I wish I saw this in middle-school. I will be using this when teaching my own children math.

OK, so a vendor of ours emailed me and I noticed they had the job title “Client Success Manager”.  It’s just my opinion, but I think it is a bad idea for a job title to exceed the physical limits of human responsibility.  Does this mean I can now blame my vendor for all my failures?

Anywho, it got me and my coworkers thinking of other fun job titles we could have that would imply super-human skill sets:

• Earthquake Prevention Specialist
• Swine Aeronautics Engineer
• Client Sexual Appeal Consultant
• Client Existential Fulfillment Manager
• Chaos Theory Circumvention Consultant 
• Customer Competency Manager

There ARE bad ideas!

How could I NOT read this book?  

As a note… I hate my damn cell phone camera.

Automated Popularity

Good software is probably one of the greatest demands of our age, just behind petroleum and porn.  It is a wonder so few people can develop good software.  When good software does come out, like Facebook, Twitter, or just about anything Apple makes, we flock to it like moths to the flame.    While consumers have seen some relief as of late, businesses have not.  Just about all business software sucks.  The reason?… Because everyone is developing backwards.

Don’t Make it Do “Everything”

I have been in more than a few “brainstorming” sessions during the conception of new business software.  The mistake that kills the project is always made right away when the first person says, “Let’s figure out everything we want this software to do.”  That’s it.  That is where any hope of a good usable software product dies.

Complication is easy.  It is so easy for us to think of “everything we want”.  What is actually hard is for us to think about is “What do we really need?”  Determining the most basic and primitive function that we truly need automated is the key.  

Do One Thing Right

The “one thing” you really need is usually discovered after months of development when the business launches a massive complex software system that does everything but the “one thing” you need.  The system goes unused, and the “C”-levels are running around wondering what they paid for.  All this time, if you just started with the “one thing”, you could have deployed quickly, invested little, and already be seeing a benefit from the software while it is still being developed.

Don’t Be Greedy

Software is not going to solve all your problems, don’t even try.  Pick out your biggest pain, and then trim it down some more.  The best thing that can happen is to launch your new software and say, “This is great, but I wish it did….”  You can always add functionality to something simple, but you can’t make something convoluted simple.

Good Examples

Google!  Just think about how Google started… type something in and hit “search”.  Today Google has a million different bells and whistles, but it all started with just plain “search”.

Flavors.me (a personal homepage maker) and Goodsie.com (dirt simple ecommerce) are great examples of good software development.  Both started out with the bare minimum functionality necessary to “meet the need”.  Then, as fans demand, they add features.  And believe me, their fans are asking for new features all the time.  The point is THEY HAVE FANS!  When you do one thing right, people want more, and that’s great!

Zen for Business Software

Making good software is about making order out of chaos.  However, the order has to be made BEFORE starting the software.  The process of finding the “one thing” to start with often times shows us just how chaotic and undisciplined our business processes really are.  When a developer goes to make software to support that chaos, he is blamed for the chaos that inevitably follows.  Finding your “one thing” to start with will help you refine your business processes, discover future issues, and generally be cathartic for everyone.

Lifehacker has posted a wonderful 5-point article on how to manage those who manage you.  As one who has some experience in the field of tyranny, I have to say that any minion of mine who followed the points outlined on lifehacker.com by Jason Fitzpatrick would most certainly NOT be killed.  Check it out if regularly dream of killing those who lord over you.

Stop Dreaming About Killing Your Boss

Following the successful launch of Google Instant, where Google shows instant results as you type, Google has announced the upcoming Google Thought.  Google Thought is a breakthrough in search that shows you results while you think about what you are searching for.  To be released in the coming year, Google Thought is set to revolutionize the search industry again.

Google stated in the announcement to the press this morning, “Google Instant was a hard act to follow.  We were all asking ourselves, ‘How can we be even more obnoxious as a search engine?’  Google Thought was the obvious next step in cutting-edge invasive chatter.”

Among the many benefits and features of the new Google Thought is the ability to predict what users are trying to think about and offer them suggestions of what to think about next.  Now, users are saved the time of having to complete a single coherent idea before seeing search results.  ”You don’t even have to know what you want to search for, Google Thought figures it out for you,” proclaimed Google.

Advertisers are excited about the new “pay-per-thought” ad system that is being launched simultaneously with Google Thought.  For the first time ever, Companies will be able to advertise to their target markets based on sub-conscious desires, primal emotions, and Freudian impulses categorized by id, ego, and super-ego instead of just keywords.  ”It is so exciting that we can put our products and solutions right into our customers brains during the initial premonitions of greed, before rationality can kick-in.” stated avid Google customer Amazon.com.

John Mandvi, a Google Thought developer, stated, “We are all really proud of what we have accomplished.  People are no longer burdened with the personal responsibility of critical thinking.  Just as you begin to think, we can suggest thoughts based on your location, demographic, and what others like yourself enjoyed thinking about.  It will change everything.”  

Google Thought was then demonstrated to the audience, but had to be turned off quickly since all that appeared on the screen was a rapidly changing series of extreme hard-core sexual fetish images.  Google assured us that a “safe-thought” setting will be added before it’s release later next year.