Agile Development

Sometime last year, our engineering and product teams embraced the Agile Software Development framework.  Without going into too much detail (here’s the Wikipedia entry for those who want it), the concept of Agile Development is to run software development in small pieces with a focus on more communication between product and development teams resulting in collaborative requirements development.  This leads to a “release early and often” environment where there are continual improvements.  For us, we group development projects now into a “release” that consists of a series of usually six, two-week “iterations.”

The release planning and iteration planning meetings are reasonably long meetings that involve the major stakeholders, product management and engineering.  The process also includes a very short, 10-minute Daily Stand-Up meeting with everyone on the team to review progress and identify roadblocks to completing the two-week iteration.  Requirements are not heavily documented and discussed more or less on the spot during the iteration meetings.  Because there’s a major pull-up every two weeks and a minor one every day, it’s easy to be light on requirements and for product management to constantly be in the loop with engineering to see progress, test functionality, and make mid-course corrections.

This methodology isn’t for everyone, but it’s particularly well suited to the kind of work we do at Return Path — small team, multiple internal and external stakeholders, very dynamic market, and web services as opposed to packaged software.

Our efforts have been bolstered by some limited consulting and more important, a fantastic web-based workflow management tool geared towards Agile Development run by a company called Rally Development in Boulder.  Think of it as Salesforce.com for your engineering and product team.

We’ve had great success with this methodology to date.  Engineering productivity is way up, product management visibility and input into development is way up, the level of friction/noise between product management and engineering is way down, and we have a much tighter grip on our development milestones than we ever have in the past.

Agile and Rally have worked so well for us, in fact, that we’re starting to extend the concept to other parts of our business, which I’ll write about separately.

Counter Cliche:  I Know When I See One, Too

I haven’t written a counter to one of Fred’s VC Cliche’s of the Week for a while now, but today’s was too good to resist.  While I haven’t (and most entrepreneurs haven’t) worked with 200 VCs, I have seen, heard about, been one (sort of), and worked with enough of them to know enough to comment as follows:  as is the case with Fred and entrepreneurs, I’m not sure I can define what makes a great VC in one phrase, but I know one when I see one, and here are some of the characteristics they exhibit:

– Major pattern recognition — "I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends…";
– Deep understanding of the market and/or customer set to add strategic value;
– Fundamental desire to be a product manager or marketing manager of your product, but also —
– Ability to stay out of the weeds with day-to-day details when the Board meeting ends;
– Always ready with a story or bon mot about other crazy investors or even crazier entrepreneurs to make you feel better about your own life;
– Complete transparency about the motives of his/her fellow GPs and LPs and ability/appetite for follow-on financings (and needless to say, no/limited blocking of transactions that are clearly in the company’s best interests but might run counter to his/her firm’s own short-term interests);
– Willingness to jump into a debate with the strongest of convictions, yet without 100% of the facts, since 100% of the facts are never available;
– Equal willingness to admit being wrong if a clear and compelling argument comes forth; and of course the most critical —
– No fear of yielding to Management when Management knows best!
– Note — note included — major rolodex (a nice to have, but not required)

The other part of the counter cliche is that I’m sure there are some great entrepreneurs who only exhibit a few of Fred’s list of traits…much as I’m sure there are some great VCs who only exhibit a few of my list above.

Help Me, Help You

I’m conducting a really short reader survey about OnlyOnce.  There are about 10 questions, half about the blog, and half about reader demographics.  Please take 2 minutes to complete it for me so I know how I’m doing!  All responses are anonymous, as you’ll see.  Click here to go to the survey.

Silly, Silly Patent Nonsense

Some news floated around the email marketing world yesterday that is potentially disturbing and destructive but highlights some lunacy at the same time.  I hope I’m getting enough of the details right here (and quite frankly that isn’t a joke, which it feels like).

Tom DiStefano of Boca-based PerfectWeb Technologies is suing direct marketing behemoth InfoUSA for patent infringement of a business process patent for bulk email distribution that he received in 2003.

I will first issue my disclaimers that I’m not a patent lawyer (nor do I even play one on TV) and that I have only quickly read both the legal complaint and the patent.  But my general take on this is that it’s more silly than anything else — but has the potential to be destructive at the same time.

Silly reason #1.  I’d like to go patent the process of blowing my nose with facial tissue predominantly using my left hand after a sneeze — will you pay me a royalty every time you do that, please?  That’s a short way of saying that I am increasingly finding that the patent system is deeply flawed, or at least very ill-suited to the way technology and Internet innovation work today.  For centuries, patents have been put in place to provide inventors adequate incentive to invest in innovation.  That made sense in a world where innovation was expensive.  It took a long time and a lot of capital to invent, say, the cotton gin or the steam engine.  It takes a long time and a lot of capital to invent a new life-saving drug.  But Internet-oriented business process patents are just silly.  It can take a guy with a piece of paper a few minutes to sketch out a business process for some niche part of the Internet ecosystem.  No real time, no real capital.  And worst of all, it’s generally easy to “design around.”  Disclaimers and all, this seems to be just such a patent.

Silly reason #2.  The patent was issued in 2003.  Really?  I’m not sure when the patent holder claims he invented the bulk email distribution process, but unless it was in the early 90s before the likes of Mercury Mail, First Virtual, Email Publishing, etc., then it’s highly likely to be “non-novel,” “obvious,” and conflicting with lots of “prior art.”

Silly reason #3.  Why wait four years to prosecute a patent that the inventor believes has been violated so obviously by so many (hundreds, maybe thousands) companies for so many years?  I don’t quite get that.

I’m not exactly seeing the David vs. Goliath here.

So here we go.  It will likely take months and millions before this thing gets resolved.  If our legal system doesn’t come through as it should, or worse, if InfoUSA punts and settles, this is going to cause big problems for many, many companies in the industry.

I hope our friends at InfoUSA are happy to dig in and fight to have the patent invalidated, although that’s expensive and time consuming.  And assuming that the patent holder is likely to go on a rampage of legal complaints against every other player in the industry — someone should tell Vin Gupta that we can all band together to fight this silliness.  We’re happy to help here at Return Path.

A Culture of Appreciation

As I mentioned in my last post in the Collaboration is Hard series, we’ve tried to create a culture of appreciation at Return Path that lowers barriers to collaboration and rewards mutual successes.  We developed a system that’s modeled somewhat after a couple of those short Ken Blanchard books, Whale Done and Gung Ho! It may seem a little hokey, and it doesn’t work 100% of the time, but in general, it’s a great way to make it easy for people to say a public “thanks” to a colleague for a job well done.

The idea is simple.  We have an “award request” form on our company Intranet that any employee can use to request one of five awards for one or more of their colleagues, and the list evolves over time.  The awards are:

ABCD – for going Above and Beyond the Call of Duty

Double E – for “everyday excellence”

Crowbar – for helping someone in sales “pry our way in” to a new customer

Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That – for coming up with a great insight for the business (credit for the name of course goes to our former colleague Andy Sernovitz)

WOOT – for Working Out Of Title and helping a colleague

Our HR coordinator Lisa does a quick review of award submissions to make sure they are true to their definitions and make sure that people aren’t abusing the system, and the awards are announced and posted on the home page of the Intranet every week and via RSS feed in near-real time.

Each award carries a token monetary value of $25-$200 paid with American Express gift checks, which are basically like cash.  We send out the checks with mini-statements to employees every quarter.

It’s not a perfect system.  The biggest shortcoming is that it’s not used evenly by different people or different groups.  But it’s the best thing we’ve come up with so far to allow everyone in the company to give a colleague a virtual pat on the back, which encourages great teamwork!

I recently returned from a six-week sabbatical. It was fantastic. I blogged about it here if you’re curious about the experience. It turned out that, while I was gone, we had probably the most successful, least dramatic six weeks in our 10 year history. I had assumed that’s because the team buckled down while I was out, and so did our Board.

Little did we know what really happened during that six week stretch. It’s often said that when the cat’s away, the mice play. The short video below is what greeted me today at an all-hands meeting. If the team can crank out such great work and have this much fun while I’m out, well, I guess I should take more time off!

Back to Business?

Today is the day every year that everyone keeps saying, "well, it’s back to school time."  Ignore for a moment the fact that half of the schools I hear about now start in the middle of August…it’s interesting to see how some things in the business world really slow down in the summer, especially in August as well as the school system.

People really disappear for vacations, short and long.  Even if we aren’t like our European counterparts who really have it figured out and can virtually shut down in August, it’s just harder to get things done.  People might not all be out at the same time or for as long, but having one or two key people out any given week just makes it harder to make progress on things.

So, it’s time to get Back to Business.  September and October are the busiest months of the year in our industry with a packed conference schedule, planning cycles for next year, and the ever-present "holiday season" for our retail clients, so it should be a crazy fall!

Sophisticated Negotiation Technique

Brad and our co-tenants in Colorado, Still Secure, have already documented this — including a dedication from Still Secure (thanks, guys – you took the words right out of my mouth).  But still, the story must be recorded here for posterity as well, if for no other reason than how absurd it was.

We share a lease in Colorado with Still Secure (the lease used to be Brad’s/Mobius’s), and the lease ends this fall.  Both we and Still Secure have grown to the point where we’re bursting at the seams, so someone is going to have to move out.  After months of polite wrangling, it was clear there was no easy solution.  Sometimes, win-win just doesn’t exist.

So we did what any civilized bunch of people would do.  We flipped a coin.  It just seemed more entertaining in the end than rock-paper-scissors.  And unfortunately, we came up short.  But we had pre-negotiated a buy-out with Still Secure whereby the party who got to keep the space paid $X to the other party to cover moving expenses, furniture, and presumably pain and suffering, so now we have a full piggy bank to go procure and set up new space for ourselves.

Harvard Program on Negotiation — do I see a case study in the works?

Curbing My Enthusiasm

For the first time since I started blogging over four years ago, I have recently run into several examples in a short period of time where I’d love to blog about something happening in the business, and I think it would make for a great blog posting, but I can’t do it.  Why can’t I?  Lots of different reasons:

– Don’t want to telegraph strategy to the competition

– Don’t want to compromise an employee (current or former)

– Worried about downstream legal ramifications

There are other reasons as well, but these are the main three.  I love transparency as much as the next person (and more than most), but these scenarios have to trump transparency in my position as a CEO.  Hopefully the passage of time and the release of news will mean that I can still do the blog postings, but as more of a post mortem than something in the moment. 

But I hate curbing my own enthusiasm.  It’s a definite frustration in this case, and a new one.

Just Ask a 5-Year Old

I heard this short but potent story recently. I can’t for the life of me remember who told it to me, so please forgive me if I’m not attributing this properly to you!

So there you go. What makes us get de-skilled or dumber as we get older? Nothing at all! It’s just our expectations of ourselves that grow. The bar goes up for what it takes to count yourself as knowing how to do something with every passing year. Why is that? When we were 5 years old, all of us were about the same in terms of our capabilities. Singing, painting, dancing, tying shoes. But as we age, we find ourselves with peers who are world class specialists in different areas, and all of a sudden, our perception of self changes. Sing? Me? Are you kidding? Who do I look like, Sting?

I see this same phenomenon in business all of the time. The better people get at one thing, the worse they think they are at other things. It’s the rare person who wants to excel at multiple disciplines, and more important, isn’t afraid to try them. But we’ve seen lots of success over the years at this at Return Path. The account manager who becomes a product manager. The tech support guy who becomes a software developer. The sales rep who becomes an account manager.

I love these stories! My anecdotal evidence suggests that people who do take this kind of plunge end up just as successful in their new discipline, if not more so, because they have a wider range of skills, knowledge, and perspectives on their job. Or it could just be that the kind of people who WANT to do multiple types of jobs are inherently stronger employees. Not sure which is the cause and which is the effect.

It’s even more rare that managers allow their people the freedom to try to be great at new things. It’s all too easy for managers to pigeonhole people into the thing they know how to do, the thing they’re doing now, the thing they first did when they started at the company. “Person X doesn’t have the skills to do that job,” we hear from time to time.

I don’t buy that. Sure, people need to be developed. They need to interview well to transition into a completely new role. But having the belief that the talent you have in one area of the company can be transferable to other areas, as long as it comes with the right desire and attitude, is a key success factor in running a business in today’s world. The opposite is an environment where you’re unable to change or challenge the organization, where you lose great people who want to do new things or feel like they are being held back, and where you feel compelled to hire in from the outside to “shore up weaknesses.” That works sometimes, but it’s basically saying you’d rather take an unknown person and try him or her out at a role than a known strong performer from another part of the organization.

And who really wants to send that message?

Angry, Defiant, and Replete with Poor Grammar

I didn’t see Bush’s farewell address on TV on Thursday, but Mariquita and I did see his press conference on Monday.  It was exactly what you’d expect it to be and quite frankly just like the last eight years:  angry, defiant, and replete with poor grammar.

I’ve said repeatedly that I think Bush has destroyed the Republican party and will go down in history as one of the worst presidents this country has ever had, if not the worst.  It’s not surprising that his tone at the end is as the title of this post describes.  But it is a shame.  His whole administration is a shame.  The really sad part is that it didn’t have to be.  People make mistakes — even really bad ones.  And they can recover from them and go on to do great things in life if two conditions exist:

1. They solicit feedback on their performance, and

2. The internalize and act on that feedback

Bush not only didn’t “get” these two points; he seemed to revel in them.  “Not paying attention to polls” and “At least you know where I stand” seemed to him to be pillars of strength as opposed to pillars of ignorance and complete and total lack of intellectual curiosity.  You don’t have to try to win a popularity contest to find out when something is going wrong on your watch.  And you can be bold, admit a failure, learn from it, and move on instead of just digging yourself deeper and deeper into the same hole.

I read a great article in The Economist last night that summarized its current view of Bush’s legacy, and in fact it noted a bunch of areas in which Bush appeared to learn from his mistakes, though he probably wouldn’t phrase it that way.  The fact that his second administration did do more to reach out to key allies in Germany and France is one example.  And to the article’s credit, it even noted some of Bush’s accomplishments, or at least the areas in which his thinking was right — those those are just dwarfed in the end by his failings.  

At any rate, I’m delighted he’ll be leaving office on Tuesday.  Inauguration day is one of my favorite days in America, and I look forward with optimism to the incoming administration as I always do, regardless of how I voted.

But as for Bush, I think I’d rather have the pilot of that USAir flight as my commander in chief.  Now there’s a guy (I don’t even know his name, and I probably never will) who had a quick grasp of a difficult situation and produced a brilliant and elegant solution in short order!