• “That’s our policy” = “I don’t care about you or your situation—so deal with it”
• “There’s nothing I can do” = “I’ve been beaten down by management for long enough that I have no hope of helping you”
• “That’s the manufacturers responsibility” = “We don’t take responsibility for our actions—you were stupid for trusting us”

• Been loving the Seattle sun. Violet and I went on adventure through downtown Seattle on Saturday—she’s becoming a little person so fast.
• Jen and I have started volunteering together on Sundays at church, it’s been really fun to do something together like this. We both thought that it felt like a date—plus we we’re helping people! I recommend volunteering with your spouse.
• This weekend we’re headed to the mountains on a retreat with Mars Hill downtown. We love it at the downtown church & are in need of some down time.
• I’m very excited about a new web app that we’re developing to make communication smoother at Mars Hill. The team is small—but super talented.
• I’ve been working in the evenings on launching a new iPhone app with some friends. I think it’s going to blow your mind.

“The easiest customers to get are almost never the best ones. If you’re considering word of mouth, stability and lifetime value, it’s almost always true that the easier it is to get someone’s attention, the less it’s worth.” Seth Godin

Links

• If you missed it, Paul Johnson guest-wrote a blog post here on the lessons he learned launching his new web app.
• Microsoft makes a major investment in Nook. When money like this is involved I predict that the distribution of paper books has a wild ride ahead.
• The way that Ryan Singer, developer at 37signals, approaches product design is smart.
• I love the New York Times, infographics like this one on cloud cover are amazing. Lately I’ve found myself picking up the paper version at the store. There is something special about an immersive reading experiance.

The new Jack White album is rad.

A couple weeks ago, my team launched Pathwright, an education platform that helps anyone craft, teach, and sell beautiful online courses. While developing Pathwright, we tried numerous methods to help us ship a quality product as quickly as possible. In hindsight, many of the things we tried resulted in wasted time, but we also discovered a few simple methods that proved to be effective. I hope these three tips will help you ship what you’re working on as well.

1. Partner with a real customer early

If you’re building software that you want people to eventually pay you for, find at least one paying customer as early as possible. Even if you only charge them one-tenth of what you’d normally charge, partnering with invested customers is critical for a few reasons:

• You’ll learn quickly if your idea is worth doing. If you can’t find a customer willing to pay a little for what you’re building now, why expect customers to pay more to use your full product later?
• You’ll make better decisions. Paying customers will take your focus off what you want for your product and put it on how you can best serve your customers. This transforms difficult questions like “Am I ready to launch?” into more helpful questions like “Am I impeding my customers’ success by not launching now?”
• You’ll produce a more useful product. Product development is fraught with the risk of spending effort on features that your future customers won’t really need. Observing a real customer use your product throughout a series of small launches will focus your effort on the right things, since it reveals what’s useful and what’s still painful while it’s still inexpensive to fix.

2. Announce important deadlines

Most of us aren’t very good at hitting the deadlines we keep to ourselves. An effective way to hack this tendency is to announce to your early customers or coworkers that they’ll be able to do an important new thing with your beta or full product on a specific day.

By putting your reputation on the line, you increase the cost of missing a deadline to the point that it’s not easily missed, and you are forced to more carefully consider the time it will take to deliver what you’ve promised.

3. Surround yourself with people who ship quality work

When we started developing Pathwright, we moved into a shared office space called CoWork in Greenville, SC. Although our coworkers didn’t write a line of code for us, I’m certain we wouldn’t have launched without them.

While the obvious benefit to working around talented, experienced people is the valuable advice and encouragement you’ll receive, there’s also a less apparent benefit to working around habitual shippers. You might think that working in an office with so many talented people would be distracting — we thought that too. Instead we found that the positive peer pressure to perform gave us an intense focus that we had struggled to maintain while working by ourselves. Working alongside driven people who ship great work has the subtle, yet potent effect of raising your own expectations for the quality and pace of your work. Never underestimate how much the people you work around influence your own effectiveness.

In summary, to ship a great product as soon as possible:

1. Partner with a real customer early.
2. Announce your important deadlines publicly after you’ve carefully considered your timeline.
3. Find a way to work around people who are in the habit of shipping great products.

Problems with heroes

• They inevitably have weaknesses that are as great as their strengths
• They are a single point of failure. If they burnout, move on, or become toxic you loose.
• An organization that depends on heroes will fragment as it grows
• Heroes become villains really quickly when they don’t save the day
• There is always a lot of drama in hero based organizations
• and on and on…

To counter the hero myth build strong teams that have high trust, sharing of responsibility, and the ability to openly discuss and debate problems. Hero mentalities only exist in organizations that tend to silo themselves. Just think about it, the more you work with even the best people in the world you see that they have weaknesses and areas that they need help. The hero mentality wouldn’t exist if there was high levels of cooperation.

Invest in your team

Team members can be treated like cogs that each have a function. But I warn you, leader, building a team of cogs is WAY more work. You’ll spend all of your time in maintenance mode figuring out what’s broken. You’ll need to constantly repair and replace. When you build and lead a well functioning team you’ll need to do very little maintenance because each member of your team will be looking to fix problems together. You will multiply your effectiveness.

Give away credit

This is really important—when the team you lead does well don’t hog the credit. Rant about them… They did it. We did it. It was us. It was the team, not just me. You’ll find that by giving away credit people begin to own the vision, they begin having breakthrough ideas, and they multiply—not just add to—the overall effect.

Give away ownership

When I lead teams I try to give people roles that they can feel ownership over, and not just tasks. One way that I do this is by separating everything that our team does into projects and operations. Operations are great to delegate ownership of because they have generally understood goals and methods of accomplishing the goals. I try to make a dashboard that lists out every operational function that my team is responsible for. Every function has an owners name next to it, and at our weekly team meetings we rate each function as a team. This allows team members to be self critical and in constant states of evaluation over their responsibilities.

Be humble

If you’re the leader you don’t need to pretend like you know how to do everything. It’s perfectly fine to admit your weak areas. It invites others on your team to step in and compliment your weakness with their strength.

What have you done to build teams?

We all like to believe in the myth of the lone visionary. This is the lie of Newton getting hit with an apple and suddenly discovering gravity. This is the lie that there was nothing, then a brilliant stroke of genius, then BAM a great outcome.

What is vision?

Vision is all about defining the end goal and keeping people focused on it. It’s not just about the goal—it’s about rallying people around the goal. It’s about helping the vision become their vision.

How does vision relate to strategy?

Vision dictates where you’re supposed to end up, and strategy is all about how you get there. If you’re the type of person who has a lot of vision then your main role should be to keep others focused on the vision. Remind them, motivate them, retell the stories of the vision.

The vision caster should work closely with the strategist—ask questions, poke holes, ensure that at every step the vision is driving the strategy.

How does vision relate to execution?

Whatever you do don’t—don’t—don’t skip from vision to execution. If you’re the visionary type you’ll have a propensity to see where you want to go and just tell people how to do it. Essentially what happens here is that you’re failing at your job as being the vision caster and you’re becoming a conductor. If you do this you cut all of the other leaders around you at the knees.

Then reality hits.

Here is a very helpful illustration of what this looks like by Paul Graham, the founder of one of the most successful start up incubators called Y-Combinator.

Has this been your experience?

Via: A VC: The Startup Curve.

Photo by Flickr:snarl

(Shorter, though, doesn’t mean less responsibility, less insight or less power. It means less fluff and less hiding.)”

via Seth Godin’s Blog: “Too long”.

Chris, here’s my advice:

Focus first on developing a good relationship with a few leaders

Relationships are the foundation that you’ll be building a new work on top of. People need to know you, trust you, like you, and believe that you’re capable and care about them too.

Develop a simple strategy

Strategy is deciding what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do to achieve a vision. Make it simple. For instance, when I was first asked to run theResurgence.com the strategy at the beginning was to create one great article from the best writer I could convince to write every day all run by volunteers. Many people would come in with an editorial calendar and create something unsustainably complicated. I figured that if I got good writers a solid volunteer team that I would have a foundation to build off as my project got traction.

Get a small win, then another

Gaining momentum quickly is key—you’ll want to pick a small win that is easily obtainable that will remind you and those around you that what you’re doing is both important and possible. If I were coming into a new church with the task of starting up small groups I would probably try to immediately get a group of 3-5 men together for a three week study on getting community started. It’s low commitment for these men, and if even one potential leader comes out of this group you’ve already showed that you can get some traction. If you get a small win don’t go for a big win, go for another small win—in this case you could start another 3 week study and have your new leaders help lead.

Make decisions

When many folks take on a new role or a large project they get paralyzed by the complexity of the task. If you’re starting small you can make informed decisions and if they’re bad decisions you have time to change those decisions. One caveat—I would highly suggest that you make sure that you have the resources to follow through on the decision you make.

Find an expert in your field and meet them

Most of the problems that you’re going to encounter in your new project have been solved many times over. In todays world where you can @reply almost anyone on Twitter, you’d be suprised how many folks are willing to help you. The key is to tell your story succinctly and well, ask specific questions that show you’ve done your research, and try to make it worth their while.

Ask for feedback from the wisest people and the dumbest

It doesn’t matter how smart you are. You’re going to do a bunch of stuff wrong—even simple things that should be obvious is often overlooked in the hustle and bustle of projects. Find some people that really know what they’re talking about and ask them as many questions as they’ll allow. Listen. Take Notes.

Then find some of the dumbest people you can locate. They will help you test the assumptions that you have—if they’re confused it means you’re not clear.

Pray a lot—talk to God about what you’re going through

Rolling toward the rock… That feeling of fear eases. My front tire goes over the front of the rock. Butterflies in the stomach.  Mid-air. Will I make it?

Nailed it! Success. Double fist pumps.

You may be in a place of debilitating fear. Any time you think about thing THAT THING your stomach turns. It could be that difficult conversation you need to have with that friend, it could be that dream you have but you fear failing, it could be about anything. What are you afraid of?

Watch this video of a 10 year old facing her fear.

Several years ago I heard Seth Godin say “The best thing to do is to walk straight into the fear”. He went on to explain that almost no one walks into the fear, they just won’t take the risk, there is a lot of opportunity on the other side of fear.

Some question to ask before walking into the fear blindly

• Will the worst case scenario hurt others?
• Am I willing to risk a relationship to do what’s right?
• Why am I fearing losing my comfort and ease?
• What am I called to?
• Can I still provide for my family if I fail? ( The answer is yes way more often than the fear will tell you)
• It is the right thing to do?
• What happens if you don’t do it?
• Who can you get wise counsel from?