About 12 years ago, I was co-founder of a brand new startup – pre-money, 15 slides and a chair at a local VC office. In 1999, we were funded with $4M and off to the whiteboards to figure out some details of what to build. In about 9 months or so, we had our first software product and I was busy leading a Professional Service team in an effort to customize and integrate enterprise software at customer sites – different days for sure. Our Engineering team was about 15 people and built software using the waterfall discipline after writing design documentation in word, conducting cross functional design reviews and laying out a series of risk based interim milestones. They were perhaps the best Engineering teams I’ve ever worked with – they built rock solid, well thought out, very stable stuff and always right on schedule. Very early in the company, I felt the pressure to go quickly. Not just because I’m impatient, but because I understood the importance of speed to our business. I was actually infamously quoted as asking for “Crappier code quicker” which was counter-intuitive coming from the Services guy and political correctness has never been my strong suit, so my opinion on over engineering was very thinly failed by this comment. The Agile discipline architects produced a more eloquent approach to what I was attempting to facilitate.

In any case, I’ve learned many lessons, gains significant experience and transitioned to leading my own Engineering teams – mostly Agile based and all Software as a Service in the cloud, thankfully. So now I’ve been reflecting back on my keen interest in speed and why. It got me thinking about the old cliche – “Quality, Time and Cost – pick two”. In 1999, I was definitely looking to swing the pendulum away from quality in favor of speed. Today, I still believe that speed is the highest priority of these three. Speed is a super important advantage in so many environments. In the sports world, there are tons of examples like a speedy base stealer yielding more runs, but maybe just as importantly the second order benefits that are forced on a competitor under time pressure. A competitor under pressure is forced to act quickly, with much less think time will make more mistakes and change from their most advantageous strategy. A speedy football defense gains many types of competitive advantages by forcing the quarterback to think quickly and make mistakes. In the cool new startup circles, speed is the key ingredient of the popular “Fail Fast” rally cry. There is no doubt that the speedy first mover advantage is a killer advantage – I could rattle off a hundred companies that are fueled primarily by speed to market – see Groupon for a spectacular example. Sure, there are some counter examples, like Google, but the scales are definitely tipped towards the speedy lot.

So what exactly gives in the closed equation of Quality, Time and Cost. In my experience, cost is almost always fixed in practice – ye’ old budget, so argue as you may but you got what you got. Does this mean that Quality is low man on the totem pole – am I back to crappier code quicker. Actually, no. Features turn out to be the governor, in my opinion, which brings me to exactly why Agile is the discipline that allows a business to launch with a minimally valuable feature set , learn and innovate quickly.

Then, my friend said something that was different and got me thinking.  He said, “The barriers to starting a new business have been greatly reduced across the board in the last decade.  In fact, I’m starting to see some new problems.  Think of it like a mature rain forest that has thrown off a ton of new seeds.  At the forest floor, young seedling all look the same and struggle to get sun light.  I’m starting to see more Venture Capitalist move down the time line and wait for opportunities with more mature entrepreneurs.”  I wonder if the data backs up the theory that Venture Capital is transitioning to more mature companies now.  And if so, is it because the cost of entry is so low that the market is flooded?  Is it because folks are more risk adverse in a tight economy?

In 1980, my dad brought an Apple II+ home (48K of memory and a single 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drive) to do some spreadsheet work using VisiCalc (Dan Bricklin‘s concept), Excel’s great, great grandfather.  I was 16 at the time, and this simple introduction was all that I need to find my passion in life.  I loved to play games on the computer and my parents insisted that I balance my computer time with something  productive.  So I learned how to program the Apple in Pascal – a few game of course, something about dropping depth charges from a surface ship to sink submarines in a 48×32 graphics display.

In 1982, I was graduating high school and I had been accepted to the University of San Francisco; I was going to study mathematics and get very far away from home.  I also always wanted to buy a motorcycle and was never allowed – probably related to my uncle loosing a leg in a motorcycle accident a few years earlier, or maybe my parents where just plain smarter than I was.  In any case, I asked for permission again and again the answer was “no, too dangerous”.  But this time, I was 18 and free.  Right?  Since I had earned money of my own, I proceeded to buy a brand spanking new Honda 400E low rider.  Very sweet.  My parents did not like that move at all and they decided that they weren’t going to pay for my reckless California escape plan.  Oops, and there was no plan B as all my friends sailed off to college.

I found a job baking croissants for Au Bon Pain at Logan airport, starting at 4:30 AM.  It was ok, even fun, riding my motorcycle to the airport early in the morning until about October.  Wearing a snow suit in November was a bit of a bummer.  I baked thousands of croissants and delivered product to 11 carts spread throughout airport terminals.  The cart person would sign a delivery receipt and at the end of their shift, they would inventory their cart, count their money and bring their receipts back to the office.  The office manager would reconcile inventory, cash and receipts by hand – a good amount of work, recounts, etc.  I saw an opportunity to write some software – yes, Apple II+.  I showed the software to my office manager, who liked it.  She introduced me to Ron Shaick – the CEO of Au Bon Pain.  Ron offered to buy the software for $1500 and even better, he wanted me to write software for their 5 stores.  Let me see, work in an office during the warm portion of the day for $10/hour or continue that 4:30 AM motorcycle thing to earn $2.50/hour baking croissants.  I shared an office with Ron in a 2500 square foot office space, writing accounting and inventory control software in Basic on an IBM System 23 as Au Bon Pain expanded their store footprint – Harvard Square, Fanueil Hall, The Burlington Mall, the Airport and Copley Square were their first store locations.

In the meantime, I did decide to get a bit more serious about going to college – but I was still a thick headed, motorcycle riding, financially strapped independent.  So, I worked hard to get into the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in February of 1983.  At the time, Ron was driving hard to build the Au Bon Pain’s empire – many stores were opening and he built a new factory, corporate office in the old navy yard in Boston.  So, I had plenty left on my plate.  Ron asked me to continue writing while in school, returning to Boston monthly to provide update and discuss new stuff – no high speed Internet in 1983.  Again, a great deal for a college kid paying $2300/semester for school.  This continued on for a few years – Au Bon Pain opened many, many stores throughout the US they needed more than a part-time college kid.

A few years ago, I searched for Ron and found that he was CEO of Panera Bread.  Ron is a winner and a great CEO; He was smart in 1983, he worked very hard and he succeeded over and over again.  It was a good experience to work with Ron, I learned many things.  I probably should have stayed at Au Bon Pain rather than going to college.  A few years ago, I bought some Panera stock and I keep fairly close tabs on the company.  Earlier this year, Ron announced that he will retire in May.  Wow, what a run!

Nary a word in the press these days (go look right now on CNN.com’s home page, 200 links and nothing about either war) and most Americans here at home lead a normal day-to-day life (Yesterday, I started my day with a celebratory tweet about free coffee at Starbuck, Wahoo!) – probably without much thought about our friends and family in harms way.  There are generations of people, many millions, that have similarly given to help us live in a great global society.

Freedom is certainly not free.  There are plenty of ways, easy ways, to reach out and help or simply say thank you.

Cover of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

My wife finally convinced me that “Java Thread Programming” was inappropriate beach-time reading.  I doubt that business books is exactly what she had in mind, but over the years I’ve managed to fill a good sized bookshelf dedicated to many of the classics, “Swim with Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive”, “The Art of the Deal”, “Hard Drive”, “Only the Paranoid Survive”, “From Worst to First”, “Getting to Yes” and of course, Steven Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Principal Centered Leadership”.  When they all started sounding too familiar, I moved onto “Playing Poker Like the Pros”.

Recently, I read “Getting Things Done” by David Allen to see what all the hoopla was about.  Again, much of it seemed like more productivity pundit preaching only this time with a bit of modern day infomercial style.  In a nutshell here is the GTD “system”:

1. Write everything down in a trusted place that fits within your personal style
2. Organize your inbox:
- Eliminate things that aren’t yours or are not needed right now
- Convert to actionable item or project
3. Do your stuff within the context of any given moment, consistent with your time and energy
4. Iterate and re-factor faithfully
5. Periodically, review with various levels of granularity the vertical projects, and horizontal focus, strategy.

I suspect most of this book’s appeal is based on the bottom up approach to productivity, where as most others philosophize about top down goal driven performance and don’t offer much practical guidance.  GTD is also fairly light about the key step – do your stuff within the context – which got me thinking about how this compares to Steven Covey’s disciplines.

Covey’s book presents a very compatible, illustrative guiding framework for creating a balanced decision context when contemplating what things you’re going to do.  Covey contends that we all have natural needs that must be fulfilled in order to lead balanced, happy and healthy lives.  The four broad areas of human need are the physical (the need to live), the social (the need to love – no not tweet), the mental (the need to learn), and the spiritual (the need to leave a legacy).  When all of a person’s needs get fulfilled in proper balance, that person experiences a “Fire Within” that drives him forward, or as Allen writes, you’re operating in the zone.

Covey also provides GTD compatible guidance on how to select projects that are consistent with your time and energy. Covey proposes that all activities can be classified into four basic categories or “quadrants” based on two measurements: Urgency and Importance.  The following matrix illustrates how to categorize projects or tasks based on these two criteria.  Quadrant II should remain a person’s primary focus when planning and Covey states that people frequently ignore Quadrant II (“fire prevention”) in favor of Quadrant I (“putting out fires”) or, worse yet, the trivial activities of Quadrants III and IV.

Relationship building is a key Quadrant II activity. An important concept introduced by the Quadrant II focus is that of the role.  In relationships, each individual serves in a role of some sort.  Examples include: parent, employee, employer, club member, etc.  The concept of the role offers a valuable grouping and planning tool when determining what GTD projects and tasks to perform over a given period of time.

Finally, when Covey’s top down meets Allen’s bottom up, there are a lot of practical techniques for integrating both productivity systems.  For example, you could color-code or tag your GTD stuff with Covey based quadrants and roles.  Neither quadrants nor roles are part of Allen’s system, but integrating these two systems can help further organize your stuff, clarify context and help keep important/non-urgent as well as important/urgent tasks on track and your various life roles in balance.

I’ve seen quiet a few different implementations depending on company goals, size and corporate culture.  Some worked really, really well but I suspect would fail miserably in different environments and different economic climates.  Most startup technology companies fail to separate this discipline to create autonomy and fail to hire a senior, experienced leader that can guide difficult decisions.  Perhaps the most disastrous that I’ve seen exist when folks are avoiding real product management behind the mantra of following an agile discipline – they are not mutually exclusive at all.  In fact, I believe that agile engineering is highly dependent on real product management.

One of the best was at Third Screen Media, after being acquired by Advertising.com (AOL/Time Warner).  The model was really based on a role better described as focused on business operations rather than classic product management.  Oh sure, we did many of the low level product management tasks.  We listened to customers, CEO, founders, marketing, sales, services and engineering.  We built feature trackers, road maps, requirement documents, etc… But the prioritizing context for many product management deliverables was primarily OIBDA (Operating Income Before Depreciation and Amortization).  We held product management responsible for regular operation’s financial performance, specifically profitability in continuing business activities.  In other words, Product Management was the company’s arbitrator of all fantastic, must have ideas, visionary and advanced technology marvels – but, we needed to understand how each would earn us profits.

Several unique and valuable results emerged from this model.  First, continuous feature tracking and road map work was essential to documenting that we were listening, thinking and deciding.  Not just favoring the squeaky wheel, five hundred pound gorilla or chasing the deal.  This helped us keep track of tons of great ideas, interests and helped us understand opportunity cost and risk.  By maintaining a context, we could quickly sort new ideas into our thinking and almost immediately reflect back a position.  The discipline was instrumental in keeping existing customers happy because we became consistent, stable and reliable.  Customers and partners appreciated the discipline because they could make important business decisions based on reliable information rather than waiting for vapor to materialize – even in the cases that they were not going to get what they wanted, when they wanted it.

But that was just professional Product Management done well.  Our guys were really managing business profitability – because most products don’t make money by themselves.  You have to sell products, maintain products, release enhancements, supply services, operate infrastructure, patch bugs, etc…  So, in the end, did we make money?  Did we build the right features?  Does it work well?  How many customers use it?  Do they use it the way we designed it to be used? Do we invest more to enhancing it, and if so, how much, when?  What were the goals?  And maybe just as important should we kill something and stop investing?

And while some may think that this feels like big company stuff, it wasn’t – we were still a relatively small operating unit at AOL, similar to a venture backed startup.  I’ll even argue that this discipline in a young firm will starve off one of the classic startup failings – lack of focus.  In other words, if you can’t describe, quantify and measure in the marketplace then you’re not ready to invest in the feature.

Big surprise – if you’re building a profitable technology product company then you’ll need to invest heavily in product management.  It is crucial to a focused agile technology discipline.

Fortunately, my entire family is very technology oriented – everyone has a cell phone, email account, online calendar and our own social network; we utilize many of the typical online services such as shopping sites, travel portals, media sharing and financial management tools.  Things quickly get complicated when we spread these services across five people.  While we’re able to gain some efficiency within some of these individual services, many of them lack coordination across our social networks and they fail to roll up across our real life events in any type of comprehensive, manageable container. Over the years, we’ve tried many tools and techniques – paper, Covey organizers, refrigerator calendars, spreadsheets, Microsoft Outlook, Google docs, Evernote and Cozi; all come with some number of short comings, silo issues and lack of integrate actionable data.  Stress builds and my brain hurts.>

These problems are exactly what Spring Partners set out to address with Springpad.  My entire family shares an account that we use to remember stuff, integrate actionable data across other online services and leverage our trusted social connections as we manage our real life events.  We’re able to aggregate “My Stuff” in meaningful combination and coordinate calendar and communications across multiple channels – TXT, email and mobile interfaces to Springpad itself.  There is a light social network integrated within Springpad – the usual “follow” other Springpad user and includes the typical “share” your stuff with your Facebook friends and Twitter followers.  Springpad also attempts to solve the empty notebook problem by offering many pre-built, pre-organized applications around many common life events like getting organized, meal planning, maintaining a home, parenting, traveling, celebrating, exercising, learning and working.

I’ll use a simple example.  My plan in life was to simply enjoy wine, not ever invest in learning the elaborate details and subtle nuances that yielded good wine and more importantly wine that I like.  Yes, I planned to simply follow others in this life pleasure – ride the coat tails of others, lean on my friend’s investment in wine knowledge.  In general, this plan was working well.  But I still had the memory gap problem; how do I remember the great wine at last Friday night’s dinner party.  Back in the day, there was only good old paper and pen – not often in my pocket at a party and a frequent washing machine victim.  More recently when I’m able to sneak the smart phone past my wife’s what not to wear review, I’m able to electronically note the wine.  Still a pain to type name, vineyard and year – but if the wine is good, this was my only shot at remembering later.  So this was a perfectly sufficient solution – but I realized that I really like almost everything that certain friends liked.  Unfortunately, I’m not always with my friends when they’re drinking wine, so I’m not there to note the ever expanding collection.  I’m off the coat tail – FAIL.  How do I keep up with this important endeavor?

One of Springpad’s nicest applications is a Wine Notebook sponsored by Gary Vanynerchuk.  Using Springpad’s Wine Notebook, I am able to collect, organize, share with followers, include in my own plans and act on the information.  I am also able to follow my other trusted friends, who also share their favorite wines.  I am even able to see what Gary is recommending.  I am able to “spring” a wine into my collection and use it in many ways.  I can reference that info on my phone while at the store and I can use it later in my party planning notebook where I am keeping track of shopping list and things to do.  Even better, my friends can see what wines I like and bring it along when they come to my house for dinner.  I able to add comments to my wine data, categorize, note vineyard and pricing information or even attach a video presentation by Gary.

The power doesn’t stop there.  While, it is great that Springpad lets me continue riding wine enthusiast coattails, I think the real power is that I’m now able to reuse “My Stuff” in managing my other life events.  In planning my next Napa visit, I can reuse all this wine data to organize my vineyard tour, using a travel planner notebook, and work diligently to verify everyone’s comments on nose and palate.  I can search and include information on my travel schedule, car rental, hotel stay, restaurent reservations and local area friend meet ups.  I can keep track of details on my trip, include picture, videos, comments and share with my followers so that they can plan a similar time later.

Finally, less stress and fewer brain cramps.

I used an iPhone a little over two year ago for about one year and I mostly liked it; I did not like AT&T’s network, many calls were dropped and I didn’t have service in places that I needed service. I’ve been using a Verizon Blackberry for the past two years; the network service has been outstanding and the phone has been rock solid. I didn’t like the browser or the application support.

I’m a huge fan of competition and free markets – I believe everyone wins in this environment. I’m thrilled by the great progress and promise of Android. I really wanted to get a Google’s Nexus One, but I need Verizon not T-Mobile. Last week, I bought a Verizon Droid phone and I love everything about it. I like it more than the iPhone because it runs multiple applications, it has a QWERTY keyboard as well as the virtual touch keyboard and it integrates beautifully with many of the Google products that I often use.

But my real excitement isn’t so much about the many cool Droid features or endless open application market place – I’m jazzed that this is the real deal, real competition. Android is going to push great companies like Apple to go further to win – the consumer is going to get great stuff out of this competition. I know that Apple is cranking up their patent suit machine, I get that they have to do that. But I don’t believe they’re DNA is about fighting battles in courts, they’ll fight in the market place and we’re going to see the pace of progress rocket.

Now we just need the carriers to open up.

I’m aware of many wise and savvy business people stating the enormous importance of hiring – most often they’re talking about attracting great resources, managing a diligent and complete inspection, closing the deal for “A players” only and then quickly realizing the newly added benefit.  While I agree that this happy path is spot on, I think that it stops short of many other important parts of hiring.  So I thought I’d share a few things that I’ve found critical in stellar recruiting and hiring execution.

I realized early on that recruiting and hiring is a team sport with many moving pieces, often including external resources like recruiters, agencies and outsource companies.  There is no single formula that works for all companies, but there is certainly one that fits each company.  Sure, I want to get the hiring done, but in most case it is a work flow that I have to repeat and scale with business growth.  So, I think that it is worth some significant investment and optimization.  One of the very first things I put into place is some type of tracking tool.  I’ve used whiteboards, paper, spreadsheets, MS-Exchange public folders and software packages to keep the work flow moving quickly.  I haven’t found a significant amount of difference with any of these, it usually depends on scale and if your team includes external recruiters.  This single tool offers sales pipeline like tracking that is easy to keep current; the entire team always knows where all the candidates are in the work flow, who owns next steps and how long are things taking.  Investing in this type of information has helped me identify execution flaws, operational bottleneck and recognize places that need focus.

I typically insist on phone screening – there are always a bunch of really easy show stoppers that can save everyone, including the candidate, time early on.  When using an external recruiter, I like to divide the screen criteria into things that the recruiter can scan for and things that our internal team must check.  Many recruiters will attempt to differentiate themselves by claiming they can handle more of the technical screening – I have not found this to be true when it comes to technical hires – so splitting the screen is important.  Some recruiters will push back on the screen and propose the interview day at their place – where they’ll line up 10 candidates in one day at the recruiter’s office.  I haven’t found this to be efficient either – the phone is best because I find it much easier to find 30 minute slots in the schedule and I don’t need to hide off site to get important work done in the office.

I invest heavily in team interview preparation – it pays big dividends when I get it working, but it usually takes a few iterations before the team is efficient.  So immediate post-interview group discussions are super important to running a smooth hiring machine.  If I’m using a professional recruiter, I definitely include them in the tuning process to make sure we’re targeting and screening correctly – we rarely get it right initially.  I like to divide up the interview agenda across disciplines and expertise on my team.  I find that some small overlaps is useful for consistency comparisons, but I usually have an agenda that needs to be mutually exclusive so that we can cover everything with sufficient depth.  I always include in-depth technical interviews, yes whiteboard exercises, puzzle solving, architecture walk through and deep dives on recent deliverables.  When I am the candidate, I easily eliminate companies that don’t have their act together – large overlaps, gaping holes and folks reading my resume for the first time during the interview quickly worries me about who else the company may have hired with such a poor work flow.

Once I am tracking the work flow and we’re efficiently interviewing, my interview team always follow up with every candidate, 100% of the time, no matter how big or small the role is or how well suited the candidate matches what we’re looking for.  It is a super small world, it is ignorant to believe that reputation won’t be communicated and bad news travels very fast.  I think this problem is much worse with the senior candidates because they’re the reference check network.  Great candidates will thoroughly check my company out and I definitely want five star backdoor references, even from candidates that we’ve rejected.  Plus, it is simply the right thing to do and it usually only takes a couple of minutes.

In addition to maintaining 100% follow up, I believe that it is in everyone’s best interest to terminate the interview process when there is a big showstopper.  I can’t tell you how many times folks on the interview team choose to waste everyone’s time, including the candidate, rather than politely and respectfully stop the interview.  I can almost guarantee that it won’t be long before the candidate adds up this bad behavior.  More bad karma to those that dodge the delivery of bad news and again, not the right thing to do.

Finally, I’ve found that reference checks are almost as important as the interviews.  I really have two goals during reference checks – the first is to verify some of the interview data.  The second is to get information that will be helpful in working with the candidate once on the team.  I rarely uncover out right lies, occasionally some creative historic accounting.  So, I spend nearly all my time on later goal.  I rarely rely on the references given to me by the candidate – they’re almost always, but not quite 100%, spectacular.  I’m frequently able to leverage my and my team’s network to find a connection to top-notch candidates who may not be on the candidate’s payroll.  With tools like LinkedIn, Plexus, Facebook, Twitter and good old Google there is no excuse for not finding the backdoor references.

I see many companies today abandoning these types of practices – maybe because the supply is so ample that they believe they can perform poorly.  Or maybe they didn’t experience the intolerance of candidates when they held all the cards a few years ago.  In either case, poor performance in an area that is well known to be a top priority points to deeper, potentially fatal, flaws.

You are operating a web site that receives about 4 million unique visitors per day from around the world seven days a week, 24 hours per day.  The load is spread evenly throughout each day.  Performance was starting to become unacceptable.  You’ve identified that the current bottle neck was your memcached machines, serving as a back cache to your web front ends.  Below is a diagram of your simple architecture.  What would you do about the problem without bringing your busy site down?