I learnt from my prior life that the best way to create a killer service is to use it! In other words, see your service through your customer’s eyes.  We use Snowflake every day to get personal feedback on how each of us is doing in our little company.

What have I learnt so far?

People are way way way more honest when you ask them for feedback, and let them respond annoymously. I saw this time and time again. Heck, even I found myself being more honest when I knew I could give an anonymous response!

Feedback (even nice constructive well meaning feedback) can burst my ego…especially when I thought that I did something well. But once I got over the initial ego bruising, I realized just how powerful it was to know exactly what I was weak on. Contrast this with vague generalities about improving your “communication skills”!

People want to help. They want to tell you constructively how to do better. But, the urge to be polite or politically correct often gets in the way. When I ask for anonymous feedback, I give people a way to tell me the truth. And I like the truth!

Tags: constructive feedback, ego, lessons about feedback

George Babu is responsible for Corporate Development and IP at Rypple. Prior to joining Rypple, George spent the last several years working on a variety of technology and intellectual property-related projects with both Research in Motion (RIM) and Bereskin & Parr, one of Canada's leading IP law firms. George holds B.A.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering and is currently completing his JD and MBA degrees, all at the University of Toronto. Given all that's on his plate, George doesn't sleep all that much!

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One of the first questions many people ask me revolves around which development methodology we follow at 2Catalyze. Although I would like to respond honestly with a simple statement and say that we are agile, I really do not want to do that because agile has become somewhat of a dirty word. Also, I do not want to specifically quote any of the agile implementation methodologies (like lean, scrum, xp) and say that we subscribe to it because that could lead to misinterpretation and it would not be correct. Really, I’d like to say that we concentrate on agile manifesto’s key values while not subscribing ourselves to a particular chic agile flavour. Since saying that might not be concrete enough so I’ll try to explain in this post how we approach development at 2Catalyze.

Our development team tries to reach out directly to our users when we need to make decisions or when they experience difficulties. We also always try to have someone from our dev team participate in Snowflake presentations and requirements gathering meetings. Our development and business team share the same premises and continuously share and discuss ideas. To help us understand our solution domain, some of our dev team members are Gen Y employees and we all read about Gen Y workplace issues and concern. We can relate to the problems our users face and we want to build a great service that will help all of us. We feel ownership of our software service solution and as owners feel confident that we can make right decisions without always seeking approval from others. At the same time, we’ve built a support network and coach each other in our individual areas of expertise.

I have recently re-read the Poppendiecks’ excellent book on Lean Software Development. This book is in fact a toolkit consisting of 22 tools that can help with implementing lean principles in a software development organization. Some of these tools need tweaking before they can be applied in a startup. In fact, such an approach is the essence of lean, and any other agile methodology for that matter. That is, to be successful one cannot simply look at other successful lean software companies and seek to replicate their model exactly. The core values focus on understanding that the development team should be intimate with the problem domain and should be in direct contact with the users to ensure the right value-adding solutions are developed. Empowering the team to gather user feedback and to make decisions on the go has proved to be a differentiating factor for many lean organizations across industries and continents.

Some of our approaches at 2Catalyze spruced up organically as a part of team discussions on how best to provide value to our users. Others were born after reflection exercises and trial and error periods. After re-reading Lean Software Development, we received confirmation that we are approaching solution creation in the right way. What do you think?

Tags: agile, Development, methodology

Development, author of onebookaweek.com

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HBR has a great article this month on how the best get better. Graham Jones, the author, made a cool observation as a sport psychologist to Olympians and other champion athletes:

Compete only with yourself, demand relentless feedback, and don’t forget to celebrate.

He also noted how many of them had an “insatiable appetite for feedback” and “a particularly strong need for instant, in the moment feedback.”

I especially liked his last piece of advice…party like a champion when you succeed!!! I think I’ll take the rest of the day off and celebrate!

Tags: Graham Jones, HBR, Rypple

George Babu is responsible for Corporate Development and IP at Rypple. Prior to joining Rypple, George spent the last several years working on a variety of technology and intellectual property-related projects with both Research in Motion (RIM) and Bereskin & Parr, one of Canada's leading IP law firms. George holds B.A.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering and is currently completing his JD and MBA degrees, all at the University of Toronto. Given all that's on his plate, George doesn't sleep all that much!

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Our alpha project has been humming along now for a few weeks, and we’ve been getting some amazing feedback from you about what you love, and what we can work on. We can’t thank you enough for all your feedback. It helps us make sure that Snowflake gets you the feedback you want!

What have people been saying about Snowflake? They love the core idea. It’s a diamond in the rough, and we need to smooth off the edges. In light of that, we’re sanding away the rough parts. Top of the list is email & tag auto-complete to make it even faster for you to get feedback.

We’re also working on some exciting new features which let you make better sense of your feedback. More on that as soon as we get it out.

George Babu is responsible for Corporate Development and IP at Rypple. Prior to joining Rypple, George spent the last several years working on a variety of technology and intellectual property-related projects with both Research in Motion (RIM) and Bereskin & Parr, one of Canada's leading IP law firms. George holds B.A.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering and is currently completing his JD and MBA degrees, all at the University of Toronto. Given all that's on his plate, George doesn't sleep all that much!

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