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Thank you, Melbourne

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Fade out on Products Are Hard Melbourne 2013

Dear Melbourne, you were an amazing audience and an integral part of making the conference the wonderful day that it was. We are forever grateful for your support, attention, and engagement. Life is short and days are precious. Thank you for spending one with us.

Slides

Slides from the presentations are available at Speaker Deck. The one glitch in the day (we attribute it to the Coriolis effect in the Southen Hemisphere) means that not everything was fully captured on video, but we’ll keep you notified if and when those videos become available.

Photos

Audience and speaker photos are posted on Flickr. Thanks again to Patrick Smith for making these beautiful images. Working with him was painless and delightful, and you can find more of his work and booking information at www.burntcaramel.com.

SpeakerRate

If you want to show your appreciation and support for any of our speakers, please rate and comment on your favorites at SpeakerRate. That also helps us continue to find the best and most relevant speakers for our future events.

Storify & Twitter

We’ve collected the massive outpouring of tweet love from the day on Storify. And in the vanishingly unlikely event that you don’t already follow us, our twitter handle is @productsarehard.

Products Are Hard visits Triple R 102.7’s Byte Into It

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Keren, Vanessa, and Warren of  Triple R 102.7’s Byte Into It interview us about the lineup for the Products Are Hard Melbourne conference, our take on the Melbourne startup scene, and where that catchy name came from.

Listen to a stream of the interview (requires Flash player). Our segment runs from minute 21:00 to minute 33:00.

Beyond Lean and Agile

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Rose Powell of Australia’s StartupSmart interviews us on situating Agile and Lean in a holistic product practice.

Beyond lean and agile: Finding a more holistic approach to start-up creation

You need to step right out of it and remember no one’s goal is to use your product. They want to get something done. Does your product do that in the best, most efficient way possible?

Dig the conversation? Fancy being in Melbourne, Victoria on October 30? Join us for the Products Are Hard conference, Australian edition. 

Sprint is a four-letter word

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I’ve always been uncomfortable with the term sprint. It’s a short word, easy to say and quick to type, but the connotations can be misleading, especially for people new to Scrum. I used to run track in high school, and I have a pretty vivid body memory of what it felt like to sprint – an all-out blast of energy expenditure that left me panting, heaving, and, sometimes, if I’d pushed hard enough, even nauseated. I was no Usain Bolt, but I wasn’t a slug either. I was a regular person, reasonably able to run pretty well. It left me in no condition to do anything but sit there recuperating until my muscles and lungs stopped screaming and returned to functioning normally.

You can’t sprint your ass off, pause for a minute, and then do it all over again. It’s not sustainable. And yet one of the most important benefits of the Scrum framework is that it provides a sustainable rhythm for work. It’s meant to be the opposite of a death march or a self-destructive series of Jolt-fueled all-nighters followed by days of hibernation and recovery.

There’s always the argument that after enough use, the word itself becomes a signifier for the concept and its connotations become less relevant. Who, after all, thinks about chitinous little bugs when talking about John, Paul, George, and Ringo? But words do matter, otherwise we’d refer to everything with algebraic letters, symbols, or glyphs. So, no, I’m not proposing that we start referring to sprints with Σ (even though that would be awfully cool), but language being what it is, the other commonly used terms are each fraught in their own ways. I tried using iteration for a while, but Nathan found that made people think about dozens of tiny, obsessive refinements towards a specific ideal. Sprints are about getting shit done and perfect being the enemy of good, most definitely not about obsessiveness or idealism. Timebox, another common-ish term, feels cold, bureaucratic, and constricting. So, in the spirit of Scrum, we continue to try out different words, getting a sense of how well they do or don’t work, and we iterate our way forward. We may never have the definitive word, there certainly isn’t a perfect one, but in the meantime we’ll keep talking, training, coaching, and working.

UPDATE: Sasha Magee offered some interesting proposals from the sport of cycling:

G+ identity follies

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Google wants real identities on G+. No pseudonyms. (After enduring enough protest, they relented for those with established pseudonymous public personae.) And yet, Google also gently but persistently harasses you to setup a G+ identity for every Google account you have. At the moment I have two personal Gmail accounts and three Google Apps work accounts. Google keeps insisting that I make a G+ profile for each one of those accounts, either by pestering me upon login or by disabling key features of applications like Hangouts for accounts without a G+ profile. I now have five G+ identities to manage. I can laboriously recreate my “circles” on each one and flesh each of them out, figure out some way to syndicate one of them to the other four, or simply ignore most of them, leaving them to molder as dusty ghost profiles. It’s hard to see how this is good for the health and vitality of G+ as a community or social network except to artificially juice the number of users.

Of Groupon, Lindsay Lohan, and the envy of crowds

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Whether or not you call what we’re in a bubble (which depends on what the meaning of the word “in” is), you can’t deny that Groupon’s June 2nd kimono-opening in advance of its IPO revealed, if nothing else, some interesting numbers.

Between the straight-up doublespeak of Adjusted CSOI and the chutzpah of trousering almost the entirety of their recent billion-dollar round, Groupon gave journalists plenty of material for scathing articles (including articles about the articles).

Of course, until recently, the preponderance of the press about Groupon was glowing.

Or, as Merlin Mann inimitably put it on Saturday:

For months, EVERYONE LOVES GROUPON! I didn’t care. Today, EVERYONE HATES GROUPON! I don’t care. If you were one guy, I’d totally punch you.

If Steve Jobs is Oprah for men, Groupon is Lindsay Lohan for tech journalists. Despite its German name, schadenfreude is one of the most American of pastimes. We love nothing better than to build someone or something up and then find reasons to tear them down. Are we that fickle? Does our adoration really turn to scorn that quickly? Maybe. But that scorn is an expression of something deeper and more powerful. Envy. If this is the land of opportunity, then there’s no reason you can’t be as successful as that guy. Except, shit, he got there first. He’s counting his millions while you’re reading an article about him counting his millions.

It’s not entirely in our heads. Lindsay made genuinely terrible choices, and Groupon’s numbers do indeed look like a trainwreck well underway, but lots of people screw up and lots of companies fail, and most of them go unnoticed. It’s not a rational Puritan thing—punishing the unworthy and praising the elect. It’s a much more fundamental, animal thing. If I can’t have what she has, then I’ll tell myself I don’t want it anyway.

We’re not going to stop celebrating people and then vilifying them. It’s what we do. But as someone who makes things, or sells things (or makes things that people sell, or sells things that people make), you shouldn’t take the hullabaloo for more than what it is. Having the media and the public turn on you doesn’t inherently mean anything. You’re not necessarily a victim, nor are you necessarily winning. Find another compass to tell you whether you’re doing well or poorly, doing right or doing wrong. The adulation or loathing of crowds is just noise. The only difference between Business Insider and TMZ is—well, actually there isn’t any.

Get in touch

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@productsarehard