tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:/feedItamar Berger2017-05-27T05:38:41-07:00Itamar Bergerhttps://itamarbe.svbtle.comSvbtle.comtag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/some-notes-on-mentoring-entprenaturs2017-05-27T05:38:41-07:002017-05-27T05:38:41-07:00Mentoring Entrepreneurs<p>Entrepreneurship is all about making the right decision at the right time out of endless opportunities. How to make a good decision? by not repeating others mistakes, how? by following smart people’s advice - people from the industry, who seen everything, been there, done that. The advises you’ll get from those people will be right to 99% of entrepreneurs. But in startup it’s all about going against the odds, against predictability. Good ideas are not just waiting for someone to pickup, good ideas are buried under tons on skepticism and irrationality.</p>
<p>Entrepreneurship is about taking part of a long unpredictable journey. <br>
I see mentoring an entrepreneurs more like mentoring artists rather than developers (yes, I do see art in coding). If you learn everything about software development, you’ll probably be a good developer, maybe even a great one. If you’ll learn everything about entrepreneurship, you’re probably wasting your time.</p>
<p>Why? Here are two excellent notes by Jason Fried</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Advice, like fruit, is best when it’s fresh. But advice quickly decays, and years old advice is bound to be radioactive. Sharing a life experience is one thing (grandparents are great at this — listen to them!), but advice is another thing. Don’t give advice about things you used to know. Just because you did something a long time ago doesn’t mean you’re qualified to talk about it today. - Jason Fried</p>
<p>One of the best skills to develop as an entrepreneur? Ignorance. I think a lot of folks are spending way too much energy trying to know it all. They’re trying to be over-informed. Soaking up every piece of advice. Following every story, watching every video. Trying to understand too many things about how things currently work. Who’s doing what, what the latest techniques are, which list of steps to follow, etc. You’ll make something <em>new</em> when you’re new. You’ll make something <em>also</em> when your mind is filled with other people’s ideas.“ - Jason Fried</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So how to mentor an entrepreneur?</p>
<ol>
<li>Understand that it is a serious commitment, could be a long one. If you’re not passionate to be part of this journey, don’t even start.</li>
<li>Optimally, you already know them for years, you know how they think, what they love, what they are passionate about. On the other hand, you understand that this a process, they will evolve, grow up, they are going to fall and rise. If you don’t know them very well, get to know them, drink beer with them.</li>
<li>Teach them the basic rules and needed soft skills in this business.</li>
<li>Help them build the company based on their who they are, if it will be successful company, it will be mostly because of them. Let build it the way they believe it should be built. Amplify what they are good at, they will learn how to fill the gap in everything else.</li>
<li>Don’t stop them from doing mistakes, if you think they will do a mistake and you were actually right, then great, plus one for you. Trust them, they will learn from it, and so thus you.</li>
<li>Deeply intervene only when it’s a dead-or-alive scenario. Any strict decision you do, make you accountable for it, at least in the entrepreneur’s mind.</li>
<li>Make your connections as their asset, a rather strong one.</li>
<li>Ask them hard questions, make them think, but keep positiveness, optimism and productivity. It sucks to be the person who break their spirit. Momentum, momentum, momentum.</li>
</ol>
<p>Lucky to me, I feel I found 2-3 great mentors who are doing the right to help me move forward in the right direction.</p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/devicion-making-debt2017-01-13T05:19:24-08:002017-01-13T05:19:24-08:00Why Managing Cultural Bias Is The Key For Scaling Teams?<p>Cultural debt occur when we decide to act not according to what we perceive as part of the team culture, usually it’s the things we don’t sleep at well after making them - recruiting someone with different personality to what we are used to, promoting someone while many deserve it, changing managers, stealthy processes, merging teams with different cultures and so on. Those decisions would be the right thing to do for the business, product or development needs, but they create potential cultural debts. Our reactions and decisions are highly correlated with previous experiences and choices we did in the past, and this create a bias to anything new, that’s why teams need to manage it, just like bugs / features - using excel, Trello, Jira whatever works.</p>
<p>So why tracking cultural debts is important?</p>
<ol>
<li>Learning to appreciate the small decisions and trade offs that define the culture</li>
<li>Adapting the culture proactively, respectfully.</li>
<li>Discovering how your employees capture the company culture.</li>
</ol>
<p>When I was a junior developer, I wanted to participate in every important meeting, I considered myself to be crucial for discussions about the product, the vision, the algorithms etc. I was able to provide great valuable insights from my point of view. From a cultural perspective, the company culture wasn’t fixed yet on who should attend each meeting, but it was clear that having big meetings is not productive at all. On the other hand, blocking a young enthusiast junior developers from insightful meetings create an emotional cultural debt. There is no right or wrong here, just a debt that should be treated. Now that I have experienced this dilemma from different perspectives, I know what culture decision I would do back then if I were the CEO.</p>
<p>Teams shouldn’t solve culture inconsistency just by aligning people using “our company culture” presentations or by having “code fast” posters on the walls. Culture is a process, built to evolve, just like code. Culture is defined by people, not by the ministry of culture.</p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/things-i-achieved-in-3-months-of-enterpetanourship2017-01-09T23:22:26-08:002017-01-09T23:22:26-08:00Opening my Schrödinger Dream Box<p>A few months ago I finally opened my long-awaited <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger's_cat">Schrodinger</a> dream box - my passion to start my own startup. Anyone who desire to achieve something big, will eventually need to face reality. As long as there is some risk and ambiguity, it is “reasonable” that by opening the box, you would discover something you wasn’t ready for. It doesn’t matter how much time you invest in preparation for filling your backpack for this journey by reading books, going to meetups, talking to people, gathering founders..</p>
<p>The option of not opening the box is quite attractive, right…? After all, every dream hypothetically sounds great, amazing, promising (and I’m not talking about people who gave up on having a dream box, too many people, in my humble opinion). In the past, I set myself a goal to present my research at the most important computer graphics conference in front of 3,000 people. I was confidence I can do it, maybe even a bit arrogant. I achieved it, with a lot of help from my family, my adviser, my brain and Disney. It was a journey, a long one, with lot’s of failures and terrifying moments, but it was fun, insightful and meaningful.</p>
<p>The number of opportunities for me to fail in the last few months was exponentially bigger than anything I experienced in any previous career journey, and with the opportunity to fail - I failed, a lot, team-wise, business-wise, customer-wise, family-wise. With every failure I learnt something new about startups, about myself, and it’s not a cliche (well it is), but the power and the intensiveness of the learning experience did surprised me. I was surprised how startup books and classes are meaningless without actually doing it.</p>
<p>Similar to the Schrodinger experiment, it may be that by opening the box I killed the cat, I hope not - cats have nine lives they say, and I’m naturally attracted to challenges.</p>
<p>I’m still considering releasing my lesson learnt posts (as there are not enough medium posts and books about that), anyway, many of my personal lessons are well written by others, so you just need to fail to be able to learn from them:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<a href="http://paulgraham.com/13sentences.html">13 Sentences</a> and <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/startupideas.html">Startup Ideas</a> - just read every Paul Graham essay</li>
<li>
<a href="http://startupclass.samaltman.com/">Sam altman startup class</a> - or start with the <a href="http://playbook.samaltman.com/">Startup Playbook</a>
</li>
<li>
<a href="http://momtestbook.com/">The Mom Test</a> by Rob Fitzpatrick </li>
<li>
<a href="http://zerotoonebook.com/">Zero to one</a> by Peter Thiel</li>
<li><a href="http://www.slideshare.net/mikewchan/what-makes-31587802">Co-founders and Startups: What Makes a Successful Team?</a></li>
</ul>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/mvp2016-10-02T06:53:27-07:002016-10-02T06:53:27-07:00The Creation Process - Rethinking on MVP<p>Minimum, Viable, Product. So simple, yet so hard. I admit that only recently I learnt to appreciate the efforts to establish it. MVP is being misused a lot, by everyone. It is mainly about learning and iterating, as quickly as possible, however it usually treated as the first release, without acually any questions that will make it an effective learning process, on the contrary, it is minimal in a way that it can be delivered fast enough to meet the manager’s expectations, and it is viable because the PM thinks it is viable, and it is a product because… it has a logo? </p>
<p>Reaching a true MVP is hard, some teams can work months or maybe even years without reaching an MVP. There are startups that got acquired without having any viable product. it can be a tech preview to get additional resources to develop something viable.</p>
<p>“P” - A creation is a product only if it is available to use for the customers it was made for. If a product is not in production, fully available, then it is not a product. The product must have a business strategy, roadmap, goals, mission.</p>
<p>“V” - Product’s viability cannot be defined by the product manager, only customers can use the word “viable” to describe the product. If other customers find your product useful, then pivot or work harder to improve your product. No customers, no product. What are you solving? for who?</p>
<p>“Too often, technology guides the solution: a company has the ability to solve a problem in a new way, so it solves the problem that way. Is that solution what the user really requires?” - from BCG perspectives</p>
<p>“M’ - The first release that customers perceived as viable, you now have the minimal set of features that can be treated as a viable product.</p>
<p>Then what is this bulk of code that we worked on days and nights? We deploy using continuous deployment on a server named "production”, it is publicly available to some users, the design is amazing, the architecture is fantastic. It is disrupting, innovating, creative, but what is it? it can be the start of what will be one day a great viable product.</p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/from-innovation-to-execution2016-08-11T22:45:38-07:002016-08-11T22:45:38-07:00Harmony<p>The magic ingredient that brings powerful experience to life. Harmony is the quality of forming a pleasing and consistent whole. Building amazing experiences requires having harmony between designers and developers. The designer approach to problems and the developer approach to solutions is different, and to bring innovation to life, design and dev teams must radically collaborate. When teams work in harmony, they can create experiences that defeat any technical barrier and achieve any designer’s desire. Doing real innovative design or functionality is hard if the developer arrive too late in the design process. Teams need to embed design in their DNA - mixing the design and engineering teams is not a process - it’s a culture.</p>
<p>Blur the barriers between designers and developers, let them sit together, teach designers to code and developers to design. Hire multidiscipline people who are gifted in both art and science as the ones that “connect the dots”. Achieve a collective ownership on the product experience, learn how to allow enough creative space for developers, and expose technology achievements to designers. Strengthen the relations between the teams, share the workspace, share the mindset, and above all, work as one unit. </p>
<p>Chaos creates paradoxes, harmony solves them.</p>
<p><a href="https://svbtleusercontent.com/6mtozhvsxvnoaq.png"><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/6mtozhvsxvnoaq_small.png" alt="bonus-launch-toon.png"></a></p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/reaching-inflection-points2016-07-18T23:35:03-07:002016-07-18T23:35:03-07:00Tools for Gaining a Positive Momentum When Reaching Inflection Points<p>A Crisis is a point on the timeline where a sequence of events are happening not as we expected them to happen, and it can feel sucks, but it can actually be a good thing. Crises are the inflection points that define a function in time. They usually happened after a trend that was not treated appropriately. This is the point where things become unstable - by definition. The function is changing and at this point, there is enough <em>emotional mass</em>, so if we set the velocity in the right direction, skilled leaders can build a positive momentum and turn crises into opportunities.</p>
<p>Tennis is one of the best examples for a sports game where everything is based on momentum. You can see the beauty of momentum when players comeback from unbelievable situations. In Basketball, one player can unite the team and do an act that brings back momentum or kill the momentum. Players skills which are based on years of practice can get amplified or diminished only by the force of the momentum. So, the first tool is to regain motivation, unite the team, see the opportunities and take things into perspective.</p>
<p>The next tool is to take actions and execute them. The group must have people that are not afraid to take ownership and act as decision makers, all the way, for good or bad. There is a great post on the difference between action and motion: <em>“Motion is when you’re busy doing something, but that task will never produce an outcome by itself. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will get you a result”</em>, read more on <a href="https://svbtle.com/tools-for-gaining-a-positive-moment-when-in-reaching-inflection-points/edit">The Mistake Smart People Make: Being In Motion vs. Taking Action</a></p>
<p>Put trust in people, build (or hire) people that can act as decision makers, educating for ownership should be before the crisis, not during a crisis. But sometimes, the crisis can unveil leaders and expose how great they are. Either way, it is always better to do the needed preparation before the next inflection point. The next inflection point doesn’t have to be a crisis, but it can be also a miss / no-miss opportunity for accelerating growth.</p>
<p>Finally, when things starting to turn positive, work even more on clarity, set goals, <a href="https://m.signalvnoise.com/building-a-lever-7607ea9a7aee#.hzcu1egnw">build levers</a> and work both on tactics and strategy to maximize the gain.</p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/impact2016-05-21T02:07:35-07:002016-05-21T02:07:35-07:00Being Incentivized For Impact<p>Working on what’s really matter. This sentence can be so powerful for teams who are eager to scale up their business and grow. But how teams can learn what’s really matter? Don’t expect to get instructions manual for the things that matter, only by trial and error teams can learn what’s make an impact. This is why culture should incentivize teams that create an actual impact on the company, a real one. This is the feedback tool for all teams to learn and align accordingly. Sometimes one team failure will make a good impact due to the valuable learning inputs, so it is actually a success since it pushes the business forward. On the other way, a local success can be meaningless if it doesn’t matter.</p>
<p>When you are part of a big team, sometimes it’s hard to know what impact you make. When I worked as a full-time developer, I was passionate to put analytics everywhere to see how users react to the feature I felt ownership on. I really wished that the feature will make an impact, even if I’m not the one who defined it. I wanted it to be presented as a meaningful feature. I felt bad when I worked hard on a feature that eventually was meaningless due to bad UI or because it is getting hidden behind menus and tabs, what pushed me to learn what’s need to be done to make an impact. Looking back, this personal learning experience gave me so much value on learning to focus on the right things. Making something great that no one sees will not make an impact. Even as a developer, I made presentations and videos to convince people why what I am working on is meaningful.</p>
<p>As the team scale, while it may sound contradicting, everyone has even more ownership to strive for making an impact. If a developer thinks that it’s role is ending on commit (and doesn’t care if his code is in production) “fire and forget” or a designer is working on UI “for” his manager but knows that it’s useless - the product will not be able to scale with the size of the team. In the team culture, if you just ship a product and it’s bad, then it should not be good for your career in the company. It doesn’t matter if you are the developer or the product manager, everyone should be incentivized only when they make an impact together. It doesn’t matter if you are in the team that maintains the log server or in the core team - if they exist they are important, if not, adjust and pivot.</p>
<p>So go and learn how to create an impact. As for how to incentivize people that make an impact? That’s the easy and enjoyable part of work.</p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/but-x-said-that2016-05-12T22:31:01-07:002016-05-12T22:31:01-07:00"Mark Said"<p>Let’s assume that Mark is a dominant persona in the company. It can be the Architect, the Team Leader, the Product Manager, the VP or even the CEO. When Mark says something, people align - line by line.</p>
<p>How many times you said in a discussion something like: “but Mark said…”, “that’s not what Mark want…”, “according to Mark…” - Explicitly mentioning the person first name, so everything you say now make much more sense, this is the clarity the discussion needed. But the discussion never ends because people are interpreting differently what Mark think, but Mark is not in the room to answer (he is busy managing a 40B$ company..), and we have no other intelligent Joker to pull off, so where should we go on from here? Is that how Mark want us to work?</p>
<p>What if instead of using the “but Mark said” Joker, we will treat the role of that person. If Mark is the highest rank business persona, we will direct the discussion toward the business, and if the business is not clear, let’s get some details first. If Mark is the Product Manager - we should leverage the product targets, goals, and roadmaps. To be professional is to know how to work with other roles and accepting their roles. Each role has the ownership to do the best of what it accountable on, and communication is part of any dominant role in a team.</p>
<p>If you are still looking for clarity and think that Mark is doing unclear decisions out of his mind, you can either complain about it, or find the path to get more clarity, not just for you, but for the entire team. Work hard to find solutions. Give up and your needs will arise in the next job you’ll follow. Is there any other workplace that will satisfy your clarity? In any exciting / innovative / dynamic workplace, you will lack some clarity, but you should strive to have just enough not to use the “Mark Said” phrase. This will assist Mark’s with his super-busy calendar to find the time to give the team the answers they are looking for.</p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/what-life-taught-me-about-creative-energy2016-03-17T11:38:53-07:002016-03-17T11:38:53-07:00Creative Minds Are Starving To Create, This Is Why Managing Creative People Is Just Different.<p>While it’s obvious that innovative teams need creative people, it is less clear that once they are part of your team, they will expect to be able to express their creativity and create, they will expect to take initiatives, they will look for a purpose and meaning.</p>
<p>Creative people expect for a direction and guidances, this is why handling ambiguity is not so easy when you are that eager to create something. On the other hand, they defiantly don’t want to be limited and constrained by the problem itself and are looking to explore new ideas.</p>
<p>Motivated employees are important to the company success more than ever, and it is worth working hard to keep your employees happy. Creative people that are too limited in their ability to create will eventually loose their motivation. Why limited? It can be that the team is too much into bug fixing, the process is limiting them, the product manager is giving too detailed specifications with no space for self-interpretation, it may be the internal politics / dynamics that put pressure on the team for deliveries and so on. </p>
<p>One way to handle this lack of creative satisfaction, is to make simple tasks more complex than needed, making a simple “justdoit” task to a complex research task that will just put more risk and ambiguity. Another way is to find some place for self-expression in other projects, but eventually, they will have to settle for something - enough money, enough sleep or enough creative satisfaction <a href="https://twitter.com/paullicino/status/707586081374343168">(diagram)</a>. The good thing is that those people usually know when (and how) to raise flags when somethings is not working right and are striving to regenerate their creative energy.</p>
tag:itamarbe.svbtle.com,2014:Post/hiring-xfactors2015-12-24T01:07:33-08:002015-12-24T01:07:33-08:00X-Factors Roles: Out Of The Box Team Hiring<p>A common dev manager trait is to repeat that it is lacking of people and that the team must scale up in order to deliver the endless list of requirements (this trait is common at all management levels). Assuming that the manager gets approval to hire and expand the team, the manager will probably start looking for more developers. But, is hiring more developers is really what’s missing?</p>
<p>Try understanding the problem that the company is trying to solve by hiring. Is it the execution that appeared to be slow? or are there too many features that “needs” to be done? It is possible that the developers are developing in void and they actually need more direction and knowledge in order to work on the right features and focus so they can design a better architecture. Do less things - better, but how do we determine what less things to do? <strong>This is where untraditional x-factors roles may come more handy than hiring the 100th developer in your company.</strong></p>
<p>In my current workplace, the first product I was part of was to create a new innovative experience for designing homes. After my hiring, I was amazed to see that there are some quite untraditional roles such as interior designer, experienced 3D modelers, artists and applied research teams that all provides great input on the problem we are working on. Developers are making daily discussions and being exposed to the domain wherever they go, either by bypassing near their desk and looking at their screens working with different tools, or just by chatting at lunch. Those interactions are priceless for the team’s productivity.</p>
<p>Diversity in workplaces is critical - sitting desk by desk with the x-factors make them accessible, moreover, workplace arrangement is a key factor as well, don’t put your x-factors in the other side of the office, or a different floor. They bring different personality and different point of view on problems (especially if they use the different side of the brain). This collaboration is very different from doing interviews or user research. When those x-factors are sitting next to you, they literally changes the culture and help us reframe problems and look at them differently.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>“The art of reframing - it’s taking a problem that everyone else is looking at in a certain way, and reframing it - looking at it from a different perspective, it’s about challenging the underline assumptions or just focusing on what’s really important”</em> - Carl Bass, AU2015</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As managers, x-factor roles let us to focus on the real problems and develop more accurate roadmap and experiences, this is a huge strategic advantage for every company.</p>
<p>Additional Read:</p>
<ul>
<li>Do Fewer Things, Better <em><a href="http://onstartups.com/do-fewer-things-better">http://onstartups.com/do-fewer-things-better</a></em>
</li>
<li>Great Teams, Great Products <em><a href="http://blog.capwatkins.com/great-teams-great-products">http://blog.capwatkins.com/great-teams-great-products</a></em>
</li>
<li>How Great Leaders Think: The Art of Reframing <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Great-Leaders-Think-Reframing/dp/1118140982">http://www.amazon.com/How-Great-Leaders-Think-Reframing/dp/1118140982</a>
</li>
</ul>