All articles by Tihomir BajicBlog Index

My father taught me how to ride a bike. He showed me the basics and provided the setting for success – he held on to the back of my seat to prevent me from falling but let me steer. He let me take on the challenge and subsequent glory. I learned how all on my own – or so I thought – and, more importantly, my dad taught me to trust my skills and believe in myself.

Marshall J. Cook talks about the same pattern in Effective Coaching. Cook’s book focuses on workplace coaching and managers as the target audience but the lessons he shares can be applied elsewhere – in schools by teachers, in sports by coaches, and at home by parents. Cook emphasizes understanding people through asking them the right questions, listening to their answers, and then by extracting the essence to ensure the common understanding and agreement on a course of action. Most importantly, after instructing and empowering their employees, Cook instructs managers to step aside and let their subordinates execute and eventually bask in the glory of a job well done.

Read the rest of my post, and learn how to be an effective coach on my blog

Tags: bike riding, Coaching, Effective Coaching, interview, learning, lesson, Marshall J. Cook, onebookaweek.com, Rypple

Rypple is a product oriented company so it’s essential to get people excited about our product. We are also often praised for our customer service. Is it possible to maintain this high level of user satisfaction with both our customer service and product quality? Can a company, especially during its early stages, afford to focus on both of these battleground? Here at Rypple, we believe we can do both.

Zappos is a great example of a customer service driven company. They rely on other companies for products they sell but Zappos customers can call them at any time and they will experience a friendly, expedient, and efficient service. Not to mention their unmatched free shipping and free 365-day return policy. On the other hand, have you tried calling Google after your Gmail inbox became sluggish? Gmail became the fastest growing online email offering because it simply beat the competition by its unmatched performance, simplicity, and massive storage. Unless you pay for the corporate edition, however, you will have a hard time reaching their representatives over the phone.

I’d like to share a personal story to show you how we at Rypple imagine offering a great customer service while building the best product.

I joined Rypple in May 2008. One of the first features I implemented was an AJAX-based auto-complete widget. It was an elegant solution that performed admirably during my benchmark testing. I was proud of it! We wanted to prove our design quickly so we immediately got it out to our alpha user base. The following day I heard that an executive at our alpha site could not use my widget at all. You can imagine my utter disbelief and embarrassment. So, my first customer support call at Rypple was directly with this executive. I apologized and tried to understand what happened. I listened. And I discovered that I did not handle a simple copy and paste use case properly. Doh! I learned plenty of other things, too. After the call, I summarized what I’d heard and explicitly outlined follow-up action items. I emailed those to my team and the concerned party. The next day I released a fix for what seemed like a blunder in hindsight.

That insight has taught us a number of lessons:

I kept reaching out to our alpha users every day. I would set aside time every morning to reach out to all alpha users who had used our service the day before. We made sure all developers did this. We listened. We showed that we cared. We learned to move our developer egos out of the way.
• The most important lessons came when we tried to understand what went wrong. We started improving quickly. We completely revamped our architecture, front-end design, and our overall service offering in the following months. This culminated in Rypple’s launch in less than 6 months after I joined the company. It proved our product decisions were dead-on.
• We were guided by what we learned through customer service. Talk about a cheap way to perform user-centered design!

We are a young company with a novel product idea. We still have a long way to go before Rypple becomes a great and lasting success. This is why we welcome your feedback! Because, after all, …

A little feedback goes a long way.

(Don’t forget that you can connect with us using our Get Satisfaction forum, email us at support@rypple.com or call us at 1-888-iRYPPLE.)

Tags: agile learning process, AJAX, alpha product, benchmark testing, customer service, developer ego, Development, Get Satisfaction, Gmail, Google, lessons learned, quality, release cycle, UCD, Zappos

The more you have riding on an idea, the more it hurts to be wrong. Human nature sometimes tricks us into perceiving disproved assumptions as failure, which can stop us from carrying on with the original idea. Successful people actually do the opposite, persisting and adapting even in the face of failure. Thomas Alva Edison once said:

Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.

Armed with such guidance from illustrious entrepreneurs, we set out to provide Rypple users with frequent, insightful, and actionable feedback.

Lukewarm Acceptance

We believed (and still do!) that asking concise questions to a select group of advisers who would then respond anonymously would be the ideal means of achieving that goal. We started with market research, ethnography, and observations of existing social behavior like Twitter, SMS, and IM, concluding that adviser’s responses should be limited to 140 characters (research shows that 160 is usually enough and we wanted to reserve a 20-character buffer for special characters).

We then implemented our first response box that prevented users from typing in more than 140 characters with a so-called ‘hard limit’, stopping them at 140 and not allowing the form to be submitted. Everything indicated that this was a smart decision that would drive high response rates, since users would find it obvious that a simple short response was required (and that they should dispense with pleasantries in order to be direct). With that design in place, we set out to conquer the world.

Lo and behold, we encountered lukewarm acceptance and some very vocal and disapproving users.

Lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection. — Martin Luther King, Jr

Back to the Drawing Board

This is the point at which failure might have tricked us into abandoning our cause. Mere mortals might have shrugged and walked away, falsely assuming that there was no solution. Fortunately for the growing population of Rypplers everywhere, we’re infected with startupitis, which carries with it a certain blunt stubborn refusal to accept failure (see our previous post about Rudyard Kipling: “if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…”). We had expected that not everyone would accept these limits on their communication, but we were confident in our ethnographic research that had lead us to targeting Gen Y users with our alpha prototype, a cohort well familiar with the restrictions of SMS and used to conveying their thoughts in short, focused blocks. Still, some users truly struggled to provide a single response. What to do when all signs pointed to our assumptions being wrong?

Turn to the power of Agile and the ability to release early and fail often. It was obvious that releasing a working prototype and observing real usage was more rewarding than isolated academic research and analysis translated into software requirements. Our weekly iteration cycle let us focus on implementing one change at a time, measuring its impact, and then reflecting and making adjustments to our hypotheses. This scientific method introduced rigor that would serve us well in our battle for delivering a usable response box that would empower responders to give quick high quality feedback more often.

Modeling Cognitive Models

User observation showed us that people were used to brainstorming ideas and then pairing them down to get the message essence across. So our second iteration of the response box allowed responders to type in more than 140 characters but did not let them submit until they edited it to 140 characters in length at most. This was our first step to a softer limit, still restricting the length before submission but better modeling users’ creative process (raw creation mode followed by structured edit mode).

Overcoming the Blank Slate

This lead to people spending less time on writing a response and increased response rates of return responders. Progress! The next thing we observed, however, got us worried. Much like the dreaded blank sheet of paper, we realized that some users got stuck staring at the empty response box. We started experimenting with showing users great questions and responses, hoping to seed their creative process with inspiration. We showed them inline or in the sidebar or even as example text in the response box. We varied the help text based on tags used to describe the questions.

Expert Opinions

Our response rate increased as people overcame their response writer’s block, jumping by 5% over the previous condition. But now we noticed that the quality of questions and answers was dropping. We measure quality as the ratio of helpful to unhelpful feedback, as reported by Rypple askers. The amount of unhelpful feedback increased by 30% after the change. Grrr! Progress on one front was causing a regression on another.

Luckily, Rypple has attracted the attention of professional feedback coaches like Jamie Resker, Jennifer Stillings, and Cheryl Sylvester (to name only a small sample of our awesome community). Based on their advice, we added some help text to the form to provide guidance to advisers on giving better feedback, and we helped advisers by explaining what type of feedback was requested (whether it was a free form advice or a guided feedback response on what was done well and on what needed to be improved).

Sometimes Quantity is Quality

This helped us get back on track with feedback quality and kept the response rate high but we still had many vocal users telling us about how limiting 140 characters were. We then started experimenting with different lengths, sizing of response boxes, font size and text copy on the page. Allowing longer responses did not necessarily lead to higher response rates or to higher quality (which supported our original hypotheses about directness and brevity). A session with our friends and users at Mozilla helped lead us to the answer: the feeling of freedom from suddenly having more characters to use enabled users to provide feedback in shorter periods of time.

Our response length analysis actually showed that 200 characters were enough in the vast majority of cases. Only some types of questions warranted longer responses. Speaking to our users, deep diving into our data to look for trends, and iterating quickly allowed us to confidently increase response lengths up to 400 characters and quickly try several soft limits between 140 and 200 characters. We ultimately settled on a maximum length of 400 characters, but with the character counter starting at 200 and going to -200 before the form blocked submitting. We also added a series of short prompts that appear in increasingly darker shades of gray, providing feedback about how your response will be perceived by the asker (e.g.: “A concise response will be more helpful to Tihomir.”, “Your response is now longer than average.”, “70% of responses are more concise than this.”, etc.).

Empowering Advisers

This helped us with responses rates but we still had users complaining that some of the feedback did not make sense. Up until this point, we had been working under the assumption that it made sense for the asker to determine the type of feedback they wanted to receive. James Wu, our User Experience Guru, observed that face-to-face feedback doesn’t work that way: I ask you a question and then you decide how to structure your response. We ran this by our feedback coaches and partners who agreed, and went a step further by showing us the power of providing feedback using the coaching metaphor (e.g. what the asker needs to stop, what he/she needs to start, and what he/she needs to continue doing to be successful). We made a final change (so far!) by switching to giving advisers a choice of the type of feedback they wanted to give, choosing from ‘Freeform’ (a single field), ‘Like/Improve’ (two fields, 400 characters each), or ‘Start/Stop/Continue’ (three fields, 400 characters each).

Getting Better!

This brings us to how Rypple’s box for responding to feedback requests looks now. Switching to a soft landing for character limits and moving the decision about feedback types to the adviser has increased our overall response rate by over 15% and kept feedback quality steady. This is by no means the end of the road as we clearly see room for improvement and refinement. We’ll continue to use your invaluable insight and work together with you and the rest of the Rypple community on creating a useful and delightful feedback tool.

Tags: 140 characters, agile, cheryl silvester, customer outreach, decision support, ethnography, fail, failure, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, gen y, im, iteration, jamie resker, jeniffer stillings, martin luther king, peer review, personal review, professional development, quick polls, Rypple, sms, team review, thomas edison, twitter, usability, user observation, user testing

Michael Jordan

We’ve all failed many times and on many different occasions. Successful people not only embrace the failure but incorporate it into their learning process. It’s important to remind yourself regularly that failure isn’t a bad thing, which is why we keep some great quotations about failing posted on our office walls. I’ve included a few of my favorites in this post.

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. — Michael Jordan

Photo by ucouldguess

We start failing early in life. We failed many times before we learned how to sit, and then to stand, and then to walk, and then to run. As babies, we would attempt to imitate adults but we’d fail almost always. We’d then learn from that event, adjust and try again. At some point, we’d master the skill we failed at so many times before.

Photo by abbyladybug

Later on in life some of us raised their hand and got an answer to a teacher’s question wrong and vowed never to offer ideas unless we were absolutely sure. Others had a similar experience early on in their careers when excitement at sharing an idea turned into embarrassment under scrutinizing eyes of our disapproving colleagues. Our ego got in the way and we became afraid of failure. Failure would challenge the assumptions we created about ourselves. That is sometimes hard to face. It’s easier to avoid those moments by shying away from failure-prone situations.

Successful people do the opposite. None of the great inventions we rely on today came without a series of failed prototypes (like the Wright Brothers’ flying machine, the incandescent light bulb, Tesla’s electric motor, the telephone) and that is why we use Tim Berners-Lee’s internet and not videotex to access this blog. Great inventors learned how to incorporate controlled failure into their learning process as well as learn on other people’s mistakes. Surprisingly, some great inventions embody failures to achieve something else – please remember Spencer Silver next time you use his Post It notes.

If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. — Thomas John Watson, Sr.; the founder of IBM

People of all professions have followed suit and deliberately learned from failure (traders and published authors,  consultants, entrepreneurs). One of the reasons why I love Agile development is because of its “release early and fail often” mantra. It helps us developers deliver value to users of our software by having them use our initial best efforts. This mantra also instructs us to be retrospective and accommodate for failure by iterating over our designs. Eventually, we can come up with such great inventions like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. None of those services were even close to what they mean to so many today had they not learned to incorporate failure into their daily routine.

Failure at Rypple

Two of the common personality traits here at Rypple are hard work and ability to turn failure into a learning opportunity. It’s in our nature to perceive users experiencing issues with our service as failures but when this happens we seek to understand the underlying causes without shirking responsibility or blaming others. And it’s not a secret that a great product comes from doing great work, having a highly experienced team, and sticking to basics. YAGNI and KISS mentality are our core principles and we focus on iteratively creating a product that’s great at exactly one thing: getting people quick, frequent, and insightful feedback.

In the next week’s blog I will talk about how we’ve incorporate failure here at Rypple and how we’ve learned from it to improve our service. I would also like to hear about how others have learned to incorporate failure into their learning process.

Tags: agile, benjamin franklin, customer outreach, decision support, failure, Feedback, feedback is fundamental, invention, KISS, light bulb, michael jordan, peer review, personal review, professional development, quick polls, Rypple, team review, telephone, tesla, thomas watson, tim berners-lee, videotex, wright brothers, YAGNI

We engage in a conversation with our users as we bring Rypple to more workplaces. This is extremely rewarding. Talking to users lets us know how we can improve. People say some nice things about Rypple. But sometimes they encounter obstacles. Here’s what a manager at a large company told me:

I did check out Rypple. Personally, I do think it’s useful but only if people take the time to fill it out. Everybody is too busy to let you know until it comes to bonus/reviews.

I’ve decided to share my response publicly:

1) Setting time aside to provide or ask for feedback is difficult even when we know of potentials benefits it can have.

Similarly, some people know that exercise and eating right are good but continue do the opposite. Healthy living takes time and an honest commitment to self-improvement. And although it is unlikely everyone can be a toned and chiseled Matthew McConaughey, we know that not supersizing fast food takeouts and even light exercise go a long way. And why don’t we do that (more often)? Because it’s much easier to do the opposite – procrastinate and engage in activities that require less thought and effort. We’ve designed Rypple with this premise in mind because obtaining specific and actionable feedback quickly on a regular basis goes a long way.

2) Not providing feedback to your colleagues stumps learning.

Highly productive and efficient teams evolve through constant feedback – remember the Borg? True, we are not the Borg; mindless drones organized in a single-minded collective. But this also means we don’t hear what others think. That is why it’s important to ask them about their thoughts. As Feral Jundi points out,

learning organizations is the theme for any company and its culture … if they want to be successful.

This refers to Peter Senge’s five centrals disciplines of learning organizations: systems thinking, personal mastery, mental models, building shared vision, and team learning. Rypple can be used easily with all five disciplines to obtained timely, specific, and actionable feedback that will lead to continuous learning and improvement (both personal and company-wide).

3) Tying compensation discussion (which is mostly not controlled by an employee) to the employee’s performance (which is mostly controlled by an employee) just does not make sense. Period!

Severely cutting someone’s bonus due to Wall Street meltdown or the big three bailout and then asking for improved performance will not set that person off on a path of success. Such practices destroy team morale and seed animosity. Robert Bacak puts it plainly in his book Manager’s Guide to Performance Reviews:

As soon as you tie review to pay or rewards, you create a situation where it’s apparently not in the best interest of the employee or the manager to work together. Couple that conflict with the lack of good objective measures and the review process changes. A review process tied to rewards tends to pit manager vs. employee…

If you think that Rypple may be inappropriate at your work place, I challenge you to think again. Rypple is not a wondrous topical cream to apply mindlessly and effortlessly to get rid of unwanted fat. To use Rypple properly, you need to be honest with yourself and apply it because you feel you could benefit from honest, timely, frequent, and confidential feedback. This feedback will show you what things you’re doing well and what should be improved.

Tags: learning organization, self-improvement, using Rypple

I blogged recently about the excitement and instant gratification I received from helping one of our users immediately after he had an issue. I’ll expand on that post by comparing my personal experience in dealing with two very successful companies; a wireless provider I will call Acme Wireless and Four Seasons hotel chain.

Last night, I spent over two hours on the phone with Acme because I wanted to find out about the status of my iPhone delivery. An Acme representative originally told me that it would take 3-5 business days. I called last night because I hadn’t received my iPhone or been notified of any delays 8 business days after my original request. One automated machine and three representatives from three different Acme departments later, someone finally explained that my iPhone still hadn’t been shipped and that she had no indication as to when the shipping may finally occur. This last representative said that there was nothing else they could do! My friend had a similar experience and after a month of waiting for his iPhone he went to an Acme outlet and purchased the device at full retail price. He then had to fight for hours on the phone to get reimbursed. I have friends and family that work for Acme, but it’s really hard to recommend Acme for its service after this experience.

Daniel had a totally different experience when he traveled through South East Asia and stayed at the Four Seasons in Singapore. The day before leaving for Thailand, he gave a concierge a traveler’s check and expected to receive US dollars in return. It was late at night when the concierge told him that he could only give him Singapore dollars – but after the check had been signed, rending it useless. Since Daniel needed US dollars, the concierge started making phone calls to find out which currency exchange office could honor Dan’s request.  He couldn’t find any place that could help at first, but the Four Seasons service approach didn’t let him simply say “too bad!”.   The concierge hopped in a cab with Dan and drove around Singapore until he finally found a place where they could process the exchange properly.  This was far above and beyond Daniel expectations, but it was greatly appreciated.  Two hours later, Dan was back in the hotel ready for his departure to Thailand.  Now he is a passionate fan of the Four Seaons, and always recommends it to his friends.

One of our investors and a key adviser, Roger Martin, wrote about how Isadore Sharp’s approach to customer service is a core competitive advantage for the Four Seasons. Sharp defined luxury not in terms of amenities or features, but instead by the delivery of great, humane service. He pushed responsibility down the chain of command thereby enabling all employees to make a difference. He hired for attitude and not experience. Everyone at Four Seasons is guided by the Golden Rule, which makes customer service everyone’s business:

to deal with others—partners, customers, coworkers, everyone—as we would want them to deal with us.

I don’t think any of the Acme Wireless representatives I talked to last night would enjoy the service they provided me.

Here at Rypple, we work hard to heed Issy Sharp’s advice. We want our users to have a complete and delightful experience so that we can build a strong network together. Issues certainly arise but we try to address them quickly and to exceed our users expectations.

Have you ever dealt with Rypple? Would you agree that the experience was satisfactory? We welcome your comments because, after all, a little feedback goes a long way.

Tags: four seasons, issy sharp, roger martin, User Experience

We think of ourselves as a services company here at Rypple. Our goal is to provide you with an awesome and complete experience, so we a take a page from Izzy Sharp, one of our Canadian idols, and “make customer service everybody’s business.” Here’s an example that got me really pumped. Daniel received a direct message via Twitter from Dilyan Damyanov. Dilyan told him that sharing feedback via email did not work as expected. Cyrillic feedback content did not show up properly in recipients’ inboxes after he’d shared it. Daniel immediately let me know and after some investigation, discovered that the problem was the email character encoding. I quickly resolved the issue, sent it to production, and asked Dilyan to approve the fix. We resolved Dilyan’s issue within the same day! That’s what I call a good day at the office!

I learned some key lessons from this:

• There is no substitute for User Interaction. We listen to our users, ask them for feedback, and acting on it. Design considerations always prove incorrect in the field, despite how smart you are, so you need to pay attention to users like you.
• A Social media footprint is critical. Our team is active on blogs, Facebook and Twitter and use these tools to quickly connect with and talk to our users.
• Agility adds immediate value. The ability to quickly respond to changes (feature requests or bug reports) is essential for an agile team. Customer collaboration, responding to change, and individual interaction are key agile values.
• Highly cohesive and modular code rocks! I traced down the problem quickly and made a simple change because all email sent from our system goes through a single nexus.
• It’s vital to release to production often. Working software is another core agile value and it’s great to be able to introduce a quick update into a production environment to resolve an issue.
• Fail early and fail often. A great way to master learning is through getting feedback, reflecting and acting upon it, and then starting this cycle early and repeating often. XP (extreme programming) takes this to heart.

We could have spent ages imagining how you might use the share-via-email features. Instead, we created a simple share feature, and after it went live, we made a few improvements based on user feedback and usage patterns. Some of that feedback even suggested novel ways of how sharing could be even more useful. It would have been hard for us to think of those novel uses because that is not how we would have used Rypple ourselves.

This whole experience has me really pumped. I was once on a team that introduced agile development into a company by taking lessons from Poppendieck’s excellent book Lean Software Development. While looking for sources of waste that we could eliminate, we discovered that it took over 100 days for a user like Dilyan to approve a fix for an average bug! We were astonished but we eventually cut that time in half.

I hope you now understand why delivering a working fix within a day has me really excited. Guided by user feedback, we surely and steadily evolve Rypple. We see our work having immediate impact. This is truly rewarding and that is why I love working for a user-focused and service-oriented software company.

Tags: agile, Feedback, Rypple, User Experience

Happy New Year!

I’d like to thank our users, friends, and families for the tremendous support you’ve given us. We are working hard and using your support as a catalyst for Rypple’s success!

January 1st bears great symbolism in our modern lives. The first day of the New Year marks the beginning of a new cycle and many of us use this occasion to make a New Year’s resolution. Finding out about the resolutions my friends were making prompted me to make one of my own and symbolically begin the New Year with a self-improvement promise. According to the New Year’s Resolutions experiment, men were significantly more likely to succeed when engaged in setting one Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time based goal (aka, the S.M.A.R.T goal!)

I had many self-improvement ideas, but I couldn’t figure out the one thing I should really focus on. Luckily, Rypple came to rescue.  I sent several Rypples to friends and colleagues to find out what other people thought I should improve. What surprised me was that both my friends and colleagues had a similar message for me! And what was really shocking was that some comments clearly pointed out that I was not the good of a listener or the pleasant guy I imagined I was. – gasp! Here are some common things I heard:

Have a vision of what you want when stating your case… Keep it super super simple.

You have a tendency to be a bit argumentative and to interrupt others when they are stating their opinion or point of view. To fix this make sure to listen and let others finish before replying

Trust that you can learn from others

Don’t assume you know why things are being done. Listen to others first

You display annoyance/frustration when telling others about their mistakes

After I calmed down from the initial shock, I distilled all responses and one goal crystallized in my mind; I will improve my communication skills. Specifically, I’d like to become friendlier, more open-minded and less argumentative when talking to friends and colleagues. I hope this will make me a more pleasant person and will help me engage people into more meaningful conversations. This may feel abstract and hard to attain and measure, but I hope to continue to use Rypple to my advantage to find out how I’m tracking by regularly getting new feedback from my advisers. These regular checks points will help me measure my progress (because, after all, my advisers are the only ones who can tell me if I’m improving) and get support and further advice on what I could do to improve.

I am very excited about all this because I feel it is something very positive I can achieve. I invite you to use Rypple to find out on what you should concentrate in the New Year. You may be surprised!

Tags: Feedback, new year's resolution, Rypple, self-improvement

The Rypple Team just watched Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond. Reviews were mixed, but one thing is certain – this Bond was different. Love it or hate it, it’s a departure from the old formula of spy gadgets, one-dimensional villains we love to hate, and Bond girls who capture our attention and then fade like shooting stars.

Daniel Craig is a more realistic James Bond. Instead of seducing every woman he meets, he nurses his lost love and channels his rage towards removing every obstacle in his way. His friends are double agents and his lover betrayed him. He rarely uses gadgets and he actually bleeds after a fight! Bond villains give up their doomsday devices & world domination plans for believable schemes involving money & greed.

The Bond franchise has matured. Goodbye to one-dimensional characters following pedantic & predictable plots. The creators of Bond have a new formula for Box Office success. But they are not the only ones with a new formula for success. Change is afoot among Gen Y’s and corporate HR departments.

Love it or hate it, the arrival of Gen Y employees created a tectonic shift in the corporate world. Most Gen Y’s need continuous feedback from their managers and a motivational career path. Instead, they get the dreaded Year End Comprehensive Performance Review, a morale shattering exercise that is the polar opposite of what Gen Y’s need. These Annual Reviews are a shock for Gen Y’s accustomed to instant communication through text messages and MSN, and continuous feedback throughout their academic lives. Fortunately, we created Rypple to fill this void providing Gen Y’s and their managers with a new formula for success.

I walked out of Quantum of Solace feeling less excited than after Casino Royale. This new direction was unexpected. Casino Royale when it came out, but still familiar. Yet, I prefer this more sophisticated and less chauvinist and black-and-white Bond franchise.

I also understand now why some HR specialists prefer to stick to traditional performance review and career guidance policies rather than adapt to Gen Y’s.  Taking a step in a new direction represents the unknown. And that is stressful. It takes a lot of effort to unlearn old ways and embrace new ones for what they are, and not for what they are not.

Just like Daniel Craig ushered the new James Bond, I hope Rypple will help herald a new era in employer-employee relationships.

Tags: bond, gen y, millenials, quantum of solace

Rypple.com was born on Monday November 3rd, 6:47am weighing in at 2lbs 5ins. Rypple and its parents are doing well. Cigars anyone??

This is a short reflection on the delivery process and the final feeling of serenity that this new service has brought into our family.

Gestation of this idea took 9 months (interesting coincidence!). During that time, we improved our service significantly by creating a prototype and getting feedback from our alpha users rather than designing in vacuum. To our alpha users: Your help was truly essential in bringing our service concept into the world in a form that people would love. Your acceptance of this idea reinforced our belief that our bottom-up solution will leverage web 2.0 to change how people get insightful feedback to improve their professional, academic and other types of relationships.

We had our first Rypple Meet-Up to thank our users, and as a token of thanks, we will host many more Rypple Meet-Ups for our users in the future.

Many have asked what it takes to get a start-up idea like this off the ground. We spoke at length about that at Professor Greg Wilson’s class at the University of Toronto. There are many things, but most important of all is an unyielding commitment to the cause.

As an anecdotal example of the level of unyielding commitment that is required, the dev team can tell you ad nauseum about how they dealt with last minute unforeseen hosting solution provider issues on a Sunday while trying to ignore a loud construction crew remodelling a nearby office and another crew releasing noxious fumes into the air vents! It was so bad that firefighters had to come in to deal with the poor air quality issue so the dev team could go back to work fighting pre-birth fires!

Now that rypple.com has been alive for more than a week, we are starting to see its true potential. Like proud parents, our commitment to raising rypple.com into adulthood is getting stronger by the day as
we get excited with every little baby step we take. Although we know that we will hit many bumps and bruises along the way, we are excited about the future and hope that you will continue to give us invaluable feedback and help us guide rypple.com’s growth.

Here are some things that people are saying about new rypple.com:

Once you start, you’ll never want to stop!  I have already caused “Rypples” with my clients, my colleagues and my friends. This is a fantastic tool to gain insights in a way that’s fun, quick and easy.  Michal Berman, Consultant, embarkonit.com

The UI is great…. Very easy to understand what I’m required to do to use the service. Fantastic! Pema Hegan, Founder, Gigpark.com

…and far too many more to list!

Tags: birth, commitment, reflection, Rypple, startup