I just finished Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport on Audible.

Recommended Read or Listen? Yes.

While it didn’t blow my mind, I found the ideas in Digital Minimalism worth spending time on.

10 years ago or so, the people who could afford it, where connected all the time. Today, it’s the wealthy people who can allow time for being disconnected, not being available on demand all the time.

10 years ago or so, our devices were able to perform impressive things. But only one thing at a time. Switching from a document to a new browser tab for example took some effort and time. We thought that was bad for our productivity, but what if, the opposite is true?

10 years ago or so, Facebook mobile ad revenue was $0. Today it’s $34.35 billion dollars. Our attention, our data is the new oil.

While many apps aim at getting the most of our attention, we have to manage how we spend it.

Technology isn’t good or bad. It’s what we make out of it.

Some of my highlights from the book include:

1. Digital Declutter: Clean up your devices. Clutter is costly. Remove all clutter. I removed all bad* social apps, any app that I haven’t used within the last month and disabled push notifications.
2. Reclaim Leisure: Schedule seasonal high-quality leisure plans, like crafting something, reading, engaging in a club. Schedule low-quality leisure too (e.g. browsing Facebook, LinkedIn etc.) to fight FOMO.
3. The Bennett principle: We get more energy out of doing something seemingly more demanding than some passive activity. E.g. instead of falling onto the couch and binge-watch Netflix every night, do something real first, like crafting a blog post ;)

Digital Minimalism is about

… the quality of your life in our current age of alluring devices. … it rejects the way so many people currently engage with these tools. …

We cannot unlock this potential (of technology) until we put in the effort required to take control of our own digital life’s to confidently decide for ourselves, what tools we want to use, for what reasons and under what conditions.

The book energized and motivated me to live a more mindful life. I’d say, attention well spent!

*that excludes micro-blog and XING. I explain why in a future post.

Paul Osman’s blog post on Production Oriented Development is pure gold.

With my limited understanding of technology and therefore without knowing all implications, I’m convinced by all of the arguments of that blog post.

I haven’t worked in a company where pre-production environments are on par with production. Hence, any QA performed on such environment can never be fully trusted.

Instead

… teams should optimize for getting code to production as quickly as possible …

Thanks to @jthingelstad for sharing this content piece in the recent Weekly Thing.

Building products with my background in gaming, the topic of “Gamification” comes up regularly. Usually with the idea of making a mundane user task more entertaining and therefore increasing the likelyhood of completion.

First, a bit of theory:

There are three so called brain loads:

1. Cognitive/Mental: Memory, Thinking etc.
2. Motor: Moving hands or arms
3. Visual: Stimulation through visuals

Games raise (= increase) one or more of these brain loads to create an entertaining and engaging experience.

• Visual & Motor: Fruit Ninja, Point and click shooters
• Motor only: Press buttons as soon as you can
• Motor + Mental: Candy Crush, Starcraft
• Mental: Puzzle games

Back in the 80’s, the goal was to lower brain loads to make everything as easy as possible. Now, there are software/web structures that are very established so they can be made more complex again to make things more engaging.

Some fail, and some succeed. I will write about that in a future post.

Epictetus, one of the great Stoics, already said

“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control.

This is still true today.

In a 2-day workshop on the topic of “Lateral Leadership” last year, I got introduced to the Circle of Influence and Control. Originally created by Stephen Covey and covered in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, it helps us to focus on what matters.

The three circles are mutually exclusive:

1. What we control are things like our words, our food, our mood, our actions, our thoughts or the output of our work.

2. What we influence are things like our family, the outcome of our work, other people’s choices, our close surroundings or who reads this blog post.

3. The things we may be concerned about are politics, traffic, results of a sports match, comments and actions from a stranger, where we were born or the outbreak of a pandamic.

We have to remind ourselfs of what we can control and influence to shift our focus away from what’s just a concern.

What we truly control is fixed. We can expand what we influence. We can’t do much about the rest.

Focus on what you control and influence.

Our government, the Bundesregierung produced some TV ads around behavior in times of the current pandemic.

No big deal.

But these are actually really good!

In order to get us citizens motivated, they tell an interesting, amusing story.

It’s about being heros by doing nothing during the “Corona Winter of 2020”. In the spots, elderly people from the future tell their story.

How they became a hero … by doing nothing.

See the first comment for an English translation.

Be brave.

Do nothing.

Winter is coming.

🙃

When developing products, having one team or part of a team focussed on Discovery and then others on Execution is a very bad idea.

It drives silo thinking and a throw-over-the-fence mentality.

People feel less committed when they weren’t there in the room from the beginning.

That’s why “cooperate innovation” labs mostly fail. Product teams have to go through the whole cycle. It will be much faster.

Avoid having teams of mercenaries. Have teams of missionaries.

———— Wise words that I paraphrased from a recent AMA session with the godfather of Product Management, Marty Cagan.

Today, I attended a short webinar on “Conversational Interfaces” hosted by Applause in collaboration with lautmaler. Conversational Interfaces offer great possibilites to onboard and guide users.

It wasn’t a sales event which I was afraid of but actually had some interesting content on the topic. Even though it was rather high level.

My most valuable takeaway is a better understanding of the anatomy of conversational systems.

I also appreciated their separation of the user intent versus the trigger of a message. My intent could be to eat a burger. What triggers a conversation could be me opening the DeliveryHero app. Identify your user intents first, then think about the triggers.

Here are my notes.

1) Conversational UI offers the opportnuity to interact with machines on human terms.

2) There are two formats: Voice interfaces that allow to talk. Chatbots that allow to type.

3) Six factors should inform our strategy to “unmute our brand” to give it a voice: Use Case, Context, Channel, Language, Knowing the User, Brand impersonation

4) Use Cases: Voice for when hands are busy. Chat for others.

5) Consider how your users talk. What could be their intents to communicate.

6) Develop a brand persona e.g. tone of voice, jargon, what kind of connection should be established (long-term or short-term; professionally distanced or amicably familiar…)

The anatomy of a voice Interface looks like this.

(ASR Automatic Speech Recognition) –> (NLU Natural Language Understanding) –> Context User Management and Situational Routing) –> (Logic Implementation of Business Logic) –> (Output Text and Visual CMS Integration) –> (TTS Text-to-Speech)

Remove ASR, NLU, TTS which leaves you with the anatomy of a chatbot interface.

7) Voice is more difficult to get right as it needs a wake up phrase (a la “ok Google”) and a “No Input” timout. A chhat is simple and save as the user just writes a message. The chat can theoretically wait indefinitely.

8) When designing system responses, we need to - identify the users intent - trigger backend calls - keep track and update dialogue context - execute business logic

9) Managing the dialogue could be handled via simple if/then statements and/or machine learning

10) The System should be tested, especially when several use cases exist to ensure proper conversation flow. Pretty sure that’s the Applause pitch here but it’s also true

Especially with remote teams, building relationships and a sense of team spirit is challenging. What helps our team are casual get-togethers so we are not in meeting-mode everytime we see each other.

We recently did that, playing the following games which was a lot of fun:

1. scribble.io - This basically is the drawing-guessing-part of Taboo. One by one, team members draw random terms (from a prepared, custom pool) and everyone else guesses what they are. Expect a lot of wrong answers.
2. Werewolf - Like back in summer camp, this also works perfectly online. And it gets everyone talking.

When I joined XING in 2018 I was happy to hear there is an office in Porto.

It’s the perfect city:

• proximity to the ocean
• great food and beverage industry (try Bacalhau and wine from the Douro valley 🤤)
• strong education sector
• a passion for high-quality, hand-made craft
• a beautiful, mostly well preserved old city
• affordable, high standard hospitality options
• loads of small, independend shops

For us as a company, Porto offers access to stellar engineering talent. For me, it’s the place that half of my team calls home. They are great people and I feel very lucky to work with them as well as to visit their home from time to time. Unfortunately, I haven’t been there since a year ago because of the birth of my second son and a certain pandemic.

My favorite print magazine Monocle just released their latest product The Forecast 2021 which features an article called Bright lights, small city and guess which city topped their annual Small Cities Index?

Right, it’s Porto 🎉

To celebrate that and to soften my wanderlust, I digged out a few shots from my last trip:

Working during the day, …

oberserving sunset afterwards,

while having a beer with the team

to hit the local restaurants afterwards.

Monocle and Nils ❤️ Porto.

Plan for 2021: be back for an extended visit ✈️

When optimizing user onboarding flows, the completion rate number of users who started the flow / number of users who finished the flow isn‘t the right KPI.

If that wouldn‘t be true, you could reduce the number of screens to a single one with a big fat „click here“ button and your completion rate will be 98%. 2% always drop-off, no matter how easy it is to click through 🤷‍♂️.

That‘s not why there is user onboarding. It exists to achieve a specific goal of getting your new users to their Aha!Moment - the moment when they realize the value of your product for them.

That‘s not at the end of a series of explainer screens, walkthrough tours, setup screens or other-things-to-get-out-of-my-way-to-finally-see-and-use-what-I-came-for. It‘s when I understand and use your product so it delivers meaningful value. Try to measure that instead.

—— We recently re-designed the onboarding flow of XING and ended up with twice the amount of screens in the flow. Our onboarding completion rate dropped 😎 Here is how it looks like.

A UX Designer actually suggested we should reduce the screens to get more people through the flow. I suppose he didn‘t understand the aim of the flow. It‘s not about maximizing the number of users at the end but to maximize the number of new users who turn into happy, engaged members of our network.

Not sure if we‘ll achieve that it‘s currently running as an AB test but if we don‘t, I‘m sure it won‘t be because of the number of screens but because their content isn‘t the right fit for purpose.

I‘ll let you know when the results are in 👨‍💻