Month: February 2006

It’s important to learn from your mistakes. That’s what they say, anyway, and I intend to do so. However, learning from mistakes involves a certain amount of painful honesty – admitting where you screwed up. It’s uncomfortable, sometimes downright excrutiating, but it needs doing. So here I go.

Last week I lost a sale. A gentleman contacted me asking me to do some work for him, and I – me, nobody but me – screwed it up and lost the sale. The reasons are a bit convoluted, and obviously I won’t give details, but here in a nutshell is what I did wrong:

I didn’t make personal contact

The gentleman concerned sent me his phone number and asked me to call him, but because I was wary of what he was asking me to do I stalled and asked for more details by email. Bad move. Emails can be misconstrued so easily, and even a short conversation with him by phone would have cleared up any misgivings about the project. It would also have put a favourable light on any future communication between us. Even if I had sent him a negative email, if I had spoken to him first he would understand that I was an approachable and friendly person who was interested in his business. However, by relying solely on email, I kept him at arms length and so trust was never established.

I presumed the worst

My misgivings turned out to be wholly unfounded, but not before they had got me in trouble and lost the sale. The gentleman was a genuine businessman from a genuine business, and I should have treated him with more respect. And respect means you don’t believe the worst until such time as it has been proved. I’m not saying you should always believe the best, but don’t always believe the worst.

I was hasty in my communication

I made the huge mistake of rushing to send emails, and even worse negative emails, rather than waiting to see what the outcome was and then respond after due thought and consideration. I’m sure the gentleman concerned would have understood if I had said “I won’t be able to respond to this today, I’m very busy. But I’ll have a think about it overnight and get back to you in the morning.” Better to be honest with someone and admit you’ll be slow to give them an answer than to rush into an answer that turns out to be wrong.

I didn’t put myself in his shoes

If I had thought for a few minutes about where the gentleman was coming from, I’d have realised how stupid I was being. Generally you can tell a genuine enquiry from a hoax, and I knew this was genuine. But I didn’t stop to appreciate the enquirers position, I rushed stupidly into a wrong decision. I’m not a great salesman, but the least I should be able to do is think like a potential customer. If I was him I wouldn’t have been as gracious as he was with me.

So, there’s one sale I have lost. But I hope that I’ll learn from my mistakes so that I don’t make them again. And I also hope that by being honest and putting my mistakes down here, you’ll benefit from them.

That’s what API stands for, isn’t it? At any rate, with over 150 currently available, this is one area that will get more and more interesting as time goes on. As they say, is this the beginning of the web as an operating system?

There’s a timely warning at WeBreakStuff.com about scope creep. That’s a term I know all-too well, and it’s interesting that Fred talks about saying no to yourself if you are the client.

You see, it doesn’t matter who you are developing for – yourself, your company, a client, a friend – as development of an application (or product, or relationship) continues, things change. The goals may not shift much, although often they come into clearer focus, it’s just that the human mind is a threaded beast. By that I mean if you start thinking about one thing, it leads you through various related subjects and eventually you land on something completely new. Let me give you an example:

I’m thinking about a banana. Mmmm, I like bananas. I like them best squashed in white crusty bread. Wow, crusty bread, that’s one of my favourite things in the world. I remember having some lovely crusty bread up a mountain in Andorra. It was baking hot, but I was dangling my feet in a clear, cool lake. I love mountain lakes.

From bananas to mountain lakes in one train of thought. A strange example, you may think, but how much different is that from this:

I’m really pleased with the uploading functionality, it works great and people are using it. But I want to make it a bit more open, so that I can store documents from around the system all in the same place. We’ll then be able to search through all documents, no matter where they have been added or what they are attached to. That would be cool – we could add some download statistics as well. And how about a viewer to be able to preview image files? Yep, and let’s make a general all-purpose document storage area called ‘The Store’ where people can store any documents they want. But they’ll have to be stored in categories. And tagged.

Yes, that is a real example from a piece of software I’m currently developing. And who is the client? Why, I am. That whole train of thought happened in a split second, and I found myself saying “Yes! Let’s do it!” to everything. Bad idea. Scope creep slays another victim. Before I knew it, that split-second thought-thread had turned into weeks of development and I was wishing I had left everything as it was.

However, some wise people think scope creep is not just inevitable, but necessary. I’m not sure I agree with them. After all, scope creep is (generally) about adding to an existing requirements set, not tweaking the requests to give them better clarity. I’m all for incremental changes as development progresses; an inflexible developer is an out-of-work developer. But that isn’t the same as saying ‘yes’ to everything.

So learn to say ‘no’. At the very least learn to say ‘not yet’, or ‘we’ll think about it’. If not, you’ll be storing up plenty of trouble for the future.

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch has been writing about what he calls “the memorandum killers“. There’s also a related article on Mashable. Memorandum is a site that tracks the popularity of web pages – normally pages from blogs. A meme is a hot topic on the web, something that goes viral.

Tracking the hot topics on the web is great, as things spread like wildfire and I (like many geeks) want to keep abreast of the latest news and technological advances. But what is worthy of being filtered to the top and what isn’t? As the article says:

…they [the meme tracking webites] rely on user voting or other algorithms to determine relevance.

Which, as you can appreciate, isn’t a foolproof method. But what’s the alternative? Employ editors? No, they can be biased as easily as the net bloke. Plus they need paying. Hmm, it’s a quandary.

So, anyone got any better ideas?

As you may know I am a big fan of little-known, free and legal music. And the internet is The Place for finding great bands and artists such as Big Strides (found via 3Hive) and Hanne Hukkelberg (found via Aurgasm).

So imagine my surprise and delight when I discovered that Indieish.com were going to post a track a day from the wonderful Creative Commons world. I almost felt a tear in my eye as I realised this, yes this, was what broadband was invented for.

So, all hail generous musicians! May their guitar strings never grow slack, their drum heads always remain taut, their mixing desks never cool down and their vocal chords never give up!