Use Cognitive Science to Improve Your Presentations

by: stacey - February 29th, 2012   Filed under: Presentation Add Comment

The scifi fan site io9 is not only a great place to keep up with your favorite geekdom, it also has great and useful articles for your career, like this one: How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your Powerpoint Presentations

The four basic points are:

The Goldilocks rule

Include only the data needed, nothing more.  Anything else is distracting from the message.

The Rudolph Rule

Do something to make the important data stand out- a different color, size, seperate it, anything, just make it different than the rest.

The Rule of Four

The human mind can visually capture about four pieces of visual data at a time- so keep your slides broken down to four batches of data or less.

The Birds of  a Feather

Organize like information in groups.  It will help people process those groups of information like a single piece of information, better enabling them to intake the information in question.

Great stuff.  Try it in your next presentation!

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Technology is Not the Problem

by: stacey - February 28th, 2012   Filed under: Communication, Leadership, Personal Development Add Comment

For the techies out there (and I’m one of you), consider this… how many times in your career have you been faced with a truly incredible technical challenge? Not many, I bet. What you consider to be the great challenges of your career are, in fact, challenges to get things done within a tight schedule, not to invent some amazing new technology. The typical company does not take a massive amount of risks, and incredible technical challenges equals amazing technical risks. While every company will take a few for the sake of competitive advantage, companies that roll the dice too often are few and far between.

On the other hand, how many communications and training challenges have you faced? How many meetings have you had with business folks trying to convince them that a fairly simple technical change is not going to go wrong and wreck their business, or worse, if they don’t embrace it, their business will go down the tubes?

Technology is becoming more and more of a commodity every day. If the people that you have on staff can’t do something, you can always find a sea of consultants that can help. Communication, on the other hand, remains an art in the workplace.

I have posted on this before and cannot emphasize this enough- the ability to communicate, influence, develop and use credibility effectively are vital skills and possibly the most vital skills in IT today. Remember this when you choose what skills to work on. Remember it as well when you make your hiring and promotion decisions. How useful is the best technical specialist you know if he can’t communicate what he knows to anyone? What if, worse, he hacks off users with his rudeness and poor attitude? Make your choices carefully, both as a manager and as a techie deciding how to better your career. Your opinions on Microsoft versus linux may be fascinating lunch conversation for your and other techies, but the end users are not interested- they’re interested in doing their job, and you doing yours. Their jobs often involve specialized knowledge that you do not have. Your job is usually to supply specialized knowledge that they do not have. In the long run, you are both commodities to the company. Your communications skills, tact, judgement, reliability, leadership, ability to take ownership of problems and find solutions for them rather than passing them along the chain… these are the things that make a difference. Remember these skills. Develop them. Use them.

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Staying on the Right Road

by: stacey - February 27th, 2012   Filed under: Product Management Add Comment

I happened upon this post on 37 Signals arguing against product roadmaps:

While I don’t agree with the notion that we don’t need product roadmaps, it does point out some careful slippery slopes you must be careful of when approaching roadmaps:

  • Selling things that aren’t in the product yet.  It is tempting to sell things that the product doesn’t do yet, especially once you set a delivery date.  The reason you can’t do this is simple:  Just because you say it will be there does not mean that you will meet the customer’s requirements.  The customer you are sales-pitching may envision an Alerts tab to do a whole litany of functionality that you yourself never thought of.  You might meet their exact expectations, of course, but without gathering detailed requirements, you won’t know until later.  You are setting yourself up to disappoint the client.  Offering that you have something like their requirement in your roadmap, and you’d like their input is a possible compromise- now you’re including the customer in your community, and that has value, in addition to learning new customer needs.  You still run the risk that their requirements will be totally askew of all your other customers’ requirements, and then what do you do?
  • You cannot plop things into your roadmap without defining some meaning to them.  “Message tab” is easy to put on the map, but unless you list at least at a high level what that means and what the specific deliverables are, you’re just doing point number one to yourself.  You have to get some scope around the stated goal before you can aim at completing it by a given date- it’s that simple.

Roadmapping is an excellent idea; the value of it is to allow you to develop a well-thought out, living plan to add value to the product that will help you grow it towards targeted, specific markets.  Without it, you’ll run into “what’s hot today” syndrome, that is, adding the most recently hot features to your product rather than sticking to the strategy- and you really must have a strategy.  Like all tools, a roadmap can be used for good or ill- be careful how you choose to use it.

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