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Jason Fried of 37signals talks productivity at SXSW
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

Jason Fried is the founder of 37signals.com – an innovative technology company that has made some simple and awesome web-based productivity apps, like basecamp and campfire. He gave an amazing talk about productivity and collaboration ("Stuff we've learned") – this is a list of advice I’d kind of like to memorize.

-red flag words: need, can’t, easy, only, fast

-“be successful and make money by helping other people be successful and make money” – people are more willing to pay for things that help them – spot chain reactions and be the catalyst for making them happen

-minimize the chance for competition from entrenched players – e.g., build tools that provide just the simple solutions of what people need (vs. the products that are overkill for most people “nonconsumers”)

-question your work regularly – remember that you don’t know everything:
Why are we doing this?
What problem are we solving?
Is this actually useful?
Are we adding value?
Will this change behavior?
Is there an easier way?
What’s the opportunity cost?
Is it really worth it?

-it’s really important to ask what you can’t do because you’re taking on something else?

-many sites don’t just suffer from bad design, they suffer from bad copy that don’t make sense to anyone – PAY ATTENTION TO THE WORDS YOU USE TO CONVEY MESSAGES TO USERS. Words that need fixing are a much cheaper problem to solve than technical ones.

-err on the side of simple – start with the easy way of doing things and see if it satisfies what you wanted to do

-get three things done in one week, instead of one thing done in 3 weeks – “the longer it takes to develop something, the less likely you are to launch it”

-resist the urge to try to do more the next time around

-invest in what doesn’t change – what are the core things about the business that are important now and will still be important ten years from now?

-“what’s your cookbook?” – Celebrity chefs as a metaphor (they don’t try to keep their recipes a secret out of fear that people will open copy-cat restaurants). Figure out what expertise you can share, and share it – don’t be afraid that people will overtake and steal your business – your business is sharing what you build.

-interruption kills productivity – having people around you who interrupt you makes you not get stuff done. Try to combat this with passive communication (wikis, IM, email, etc) – these tools let the other person hear from you when you’re ready, not when they think you’re ready

-be open, honest, public, and responsive – people would much rather hear the truth, even in crisis.

-break problems down to the atomic level – “when you make tiny decisions you can’t make big mistakes”

-everything you do should matter – don’t do stuff that doesn’t matter!

-hire by looking for people who are honest/have good character, curious (most important), and do interesting things outside of work

-use what you build, and then you will know when it works

March 25, 2008 | 6:25 PM Comments  0 comments


Johnson/Jenkins SXSW Keynote
Related to country: United States
Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

I'm finally getting my notes from SXSW posted. I took a lot of them, and came home and promptly got really sick. But they will all appear here in good time.

Jenkins keynote

The opening keynote on Saturday was a conversation between Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You) and Henry Jenkins (professor at MIT, Comparative Media Studies Program). As a chronic conference-goer, I find myself hearing the same people keynoting over and over again, saying the same things over and over, and often saying essentially the same things as one another. It was refreshing that, despite having read the work of both speakers, and having heard each speak at other events, I actually learned some new things and had a chance to rethink some previous ideas.

That said, there were some points I was glad to hear repeated, since the audience at SXSW is not dominated by educators. We need people in other sectors to rally behind the need for empirical evidence and educational assessment models that support new media literacies, and to challenge the current reality that schools measure autonomous, not collective, learning. Also:
-high school students are one of the most highly underestimated groups online, but the challenge is – can we free young people up to write about what’s happening in their community? (not punish them, censor them, restrict their first amendment rights)
How do we give students the tools to use the time, creativity, and idealism they have, so they can be active community participants?

-if 50-60% of young people are creating content online, what is causing the other 40% not to create? Social, cultural, and economic disempowerment? Lack of ethical guidance from adult mentors?

-if America is failing in the world, it’s because workplaces and schools are failing to empower workers and students to realize their full potential – they start with the premise that we’re all idiots, not that we are all knowledgeable with expertise and creativity to share.

On politics, Jenkins made some interesting points about Obama’s “yes we can” as a metaphor for new kinds of social/civic engagement, by using language that describes a process of participation, collecting knowledge and distributing it to make change. He also argues that the criticism of Obama borrowing pieces of a speech from Deval Patrick holds less water if you look at it through the new lens of collective learning, knowledge, and participation. And, we should be asking what a culture of democracy truly looks like.

Other thought provoking ideas:
-the deep level of fan/consumer engagement with tv shows like Lost and The Wire, and the pop culture communities that have grown up around them, often come out of people not having enough intellectual and creative stimulation in the workplace.

-thinking about collective intelligence as Surowiecki’s “wisdom of crowds” (pooling knowledge and averaging out an answer) vs. the deliberative sharing of knowledge from different points of view and reaching a consensus (dependent on individual expertise, diversity of the community, and respect for all perspectives brought to the table). Jenkins aligned these approaches with YouTube (what moves up is the dominant/majority/popular perspective) vs. Wikipedia (a space with mechanisms for inclusion of diverse perspectives).

-it’s important to question the usage of the language of addiction related to online activity and gaming (many “addicts” are actually depressed and the addiction is manifesting itself through gaming; also Chinese gov’t using “addiction” as reason to restrict young people’s access to the internet)

-progressives need to have a context for where progress is coming from in order to encourage the movement to continue growing (this sounds like what Chris Lehman often says about the current technology in education movement)

Cool sites they mentioned:
- Harry Potter Alliance– global network of young people trying to change the world, inspired by Harry Potter as a young person who transformed his world:

- Outside.In – Johnson’s project, building out geographic infrastructure of the web and fostering people using the internet for very local community participation. Their about-to-launch tool is On My Radar (“like a geo-twitter,” commented Kate). Speaks to a need for civic media tools for local experts to participate and share knowledge without having to go through traditional media structures to communicate

Finally, some dissertation-ey thoughts about new media literacies. Because of YMEX I’ve had Jenkins’ framework on the brain for quite a while, but one component I would like to spend more time unpacking – is where these new media literacies intersect with the sociolinguistic concept of codeswitching. If young people are developing the ability to learn and access information across a range of modalities (what Jenkins calls transmedia navigation), can it also be argued that they are learning to communicate in a range of linguistic codes that these new media require? How well do they codeswitch between the linguistic norms of each – from text messaging to online social networking sites to the f2f classroom, etc.? How might educators interact better with their students if they understood their ways of communicating through the lens of codeswitching? I’ve been thinking particularly about how Ben Rampton’s work on codeswitching and youth could be applied…

And, apparently not everyone at SXSW was hearing repeat speakers. As I walked out, I heard a guy behind me say to his friend, “It was cool, but I didn’t know who he was exactly…I thought it was Henry James.”

Right.