I recently responded to a question on FounderCafe

asking “How important is Founder’s Profile to be visible on website?”; this was my answer:

I do think it can be helpful for a small business to have a brief personal narrative about who you are and why you’re creating the business. How you expose that story depends.

I have a lot of anxiety about my business generally. I do have fears that by connecting the business to myself personally that my business failing is a personal failure. I have previously tried to hide behind an impersonal “business” (generic reply addresses, 3rd-person copy) but I’ve lately been trying to not hide behind that curtain.

As a small business, my customers are just as likely to interact with me as they are to interact with “the product”. From onboarding emails and messages, to microcopy within the application, these are driven primarily by a small number of people’s values and personality. Grounding that by letting people know “hey, I’m a real person whose business and personal goals are intertwined” can get you better feedback and maybe give you the benefit of a more meaningful connection (personally and business) with your customers.

If I’m understanding some of your concerns, it sounds like you’re worried that by connecting your name to it, that it will negatively impact your day jobs. I’ve personally never had a problem with that, but that’s heavily situational.

This was another experience that resonated:

When I didn’t have my founder story, I had occasional customers categorize me as some outsourced company, but after I added my profile, those emails stopped.

Your most passionate customers will care about your story, and passionate customers are extremely important in the beginning. Honestly, your story, relatability, and likability might be what closes your first sales.

A Wikipedia Essay that is itself primarily a quote:

Chesterton’s fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood. The quotation is from G. K. Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter entitled “The Drift from Domesticity”:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

From Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri:

Product managers ultimately play a few key roles, but one of the most important ones is being able to marry the business goals with the customer goals to achieve value. Good product managers are able to figure out how to achieve goals for the business by creating or optimizing products, all with a view toward solving actual customer problems. This is a very important skill set.

When you look at the role of the product owner in most Scrum literature, the three responsibilities of the position include the following:

• Define the product backlog and create actionable user stories for the development teams.
• Groom and prioritize the work in the backlog.
• Accept the completed user stories to make sure the work fulfills the criteria.

These are the functions that are focused on and taught in the shorter product owner trainings, usually over a day or two. Although Scrum has a lot of information on the processes and rituals of what to do as a product owner, it leaves lots of questions unanswered and these questions are important for creating successful products:

• How do we determine value?
• How do we measure the success of our products in the market?
• How do we make sure we are building the right thing?
• How do we price and package our product?
• How do we bring our product to market?
• What makes sense to build versus buy?
• How can we integrate with third-party software to enter new markets?

Product ownership is just a piece of product management. A good product manager is taught how to prioritize work against clear, outcome-oriented goals, to define and discover real customer and business value, and to determine what processes are needed to reduce the uncertainty about the product’s success in the market.

From Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni:

How many people should be on a team?

This is the $64,000 question, for sure. And while there is no way to answer it definitively for every organization, I believe the range is from three to twelve.

Most organizations I work with err on the side of including too many people on a team, in many cases because they don’t want to exclude anyone. It’s as though they’re mistakenly viewing team membership as a reward or a benefit rather than as a strategic decision about how to best run the organization. And while I salute the desire to be inclusive, there are some big problems with having too many people on a team:

• On a purely practical and tactical note, it’s tough to coordinate meetings and other team activities when there are fifteen schedules to consider.
• More important, it’s difficult for team members to get to know one another, develop bonds of trust with one another, when there are too many people in the room. Generally speaking, a kid who grows up in a family of ten children is probably not going to have as deep and meaningful relationship with most siblings as a kid born to a family of four. Generally speaking, that is.
• But perhaps most important of all, having too many people on a team makes team dynamics during meetings and other decision-making events almost impossible. That’s because a good team has to engage in two types of communication in order to optimize decision making, but only one of these is practical in a large group.

According to Harvard’s Chris Argyris, those two types of communication are advocacy and inquiry. Basically, advocacy is the statement of ideas and opinions; inquiry is the asking of questions for clarity and understanding. When a group gets too large, people realize they are not going to get the floor back any time soon, so they resort almost exclusively to advocacy. It becomes like Congress (which is not designed to be a team) or the United Nations (ditto).

One member says, “I think we should pursue proposal A,” provoking another member to say, “Well, I think we should pursue proposal B.” Someone else lobbies for C, yet another person wants A with a slight modification, and before you know it, everyone is trying to get their opinion heard.

Inquiry, on the other hand, would entail one of the members saying, “Wait a minute. I’d like to hear you explain why you support proposal A, because I want to understand your rationale. After all, if it makes sense, I could go along with it.” Okay, that might be just a little too idealistic, but you get the point.

From Overcoming The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni:

Question #1: Are we really a team?

Sometimes a team improvement effort is doomed from the start because the group going through it isn’t really a team at all, at least not in the true sense of the word. You see, a team is a relatively small number of people (anywhere from three to twelve) that shares common goals as well as the rewards and responsibilities for achieving them. Team members readily set aside their individual or personal needs for the greater good of the group.

If your “team” doesn’t meet these criteria, you might want to consider whether you have a smaller subset of the group that is a real team. Or maybe the group is simply a collection of people who report to the same manager, but with relatively little interdependence and mutual accountability (that is, not a team).

And remember, it’s okay to decide that your group isn’t a team. In a world where teamwork is rarer than we might think, plenty of non-teams succeed. In fact, if your group is not meant to be a team, it’s far better to be clear about that than to waste time and energy pretending you’re something you’re not. Because that only creates false expectations, which leads to frustration and resentment.

I’ve been wondering a lot about defining a team as a group of people who receive rewards when those rewards are indirect e.g. there isn’t a financial reward. When working within a nonprofit context, there is impact (bettering the world) but not everyone involved is able to turn that into social or economic gain. In other words, the work you’re doing doesn’t advance your career from a skills/competency perspective, and your position doesn’t allow you to claim a significant leadership narrative that might accrue social benefit (thought leadership).

From Marshal B. Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communications:

“The Most Arrogant Speaker We’ve Ever Had!”

This dialogue occurred during a workshop I was conducting. About half an hour into my presentation, I paused to invite reactions from the participants. One of them raised a hand and declared, “You’re the most arrogant speaker we’ve ever had!”

I have several options open to me when people address me this way. One option is to take the message personally; I know I’m doing this when I have a strong urge to either grovel, defend myself, or make excuses. Another option (for which I am well-rehearsed) is to attack the other person for what I perceive as their attack upon me. On this occasion, I chose a third option by focusing on what might be going on behind the man’s statement.

MBR: (guessing at the observations being made) Are you reacting to my having taken thirty straight minutes to present my views before giving you a chance to talk?

Phil: No, you make it sound so simple.

MBR: (trying to obtain further clarification) Are you reacting to my not having said anything about how the process can be difficult for some people to apply?

Phil: No, not some people—you!

MBR: So you’re reacting to my not having said that the process can be difficult for me at times?

Phil: That’s right.

MBR: Are you feeling annoyed because you would have liked some sign from me that indicated that I have some problems with the process myself?

Phil: (after a moment’s pause) That’s right.

MBR: (feeling more relaxed now that I am in touch with the person’s feeling and need, I direct my attention to what he might be requesting of me) Would you like me to admit right now that this process can be a struggle for me to apply?

Phil: Yes.

MBR: (having gotten clear on his observation, feeling, need, and request, I check inside myself to see if I am willing to do as he requests) Yes, this process is often difficult for me. As we continue with the workshop, you’ll probably hear me describe several incidents where I’ve struggled … or completely lost touch … with this process, this consciousness, that I am presenting here to you. But what keeps me in the struggle are the close connections to other people that happen when I do stay with the process.

From Brené Brown’s Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead:

Last year I gave a talk on vulnerability to 350 SWAT team officers, parole officers, and jailers. (Yes, it was as intimidating as it sounds.) A SWAT officer walked up to me after the talk and said, “The only reason we listened to you is because you’re just as bad at being open as we are. If you didn’t wrestle with being vulnerable, we wouldn’t trust you one bit.”

From Pietra Rivoli’s The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy: An Economist Examines the Markets, Power, and Politics of World Trade:

So, what do I say to the young woman on the steps at Georgetown University who was so concerned about the evils of the race to the bottom, so concerned about where and how her T-shirt was produced? I would tell her to appreciate what markets and trade have accomplished for all of the sisters in time who have been liberated by life in a sweatshop, and that she should be careful about dooming anyone to life on the farm. I would tell her that the poor suffer more from exclusion from politics than from the perils of the market, and that if she has activist energy left over it should be focused on including people in politics rather than shielding them from markets. And I would tell her about the shoulders she stands on, about her own sisters and brothers in time and the noble family tree of activists, and the difference they have made in a day’s life at work all over the world. I would tell her that, in just a few short years, I have seen the difference her own generation has made, and that someday people will stand on her shoulders, too. I would tell her that Nike, Adidas, and GAP need her to keep watching, and so do Wal-Mart and the Chinese government. I would tell her that I have met dozens of seamstresses in Chinese factories who need her, and that future generations of sweatshop workers and cotton farmers need her as well. I would tell her to look both ways, but to march on.

Specifically:

My T-shirt’s story, then, is not a tale of Adam Smith’s market forces, but is instead a tale of Karl Polanyi’s double movement, in which market forces on the one hand meet demands for protection on the other.

I also like this on boring meetings as a sign of progress:

With a long historical perspective, it seems clear that when the meetings get boring, we have taken a step forward. Boring meetings mean that the radical has become mainstream, and that the establishment has changed its mind about the very nature of right and wrong. The struggles for bans on child labor, or for fire exits or minimum wage or factory codes of conduct, are never boring. But when the fight is won, the meetings get boring. While the battle rages for and against, it is interesting. But when the battle is over and the fight is no longer about whether to have fire exits but where to put them, not whether to have a minimum wage, but how to administer it, not whether to disclose factory locations but by what means and how often—when the establishment has changed its mind and we are just working out the details in (yet another) early morning committee meeting—it gets boring.

From Michael Lewis’ The Undoing Project on how happiness and misery is experienced differently:

“What might have been is an essential component of misery,’” he [Daniel Kahneman] wrote to Amos [Tversky]. “There is an asymmetry here, because considerations of how much worse things could have been is not a salient factor in human joy and happiness.”

[..,]

Happy people did not dwell on some imagined unhappiness the way unhappy people imagined what they might have done differently so that they might be happy. People did not seek to avoid other emotions with the same energy they sought to avoid regret.

This bit on how people remember (and compare) bad experiences is also fascinating:

When he met Redelmeier, Danny was already running experiments on unhappiness in his Berkeley lab. He’d stick the bare arms of his subjects into buckets of ice water. Each subject was given two painful experiences. He’d then be asked which of the two experiences he’d most like to repeat. Funny things happened when you did this with people. Their memory of pain was different from their experience of it. They remembered moments of maximum pain, and they remembered, especially, how they felt the moment the pain ended. But they didn’t particularly remember the length of the painful experience. If you stuck people’s arms in ice buckets for three minutes but warmed the water just a bit for another minute or so before allowing them to flee the lab, they remembered the experience more fondly than if you stuck their arms in the bucket for three minutes and removed them at a moment of maximum misery. If you asked them to choose one experiment to repeat, they’d take the first session. That is, people preferred to endure more total pain so long as the experience ended on a more pleasant note.

These are my notes from attending a full-day in-person Priceonomics Bootcamp; they now have an online Priceonomics Content Marketing Bootcamp. Most of this is covered in their The Content Marketing Handbook or on their blog and operationalized through their Content Tracker. It’s fantastic.

The Priceonomics Story:

1. What they were doing at the time: had a business pricing stuff
2. Context at the time: OkCupid data blog was good
3. Tried to emulate what was going on: “We were better at writing about the business’s data than the doing the business.”
4. Found success and evolved: people liked it

Information Marketing

“Data content that spreads”

Key questions:

• What is interesting data that is a byproduct of your business?
• What do you know that’s valuable to other people

“You don’t necessarily need to do information marketing, that’s just what Priceonomics does”

Alternatives to information marketing:

• Story <- Wealthsimple does this
• Info <- Artsy does this

Information Marketing helps reporters AND helps you.

Two Information Marketing strategies:

1. Create content that is popular that leads to press hits that leads to inbound
2. Do not-massively popular content that converts highly

“Have a clear idea, have a clear distribution plan, and it will work. It’s simpler than you think, but simultaneously easy to screw up.”

Information Marketing overcomes a common challenge: When you publish stories/info about your industry, what do you do with it because it doesn’t fit a media narrative of something to write about… that’s why data posts are easier to share.

Writers Playbook:

• “The Nugget”: What will someone say about this? can they verbalize it? how would they explain it to a friend. Why will someone share this? What will they say about it?
• Maximize “shots on goal” by having something relevant to as many people as possible.
  • Top 100 List is better than a Top 10. More people can identify with something you have to say.
  • Giving a ranking gives people something to say, e.g. “my thing is 7th”.
• Write clearly, people only read topic sentences. You can’t say anything important in the middle of a paragraph.
• Title should get the point across, and not sound like the article will be boring. “You don’t have the credibility of the New Yorker to have an artsy or vague title”. Signal it’s quantitative and imply “there will be a ranking”. lendedu has good titles.
• Don’t spend time on trying to explain “why”, just show the data. 3-5 charts, 800-1,000 words
• • A/B Testing Titles: Buy facebook ads with different titles and test clicks. For example “Unfortunate physics of mail urination” vs “Why can’t we design a splash proof toilet?”
• People tend to link to data-driven studies because it’s hard to summarize.
• The holy rail is having a report you update once a year or quarter. Example: Thumbtack small business confidence.

The Process:

Spend 40 hours on pulling together the data. Priceonomics takes 3 week for a full turnaround.

1. Prep -> 1 hour. People already have the ideas, they just need to be scoped down and picked for ones that fit a template. Don’t start with a story, just get the data!
2. Get the data -> 1 week
3. Analyze the data -> 2 weeks
4. Write -> 1 week
5. Iterations -> 1 week
6. Finishing touches -> 1-2 days

Distribution

• Nothing happens until a critical mass of people see it.
• Anticipate where your content will be popular before you start writing. Supernodes: Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, Metafilter, Product Hunt, Next Draft, MediaRedef. Find niche supernodes for your vertical.
• THE BUMP. 1000 simultaneous people. leads to it being organically shared.
• Journalists are the only channel you control.
  • Make a list of 50 journalists who would be interested in your data
  • Craft your pitch to them in a short email draft (don’t send it). Write the journalist email draft before you write your article
  • Start writing your article
  • Send the journalist a short, individualized message
  • It takes just one
  • You’re the information provider It’s not news until an outlet covers you.
• How to do it:
  1. Make list of 50 journalists who’d be interested in your article.
  2. Craft your pitch to them in a short email
  3. Start writing your article
  4. Then send them a short individualized email.
  5. It takes just one. Keep a list of everyone who has ever written about you. Send them a quick thanks.

Subject: Buying data shows people purchase t-shirts when they wake up
Hi Sam,

I read your article about shirts.io last year

Just wanted to let you know Day of the Shirt just published some interesting data about when people shop for t-shirts:

[link to blog article]

Basically most people shop when they wake up. Thought you’d be interested.
Best,
Ben

Data Studio Philosophy:

• Our readers deserve never to be confused
• It’s about the information, not the writing style
• Focus on why someone would want to share this story
• People love data. They love maps. They love charts. They love tables. We give people what they want.

Article Templates:

These are also published here in more detail.

1. Geographic Variation: “who clicks on ads”
2. Trend related to the news: “trump bump”
3. Who does that? “the age people outgrow ikea”
4. Secret data about something people care about “cost of being a bridesmaid”
5. Data that you have that is valuable to business “does mentioning a famous client in an email convert better”
6. Rank stuff: “diverse universities”
7. Cost and price of stuff: “which cars have lowest maintenance cost”

Non-obvious Learnings about writing

• People care more about cities than states
• For rankings (geography, colleges) have a cutoff of top 100 cities (based on population) or top-ranked colleges
• It’s about the information, not the process. You only need 1 short paragraph about your methodology, near the beginning.
• The intro is paramount. You have to sell the article. You just have to get people excited. You don’t need to get into an elaborate explanation of who you are or why you’re writing it.
• Don’t try to be funny, try to be clear.
• Keep interpretation to a minimum. After writing a few of these style articles you’ll learn what is a PhD dissertation is and what is a 40-hour piece. Don’t make it a PhD dissertation.
• Never apologize for what you didn’t do. Explain what you did do. Say how novel it is “this is the first time…”
• The conclusion should re-emphasize your main point.
• We don’t care about what other data is out there

Editing

• Is this offensive?
• Can anything be taken out of context
• Typos matter less than misunderstandings/offending in massive distribution. Even offending 1% of people is huge.
• Make it possible for people who are responsible for the blog to succeed

Learnings about visualizing data

• Titles should be clear and enticing. Catchy title: “Ranking the countries that drink the most wine”. Boring subtitle: “Wine consumption in liters per capita in 2011”
• Tables are fine, don’t need to be complicated or interactive. It’s nice have some variation though.
• People love maps! And not because they convey information well.
• Round your numbers sensible. Use commas, have empathy for your readers’ eyes
• 3-5 charts is the maximum before it gets boring

Questions

Should I be worried about other content on my blog? No one cares about you. Don’t worry about your other content or feel obligated to retool, edit or delete it. No one cares.

I’ve found too many opportunities to quote this from “Ask a Manager” in the past few weeks:

…one of the ways that dysfunctional workplaces harm the people who work there is by warping their sense of what’s normal … and by getting them overly invested in trying to make something work that they aren’t well positioned to fix in any meaningful way.