Ade in Business

This is a duplicate of a post I wrote at our new Recursive Function Blog. If you’d like to comment, please do so there.

I enjoyed the 37signals book and agree with a lot of their philosophy, but was baffled by today’s article, You don’t need a product road map.

The article makes a lot of assumptions about people who have a product road map:

• They add all feature requests to the road map
• They don’t do due diligence before adding features to the road map
• They sell their software based on the road map, not the current features
• They share their road map with current and prospective customers
• They promise features to current and prospective customers

I agree that all the things above are bad, but to me this doesn’t translate at all to: don’t use a product road map.

We use a road map internally for FormSpring, although it’s very informal — deadlines are vague, items are not well defined unless slated for release in the near future, and we take a lot of liberties in adding/removing items when necessary. But having a road map is the best thing we’ve done to help focus development so that what we create has maximum value for customers.

We had to make a conscious decision to put together a road map based on an overall vision for the product. Our list of feature ideas and requests is very very long, and if we sat at the keyboard each morning and asked, “what do I build today?” it would be far too easy to slip into picking the items that are easy or fun. If you pick new features at a whim, then you end up with a horrible product overall, and one that hardly appeals to any of your customers.

And while I would agree with 37signals that writing a 5-20 year plan is ludicrous, I think it’s even more dangerous to not have any plan whatsoever, even if it’s only a few square feet of space on the conference room whiteboard.

I’m almost a month late with the news, but I’ll blame it on the lack of sleep and the distraction of diapers and bottles.

We welcomed Jax on October 17th, and he’s been a blast (even if he does have days and nights confused).

On a related note, I was speculating recently with another father about the effect blogging will have on our kids when they grow up. Will kids be surfing the Wayback Machine in middle school computer labs looking for each other’s baby pictures? Is it too much to hope that kids will actually think someone’s cool because their dad blogged about them, and not the other way around?

When I first saw Twitter I thought it was a complete waste of time, found it technologically unimpressive, and was positive it had no viability as a “real” business.

I’m still not completely convinced otherwise, but am starting to see the appeal.

I think my initial skepticism was largely founded on the way Twitter had been explained to me, and the examples I’d seen in conjunction. I don’t see any appeal in it as an instant messaging platform (my Pidgin client works far better for this purpose), or as a way to peek in on friends in real-time (I don’t really care that you’re eating leftover fish tacos right now).

But I do see appeal in Twitter as a micro-blogging platform — a medium to publish relevant content, much as you would with a personal or company blog. The content limitations of Twitter (no post can exceed 140 characters) free me from the pressure of having to write a lengthy, time-consuming post. If I want to write about an event or interesting article I can do so in under 30 seconds. It’s rare that I can put together a coherent blog post in under 30 minutes.

However, using Twitter as a micro-blogging platform might not be a good thing. The most obvious problem is that generally speaking, content under 140 characters is going to be of far less quality than a lengthier blog post that has a lot more time behind it. And there seems to be a growing list of bloggers whose blogging time and mind share has been cannibalized by Twitter. There are signs that it’s done the same to me, although I can’t really use it completely as an excuse since I wasn’t really posting that frequently before using Twitter.

If you haven’t looked at Twitter at all, or haven’t given it a second glance since you scoffed at how ridiculous it was, I encourage you to give it another look. There’s some value there … I think.  And you can follow me here or subscribe to my RSS feed.

If you have given it a second look, I’m curious to know: what made you decide to start using it? Or what made you decide firmly that you’ll stay far, far away?

I signed up for a Facebook account a few months ago and have slowly started to build my network. I sent an invite to a long-time friend, and here’s the message I got in return:

I have 49 friends in que waiting because I sent them this message…

I’m quite all right with limited friends on my facebook, therefore I have put limitations on who I will accept as friends. Ah… this is where it gets fun!

I’ll accept our “Facebook” friendship if you fulfill one of three stipulations: 1) Come to my house and watch me personally accept your request 2) If you live outside of Indiana, send me five “good” reasons why I should complete your request or 3) buy me lunch!

I mean come on… our friendship has to mean more than clicking “enter”!

I absolutely love that he’s doing this. With social networking sites there’s too much pressure to build up a big network and invite anyone that you’ve ever met. I’m frequently getting invites from old high school and college classmates that I barely knew then and haven’t seen since. It’s good to get back in touch with many of them, but does “clicking enter” really help us get connected again?

I went through a phase where I tried to rapidly build up my LinkedIn profile. What if I made it a point to have lunch with all my contacts at least once every 6 months? I couldn’t even begin to imagine how much more meaningful that would be. It’s just too easy to otherwise feel like we’re connected because we’re in each other’s list of contacts, or get the occasional status update when we change some text in our profile.

How many fewer Facebook friends or LinkedIn contacts would you have if you had to buy them lunch? (By the way, soup does count.)

With apologies to Mr. Palahniuk, I’ve always felt like the first rule of blogging should be, “don’t blog about blogging.” The second rule should be, “don’t blog about blogging.”

Exceptions can be made if you’re a blogging expert, or an author of blogging software. Otherwise, readers don’t want to hear about how you really really promise to start blogging frequently, even though you’ve barely posted in the last few months. Just start doing it, and we’ll believe you.

I know I just broke my own rule. It was in a subtle way though, so it doesn’t really count.

Here are a few of the things I’ve been up to lately, and may or may not blog about in the coming weeks:

• Getting the house ready for my second son, due in about 8 weeks
• Releasing version 2 of a really incredible online form builder
• Working with a great Indianapolis web designer to build the new Recursive Function website
• Getting ready to move down the hall into new offices
• Catching up on episodes of the 2007 World Series of Poker