What does a boss expect?

Yesterday I wrote about what I think it takes to be a boss. Today, I'm going to write about what your boss wants from you.

As I said yesterday, everyone has a boss. Your boss has a boss. His boss has a boss. And so on. There is an unending circle of trust and dependence that encompasses all of us (i.e., we all have a boss).

So, what does your boss want?

1. Solutions

I'm sure you've heard this before, but your boss wants solutions, not just problems. Sure it's your boss' job to help provide solutions, but it's your job too. Why to you think you were hired? How do you like it when someone comes to you with a problem, but no suggestions on how to solve it. Now think about how that would feel if it happened constantly, every day. It IS important that you let your boss know about problems. The flow of information is key, but it's also important that you bring a solution. If your boss is the only one doing the thinking, then what value are you adding to the mix? When you bring a problem, bring a solution with you. It may not be the right one, but it's better than coming in empty handed.

2. Multiple viewpoints

When you talk to your boss, it is important to bring your perspective to the situation. Your boss probably depends somewhat on your eyes and ears. Your insights are important. But you also need to make sure that you can see your boss' perspective on things. If you can't see each situation from both the trenches and from a leadership point of view, you aren't adding any value. Make sure you at least try to see things from your boss' perspective. This will help both of you.

3. Brevity

There is a reason why a document abstract is also called an "executve summary". It's because your boss often needs to get a quick overview of a situation. If your boss needs more information, he or she will ask you questions or read further. It's very important to be able to present a quick overview of the "lay of the land" at first. For your boss, context is often more important than detail.

4. Directness

This may be just another form of brevity, but I'm adding it in to my list anyway. A boss usually wants you to be direct. Worry more about communication than sparing anyone's feelings. Bosses have usually developed a pretty thick skin. If they haven't, they will. If you have a comment. Present it. Don't hold back. If you have a question. Ask. Don't apologize for asking. If you need something to do your job. Make the request. Don't over justify. Every good boss will solicit questions, comments, and requests. Don't be afraid to speak up. Communication is a two way street.

I'm not saying that by following all of these guidelines that you and your boss will always see eye to eye. You probably won't. But remembering these tips can sure help.

What else would you add to this list?

Let me know.

photo credit, shrubby

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How to be a boss.

A lot of people describe going into business for themselves as "being their own boss". But is this really true? Are you ever really your own boss?

Generally, everyone has someone else who has some sort of expectations of them. As an employee, you have a supervisor or manager of someone who expects something from you. Middle managers report to executives. Executives report to the board. The board members often represent investors who they must answer to. Even at home, your family has certain expectations of you as do your neighbors, your friends, etc. It's a never ending circle of responsibility and trust.

So, what is it that defines a boss? And what do people expect from you as the leader of a company?

There are a lot of components to this, but I think a lot of it boils down to being a trailblazer versus being a trail follower. If you are going to start your own business, you have to be ready to make your own path that others will follow.

Trailblazing isn't always creating something completely new. One analogy might be an artist who learned the basics and then tried something new and started a movement. The artist understood all of the basics of the systems and techniques that other artists use and then decided what to change and when to break free of the known path and become a trailblazer. (Think Picasso, Kandinksy, Matisse, Monet, Pollock, Van Gogh, etc.)

How do you become a trailblazer for your business? Learn the systems, rules and techniques that govern your business. See if you can figure out what parts of those systems are useful and what parts need to be changed to create a new path that gets you to where you want to go. Then lead your company through that rough, bumpy ground and make a new trail that others will want to follow.

The great companies and the heroes in popular literature are filled with these type of trailblazers: Jobs and Wozniak, Brin and Page, Gates, Luke Skywalker, Neo. (Yeah, I just put Neo and Gates in the same sentence...cheesy, but you get the point, right?) These are people or characters who understand the systems they exist within and have figured out a way to change, tweak, interrupt or interfere with those systems to create something new.

If you are the boss, you are the one who needs to create the trail that others will follow. And there will be many times when you are left with no choice but to create your own trail. You will be faced with decisions where there are no good choices. You will find yourself put into situations where none of the standard answers you've learned are feasible. You will have to do more with less. And you will be the one that needs to help others understand why the path you chose is one they should be on too.

What trails will you blaze? How will you change systems to create something new?

photo credit, jayriot

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Success feeds on itself.

Last week my daughter got a new game for her Nintendo DS. It was a dreary day outside and so she spent nearly the whole day playing the game. By the end of the day, she had "beaten" the game. The next day, she "beat" the game about 3 more times. Each time she beat it faster than the last time and did a little better. Each success excited her a little more and fed her desire to try again and do a little better still.

This is a great illustration of how success can feed on itself in business too. Each time you close a deal, do a product release, hire a new employee or create a new partnership, you learn a little bit and hopefully you use that knowledge to do a little better and go a little faster the next time.

Visible successes can also be a great motivator for your company. If you've got the right people on your team, they have as much a desire to be part of an organization that succeeds and shows visible results as you do. As employees see the company starting to win and making progress, it helps to create a little more motivation and a little more enthusiasm. Once your employees see that what they are doing generates successes, they will continue to do it.

Of course, you've got to make sure that you are doing the right things to "win" whatever game it is that your company is playing. And you have to think about how you can "win" a little faster or do a little better each time.

Bertrand Russel said, "Most men would rather die, than think. Many do." You can't let your failures drive you into thoughtlessly reacting to try to create a success. If you find that there is something that you aren't doing well, maybe you shouldn't be doing it. Setting up a new task force or tiger team isn't likely to make your company good at something that it has repeatedly failed at.

Once you find what you do well, keep repeating it and do a little better each time. Make sure the results are visible to the rest of your company. Use the momentum and motivation that successes generate to drive more success.

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It's never too late.

A friend of mine had a saying which I've always liked. "It's never too late to become the person you've always wanted to be." It might be a well known quotation from someone famous. I'm not sure, but I've always attributed it to my buddy, Jim.

I admire Jim because he is the kind of person who decides what he wantes to do and then somehow figures out a way to be able to do it. For example, at one point he decided that he wanted to spend a few years in Europe. And he got a job and a flat in the UK. He wanted to become a writer. He studied writing relentlessly. He even attended a writing school. Not every move he made was the smartest (sorry, Jim), but he wasn't afraid to keep trying. And, eventually, he usually got there.

The same thing is true in business. It's never too late. There is no reason you have to keep doing the same thing over and over just because that's what you've been doing in the past. You need to constantly be working to refine your processes and your business.

In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins (not the Jim from the first paragraph) talks about the breakthroughs that great companies have made. This is the point of transition where a company seemingly pulls itself out of mediocracy into greatness. This is the point where you start to see articles mentioning the company published on a regular basis. This is the point where their stock chart hits the heel of that hockey stick shape and starts to rise rapidly.

The interesting thing is that none of the companies that Collins talks about could point to any one defining moment that pushed them into greatness. The dramatic positive change was simply the result of many previous smaller tweaks that each company had made. At some point, the convergence of all of these tweaks begins to drive the company forward to become something that is more than the sum of it's individual parts.

Just like my friend, Jim, and the great companies that Jim Collins talks about, your company can become what you want it to be. You can't let your short-term obstacles stop you from trying new things and constantly refining your business.

Jim had to pay his bills and feed and clothe himself just like everyone else on the planet. He didn't have a trust fund or a windfall from some dot-com sellout. But he also didn't make excuses. He took action.

Just like my buddy, the great companies Jim Collins talks about all had significant short-term pressures that they had to deal with. But they never lost sight of what they wanted to become and they made the changes necessary to get there in spite of their circumstances and other pressures.

What action can you take today to help your company become the business you've always wanted?


photo credit, iamwahid

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Startup Spotlight: Reza Hussein on Jambool

Recently, I had the opportunity to talk with Reza Hussein, the CTO and co-founder of Jambool about their recent $5 million round of funding and about how Jambool got on the road to success.

Some background on Jambool. It was co-founded in 2006 by Hussein and his business partner Vikas Gupta. Both partners are long-time veterans of Amazon and worked with each other while there. Hussein and Gupta both had a desire to break out on their own and do "something different." Jambool originally produced web-based collaborative research applications and games that run on social networks such as Facebook. Indeed, they have several popular applications currently in heavy use on Facebook. About a year ago, the team decided to move away from the end-user applications space and develop Social Gold, a payments system for use in managing virtual currencies. It was this move that provided Jambool with their greatest success and led to the recent round of funding.

Hussein describes Social Gold as "a seamless in-app payments system for social games and applications with analytics for optimizing your virtual economy" in comparison with some other competitors who he describes as "analytics systems with payments" or just "basic payments systems". The space does seem to be heating up. In fact, there have been a couple of recent acquisitions in the space over the last year or so. Spare Change was acquired by PlaySpan earlier this year and Two Fish was scooped up by Live Gamer last month.

In some ways, even PayPal could be considered a competitor to these micropayment management systems. Hussein explained that while their system is primarily used in online games today, its functionality certainly doesn't limit it to that market. He says that their real target is any site which offers the use of a digital asset or a virtual currency in exchange for real money. The one parameter they insist on is that the virtual currency must be based on a real-world monetary system.

Some games or applications have multiple virtual currencies. Some currencies are "earned" as you gain more experience. Other currencies are purchased with real money. It's the latter of these currency types that Jambool is focused on. Anyone who has played World of Warcraft or used Wii points to download an application to their Wii console has used a virtual currency.

It seems like there is a new type of virtual currency popping up every day on some new application or game on the various social media sites. Hussein predicts that someday virtual currencies may be as reliable and valuable as Dollars or Euros. (Now we just need someone to develop an exchange to help us convert our Green Patch points into World of Warcraft points.)

The prospect of this exploding market could be part of what got Madrona and Bay Partners to dive in on this recent $5 million series B funding round. In addition, Hussein explained some of his other theories about why Madrona and Bay bet on Jambool.

He said that over the past couple of years Jambool has tried to attack several different markets in this area of social or collaborative applications. Each step of the way, they have kept Madrona and Bay Partners in the loop, constantly running ideas by them and getting feedback. They picked their funding partners, in part, because Hussein and Gupta knew people there who were familiar with the their background at Amazon and believed that the combination of Hussein and Gupta made a good team. Their history of working together and having proven that they could deliver is part of what made Jambool a good bet.

In addition to their successes at Amazon, they had shown Madrona and Bay that they had the ability to deliver results on their own. Many of Jambool's apps are consistently ranked in the very top of the pack based on number of users. The team had shown that they were able to take an unknown business, an unproven business plan and create a name in the industry that is now widely recognized by application developers in their space.

Hussein told me that the obstacles that once seemed so large are now small in retrospect. He recalled the difficulty of the days when they were trying to just get their foot in the door and get their product "out there". (Note: stay tuned for more information on marketing and PR for early stage businesses next week when I'll share my discussion with Gail Kent of The Buzz Factory.)

Hussein credits several things with getting over their obstacles. They brought on a full-time person responsible for business development. They also found an advisor who helped point them in the right direction. Hussein insists that having an advisor is paramount to a start up. He explains that it should be someone who isn't like you. You want to make sure that you get a different perspective on your ideas.

The team also made sure they were very "pluged-in" to their industry. They knew the space, in part, because they had worked on payment related software while at Amazon. Many of the people who now work at Jambool worked with them at one time or another at Amazon. They also knew many of the developers of other Facebook applications through their previous application development experience. Staying close to those developers helped them tap into that network. This helped them understand what their customers wanted and gave them insight into features that resonated.

Hussein also said that getting funding was "not as easy as it was before, but we did as well as anyone else." We discussed the fact that the days of getting funding for an idea written on a cocktail napkin are long gone. Today, you need to build something great, keep metrics on your business and then ask for funding. Hussein reiterated how important it is to be able to demonstrate your track record with real metrics.

Additionally, Hussein made one last interesting point. When we talked about Jambool's change from collaborative applications to social gaming to payments, he said that sometimes you have to be willing to throw out some things that you might have worked very hard on for a very long time to focus on what will make you successful.

In summary: get an advisor, build something that resonates, stay tuned-in to your industry, keep good metrics and track your progress. Remember that you need to prove to your funding partners why you are a good bet. A proven track record is the best way to do that. Make sure you keep your partners in the loop.

CrunchBase Information

Jambool

Madrona Venture Group

Bay Partners

Information provided by CrunchBase

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Two's company...three's a community.

Every start up could probably use more resources. One great way to get some help is to outsource work to your community of followers. Whether they are customers or just fans, you can find some great resources out there.

Now, I don't pretend to be an expert in social media or crowd sourcing. There are tons of people who claim to be experts in these subjects, and there are a few people who are really outstanding in this field. I encourage you to read their blogs, follow them on twitter and read their books. One of the best I've seen is Chris Brogan. Read his blog and be sure to check out his new book Trust Agents too.

But back to your business. If you want, you can really get a lot out of a community of followers for your business. Social media is more than just a marketing tool. Let's look at some other ideas.

Product Innovation

Find a way to engage your community of users in the development of new ideas for your product. Build a gated online presence for your power users and let them suggest ideas or vote on ideas that you come up with. Get them engaged in helping you determine the direction of your product. There is an awesome tool called Ideascope that can help you manage this type of community. But you can also use just about any content management system if you are clever and have a plan.

When getting product feedback from a community, remember that you don't necessarily need to do everything in exactly the way that your community suggests. Look for trends and themes. Figure out what problems your users are trying to solve with their suggestions. And when you put some of their ideas into your roadmap and get them into your product, be sure to let them know. Show them that you listened and foster a trust relationship.

Product Development

There are a lot of ways to access a community of developers and engage them. The most obvious way is to create an open source product or a set of open source tools to customize your product. This can be risky and you need to have all of your ducks in a row before you open up a codebase to the public. Make sure you have your licensing set the way you want. And make sure you have some experience in managing an open codebase. Once you let this type of beast out of the cage, it's almost impossible to get it back in. If you do it right though, you can reap some huge rewards. Check out Coupa as one example of a company who has had some success using this model.

Another great way to engage a community of developers is to have a great API that allows the development of third party tools and products that can use your product. There are tons of great examples of this. Twitter is probably the most often cited recent example of a web-based product that has a rich and open API allowing developers to create really great products and services around the core application.

If you do decide to develop an open API, make sure it's meaningful and not just a toy. If all you can do with your API is create web page widgets that provide a data feed, it might be interesting; but you won't see the type of innovation that a fuller, richer API can generate.

Product Support

Create a forum where users of your product can share ideas and help each other. Let them ask questions. Let them answer each other's questions. Let them post about their own experiences and how they have solved some problem using your product. Your support desk probably provides solutions to some of the same problems over and over. Get that information into a forum where other users can access it too.

If you can use your product to solve some problem that is common to many of your users, don't tell them one-by-one, have your subject matter experts tell everyone in your user community at the same time. This type of community can also be used as a forum to explain new features in upcoming releases and how they can be used as well. There are a lot of great forum management tools out there that are very inexpensive and easy to manage.

Manage your community

Getting your community engaged is more than just setting up a server and letting it run. You need to do some planning. It's probably a good idea to have someone dedicated to managing and maintaining the community. Figure out what the goals are for each of your communities and then put together a plan for getting from ground zero to your target. Spend some time thinking through the stages you will need to go through and what you think it will take to get through each stage. Don't make your plans overly complex though. If they are too complicated, you probably won't be able to sustain it. Keep it simple and sustainable.

When choosing the tools you want to use to manage your community, make sure you choose the tool that fits your goals. Don't try to force your goals onto a tool not designed for it just because you think the tool is cool.

You also need to put some plans in place to keep things civil in your community. I don't really like the word "police" when talking about managing a community, but you do need to set some rules and make sure you enforce them. Maybe "govern" is a better word. Either way, make sure you have guidelines and have thought about ways to ensure that conflicts that might arise don't destroy the benefits that a community can bring.

Be sure to watch other communities to see what the trends are. Those same trends are likely to affect you as well. Look at how Wikipedia is managing the "noise" generated by requiring more moderation as their community grows. Look at communities of different sizes. What percentage of the users are generating the content? Does that change as the communities grow? How do people like to interact with communities? Do they like to go to the website? Do they want to get daily summary information in their inbox? Watch the trends and adapt.

When you're ready to go, market your community just like you would the rest of your company. A great community can be just as much of a value-add as anything else your company does.

How have you used crowd sourcing to help your start up?

photo credit, michelini

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Do you have enough gas to get there?

Measuring progress is something that has been on my mind a lot recently. I've been looking at a couple of different businesses that don't really measure very much about themselves other than their revenue. To me this is sort of like measuring a car trip only by looking at your speedometer. You might be ignoring things like: Are you on the right road? Are you getting closer to your destination? Is your engine overheating? Do you have enough gas to get there? All of those things are important, but so many businesses don't do a very good job at measuring them.

I'm a big fan of metrics and I know it will make me sound like a huge geek, but I love to pick apart systems and figure out how they work and what could make them work better. Yesterday I wrote about some lessons I learned in my career. In a recent post about how to measure your growth, (Size Matters--part 2), I talked about some specific metrics to gather and how to incorporate those into a feedback loop to refine the process of growing your company. Both of those posts are really about the same thing: Tweaking your systems to achieve the results you want. Today I wanted to just mention a few other ways to measure your performance.

Win-loss reports

After a sales cycle, you should do a win-loss report with the customer to figure out why you won or lost. You are making a big investment in sales and marketing. Why would you continue to invest in something if you don't understand the return? Win-loss is the best way to understand this.

Project post-mortems

After an implementation or software development project, do a post mortem. What helped your project? What hurt it? How good were your estimates of time or resources needed for different tasks? Why were they incorrect? How can you improve next time? No matter how well, you think you are doing, there is always room for improvement.

Employee Reviews

Do you conduct annual employee reviews? Most high-tech companies spend a very large portion of their annual budget on people. In addition to your other systems, you can tweak the performance of each individual. Have their managers work with them to figure out what they are doing well and where they need improvement. Give them some feedback.

Audits

There are a lot of different kinds of audits: financial, security, tax, etc. Do you do them just so you can comply with regulations? Or do you use them to understand where your problems are and figure out how to correct the problems? Audits are a great source of real data.

Often looking at data generates more questions than it answers. If that's the case, don't reject the data as useless, figure out how to get the data you need and then continue. Don't let that stop you.

Also, remember that you don't have to have all of your measurement systems in place to show improvement. It takes time to build up to a place where you are able to do all of these things effectively. If you can't do a full post-mortem of your project this time, take your team to lunch and spend 30 minutes talking to them about what went right and what went wrong. Any data is better than no data.

Constant improvement depends on understanding your process, figuring out how to measure your success or failures and then modifying your process to achieve better performance the next time you go through that process.

What sort of things do you measure about your business? How do you use that data to improve? I'd love to know.


photo credit, mbylow

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Lessons Learned

"When things get tough, the tough get going." That's what you always hear people say. It's a trite, but sometimes true. Are they talking about just doggedly slogging through whatever comes their way or is it something else? In my life, when times got tough, I always been able to get through them one way or another. Sometimes I end up with more scars than others.

For every brilliant move I've made, there have been ten other situations that I've stumbled through. Some of them are funny. And come are painful. I can either lock those stumbling, scarring, embarassing experiences away in the closet and hope they never surface again or I can dissect them and try to figure out what lessons they are teaching me. Today I'd like to share a few lessons I've learned from some tough experiences.

Let's get started...

Be humble -- ask questions

If you're used to being the student at the head of the class--the one who knows all the answers--sometimes its tough to step back and admit to yourself (and others) that you just don't understand what's going on. As much as you may want it to seem like you know everything, that's impossible. And nobody really expects you to know everything--except possibly you.

Years ago a friend and mentor once told me, "Even a fool can teach you something." I always liked that saying and it's a good one to remember when you are confused. The best thing you can do when you don't understand something is to ask questions and learn. That's not to say that everyone you ask questions of is a fool. The point is that nobody knows everything, but everyone has some morsel of knowledge to share.

It's up to you to ask the right questions and to listen to the answers, though. The second half of this lesson is to keep on asking questions until it makes complete sense to you. Don't just take the first answer you get. Keep digging until you are completely satisfied and feel like you have a complete grasp of the situation. Make yourself teachable. And ask. Ask. Ask.

Details are important -- have a plan

You've probably heard people say, "I'm a big-picture guy." Well, I'm here to tell you that a big picture is always an incomplete picture. There's a reason that the saying, "the devil is in the details" is so popular. It's true. Don't rush into something without doing the necessary detailed planning. It doesn't mean that you, as a leader, have to come up with the all of the plans for your company all on your own, but you need to make sure that you understand them. You may not be the one executing the plan, but you are definitely the one responsible if the plan fails.

Once you have a plan, you also need to make sure that it's executed properly. Part of the plan should include ways to monitor the progress. You need to be able to figure out how well the plan is working and whether or not you will have to make adjustments along the way. There's a crude saying that I've found to be rather true in business. "Crap rolls uphill." That means, that if your team fails to deliver, it's your fault. Don't make excuses for failure by citing someone else's mistakes. Make a plan. Understand it. Monitor it. Details ARE important.

Don't be "religious" about your arguments - learn to "let it go"

Sometimes, in the course of business, arguments about certain topics can get passionate and heated. That shows that people have a lot of ownership of their ideas and genuinely believe in what they are doing. This is type of zeal can be a great motivator and can really help you harness your energy to accomplish great things. But zeal doesn't win arguments.

Just because you are passionate about something doesn't mean that you are right. Whether you are an Intern, a Developer, a Director or the CEO, you have someone to answer to and someone who will argue with you about your ideas or plans. Sometimes you just won't win an argument. For me, it was tough (and still is sometimes) to learn when to stop arguing. Once you've lost (or won), let it go. Move on. Get back to work. If you find yourself stewing about it, take a walk. Play a game. Do something different to get your mind off of it. Just. Let. It. Go.

Be open to alternatives - YOUR plan may not be the best

Sometimes I've come up with what I felt was a great solution to some problem at work, but when I present the solution my boss or the customer they seemed skeptical or just weren't as excited about it as I was. Sometimes you can feel like you KNOW that you have the best solution (I know I feel like this sometimes), but it's not well received. It may be difficult for you to understand why everyone else isn't as excited as you are.

At times like these, you need to take a step back and take a second look at the problem you are trying to solve. Instead of putting all of your effort into trying to convince others that you have the answer, sometimes you have to take a look at what problems you are trying to solve and realize that there may be another way to solve them. Remember, it's not YOUR solution that's important; it's solving the problem that's important.

Whether or not your plan is the most efficient or makes the most sense to you may be irrelevant in some situations. As part of a team, you sometimes have to compromise. Don't settle, but do compromise. The best solution is the one that both solves the problem and has buy-in from your team. Always keep an open mind.


Thanks for taking the time to read this. I hope that some of these thoughts resonate with you in some way. I've always found that learning that someone else who has the same problems I do, makes them seem smaller and easier to get around somehow. What are some of your obstacles? What have they taught you? I'd love to learn from you.

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