Jason Yip has a great post at Martin Fowler.com about making sure the ‘daily scrum’ is productive. One of the key concepts in his post centers around focusing on three things:
- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What are my obstacles?
- What do I intend on accomplishing today?
Another key concept focuses on the need to build shared commitment. All these items make a ton of sense, but the hard part is implementing them consistently. We had tried to do this at Judy’s Book, but had let them lapse. His post inspired me to try and start them up again. We’re in a critical phase of our business and need to make sure we are executing as efficiently as possible. I think implementing some of these ideas will help us achieve that.
There’s a new article on Techcrunch about our strategic shift from being a local review pure play to focusing on deals and saving users money.
From the article:
Judy’s Book, in contrast, made some fairly dramatic strategic changes last fall, in the hope of avoiding the same fate. They de-focused on local reviews, and went more towards the shopping angle and local deals.
There’s a long way to go before we can declare that we’re a success, but I’m proud to be part of a company that can ask itself tough questions and live with the answers it finds. If you haven’t already done so, check out our CEO, Andy Sack’s blog where he talks about the changes we’ve been going through.
It’s going to be a busy, interesting year. Shifting our attention to shopping and deals was hard - we had invested a lot in local reviews and our strategic shift impacted employees and users. I’m confident we made the right choice and although we have a metric buttload to learn, I’m excited about the direction we’re moving in.
UPDATE: 1/9, 1:18am (no, I have no idea why I’m up so late) - Acknowledgment from Andy
The phrase “it’s done” means different things to different people. From a product standpoint, it should mean - “it works as desired” not “I’m done working on it.” This is one of my pet peeves. It’s unfortunate how rare truly taking ownership and pushing a task to completion really is.
The process goal of checking off a box on a list when a task is complete is irrelevant. Something is done when the person you’re doing it for (everyone answers to somebody) is satisfied. End of story.
