I'm a product manager. One of the things I'm moved towards doing with engineering teams over the years is bringing ideas when they aren't fully fleshed out sooner to engineering teams. It really helps do a couple of things- it saves time, if it is a bad idea, I found out sooner rather than later. And if it is a good idea, it gives other people the opportunity to contribute to it, making it their own as well as mine, which helps everyone on the team take more ownership of the outcome and have a better feeling of purpose in life. I think you need to earn credibility before you start doing it but once you have that credibility I highly recommend it.
There’s an approach in design thinking that you should only ever present half-baked prototypes to a team or client - if they see a somewhat polished product, one a few things can go through their mind: you’ve put so much effort into it, that you must really know what you’re doing, and will accept it as is with no further input; they might also think that you’ve committed to an idea that they didn’t endorse or have a hand in. They might also feel pity that you put in so much effort, and just let you do it.
All of these things relate to your points: you want them to contribute to the creative process, which ultimately results in a better product, and makes them feel like they’ve made a positive contribution. Everyone wins: you get hired again because you deliver a good product while making them feel good.
I have experienced exactly this. Painstakingly detailed wireframes that look like finished designs. What I have gotten back from world-class designers are my exact design but expertly, gloriously, colored inside the lines I inadvertently created and that the designers and team thought they shouldn't alter.
It’s great that you share your ideas with your team. I’ve been in both product management and engineering roles and I can say with certainty that everyone has terrible ideas, including (sometimes especially) engineers.
The thing is, you can’t tell if an idea has legs until you share it. And even after going through your own filter and that of your colleagues and other disciplines, the only thing that’s actually important is how the product is received by the audience.
So holding it all close to your chest is just a really good way of reducing the likelihood of success. And because of this, wherever I can, I try to mock up a cheap prototype of a product first, something that expresses my ideas in a tangible way that others can understand, just to make sure that what I’m working on is actually worth the time.
In principle I think it’s good practice, but in practice I think it’s risky. It very much depends on your relationship with your customers.
It can go wrong in a few ways.
Probably the worst way is where the customer takes a half baked demo or idea as a preview and a commitment, and then demands that you deliver it, or complains when you don’t; not all half baked ideas can be turned into a product.
Another potential pitfall is that the idea may be seen to represent a change to something important to them, and they get scared. Inducing needless fear is best avoided!
They might just tell you that it’s a stupid idea. Which at best is just embarrassing.
There are probably many other negative scenarios, but those come to mind from experience.
So while on the whole I think you really, really should let customers be part of the ideation process - they are the users and beneficiaries of the work, after all - you have to chose who you include carefully, because the relationship with your customers is fundamentally different to the one you have with your coworkers, and it can go south in really unexpected ways.
I agree. With some customers/prospects who I know won't take wireframes as commitments or think poorly of something have baked, I share such ideas. I'm hesitant to do so to a wide general audience.
Sounds heavenly. I frequently ask the PMs to include a few devs in the process just to help offer feedback or to bounce ideas around because like you said this approach does appear to save time. And from personal experience implementing an idea that you helped chisel out is a more enjoyable experience.
I didn't know what this meant. Apparently there is a legend that Pythagoras discovered harmony accidentally by overhearing four hammers working. Upon closer inspection of the forge, he also heard a fifth hammer that was discordant to the other four, so he discarded it.
Search "Pythagorean Hammers" for multiple shaky retellings that don't always include the fifth hammer, and a book named after it.
The one thing I'd try to add or note is that, in a more public environment, I'd love to see more ability to signal how baked we think our shit is. A lot of being online is just fun & merry making & not heavy, is apt for spitballing & play & exploration, but that mixes in with so many serious, real, important shares in the mileau. Just having a knob, high or low bakedness, seriousness, doneness: this kind of information or annotation or metadata could help us better navigate our information spaces so much more clearly.
Some bloggers have adopted attaching epistemic status to their posts. Gwern for example has a write-up on his blog's use of "status"[1], which is to inform the reader essentially of how far they've gotten diving into the topic.
I really like the idea of indicating epistemic status for posts. The closest to that for code might be version numbers where anything under v1.0 should be taken with a grain of salt. This dynamic of spitballing-or-serious appears on HN sometimes when a personal project gets shared by a third party, is good enough to attract serious comments/critiques, but then the author of the project chimes in to say “I totally didn’t expect this to be shared here it’s definitely a work in progress…”
That's a very cool idea and quite applicable to sites with pages that change over time, such as personal wikis. I think I'll add it to my personal wiki! (Feeds for posts of various maturities can be provided, too, which would be nice!)
I'm not at all sure the evidence support's Seth's claim that Paul and John were not geniuses, at least at that point in their careers.
The music for most recorded song of all-time, Yesterday, came to him in a dream; he went to the piano upon waking up and played it. That's just one example. If you won't call that "genius," as opposed to mere "skill," you have very, very high standards, I would think unrealistically so.
But Seth is allowed to share his writing before it's fully-baked. :)
I like it too. I definitely hear you. For instance, Gilbert and Sullivan... neither of them could have done it alone. Sullivan, in particular, tried, and didn't succeed.
But, I think Seth may be pushing too hard to make his point. I think it's very arguable that at least during the 60's to early 70's, John and Paul were both categorizable as geniuses. As another example, John wrote Imagine without Paul, and it is frequently considered one of the greatest songs of all time. If it was a one-off, that would be one thing, but he also wrote some of the greatest Beatles songs with little input from Paul.
I thought this was the key. For the beatles it probably wasn't that hard to do. But for other people taking inspiration, know where and when to share.
Had the beatles performed their half-baked songs in front of a mediocre band that was to perform the very next day in front of a large audience, what would have stopped this mediocre band from stealing a song and performing it as their own?
Closed-source software makes all the money in the world today.
The author of this post and I saw wildly different documentaries. It was obvious to me that Paul knew exactly how every part should be arranged and played in his songs, and that half of his battle was bringing folks along.
Weather. It's all very well and good, but you can't get it on iTunes.
Until now.
For several decades, thousands of weather stations around the globe have been recording barometric pressures on a minute by minute basis.
In a recent lucrative deal with the Met Office*, MaxCo. has secured the non-exclusive rights to this data. Sped up by a factor of several thousand, and digitally remasturbated, these barometric pressure fluctuations become a dynamic soundscape available on a wide range of regionally-themed CDs.
The daily fluctuations in recorded pressure become a rich A above middle C. Spells of sunny, dull or stormy weather add modulations and overtones, whilst the seasonal barometric trends become deep bass notes. Longer-term climate shifts are reflected in gradual transitions of timbre and amplitude.
Listen from the comfort of your own armchair to fifteen years of your local weather. Enjoy full stereophony as the pulsing mercury of Africa plays a counterpoint to the slow- shifting monsoon-driven barometry of Asia, or let the perpetual depression over North Wales lull you to sleep.
Buy now while weather lasts!
[*actually we just had to agree to buy them several packets of Hobnobs]
“ By putting themselves in a corner, he created (at no small cost) the conditions where he could do the work.”
I think this might be the more important part. I am a firm believer that you do your best and most creative work under known and limiting constraints. With the constraints in place you couldn’t afford to NOT bring your half-baked ideas to the table.
"The driving force behind par-baked is economics," explained Russell Chapman, c.e.o. of Ecce Panis, Carlstadt, N.J. "Scratch baking is very labor intensive and requires skilled labor, which is extremely difficult for our customers to find. The par-baked method is not so labor intensive, and it allows food service operators and in-store bakers to hire less-skilled workers. Basically, they just take product from the freezer and pop it into the oven. Par-baked takes the labor out of their process while allowing them to offer consumers a great quality product."
This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-simple-idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
Paul McCartney might be the greatest pop musician/songwriter of the 20th century. Some (most?) of his best works were performed after the Beatles. If he's not a genius, then no musician is a genius.
Not only all of the above, but for Paul in particular, a genius who was in the midst of one of the largest creative highs of his entire career. I mean, some of the snippets of ‘half-baked’ songs he plays are songs that will figure well into his solo/Wings career. I honestly don’t know how you can come out of watching Get Back with anything other than admiration for human creativity as personified by Paul McCartney during this amazing month that got captured on film.
This was a fun read but I think it is also not accurate. Paul and John are both geniuses. Both wrote amazing songs without the other. Yes the Beatles output was more consistent but I chalk that up to being younger and more open and agree that having a sparing partner improves every persons game.
I have worked with dev's and researchers who have a very sensitive "bullshit meter" which is good a lot of the time, but often prevented me from bringing my half-baked ideas to the table. I would wait until I knew I had something solid.
I'm curious if they changed over time? I've observed this change in myself to a degree. There are things I'd not have let go in the past, but now I catch myself and evaluate the context. There is a fine balance between reducing bullshit that affects an organization and limiting the potential of the organization.
Eventually it has always improved over time in terms of others being open to my ideas. It sometimes takes awhile to develop a good reputation to be trusted.
This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-simple-idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
Yes, MVPs are good. But Paul McCartney might be the greatest pop musician/songwriter of the 20th century. Some (most?) of his best works were performed after the Beatles. If he's not a genius, then no musician is a genius.
> This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-simple-idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
You've identified Seth Godin's entire schtick. The man is the godfather of vapid "give me your email address in exchange for a free ebook where I teach you to how to become a billionaire" hucksters and is not worthy of respect.
Agree that Paul is a genius, not so sure I agree his best works came post-Beatles. To be sure his catalog post-Beatles is greater, if good songs are a roll of the dice then five decades vs. one is kind of loading the dice....
I'll argue that with John and his "fresh ears" Paul was able to write some of his most creative songs with the Beatles.
Don't cherrypick it then. The rest of the piece explains it. He's not someone who just walks into a collaborative process with wholly self-completed works of natural brilliance. Instead, he's someone who knows how to facilitate the emergence of a genius-level chemistry between himself and another.
Now you can see that he is saying that Paul is a genius, just that his true genius isn't exactly what we think it is when we talk about creative genius.
> He's not someone who just walks into a collaborative process with wholly self-completed works of natural brilliance
'Yesterday':
“I woke up with a lovely tune in my head,” he told author Barry Miles for the biography Many Years From Now, which was published in 1998. “I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot but because I’d dreamed it I couldn’t believe I’d written it.”
A century of pop musician/songwriters and you chose Paul McCartney as the greatest? That's a pretty high bar. His singing doesn't come close to the melodic, cat-drowning sound of Bob Dylan. I'd say it's much better in fact.
