Mobile first, or simplicity of design?

Mobile first has become an industry buzz word and trend, so I wanted to explore it for a moment.

First, my view is that it's the completely wrong approach. It also works.

Contradictory? Probably... I'll explain.

Companies who go mobile first always end up making a web or desktop version. I've talked to many in the last year or two who have had to make this transition to stay alive. The fact is, outside road warriors such as Sales, knowledge workers just don't work on mobile. They work on a laptop, MAYBE a desktop.

So why do I say this philosophy works? It's an accident.

Mobile first DESIGN principles, i.e. simplicity and focus, are key to a modern UI. The reason people like consumer apps and hate heavy "enterprise" ones is simplicity and ease of use. Companies who go mobile first embrace this paradigm from the beginning and thus keep it when they transition to more real estate. This results in a better user experience.

So while I think companies targeting the business space should absolutely not take a mobile first approach, and I think we'll see a move away from this very soon, it's important that when the shift happens, the design principles are kept.

To fix, or not to fix?

I had an interesting discussion with my team yesterday in which I discovered some believe their job is to fix problems as people bring them to us.

I considered this an utter and complete failure on my part to instill in them the purpose of IT. MAYBE that applies to a level 1 help desk person, but then again I don't believe in those folks and that's why they don't exist on my team.

We should want people who are smarter than the computers they fix, following a set instruction for each issue and never deviating. I think they should be spending their effort and brain power to make sure issues don't come up with to begin with, don't you? To me rote fixing of the same issue repeatedly is an attitude is akin to data entry. You are going to take the information from point A and type it into point B. It takes no particular skill or creativity, just memorizing a set of solutions. Boring!

IT is like chess. Chess is fun. There are a lot of moving parts that behave differently. If you think one move ahead, i.e. fixing the problem directly in front of you, you will occasionally win against unskilled opponents. The problem is todays workforce is not unskilled any more. They are increasingly tech savvy and able to solve their own problems. We have no value in a world where IT knows as much as your average high schooler about the systems we work on. When everyone can compete thinking one move, you need to think at least two to even provide value. Preferably three to four moves ahead to be making a real difference for your company. If your staff are not consistently out preforming the average (or even above average) person at your company, why are you paying them?

The world is changing for IT. It's becoming more interconnected and our problems are only getting harder. This comes with it a grand opportunity to embrace that to automate our world and enable users to help themselves. Industry standard help-desk ratios have been shrinking from 1:70 to 1:180 while application support is on the rise.

To  keep up we need to be ridding ourselves of busy work. Don't think about how to solve a single problem for a single user right now, but how to you make sure NO user needs to come to you with that problem ever again. If you can't do that, you will be crushes beneath the weight of your button pushing.

We should also be thinking ahead when asked for things like software. Don't assume what they are asking for is what they need. Understand the issue they are trying to solve, and know your industry and world well enough to  know the best way to solve that problem. Maybe they are coming to you with something you've never seen. That's great, learn. But also understand the base issue the person you are trying to help is trying to solve.

Computers, software, these are tools to solve productivity problems. To think several moves ahead you need to understand the workflows and productivity headaches of your company better than they do. THAT is what we do.

IT should be striving to ensure problems don't exist to begin with, not just fixing them when they do.

Maintaining High Standards

One thing I am realizing as I advance in my career:
The difference between good and great is not as large as people pretend it is.

It's little things. That runner who runs 5 miles instead of 4, that extra 30 seconds to proofread a communication, putting your own personal bar just that little bit higher. More importantly I've noticed in great people, when they reach this high bar, they don't settle, they raise the standards again. That 5 miles becomes 6, or 10. That 98% satisfaction becomes 99%.

Look at people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk people love to gush over. The difference between them and others is just a higher standard and an unwillingness to compromise that standard. That little extra push right at the end when most people give in and settle. A willingness to say "no, that's not good enough, we can do better."

Best analogy I've heard recently was in relation to a diet. Some people, when they've lost 18 of 20 lbs, make a choice to cheat and eat a candy bar, setting themselves back. Others eat an apple and go running to achieve their goal faster.

Be the runner in that last push and reach your goal with pride and speed.

Now when you get down to managing people there is a right and a wrong way to do this. Obviously Jobs was known for being on the poor end of personal motivation so although his achievements were great, his methods were a bit questionable. I advise against temper tantrums and yelling.

The first step is to simply let the people working for you know what the standards are. If you are holding someone to a standard that exists nowhere but your head, it will lead to resentment. That was Jobs' mistake, and one I've made recently as well. Be clear and definitive in what you expect, and let it be known this standard is not optional.

Second step is to ensure the people you are holding to this standard have what they need to be successful. In IT it's easy to say "we need 100% satisfaction rating on tickets". If your helpdesk is overloaded and doesn't have time to take the care you want, they, and you, will fail. This is where proper metrics come in. You are what you monitor and what you prioritize.

Example: My support team monitors the usual Satisfaction, First response time, Follow up response time, Returns (number of interactions) etc. Satisfaction is the first metric on our report, the rest are on page 2+.

On my support team Satisfaction rating is everything. I make this well known. We track all the usual things but philosophically I, and they, understand that every other metric is a function of Satisfaction. Why is response time important? Because responding faster leads to more satisfied users. Why are fewer interactions on a ticket important? Because people are happier when they get a good answer the first or second time. We're monitoring for many things, but never lose sight of the fact only one of these things truly matters. Other metrics can slip, Satisfaction will not. The others are functions of the true metric, and simply indicators of when you need to hire to keep up with the demand, or find efficiencies and increase ticket deflection, but that's a different article :)

This applies to design as well. When the Sysadmins are evaluating software user satisfaction is first. Our ability to manage the software is second. Is this software going to make the people we are responsible for making productive able to do their work in the most efficient way possible?

Always, always maintain that high bar. You'll be surprised at what you can achieve.

Diversity in the workplace

This is a hot topic right now and one of personal relevance to me. My mother spent a large part of my childhood a female engineer working through the 90s and 2000s. I watched her struggle with having her skill accepted and heard her frustration when she got home. I never understood it. There are numerous benefits to a diverse workplace.

For me, she was the source of help with my math homework (having a masters in mathematics) and always knew how to help with science homework (also having duel bachelors in electrical engineering and math). This idea that women couldn't do technology baffled me as it was against everything I knew growing up.

I have had the privilege of working with and employees many very talented women, but they were always the minority in the office. Like most men, I didn't think much about it. I considered these women peers, and treated them as I did any other peer, what was the issue?

Turns out I was an anomaly in this and as such I started to be confided in. I saw the things my male peers did and heard how it effected my co-workers. I got angry as anyone who cares about another and is seeing them mis-treated would be. I tried to explain only to receive blank looks from male counterparts.

Then the world shifted. Unconscious bias became the word of the day. No longer was it a blame game and the conversation changed, became more inclusive and acknowledged that people were not doing these hurtful things on purpose, simply that they didn't know they were doing it. This made a lot of sense to me, I was sold. I started sending my employees to trainings and saw the results, the changes in behavior. I was not angry, I was helping. This felt good.

So when at Medallia this discussion inevitably came up, as it is wont to in a company with a female President, I was all in. The VP of Engineering asked me how I had an IT team that was half women. He wanted to understand how my group was different than the other groups in his department. I told him about my mother, he told me how he wanted his daughter to grow up equal and how he was just started to realize how he was influencing her. It was a conversation that ten years ago would have never happened between two men. It was a good conversation.

At this point you're probably wondering, as interesting as this story is, what's the point?

The point is what happened next that lead me to a revelation. I was energized, I wanted to help and make a difference. I wanted Medallia to be a place my mother could have worked and succeeded.

So I went to my team and asked the women how I had done it, mostly because I honestly had no clue. I wanted to discover some secret nugget and solution for unconscious bias that I had unconsciously implemented. Their response was not what I expected. It was basically "We like working in this group because no one cares that we're women. You treat everyone the same." When I asked what we should do to hire more, "Nothing, we don't want special treatment or for anyone to think we are subjected to lower standards or got hired just because we are women."

I was baffled. Ok... so how do I do this then? How do I help women in technology if the best thing I have ever done, the secret to my success on that front, is ignoring the fact they are women? This bothered me for some time as it was a conundrum. I saw the viewpoint of not wanting special treatment, but then how do we encourage? At the same time Medallia struggled with the same catch 22. More women were speaking out and saying no special treatment, while everyone wanted to do the right thing and promote diversity.

It wasn't until I realized something that the answer dawned on me. I noticed the same thing missing from the discussions as an astute reader will have noticed was missing from this narrative. Why were we only talking about women, and not racial minorities?

The answer, no one was thinking about it as it didn't matter to us. We had Chinese, Indian, Mexican, Lebonese etc employees in abundance and no one thought of them as different. Bingo. This was the key.

Everyone identifies with traits they have, and how important those traits are to you determines where you see similarities and differences. I'll explain.

I took out a set of 3x5 cards and began to write down things about myself. Traits that mattered to me about myself. Engineer, moral, husband etc. Then I realized this was incomplete and I started to write down things I was not in a different column; racist, poor etc. I looked at this and put them in order.

The two things I identified myself the strongest as were an engineer and a nerd. Yes, they are different. I thought about this and the people I knew and interacted with. If someone I met possessed one of these traits, I immediately stopped considering other traits. They were a kindred spirit. In my world being an engineer trumped race, gender etc.

I went down the list and examined my life and the theory held near universally. The higher something was on the positive side, the easier it was for me to identify with someone. This fit perfectly into unconscious bias.

Then the reverse... the things I was not. These traits where things that were important to me that I was not in the same way the other list represented things that mattered to me that I was. If someone were racist for example, I could not identify with them. I would never connect with them because they possessed a trait I was inherently against. Poor being on the list bothered me and I was forced to acknowledge bias there. I am a bit classist, which is odd for someone solidly middle class. But this project showed that and I can now work on it.

Now if I see someone and react negatively because of an item on the "I am not" list, I can very purposefully go down my "I am" list and find a point of connection. THIS is how you find new ways to connect with people and begin to treat them the same. It's also how you can slowly make less relevant the negative.

I encourage everyone to do this. Take 20 3x5 cards, post-its, whatever and make your lists. First words that pop into your head for "I am" and "I am not". Write it down and then order them. Next time you meet someone, look for the "I am" and find where you connect with them. Discuss it :)

How is this relevant to the workplace you ask? Well... if you can find this point of connection with someone you are interviewing, and account for the "I am not", your hiring will begin to reflect this and your diversity will grow. Understanding what is important to you, both positive and negative, is the first step towards conquering your biases.

An explination for Imposter Syndrome

In tech there is a growing awareness of this thing called "imposter syndrome" that has many engineers, sysadmins etc feeling like they are somewhere in their career or are being given responsibility well above what they are actually qualified for.

I'll fully admit I've suffered from this at various points in my career. I've wondered why I, an IT guy, was sitting in a meeting with a board of directors or a meeting with the executive staff of a company trying to explain something. But that's occasional, and I think a very rational reaction to have for someone not suffering from an over abundance of ego. What I want to talk about is that nagging day to day fear that makes you wonder if you belong where you are or are being given such huge tasks.

I didn't really understand these feelings myself until very recently. I'd always felt them, always heard them talked about, and knew co-workers who shared these fears. It's something inherent in an engineers DNA I think as we are trained to expect the worst, to always anticipate how things will not be good enough or go wrong. At least that's what I thought. A light bulb went on when I read an article written by an old co-worker of mine, Oscar, titled I have no idea what I'm doing. He hit on some very key points about embracing confusion and it got me thinking.

The truth was much more insidious and core to the high tech industry. When you work in high tech, silicon valley especially, you are surrounding yourself with the best of the best. Not to toot our own horn but you just don't survive here unless you have something incredible to offer. There are a few things that define really smart people I've found... never being satisfied with anything less than a perfect answer, being incredibly stubborn about finding said answer, and acknowledging what you don't know.

Think about that for a second. You are constantly surrounded by the top people in their fields who are also never satisfied with their own work as they KNOW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, it could be better. These are people who are smart and humble enough to acknowledge the huge areas of knowledge they do not have, and that is scary.

Want to know why engineers like conventions so much? We want to know what everyone else has figured out. It's that insatiable thirst for knowledge, that need to understand, that drove us into the field in the first place. Of course we are never satisfied, if we were that drive that got us where we are, that keeps us up and night pondering problems, would vanish, and THEN we would be unworthy.

We have the incredible fortune of living in a time where it is simply not possible to master a field. The best you can possibly hope for is to master one tiny specialized area of technology. It's ok to not know everything. That gives you the proper humility needed to keep learning, to keep pushing yourself. Those guys that claim they know it all? Idiots too stupid to realize what they don't know. They've stopped learning. The ones everyone ELSE says know it all? They feel just like you do every time they hear someone say that about them.

So next time you feel this pang of wondering if you deserve to be where you are, just remind yourself that you are comparing yourself to the best of the best. Look around you and think about everyone you work with on a daily basis. Do you respect them? Are they good at their job? Well they probably see you the same way or you wouldn't be there. Like I said, tech is very unforgiving in Silicon Valley. It's a VERY high bar to work here.

Of course a pro athlete is going to compare themselves to other pro athletes and measure themselves on that scale, just like you are. Just remember though, like you, they had to beat out a whole lot of competition to even be on that scale to begin with. Think about that. Your scale, your world, encompasses maybe the top 10%. Even measuring yourself on that scale says you've beat out 90% of the people who want to be where you are.

Don't let it go to your head though or you'll start slacking and loose that edge that got you where you are to begin with :) Humility at all levels is a good, healthy thing that keeps you moving forward.