Best Live Chat Widget for Startups: Jan 2016
January 20, 2016 § Leave a comment
Live chat support software is a great way to ensure visitors to your SaaS site are successful – or at least tell you what went wrong. An in-page widget with a friendly human being on the other side is much more approachable than a link to anonymous forum!
Unfortunately, few startups are able to guarantee 24×7 coverage, which means you need a easy-to-use tool with a good fallback user experience for when nobody is available to chat. Here is what appear to be the best options as of January 2016.
How to Build a Team
November 20, 2015 § Leave a comment
- Vision: What does success look like?
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Humanity: What do you need to succeed?
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Process: How do we ensure everyone gets what they need?
Agile as Organizational Therapy
November 11, 2015 § Leave a comment
Agile is a meaningless buzzword for many because it is perceived as an answer in search of a question. Too often, Agile is “cargo-culted” into an organization as an imposed process without first developing a deep understanding of what problems need to be solved. True progress only happens when the solution is aligned with the problems people actually care about.
To make that happen, we need to take our organizations though a therapeutic process of surfacing and dealing with the hidden pains and frustrations than prevent top performance. The good news is that we could use the same principles of agile to get us there.
- Agree on a Vision
- Define a Deliverable
- Commit to a Process
« Read the rest of this entry »
Best Practices for Design in Agile
August 7, 2015 § 1 Comment
A Bibliography, mostly discussing UX Design but a little on the related issue of Architectural Design.
- A List Apart: Getting Real about Agile Design
- The uneasy relationships between design and agile
- SPARC: What an Agile Design Process looks like
- Thought Works: Just Enough Design
- Martin Fowler: Is Design Dead?
- Design Spikes
- Enough Design Up Front
- Overcoming Why Designers Resist Agile
- Agile Web Design Manifesto
- Agile Modeling: Agile Design Practices (architecture-focused)
- How does Design get done on an Agile Project?
- The Last Responsible Moment for Design
- Stack Exchange: How is architectural design done in an agile environment?
- Full Day Training: Lean UX and Agile
- 12 emerging best practices for adding UX work to Agile development
- Atlasssian: Collaborative design in agile teams (video)
Ten Universally Useful Skills
August 5, 2015 § Leave a comment
In no particular order
- Financial Management
- Public Performance
- Writing
- Design
- Programming
- Sales
- Fitness Training
- Research
- Listening
- Self-Awareness
Did I miss anything?
How to Fund Growth
July 2, 2015 § Leave a comment
Most organizations’ financial structures are designed for predictability rather than explosive growth.
To change that, we must:
Invest Constructively in Passion
Specifically:
1. Align Incentives
- Learn what people deeply want.
- Articulate how they can pursue that by contributing to the organization’s mission
2. Unleash Talent
- Learn where people are the happiest and most productive.
- Build support systems that allow them to maximize flow.
3. Virtualize Infrastructure
- Learn which essential tasks nobody is able to do efficiently and awesomely.
- Sell those to a business that sees the opportunity.
D.R.I.P.: Platform Thinking for Lean Startups
May 21, 2015 § Leave a comment
Define
Terms, flows, roles, success criteria, open questions
Research
Characterize and identify Customer Zero
Implement
Enable Customer Zero to deploy a minimally viable app
Productize
Deliver a coherent and sustainable ecosystem
