Pablo Fernandez

Category: Business

Business related posts, about running companies, entrepreneurship, etc.

  • Standups should be asynchronous

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    Quick definition:

    A standup is a type of meeting commonly done in software development teams and now expanding to other knowledge working teams. During the standup meeting you say what you’ve done, what you are planning to do, and whether you need help or are blocked. Normally they happen daily and they are called standups because traditionally were supposed to stand up in front of your desk and just share with everyone else. The idea is that by standing up, people would be brief… that is often not the case (I worked at a place where standups would take between 20 to 60 minutes for about 6 people).

    The idea of the standup is that the whole team is on the same page, but in my opinion, most developers zone out until it’s their turn, they say their bit, and then they zone out again. The only person paying attention to everyone is the manager. And generally there’s nothing bad with that except that we are wasting people’s times.

    There’s a problem with the standup though, which is, at what time is it supposed to happen?

    • 9? too early for most developers
    • 10? ok for most, but those that show up at 9 will do nothing until the standup, because why bother getting in the zone if you are getting to get pushed out of it.
    • 11? now almost everybody spends most of the morning doing nothing because of the upcoming interruption
    • 12? just before lunch? maybe… at least people will keep it brief! But those that eat later will get annoyed by the interruption.
    • Any time in the afternoon? are we talking about today/tomorrow instead of yesterday/today? most people don’t plan tomorrow’s work and thus the what-will-you-do? part will be of low quality. Oh… and those that are not morning people will get their most productive time interrupted.

    The solution is very straightforward: asynchronous standup. People just give a brief report to the manager, but in a public space, about their plan for the day and what happened yesterday. I guess you could do it face to face, but that’s awkward. Text asynchronous standup are much better and they are friendly towards distributed work. They have a second advantage: track record.

    The standup is one of my most useful tools for management. I don’t expect members of the team to read each others report, but they are all public. If I notice a conflict or a potential synergy, I may ask someone to look at someone else’s report.

    If I don’t understand something, I drop a question. If someone has been working on the same thing every day for too long, specially if they mentioned they were close to finish, I have a chat with them (could be a task is problematic, blocked, a drop in performance, etc). If someone is planning on doing something that shouldn’t happen, I jump immediately.

    As a manager, it’s yet another opportunity for me to give encouragement to individual members of my team about their work, to thank them for doing the crappy tasks that nobody likes, etc. I sometimes push myself to do that, because otherwise the standup could start feeling like a useless bureaucracy, writing something that nobody ever reads, a thankless task. I want my team to know I’m reading it, paying attention, finding places to help, etc.

    I generally use Slack for text communication for my teams and my favorite app for asynchronous standups in Geekbot. It’s good if you are together, essential if you are distributed.

  • Your first tool for distributed work: the headset

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    This is an essential tool that every worker on a distributed team or company should have, no exceptions: a headset. Let’s explore why.

    When working distributed you are going to be having a lot of calls and the quality of audio is important. All meetings are tiring the same thing work is tiring, but bad audio is a divider. The worst the audio is, the shorter people can sustain the attention to complex meetings. Not only that, but the cognitive load generally means that people get cranky, irritated, tired and that means wasting productivity.

    You want the audio of the other person to come directly to your ears. That will help you understand and hear, but also it will remove any chances of the audio getting to the mic completely removing the chances of any echo. Yes, software can kill echo, but generally that adds awkward micro silences at the beginning and end of someone’s speech that are very tiring.

    You want the microphone right in front of your mouth to avoid capturing your environment’s noise, the cars on the street, the AC or fan, the children on the patio (or your lap), the cat running around, etc.

    This formula is not new, it’s what we use in environments that are so noisy people can’t talk to someone sitting next to them and so critical that miscommunication can mean death, aviation:

    Just copying the aviation headset form factor is a good place to start.

    FAQ

    Can I use my laptop’s speakers and microphone?

    The microphone tends to be bad, capture audio from the speakers, generating echo, or vibrations from the cooling fans making a buzzing sound that can go from annoying to overpowering depending on the laptop and frequently they are omnidirectional making any tiny noise on your environment really loud.

    When someone uses a laptop I feel they don’t care about anybody but themselves. Everybody has to put up with their shitty audio while for them it’s just fine.

    What about headphones and my laptops or phone microphone?

    That’s a bit better, at least there’s no echo, but buzzing and background noise as well as bad quality voice are still there.

    What about my phone?

    The mic and speaker tend to be of poor quality and limited processing power on the device mean more frequent artifacts, but at least there’s no echo nor buzzing. Depending on the phone, the mic could be quite omnidirectional though.

    What about the phone in loudspeak?

    No… that’s almost as bad as the laptop.

  • Be distributed because it’s cooler, not cheaper

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    There are two motivations that drive the creation of distributed teams or companies:

    • it’s cheaper
    • there just isn’t any available people locally

    There’s nothing wrong with these motivations as starting point, but if they become your sole driver for being distributed the results are probably going to end badly. Remote workers will be treated as cheaper handicapped workers and nobody likes being on that position. Soon they’ll find another better company to work for.

    Also, if you expect that a distributed company behaves the same way as a local one, you’ll end up with a dysfunctional organization (something that’s happening to a lot of companies during the pandemic, they are now distributed but they behave as if they are not).

    To build an effective distributed team engage the cool factor: we are all different, we are more diverse, we bring variety and we feel very strongly about living where we live. Celebrate the distributeness. This will not happen automatically and as a manager/leader at a distributed company, you have to make it happen. Same thing with socializing and bonding: it will not happen automatically as it might if you are all in the same room, and the manager/leader is in charge of making it happen.

    Here are some examples of things you can do:

    • Create a Slack channel where people can share pictures of their food. People will show off the good and bad of the food of where they live. People might end up exchanging recipes.
    • Follow news of the countries/cities where your staff is located and if something major happens, reach out to check on their well-being. Send the signal that you care about where they are, not just that they are far away.
    • Create optional and mandatory engineered social time for people to hang out together. A small amount of mandatory bonding is a good thing, because otherwise it may not happen at all (there’s no water cooler), but don’t force people to be away from their families for a gaming night to avoid losing status at the company.
    • Embrace hobbies, activities and lifestyles. People that work remotely they often care deeply about somethings, like their families, living in rural areas, having more free time, being able to work with constraints, hobbies that are location specific. Celebrate all of that.
    • Allow extra flexibility: don’t expect them to work 9 to 5, but know that they can still work hard or harder and even for more hours. Allow someone to break away from work to go pick up the kids from school in the middle of the day but they fixed a ticket in the middle of the night.

    If you want to learn more, I highly recommend The Year Without Pants. If you want some help distributing your company, feel free to contact me.

  • My biggest hiring secret: text interviews

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    I built a kick-ass team of 6 developers in little over 6 weeks, by myself, doing all the hiring and without using any recruiters. When I tell people how I did it there’s one aspect of my hiring process that raises the most eyebrows: text interviews.

    When someones profile looks promising (CV, GitHub, cover letter) I send them a text message over Google Hangouts, WhatsApp, Signal, etc asking them if they are free for 10 minutes. I don’t even book a time, it’s a short informal text conversation. The goal is to evaluate how good they are at maintaining that type of communication which is important for all development teams and essential for distributed ones. These are some of the questions I ask:

    • How did you learn to code?
    • How did you learn programming language X?
    • What do you want to learn next?
    • What are the pros/cons of distributed companies?
    • Can you tell more about project X?
    • In your application you said X, what did you mean? Can you clarify?
    • Do you have any questions for me?

    The sad reality is that a lot of people don’t pass this stage and only a few pass it with flying colors. This makes it a good filter to put at the very beginning.

    But there’s another reason why this is a good first filter: I can hold several text conversations at the same time. I can probably interview about 4 people at the same time this way. Or, I can interview 1 or 2 as I keep on doing other work, reading documents, addressing questions, etc making it not only of high efficacy but also highly efficient.

    I didn’t invent this, I was inspired by how Automattic hires according to The Year Without Pants. If you have any questions feel free to just ask in the comments and if you need any help hiring developers, don’t hesitate to contact me, but know that I’m not a recruiter.

  • From bank to Google, what’s your staff onboarding like?

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    I remember two onboarding experiences the most. Joining Google was an amazing experience, I felt like a hero in a hero’s parade. Joining a Swiss Investment Bank made me question my life choices.

    Google

    At Google, I had clear instructions sent to me well in advance about what to expect, where I was supposed to show up. I was taken step by step like clueless tourist in a packaged tour. There was one whole week of super interesting lessons about the ins-and-outs of Google, from the amazing (how does search work) to the mundane (how do I log in to my own computer). It was like being a Disney World. My manager personally came to pick me up from the cafeteria where us nooglers (new googlers) would be hanging out to take me to my brand new desk ready for me to start learning more.

    The Bank

    At the bank I had to convince the receptionist that I worked there, get her to issue me a badge and then give me some instructions on how to find my team. When I finally did I and said hello to my manager he said:

    Oh, I forgot you were starting today. I didn’t order your computer, I’m doing that now, it’ll take 2 weeks. Go find someone to pair with.

    I was faced with a sea of 200 grumpy-looking people of which about 4 were in my team but I wasn’t sure who, or their names, and there was no way for me to find out. This is a horrible way of onboarding socially awkward introverts. It made me feel bad for weeks, months even.

    The Strategy

    When designing an onboarding process for your new staff, I believe this is the strategy to follow: don’t make newcomers do any work other than what you are paying them for.

    New staff shouldn’t spend any amount of time trying to figure out the company, navigating complex undocumented hierarchies of people, wondering what to do if their computer doesn’t start, finding out where critical information is stored by accident, learning what tools to use because they overheard someone else talk about it, not knowing where the central documentation is, etc.

    If you like to learn more about staff onboarding tactics, let me know and I’ll write a follow up post. If you need any help designing the onboarding experience at your company feel free to contact me, I’m very passionate about it.

  • Talk to each other, you are missing out

    For the past few weeks I’ve been talking to entrepreneurs, trying to help with their problems. I’ve heard both of these statements repeated a few times:

    Marketing is easy, but coding is impossible.

    Marketeers

    and

    Building a thing is fun, but then I have no idea how to market it.

    Coders

    It’s frustrating to hear both this things at the same time. Even within each of the communities, inside Indie Hackers, Microconf, TWiST, we seem to have subgroups of techies and non-techies that talk among themselves but not to one another and they are both wondering where the other ones are.

    Please: start talking to one another, you need those connections, your idea need those connections.

    If you are either a marketer or a coder and want the other one to join your team as a non-paid co-founder you are asking them to make an investment. A huge investment in terms of personal wealth. A person might be able to start 10 startups in their life, so, you are asking them for 1 tenth of their resources. Act accordingly. Put the effort, show traction, show results. I see people put more effort into talking to an investor that will invest only 1% of their resources.

    The second thing a lot of us should do, and this include me, is not focus so much on our own ideas and try to work on other people’s ideas. Build someone else’s thing, market someone else’s thing. Don’t chase one idea, chase the outcome of a successful startup and accept that it might not be your idea.

    If you are a developer, know this: whatever idea you come up with, it’s an idea that another developer is likely to have, and likely to implement to compete with you. That’s why there’s so much out there in terms of Twitter clones, issue trackers, cryptocurrencies thingies, etc. A non-coder idea has the value of less competition. A CRM for a niche you’ve never heard of might be the best SaaS ever!

    If you are a marketer, know this: even in a crowded space, you can make a difference because there are a lot of companies out there that have a great product and are struggling with marketing. I often find a market need, like, “Private teachers need booking systems” and in my market research I find that the perfect booking system exists and nobody is using it. Lending your superpowers to a developer that’s charging ahead with building yet-another-whatever might be the best SaaS ever!

  • Finding a co-founder for your startup

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    Update: this list is now being maintained on it’s own page: Finding a co-founder

    Someone recently contacted me at MicroMentor with a few questions about their startup, including, how to proceed without a business partner. I told him he should probably find one and then I discovered I had more co-founder search resources than I thought:

    Any other resources you are aware of?

  • The $10 weekend (or why selling to techies is sometimes so hard)

    The first version of Dashman didn’t have a centralized configuration system to control a lot of displays at once. It was a one time fee software to run in one computer. Its price was $10.

    I started networking, going to events, trying to find customers. I’m a techie, but I cleaned up, trimmed my beard, combed my hair, put on a suit (well, most of one… I still have issues with ties) and off I went, looking like this:

    pupeno6

    Techies stopped identifying me as part of their crowd which was enlightening. I was the target of so much condescension. It was funny. I still remember the face of a coder that told me he was building his application on Lisp and I asked “Which one?”. His face lit up when we discussed Common Lisp vs others, or SBCL vs other Common Lisp compilers. We became friends, but I digress.

    One of my most enlightening discussions was with a developer that told me that he didn’t need my product because he could hack something together in a weekend. Let’s assume this is correct. He preferred to work for a weekend over spending $10. Or put in a different way, his weekend rate was $0.42 per hour. “Excuse me, can I hire you?”

    Building something because it’s fun or educational is obviously a very rewarding activity and everybody that wants to do it should do it. When it comes to business, the equation of whether to build or buy should be a financial one.

  • Screensaver Ninja might be coming back

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    Since discontinuing Screensaver Ninja, I have received many messages asking when it is coming back: over Twitter, Facebook, email, and even one person tracking me down on Reddit..

    For those of you who don’t know what Screensaver Ninja is, here is the old explainer video:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2XStYc3TmQ

    It has been very painful to read these messages for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I strongly believe in the product. I want to have it; use it; and enable others to use it. I constantly see expensive and badly designed dashboards or wasted screens, which my product will address. Secondly, judging by the requests, other people want this just as much as I do. Not proceeding with Screensaver ninja could be a wasted business opportunity; although it is hard to tell if the demand is enough to support its development right now.

    I set up a landing page explaining what happened to Screensaver Ninja and a form for people to register for notifications of its potential comeback. This was a way to save everybody’s time and frustration; for those emailing requests for up to date information when I could only say, with sadness, “it’s over”. To my surprise, this form has been gathering five or so leads a week, which is rather a lot for an abandoned product.

    I have started playing with the idea that I might revive Ninja: This time I have designed a bigger system that covers many more use cases and allows me to support both Windows and Mac OS as well as other platforms just as easily.

    During this process I identified the technological bottlenecks; the aspects to product creation that can take months to negotiate and solve, such as hacking Apple’s cookie jar or packaging Chromium. In doing so, I have built a selection of prototypes testing my choices – and everything is working beautifully.

    So that’s it: I have decided to revive Screensaver Ninja. I have emailed all of you whom have shown interest to tell you the good news, and have received an overwhelmingly positive response from both individuals and corporations; some wanting to run hundreds of instances.

    I want to be completely transparent with my supporters; I am building Screensaver Ninja by myself in my spare time between long days and after hours work at two different consultant gigs. Whilst I am looking into the options of partnerships, developers, and marketers, I have decided not to wait for these additions to the team in order to make progress. I’m very excited about this phase both from the technical as well as the business points of view so Screensaver Ninja is moving forward and I will have frequent updates.

  • Going into the property business 

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    ​I’m a tech entrepreneur and that has not changed, but after six or seven years of trying to have at least moderate success, I’m starting to hedge my bets.

    On the side, I want to have some passive income and it looks to me like buy and hold properties, that is, buying them and renting them out, also known as buy to let, is the way to move forward. I identified some very profitable areas and they are in the least expected places. For example, in London you can expect a return on investment of around 3% while I’m getting something around 16%.

    If you want to listen to my journey, I’m documenting it as I go with Clayton Morris on his podcast about investing in property. He just published the second episode in which I talk about getting the money for my first two deals.  I just pulled the trigger on starting the business. I’m super excited and I can’t wait to share more good news in the next episode.