The By-Product of Work

At this stage in development (working diligently towards the first private beta of a new product) it is easy to get anxious.  A ton of things have been accomplished.  A huge pile of work remains.  Excitement is growing.  Life is in fast-forward at the same time as time is ticking painfully slow to the next milestone.   The finished product is on our minds, while the activity on a daily basis is…daily.

I ran across a quote today that might shed some light on a different approach:

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
  – Robertson Davies

Just like happiness is not a goal, not something you find as a direct result of effort, so is contentment or peace.  You can’t demand to be satisfied with things in their various stages of incomplete.  All you can do is work, day after day, towards the goal.  Happiness, as they say, is a by-product.  A by-product of work.

#1 Way to Address Procrastination: Do Something!

Isn’t procrastination such a fascinating thing!  It can lead to great innovations and streamlining as deadlines loom and the unimportant is stripped off the “to do” list.  It can lead to elevated blood pressure and heart rate and untold damage on our psyches.  There is always a good reason to procrastinate a task or decision. Sometimes you procrastinate really important things, perhaps because they are so important and you want to do them right.  This is where I find myself on this Sunday night.

In preparation for the upcoming beta (not to late to sign up, by the way) of Remarkable Tributes and the go live later this Summer, I have been working on a series of “Frequently Asked Questions.”  You know the type that walk customers through how to use the website, why to use the website, and what to do if things go wrong.  I will be putting them into the new Remarkable Tributes Help Center to be searched and added to by you once the system goes live.  This is really important stuff!  I have brainstorming a list of questions and typed them out this weekend to begin the work of answering them.  The list of questions is 9 pages long!  Those are just the questions, as I have not yet penned the answers.

Now, readers to this blog (or perhaps my other blog or Twitter stream) will probably rightly assess that coming up with a lot of ideas isn’t a problem for me.   So, perhaps some of these questions are not as important as others.  Some of thing may very well be a question that no one would ask, but still the list is there.  All 9 pages of it. 

So, I am going to fight procrastination.  I am taking a number of questions a day and will write the answers.  The ones that require screen shots or other reference materials from the software (which is in development and not quite ready for prime time) will have to wait, but there are many that I can do now, get out of the way, and be ready for the go live.

There, now I feel much better.  I have a plan.  Certainly, I can’t wait to see what questions you have once you start using Remarkable Tributes.  Stay tuned for more details on the Help Center and other things we are pulling together to make you successful!

By the way, this post will be mirrored over at http://RemarkableTributes.wordpress.com where I will be moving the blog officially in the next few weeks.  Go ahead and change your reader to the new address.

It’s still about the humans…making choices

My 5-year-old son has never probably seen us look up anything in a phone book or heard us call directory assistance.  We never had to go the library for anything, but recreational reading.  His only frame of reference includes high-speed internet.  Today, he asked me if I knew why God invented lightning (oh, the questions of a pre-schooler!).  I said that I wasn’t sure.  He replied, “you should look it up on the computer.”  “Hmmm, I am not sure the computer will know what God was thinking…” I start to reply.  “Mom, the computer is really smart!” he retorts. 

I then try to explain to him that it is people that are smart, that put information on the Internet, and develop ways to search.  So, if we wanted to learn more about lightning it was someone who learned about it that posted the information so that we could find it (not to mention God, for “inventing” lightning in the first place, but that is another post all together). 

To this my son replies, “Yeah, but it was the computer that found that cartoon episode of Ben Ten Alien Force.”  True, but yet not so true.  If the animators, storytellers, marketing folks, executives at the Cartoon Network, and IT gurus didn’t create and post the Ben Ten episodes, we never would have found them…no matter how much R&D Google invests in search technology.

All of this makes me realize how easy it is to lose the humaness when dealing with technology.  We sometimes forget that every piece of technology (from our TV remote to a sophisticated ERP software system) is actually the creation of human beings and the collection of tough choices that they made.  Ben Ten could have been live action instead of cartoon.  He could have been called Kevin Eleven (a great name for a sequel, I might add, if Kevin hadn’t been the name of the bad guy).  The stories could only be available online, on TV, or in theaters.  Choices, choices.  And these are just the choices we can see from the outside.  Internally, the development team made thousands of choices about how they would work, what tools they would use, etc that although behind-the-scenes, but still critically important.

As we approach the beta release of Remarkable Tributes, the breadth of these choices are becoming clearer.  We have long selected development platforms and key vendors, but continue to add tools and supplementary products to the business so that we might serve our clients and our customers.  We continue to refine features to make sure they provide the most benefit and allow you to do new things in new ways. 

So, perhaps one day another family will be able to have a discussion about how smart their computer is because they found Remarkable Tributes!

Perception is Reality

When I was in high school I was involved in competitive speech and debate, something I really enjoyed and was fairly good at.  I would often joke with my classmates and my coach that “perception is reality.”  If you appear confident, you will be perceived as more engaging.  If you dressed the part, you’d be taken more seriously.  If you walked in with file boxes of literature and research, you had immediate credibility.  You could help judges and competitors focus on your strengths by playing them up.  I find that this was an important lesson when I was sixteen, and is just as true today.

I recently wrote a post about the relationship between storytelling and branding.  In it, I pose the relationship between the reality of the product offering a company brings to market and the perception of the customers about how that product affects their lives.  In essence, all great brands leave their customers with a feeling - sense of being part of a larger story, movement, or idea.  Just like the file boxes make the debater more “serious” and “prepared,” so all products affect how individuals view themselves.  The perception of the brand in the mind of your customers, is in fact, the reality of what your brand stands for.

As we march towards the public release of the web application, Remarkable, I am challenged to define the few things that I want my customers to feel about themselves when they buy, use, and recommend the product to others.  Do I want them to feel technologically-saavy (not if that makes that application too difficult to use)?  Do I want them to feel thoughtful and connected to people in their lives?  Do I want them to feel organized and “with it”?  Do I want customers to feel creative (without overwhleming folks with options that detract from simplicity)?  How can the service itself make people feel proud to be associated with it?  So much so, that they want to use it again and again and recommend it to others.

It is these discussions that help drive the product design to focus on the things that are most important to the customer experience.  These decisions help reinforce the feelings of our customers.  I can’t wait for you to experience it and give me feedback first-hand.

Sign up for the beta (and encourage others folks you know and want to impress to do the same) and I guarantee you will feel like a part of an elite and exclusive group when this Summer I let you take an early peak at the application.

This cool picture is from Retinal Fetish on flickr.

The Best Job Ever!

Some girlfriends and I slipped away last weekend to a retreat where we could visit, reflect, and relax (and find some snow falling if you can believe it…in late April!).  At the retreat we played some games and in one a friend asked me what my favorite job of all time had been and why.  Without thinking about it much, I mentioned working for a software start-up early in my career.  There were tons of things I didn’t know, we weren’t terribly successful (all things considered and by benchmark standards), but, man, I will tell you that we had a lot of fun.  I don’t think I haven’t laughed so hard at work since those days.  Thanks to every colleague and customer who made that experience possible!

It could have been because the group and company was small (see a great post by the good folks at 37Signals about the concept of ten-groups, very provocative and right on the money in my experience).  It could have been because we were making creative software and selling it to schools.  It could be because I was learning so much and having fun stretching my professional muscles.  In any case, that is the position that came to mind.

Later, I was reflecting on my answer and thought that what I am doing with Creative Outlet Labs might be my favorite job ever.  After all, I am posting an article to the blog at 10:25 PM!  I am back learning, creating, and risking in new ways.  I so enjoy the creative process that I don’t consider it work and I have literally paid (instead of been paid) for the privilege of being involved in an inspiring project like this.  By all accounts and measures, this might be my favorite job.  The “job” of an entrepreneur.

I think the only job I would like more is to be the leader of a successful business.  I feel like I am on my way there and can’t wait and will someday soon be honored to invite a whole new group of customers (you!) to be a part of this journey.  Sign up for the beta to be a part.

What has been your all-time favorite job and why? 

It All Starts With You

If you are interested in being part of our alpha test, or better yet, you have an occasion coming up in the life of someone you love that is worthy of celebrating, please let me know.   Unlike our upcoming beta test (sign up here), we are not releasing code access or allowing people outside our team to use these early versions, but parallel to that we are working on mastering the work flow and human processes that will be streamlined and automated with the new Remarkable by Creative Outlet Labs.

So, here is where I can use your help (and in plain English): if you are looking to celebrate a milestone birthday, graduation, retirement, or some other notable occasion with someone you love in the coming months and want to do something incredible for them (and you are willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement that you won’t tell all of our secrets before its time), I’d love to hear from you.  Email AlphaMe@CreativeOutletLabs.com with the details and hopefully we can work together on something remarkable for the someone in your life that is remarkable!

Nothing Happens Automagically

After a brief hiatus (due, if you must know, to a relocation, several family emergencies, and general life upheaval), I am back in the blogging business.  I do wish that WordPress (or someone) would write an application that would “automagically” post whenever I thought of things that might be of interest.  While mind reading is still sci-fi fiction, I have enjoyed Twittering away and encourage you to follow me there (Twitter, as a micro-blog, probably being the closest thing to automagic, which ironically is a term I read for the first time in a Twitter post earlier this week).  I really do hope you missed the blog posts and the updates on the development of Remarkable.

So, on that topic, we have been working diligently on building out the application and are nearing a critical alpha milestone.  For those of you unfamiliar with software development methodologies, most have stages of development during which critical foundational code is written, but only used internally.  This stage is called alpha.  It is usually not in the final user interface (a $20 phrase that means things like how the software looks, how people would click around to do things, and the colors, font styles, and button treatments used).  It is usually pretty unreliable, but is a way to start testing and building out the core functionality. 

With the development of agile philosophies for programming and a “nothing beats real code” attitude, the alpha phases of development are getting shorter.   Even the alpha phase can have several sub-phases as you anticipate changes and iterations throughout the project.  Ours will be several months in total (hate to publicly commit at this point) before we turn our attention to the beta phase which comes next.

Beta is a word that has gotten a little skewed (or expanded, rather) lately as many companies have public, “all comer” beta periods that last a year or more.  In most companies, beta is reserved for either a select group of testers or product champions who can use the real application (usually still with some final tweaks and adjustments to be made) and provide feedback.  Usually beta releases are feature complete and try to represent, as best as possible, the real user experience.  Beta phases also allow a forum for testing pricing, promotions, and for getting the word out about the coming application.  If you haven’t yet registered to receive an invitation to participate in our beta , click here and sign up.

Eventually, you call the application “production” and the beta is complete (you never call it “done,” of course, as you always have ideas and things you can do to improve).  In my days of working in packaged software, we’d do the final release sign-offs and exclaim “ship it!”  With this web application, it is just a matter of pushing the code live.  Now that I think about it, I will probably still yell “ship it” when we get to that point, as “push it” doesn’t really have the same ring to it.

Yes, development is going well even though we are in the early stages.  Thanks for asking!  I am sure we all wish that the process of developing software, just like blog posts, could happen automagically, but alas…our hard work will be your gain when Remarkable is ready for you to use. 

Someone you know absolutely remarkable?

Don’t wait another second!  Tell them with a mini-tribute.

Creative Outlet Labs announced today the Absolutely Remarkable mini-tribute.  This new, free application allows you to create a custom, animated mini-tribute honoring someone and view it, send it yourself, or let us send it for you.  If you know someone who is absolutely remarkable, you must check out this fun site.

While you are at it, encourage your friend to sign up for the beta of Remarkable by Creative Outlet Labs.  If you like Absolutely Remarkable mini-tributes, you will love the full-blown application coming soon.  Sort of like a movie studio will issue a trailer to build excitement for their new film, we are doing the same, building excitement for Remarkable. 

Have fun using this and sharing it!

It all depends on what you mean by success

Forty years ago this month, the first human to human heart transplant was performed in South Africa.  An incredibly complicated and dangerous procedure, the first one was deemed a success.  According to an article about it, the patient’s ”body did not reject the heart, due in large part to the immunosuppressive drugs he received. But those drugs also weakened his immune system, and he contracted double pneumonia, which killed him 18 days after the transplant.”

So, was the surgery a success or not?  The heart was transplanted, so the answer is “yes.”  The patient died from complications, so the answer is “no.”  It was a giant leap for the field of medicine and a huge disappointment to the family and friends of the patient, and probably to the surgeon and staff who attended to the man and his borrowed heart.

I find this same challenge in other more routine projects that I work on.  Lives may not be on the line, but often the goals are not completely achieved, yet lots of progress is made.  Is it a success or not?  Well, that depends.  Goal setting can be tricky, as there is often both a component of results and the journey to the results, both of which have value.

So, what will constitute a beta test of Remarkable when we are ready?  Will all our potential customers have a great experience?  We hope so, but do not bet on it (after all, it is a beta, and if it was perfect we would call it a “production release” instead).  Will we learn a lot that will make the product better over time and ensure that we have something that everyone will love as much as we will?  That is the goal. 

And the good news is that our offering requires no antibiotics and has no side-effects (other than an addiction to using it and a complusion to telling your friends about it).

If you haven’t signed up to receive notification of our upcoming beta test, do it today!

Don’t Forget to Dry Clean your Labcoat

 

You will now find a new site posted at www.CreativeOutletLabs.com with some features you should check out.  The most exciting of which is that we are now collecting volunteers for an upcoming beta test of a new service called Remarkable by Creative Outlet Labs.  Dust off your chemistry set, pick up your labcoat from the cleaners, and sign up to try out this new service!  We’ll let you know when it is ready.

…because SomeoneYouKnow.isRemarkable.com!