Pixar: Getting over embarrassment
blog.protoshare.com
blog.protoshare.com
- Success hides problems. Big organizations fall slowly.
- Daily reviews. Everybody gets reviewed everyday; this removes the embarrassment factor so that no one waits until "it's perfect" before presenting.
- Communication structure is not the same as organizational structure. A firm might require a strict hierarchy to ensure control, but that doesn't mean everyone should be prevented from talking to anyone else.
- The only measurement that matters is whether the team functions together.
- Don't copy successful products, even if they're your own product. Either invent something new or fix an unsuccessful product.
Scary that some things in an organization can be so successful that it hides the cancer of rotting code/processes for a long time.
Meanwhile, their less enlightened, less capable, and frankly less humble competition just assumes that most movies will end up losing money, and that what REALLY matters is getting a handful of hits that can offset endemic failure.
Without having watched the talk, isn't that the fail early, fail often startup mantra?
So I don't think he actually agrees with that mantra.
By getting over the embarrassment of showing someone a product that sucks or isn't complete, we position ourselves to get feedback and assistance -- which means we can make things that we couldn't have made without help.
As often as possible. Everything I've ever read about creativity starts with some variation of "Do you want a good idea? First have lots of ideas."
As a manager, I don't have a problem with people "sucking". I have a lot of issues with people being lazy.
"The best way to make sure your product meets the needs of your target audience is to expose your designs to the scrutiny of your users. Doing this during every phase of the design process can help reveal which features of your product work well and which need improvement."
However, the "just do it" idea of the post is great.
On the other hand, if you're presenting to people who really don't have a sense of the big picture (and who are often insecure about their position and judgement), you tend to anticipate their tendency to (a) fixate on small, rough bits and (b) issue VERY specific instructions about those elements (often, while ignoring the rest). This is the exact mechanism by which incompetent managers paralyze creative talent, reducing any project to a derivative effort that hews as close as legally possible to "whatever worked before." In this case, management IS the obstacle, and good luck getting them to remove themselves.
In these situations, you're no longer focused on the work. You're thinking about dodging bullets and managing up, hoping to find the best 'compromise' between a great creative solution, and the need to placate the fragile egos of people who probably don't belong in their jobs. The awesome thing about Pixar is that they really seem to get this, and invest considerably resources in creating and staffing the kind of environment where people CAN iterate freely.
Always, always start with putting a very bad replication of the product in front of your users. Paper prototypes work very well.
I've been meaning to polish it but... I think I'm going to put all my code in github now!