Perry

Hewitt

Tag: management

  • Friday 5 — 1.30.2015

    Friday 5 — 1.30.2015

    snapchat

     

    1. Snapchat aims to become a force in mobile news with this week’s launch of Snapchat Discover. Here are some tips on how to use it.
    2. If you’re like 82% of people, you have forgotten a password for a website. Luke Wroblewski has a thoughtful piece on password masking, security, and our one-touch future. Because we’re not getting any smarter about passwords.
    3. GIFs are everywhere you look these days, as a recent investment in Giphy, a two-year old GIF search engine, confirms. Imgur has launched a useful new way to make your own (desktop only).
    4. Making the move from individual contributor to engineering manager, is not for everyone.  Noah Brier shares his thoughts on the need for pragmatism, balancing systems/scale, and a more general point on clarity of assignment.
    5. Think we should be taking videogames seriously? Don’t miss the astonishing growth in Twitch’s year end roundup or Steam’s announced $50M in earnings for in-game hats and maps. Pick and shovel plays galore as industries build up around videogames’ burgeoning culture and revenue.

     

    Weekend fun: Not your average armchair quarterbacks, Harvard Business School professors suit up, kind of, to discuss the Super Bowl. Whether you’re a Seahawks or Pats fan, tune in at 2pm today for a Super Bowl-themed #HBXChat.

    Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.

  • How to manage your bandwidth — for social

    pebbles ajrI’ve long been a believer in the rocks, gravel, sand analogy popularized by Steven Covey when it comes to task management. You have to make sure you get the big rocks in — that presentation due Wednesday, that project plan review for Friday — before you are pecked to death by ducks, a.k.a. email. It’s easy for small tasks to prevent focus, so be aggressive about putting holds in your calendar for the big ones.

    Reading The Mistake Busy People Make a few months back was a similar turning point for me. The article urges a shift in focus: manage your bandwidth, not your time. And it caused me to reflect — calendar apps I’ve seen allow us to book only the hours something take to complete, but not assign a level of cognitive effort. That additional lens would make a lot of sense: a meeting on concept design for a new product eats up significantly more mental bandwidth than a standing budget meeting. There are ways to color code, but it would be amazing to have a heuristic feature that could learn and assign bandwidth consumed during different kinds of work activities. As a result, you could manage your calendar more effectively.

    Where does time spent filtering, listening, and publishing social media fit into all this? The concern I hear from most executives contemplating personal social media stems from legitimate fears about where social media activity can fit into an already overcommitted calendar. I’ve written before about my own time management hacks for social. This article about bandwidth has prompted a few new thoughts:

    • Social can fuel some of your low-bandwidth research consumption. Remember the trades? With smart filtering in place, you can use social to get a terrifically well-informed stream of ideas about your industry. This is a great activity to sandwich in between high-bandwidth events.
    • Social has both high- and low- bandwidth activities. Interaction is high bandwidth, but bursty — no one ever gets angry (except this guy) if you drop the thread in a Twitter conversation. Re-sharing is low bandwidth — it’s finding two-three interesting pieces (I do this after dinner) and teeing them up for the next day.
    • Social provides opportunities for listening, engagement, and content syndication. In any kind of senior role, you’re creating good content. That content may be mired in a PowerPoint or an email chain, but social provides a way to share those ideas (low-bandwidth), and benefit from feedback of a broader forum (high-bandwidth).

    No one can help you with the only-24-hours-in-a-day problem. Factoring for bandwidth as well as time can help you prioritize and balance your efforts — and enable you to add meaningful social media to the mix.

     Photo credit: fragment.fi

  • Mastering digital project momentum

    post-itsWhat are the factors that make a digital project take off and gather momentum—or drop like a stone?

    We’ve all been in kickoff meetings for large-scale web projects. People show up bright-eyed and well-intentioned, ready to take part in a brainstorm led by someone with fashionable glasses. Colorful sticky notes and Sharpie fumes create an atmosphere of endless possibility. And by and large, that’s a good thing—kickoffs are a reasonable way to assemble a team and get everyone aligned. But once people leave the headiness of the room, I’ve seen many projects become far more complex and less orderly.

    How does that happen, and how can you, as a digital leader, strive to prevent it? Read the full article over at A List Apart.

    Photo credit: Jay Peg

     

  • How to staff an effective social team

    How to staff an effective social team

    Good post from Jerry Kane on the difference between strategic and procedural social media practitioners. The former group understands your business and its vision, and the latter are the digital natives, expert in the tactical usage and what’s next on the horizon. The strategic team members have experiential business knowledge; the procedural pros have the digital muscle memory that informs both gestures and interface expectations. Clearly, age serves as a useful proxy for this divide.

    Social media can enhance the status quo, or disrupt and advance business goals. If your organization’s social media is only a vehicle for news releases, a procedural approach can inform choices of the best technical tools, hashtag usage, and posting times. But if you want to use social media to change what you are doing alongside how you are doing it, cultivate strategic capabilities for your social team as well.

    gratuitous dog photoA concrete example: if you are a high-end pet care company, you can amplify your communications with a procedural approach to going social. Develop an Instagram program that posts your pet grooming success stories, and ride or create a hashtag for people to share similar photos. Create and actively curate a Facebook page with a system of recognition and prizes, and empower local moderators for that page.

    But if your pet care company vision is growth into new revenue streams, you may want to take a more strategic approach to social. Think about offering your customers a sponsored sharing marketplace for your customer community to exchange good and services from crate exchanges to cat-sitting. In return for advancing a “collaborative economy” community, your company gains access to new, younger markets, and intelligence into demand for emerging products and services. This is a uniquely social opportunity, tied to your overall business vision.

    As Kane points out from his teaching, “Classes that include both types of students are often more effective than either one taught separately.” The power of the mixed-capability team holds true in a business setting as well. Build a social team with procedural and strategic capabilities combined to avoid the pitfalls of silos and hierarchies. You’ll end up with a social-enabled organization that’s less reliant on a SWAT team and more aligned with your business goals.