Understanding the Job You Hire a Product To Do

In this talk Clayton Christensen explains the concept of product and sales improvement from a different view: What job are you hiring a product to do?

Finishing A Project

Anders did his Fourier analysis exam wednesday and travelled to Hillerød this afternoon and tomorrow we will be in front of our screens at his parents’ house. We are doing a lot of the finishing touches on our current project Our Workouts. The concept and idea phase of a project is always fun but a project is only a project when it is being implemented and that means hard work.

I find this phase the most fun, because the small details are those that define the project. Excellence come from hard work and great people that dare to lead and get their hands dirty. So don’t just dream – DO!

Good Experience

I’ve been criticizing the Danish National Railways (DSB) before, but today they created a good experience on this otherwise dreary grey day. The train driver came on the loudspeakers and told us which train we were on and the estimated time of arrival in Copenhagen and then said have a nice day. These are the little things that make a huge difference in the perception of a company. The driver did not have to do it, but he did! That is leadership at its core.

Ps.: For a great book on these little things read Tom Peters The Little BIG Things.

Java Beans with caffeine

This alkaloid is definitely one of the few wonders in the world.

However, when you tired of ordinary coffee from the market and have had enough instant coffee, it is time to find a place where quality really matters.
I found this place in the basement of a bookshop in the center of Aarhus. And I got exactly what I was looking for – a cup of coffee with a story to tell.

The barista explained about the taste and flavour of the different products and where and how it was produced.

Everybody has a story to tell. Tell the story of your product and your customers will enjoy your service even more.

If you ever come by Aarhus and want a cup of coffee, I strongly suggest you visit Sigfreds and ask for the story of your cup of coffee.

Loyalty in Business or Who is the Customer?

I just recently finished Jeffrey Gitomer’s Little Red Book of Selling (go buy if you want to sell, and come on, who doesn’t) and today his email news letter featured an interesting piece (http://www.gitomer.com/articles/ViewPublicArticle.html?key=ajcdMibak3MF2WC4DtfTQQ%3D%3D) on airplane service and how simple good manners will help your business in the loyalty department. Those questions Gitomer asks at the bottom of the article should be answered every month? every week? every day? by everyone in your company. It is so easy to beat mediocrity. Be EXCELLENT!

Intent

Always have an Intent with what you do. Give your designs opinions, give your designs an Intent. Then you will never just blend in.

http://www.ted.com/talks/john_hockenberry_we_are_all_designers.html

HTML mockups

After watching (and posting) Ryan Singer of 37signals talk about design, I decided that a nice start to our coacher project would be to do something like the 37signals approach. So after writing a few lines in Evernote about the functionality of coacher I did two html mockups of a coach and athlete view (also got sidetracked and did a helper function. A programmer gotta code)

I find it a good way to, more than, visualize what will be in the app. We are using the twitter bootstrap for rails to easily get the CSS needed and don’t waste time on those parts. We will see if Anders likes my mockups when we talk tomorrow otherwise they can be changed.

Design Is the Entire Process

Design is not just something you add at the last moment, it should be present at all times. This Great Talk by Ryan Singer explains and exemplifies it very well for the things we are doing:

rails new coacher –skip-test-unit

Anders is in the final weeks of his exam period studying hard for Security, Science Theory, and Linear Algebra exams and I have already gone on my last long summer break. Tomorrow I will get my ACL reconstructed, so a project was needed now I can’t enjoy the sunshine. So I have just run this command in Terminal and committed it to our git server, so now I won’t be bored to death in the coming weeks. Anders will join in July when he has passed all his exams. This will be Anders’ first rails development so it will be a process of learning, teaching, and efficient development. We have guessed (planned) that a first release of the system will be at the end of August. We will keep you posted on progress and workflow in our first project together.

How the Internet Was Built

Roy Fielding was an integral person in designing the World Wide Web and without him and others the World would definitely not look the same. His dissertation is an amazing introduction to software architecture and the architecture of the World Wide Web: REST. Roy Fielding’s homepage and his dissertation (pdf)

Go get it and learn how the Internet actually works