not obligated on a daily basis to work for anyone. Most days I don’t have to be anywhere at any particular time. When I’m working for hire I’m often paid to travel to interesting places, meet smart, passionate people and see things few get to experience. I feel very lucky and happy and I protect my lifestyle accordingly.

In terms of ballpark revenue, it goes something like this:

  • Book Royalties & Freelance writing: 40% of income
  • Speaking fees: 50% of income
  • Consulting fees: 10% of my income
  • For the last two years I’ve earned between $100k and $120k a year.
  • But these numbers are ballpark – it fluctuates every year – it’s not a salary.

It’s worth noting:

  • When I quit Microsoft in 2003, my salary was higher than the above figures.
  • My goal when I quit was to earn $50k a year, a number that covered my expenses. The idea of making a living independently was terrifying as I started with $0 income. I think of $50k as the low mark for sustaining this lifestyle (See should I quit my job?)
  • My income varies year to year. The primary risk I have is uncertainty. I have no guarantees this will continue.

How the business works: It’s very simple. I write books. I go out on the road and work hard to promote them. When I speak, and do well, people tell others about me and the books. I have some very popular videos on youtube and that helps too. The books, if they are good, get good reviews, and sell. Requests to speak for hire or consult come in through email or the web site and I prioritize and schedule them, or turn them down if they doesn’t fit the calendar.

Unless a new book is coming out, I do little active marketing or promotion, as the frequency of speaking gigs, and the popularity of this blog, does much of that for me. If things get quiet I might tickle people who have hired me to speak before, but that has almost never happened. Things were much harder when I started, but the success of each successive book catapulted things forward.

On Book Royalties / Freelance:  I have four successful books that continue to sell, but there’s no guarantee this will continue. Book sales generally trail off as the books age. Some fans don’t buy the books, and just read the blog. This is an external motivator that helps drive me to write the next one, and as I mentioned my primary love and ambition is writing books. I get occasional requests to write for magazines and take them when I can, but it’s not a consistent income source.

On speaking fees: Keynote style lectures are the most lucrative activity I do based on time. I’m typically paid $6 $7k $8k, plus travel, for keynote style lectures. This is in the mid-range for what pro-speakers charge (see Chapter 3 of Confessions if you wonder how on earth anyone, me included, is worth this much or more). I take many of these gigs as it makes up for the less lucrative time spent writing.

I used to teach workshops & courses but there has been enough demand for lectures that I rarely do this anymore. I do speaking engagements for free when it’s for a good cause, if I’m a fan of the company and want to visit (e.g. Netflix) or it’s a good opportunity to promote myself and my work (Harvard, MIT, Google, etc.) and I have new book to promote.

On Consulting:  For years this was much of my income, but the last years I rarely do consulting.  I have the luxury of being picky about clients – often my consulting engagements are follow-ons or additions to speaking gigs.   This makes sense as people know me and the trust required to be effective as an outsider is there.  I little UX/design related consulting anymore, which is funny if you knew me pre-2003.

I think of consulting as ‘brain for hire’- I sit with teams, review plans, critique projects, and advise leaders on what I see based on the hundreds of other work environments/cultures/projects I’ve seen and learned from. Speaking is preferable in that it’s easier to give clients a sense of satisfaction.  I can finish a lecture and know exactly how much value I just provided. When I leave a consulting gig it’s difficult to measure value (despite what major consulting firms claim) and that makes me feel less good about taking people’s money. I do like money, but I also like feeling I earned every penny of it.

On Blogging:  I have rarely viewed this blog as marketing. I’d always seen it primarily as writing and connecting. Good writing markets itself, and me. So I write here mostly as an exercise in short form writing, as a way to connect, and to help get my work out there. That’s part of why there are no ads here and why I try to avoid most of the annoyances you find on other blogs. It’s just me, you and a good, honest, intelligent discussion (at least your half is – hahaha :)

On Agents: I don’t have one and never have [Update 2014: I worked with David Fugate on The Year Without Pants]. I’ve looked for one with each of the last two books, but couldn’t find one that I liked or that was interested in the particular book I was working on (or was interested in the long view of representing me).  I’d like one, but so far it’s been way more work and frustration than writing the books themselves. I haven’t needed a speaker bureau (e.g. agent), but now and then requests come in from them for gigs I would not get otherwise and I say yes.

Secret to my success: I attribute my success to working at this for years and taking a long term view. There is no secret.  Without the successful books much of this would not be possible – (good) books still provide a credibility in the world that most blogs do not (and if you want advice on writing a book, this is for you). I am an army of one, not part of consulting firm, so I only have one calendar to fill which makes me lean and agile, which helps. It’s no secret, but it does seem unusual, that I feel intensely grateful to the universe I can make a living doing what I love, writing, in this era.

But the real secret is all of the people whose name I never learn who recommend my books, blog posts, and lectures to their friends, bosses and coworkers. I wish I knew more of you, but in lieu of that, thank you. I think about you often as I depend on you – I’ll try to keep up the good work. Please let me know if I don’t.

Also see:  Should I quit my job now

If there’s more you want to know, ask a question below.  Hope you appreciate and respect my candor here.

(Hat tip to Lynn for suggesting this topic)

Cloud Computing is a bad metaphor

Posted on in Software/Web developmentby Scott Berkun

At a certain point you hear a name for something so many times it looses any real meaning. It’s just a name. Kleenex, as a word, doesn’t mean anything.  Neither does Häagen-Dazs. But over time words just become labels and we forget their origins or initial meanings.

But in the case of Cloud Computing, I’m still stuck on what an awful metaphor it is for anything.

  • Clouds are fleeting. They don’t last long.
  • Clouds are vague and open to wide interpretation. No one sees the same thing when they look up at clouds.  (“Do you see Darth Vader’s nose?” “No… oh do you mean the leg of the camel sitting under a tree?” “What Camel?” “Nevermind”)
  • Clouds often bring rain, lightening and cold wind.
  • You can’t see the sky, or the stars, when the clouds are out.
  • (However Obscured by clouds is a good Pink Floyd album few know about).
  • When someone has ill-formed ideas, we say their thinking is cloudy.
  • Clouds, and the weather, are unpredictable.

Forgetting the fact that it’s an old idea that’s fallen in and out of favor several times already, the metaphor itself has never sat well with me.

(Hat tip R/J/A)

How UX can get anything they want

Posted on in design, usabilityby Scott Berkun

I’m a fan of the unconventional view that most people, most of the time, worry about the wrong things.

When it comes to the world of UX, designers, usability engineers, and the rest, they tend to complain about how little power they have, but spend little time doing skill development in how to gain influence and power.  The average designer or IA would be better served by going to a sales conference and learning sales and pitching skills, than going to yet another design event. They’re already good at design, but they’re probably not very good at pitching design ideas to non-designers.

One fallacy in how designers and HCI experts are trained is the lack of recognition that most of their careers will be spent working with people who know almost nothing about design or HCI. They are set up to be marginalized and kept in the corner of organizations, since they’re never shown that their success hinges not just on expertise, but the ability to translate that expertise into terms the people who they work with, and for, can understand. The biggest skill gap the UX world has are advocates, translators, and persuaders, people who are not afraid to sell and convince others on the value of their work.

Last year at UI14 I met Alastair Simpson, a UX manager who, in a former life, worked in sales.  I asked him to blog about how to apply his sales background to the challenges of working in UX, and finally he did.

Here’s an excerpt:

Each time I visit a conference I hear the same problems faced by UX professionals.  Not the never ending search for a perfect interface, the perfect user flow, or a usability test that passes without incident.  Most commonly it is “If I could only get the budget, my CEO just doesn’t listen to me in meetings, they seem to switch off and just don’t understand my point of view”.  In the majority of cases this is probably your problem, not theirs.  Successfully pitching your ideas and making your managers, and their managers buy into the UX problems on your site is essential in getting sign off for your projects.

Read the full post here.

I don’t think UX, or anyone, ever gets everything they want. But if you know how to sell, build trust, and choose wisely, you can often get any one thing that you want. And having the courage to do this is how respect, power and influence are earned.

Also see: