Emotional Sustainability in Brand and Product Design

Product design is a creative discipline that challenges designers to build an aesthetic, functional and marketable product. The rapid speed of innovation has stimulated interest and change in designing the user experience. The discipline is now responsible to create a new paradigm in the product design process, as there are many more factors to explore. Human behaviour has been studied to inform the design of this curated user experience.

Creating an emotional connection to your target market can translate into conversion, sales, as well as online and offline interaction. Good design is a huge part of this process. In order to understand the role of design, when establishing consumer relationships, we have to define design. Design is not just embellishing content , or the crafting of a clean site or application. Design can also be a way of thinking that is mindful of your market’s needs, and ideally addresses them before they are even known.

To build an emotionally sustainable brand, Design thinking requires a focus on building personalities and stories in tandem with building a product in order to establish an emotionally sustainable brand. Giving a product a life beyond its base function is how Apple gets us so excited about their latest release or why your favourite restaurant has a line.

What does it take to design a brand that really sticks with users?

The Emotional Levels of Brand Design

In the startup world, there is a term called “Unique Value Proposition.” This proposition is a clear statement that communicates to potential customers how your product or service will improve their lives. Instead of focusing on the unique value proposition, I often pitch the concept of the emotional value proposition. The difference between the two is that the latter is based on narratives or personality, while the former often occupies a more practical space.

Author Donald Norman offers a digestible breakdown of a concept he refers to as the levels of processing. These levels can be directly applied in product design.

The Visceral

The first emotional level is visceral. We have all experienced this level of emotion, as it is usually outside of our control and directly related to our physical senses. The visceral is an automatic, “prewired” level of emotion. When experiencing visceral emotions we make rapid judgments that are largely biologically determined. We are quickly able to categorize experiences as good or bad - safe or dangerous. This level is dominated by our senses.

In a three dimensional sense, the visceral is our environment. We react to the senses in the air, the touch on our skin, the sounds nearby and any taste we experience. Hearing a loud, unexpected sounds while relaxing on a quiet beach may ignite the classic flight or fight reaction. This would be an example of a visceral reaction.

Translated into design, the User Interface as a product would be a great example of designing for the visceral. The two dimensional world of our phones may not include smell, and a wide variety of touch - but color and fonts can have a similar effect.

These initial, visceral reactions shape our immediate experience of a product or brand.

How can design elements create sensory, visceral emotion within users?

Behavioral

The behavioral emotional level mostly involves cognitive processing within the mind. Behavioral, is the interaction between your product or service and the consumer over time. This level occurs as the user moves through the cognitive process of planning, expecting and learning within your product.

In the world of web or application design, the behavioral level could be seen as the User Experience design. How is the consumer interacting with your brand or product?

How easy is it to reach customer support on your website, for example? A hard to react support team may build narratives with a lack of trust and therefore reduce the emotional connection. A very interactive site with many members, for example, may build a sense of community in the user’s narrative of the brand or product.

Reflective

The third emotional level is reflective and it’s about the message. The reflective level thinks back to the behavioral user experience and the visceral reactions to the user interface and gives the experience meanings. The reflective stage is when the user makes a connection between the experience and their own sense of self.

The meaning assigned to an experience will be contingent on a variety of variables; including the user’s culture, past experiences, and the situation they find themselves in when interacting with your product.

The reflective state is the most conscious of the three levels of emotion and can observe the impact of both the visceral and behavioural levels.

Can your users see themselves in your product?

Addressing the Cognitive Levels in Product Design

Building emotional ties with a brand and their customers requires the designer to know their market. Each generation enters the world with a new set of needs and understanding of how the world is. Understanding the beliefs and priorities of your market is vital for your brand’s emotional durability.

For example, marketing to millennials has become a challenge because of the noncommittal, value based, experience oriented relationship this age group has towards brands. Understanding the value systems of your target market will help you build your product’s value.

Identify Your Market, and be Specific

Target market selection is a very important decision for many companies. Identifying your target market starts with looking at the problem you are trying to solve, or the ways you are attempting to make your user’s life better. It is imperative to tailor your marketing and sales efforts to reach the specific segment of the population that will most likely interact with you brand. As much as we may like to think our products or services will be useful and beneficial to all markets, this is often not the case. A broad market is a great starting place, but defining the specifics of your market will allow you to create a more curated experience for your users. Targeting a specific market attracts loyal first users or customers who then can become advocates for your brand or product.

Identifying a customer’s desire to buy your product or interact with your service is a question of customer values. Understanding the value your product offers goes beyond knowing its ‘features’. A feature is a default characteristic of your product or service. Today, iPhones now come with the ability to scan your fingerprint. This feature is used to unlock your phone, make purchases and to open certain application. To some, the value or benefit of this feature is safety. Understanding that your market is not looking for a fingerprint scanner in a phone but rather values safety is a very important distinction to make.

What value does your product or service have?

Using the iPhone as example, safety is a largely universal value and will only segment your target market so far. Technical factors such as geography, demographics, psychographics as well as behaviour will help dissect your market further.

Don’t Create User Story, Listen to Them

After identifying your market, listen to them. It is important that your brand has an internalized sense of who it is speaking and interacting with. Qualitative research is a method focused on understanding the motives behind thought patterns and behaviours. Interviews are a great source of data in qualitative research, so are observations. Observations are extremely important when designing an emotionally sustainable brand, as they take place in a setting that naturally occurs in contrast to a formal interview.

Renata Tesch, a qualitative researcher, outlines three major approaches to qualitative research that we can apply to product or brand design.

Ethnography

The ethnographic approach, in regards to qualitative research, is largely based on the understanding of culture and its influences in a potential customer’s or user’s behaviour. Originally, designers could assume concepts of culture around ethnicity and geographic location. Today the concept of culture is much more broad as it includes groups, organizations, sexuality and much more. The most common way to study the ethnography of your target market is through observation.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the focus on the individual and their understanding of the world. This research method focuses on the individual’s subjective experience and personal interpretation of the world. With this method of research we can understand a collective ideology of our market through individuals, to perhaps create a related brand culture. A great way to collect this type of data would be through formal and informal interviews.

Field Research

Field research is an extremely broach approach to qualitative research but will certain help create a more internalized sense of your target market. Field research is when the researcher enters a natural setting where their market can be found and observers. Notes are critical for successful field research.

Identify your market, and listen to them!

Create a Personality

A brand personality can be defined as a set of human characteristics associated with a brand. To illustrate, GoPro personifies itself as an adventurous, sporty, young, and creative brand. Consumers can easily relate to a brand if they can project their identity onto the values of the product. Research around brand building techniques has suggested that the greater the connection between the human characteristics that describe an individual idealized or actual self and those that describe the brand, the higher preference the user or consumer will have for that specific brand.

Although there may be similarities in the adjectives used to describe human characteristics and brand traits, they are very different the ways that they are formed. Human traits are based on attitudes, beliefs, physical appearance as well as behaviour. Brand personalities are built based on direct or indirect contact with the consumer or user. People begin to build personas of brands based on the employees, the CEO, brand endorsements - and many more factors. Brand personalities are also built in indirect ways such as the brand name, logo, advertising and price for example.

There are many different aspects of a brand and consumers will continue to draw new links, that expand your brand identity further. Here are some dimensions of your brand to be mindful of:

Attribute

These are distinctive features that concisely characterize the product or brand name. For example the feature can be intrinsic - which would relate to product performance, features, and unique abilities of your product. In contrast, the attribute can be extrinsic and relate to the personality or history of your brand or product.

Benefits

The benefits outline the individual value the consumer has attached to your products attributes. For example, the iPhone may be known by some for its easy to use interface. For many consumers, that is the primary attribute of the iPhone. Yet, the benefit looks at what an “easy to use” phone means for the consumer. How does it relate to their sense of self? For some the benefit may include a strong family connection - as even your grandmother can use this phone. For others, this benefit may include more family time because you spend less time figuring functions out on your phone. In Apple commercials, they often highlight the attribute in response to the benefit. Now they are more connected as a family, because of Apples’ easy to use interface.

Imagery

Visual information is often closely linked with a brand personality and overall voice. Imagery can be concrete and deliberate, sourced from your company, or they can naturally occuring. An example of a naturally occurring image could be a consumer wearing or using your product, seen by another consumer.

Experiences

An experience of a brand can occur at purchase, contemplation of purchase, and during consumption. These experiences shape the narrative of your brand. If the purchasing experience is difficult, your product and whole identity as a brand could be interpreted less positively.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of User Testing

Usability testing is extremely important in product design. Understanding areas where people may struggle with your product, opens up space for recommendations and possibly a strong end result. The goal is to have a better and more accurate understanding of how your product is being used and where it needs to improve. User testing often happens in a controlled environment that allows for live/real time observation or instant feedback.

When testing with users it is important to understand what aspect of your product you are testing. Although it may be tempting to test the entire interaction, more valuable specific data can be collected when goals are established. What do you hope to learn with this test?

Testing can be done at each stage of product design, allowing for your product to be highly consumer centric. Here are the stages of product testing:

Low-Fidelity Prototype or Paper Prototype

This stage of testing is done very early in the product design process. A mockup, wireframe or hand drawn version of the product or website allows businesses to test basic assumptions and flows.

High-Fidelity Prototype

An interactive version of the product, usually computer based, is used in this level of testing. The form of the product varies significantly depending on if it is natively digital or a three dimensional product, but interaction is the key to this stage. The product responds to user inputs at this stage of testing.

Alpha and Beta Version

These products are not ready to be released, but are stable enough to have an accurate idea of usability.

Release Version

At this level of testing, the product has been released to the mass market. This is an opportune time to test entire user flows from beginning to end.

Comparative or A/B Test

Multiple versions of the product are designed to measure the impact of small changes. These designs are alternated between consumers to test the performance and satisfaction. During comparative testing it is important in emotional branding that concept are also tested, not solely elements. For example, when testing which headliner works better - refer to your qualitative data about your target market and build concepts around their values in regards to the words you are using in the headline.

Optimize for the Emotional Journey

This article has provided a series of tools that will allow your brand to be optimized for the user or customers emotional journey. In no way has this article summarized all of the tools that are available to aid in building an emotionally sustainable brand, but simply serves as a launch point. Consumer values translate into consumer preferences. Understanding the “why” behind your target markets behaviour will aid you in building a strong emotional brand. Emotional brands not only translate into conversion, sales and offline and online interaction, but build strong consumer connections for your product or service and in turn strong consumer communities.

The original article can be found on the Toptal Design Blog.

You Need a Hero: The Project Manager

This article is for you, the plucky entrepreneur with an app idea in your heart and a bit of cash in the bank. The diagrams that you’ve scribbled on cocktail napkins will disrupt the entire world, and dump trucks full of money have already been dispatched to your house. To ensure that they arrive on time, here’s some simple advice for making your production cycle run smoothly.

Why you need a project manager in the first place

“Computer programs are the most complex things that humans make”, says Douglas Crockford. You may not have heard that name before, but he’s pretty famous for a programmer. He’s currently a senior software architect at Paypal, and he has pioneered all sorts of cool technology that is beyond the purview of this article. He is someone who knows a great deal about working on large projects.

As for myself, I’ve been programming for 13 years, and even now, at some point, every project takes me into uncharted territory. There are so many different technologies out there, and new techniques are being devised at such an alarming rate that I never feel I’m completely on top of what’s going on. While every project has its unique challenges, there are some constants:

• The project has time pressure.
• The budget is smaller than I would like.
• I am a more expensive than the client would like.
• I do not listen as perfectly as the client would like.
• The client does not explain things as perfectly as I would like.

Clearly, we need a babysitter. Someone has to step in to establish the ground rules, keep everyone honest and make sure that we’re not forgetting anything important. Someone has to facilitate communication between all parties.

This someone, this hero, is the project manager.

Why is the product manager in a box? He’s a cat. Cats love boxes.

Toptal did not offer contracts with project managers when I began writing this article, but they do now. Synergy! I can only imagine that the powers that be read the following advice and realized that they were missing a great opportunity.

Why a programmer does not make a good project manager

Certification by the Project Management Institute aside, the most important thing that a project manager can bring to the table is experience. As a result, many programmers would make pretty decent project managers; we have more experience with technical projects than anyone else and our analytical minds are adept at cataloguing information and setting concrete goals.

Goodness knows, you’re paying us enough, so it seems reasonable to expect that we could manage ourselves rather than force you to pay for someone else’s time as well, right?

Well, for starters, you’re paying us to code.

When we come out of our programming daze to make decisions about what to prioritize, or to argue about how much is actually going to get done this week, code is not being written. It then takes at least 10 minutes to get back into “the zone”, especially if we’re stressed out by the conversation that we just had, which is likely if we’re arguing feature priority. Boo hoo, I know, but this is all about making the most efficient use of costly resources.

Most importantly, we really can’t see the forest for the trees. If you take nothing else away from this article, please understand this: When I spend all day staring at a few specific bugs, my brain loses track of the bigger picture.

My brain rewards me when I fix those bugs, and I assume that I’ve done great things and can go play video games now. When someone reminds me that the home page is still broken, it comes as a complete surprise because I have spent the day filling my brain with very detailed knowledge of a very small piece of the overall project and sort of forgot about the rest of it. That’s just how my brain works, and a lot of other programmers have a similar psychological make up.

When we come out of our programming daze to make project decisions, code is not being written.

Why a client does not make a good project manager

Well then, if we programmers don’t want to take the responsibility for getting project managerial things done, then it must fall to you, the client. It’s your money. It’s your vision. You’re ultimately responsible for the whole thing, anyway.

You, however, also have a lot on your plate.

Many clients are mere mortals with day jobs like the rest of us, and some have even been known to suffer from procrastination or forgetfulness. Although this certainly does not describe you, please entertain the idea of having a Professional Rememberer around so that you can get back to the important work of keeping the whole project alive.

If you have worked on, or overseen, a technical project of similar scope, you may indeed make a good manager for your project. If you have not, please don’t underestimate the value of someone who can predict the issues that may arise. Time estimates are always just estimates, and bugs tend to pop up at the least opportune times. It’s worth the cost of another (if only part-time) employee to have someone around who knows which parts of the process need, or are likely to need, the most attention.

Take quality assurance (QA) for example. Proper QA is essential for getting what you want out of any project, and it never ever gets the attention that it deserves. A good project manager will make the most of limited QA resources, and also quality-assure your programmers for you. Sometimes, we get out of our depth, and sometimes we make mistakes. You need a technically-proficient person in a supervisory role to determine whether your programmer is just having an off day, or if he or she is, in fact, a bad fit for the project. Heading off personnel problems early could mean the difference between life and death for your project.

Lastly, even you, oh glorious client, sometimes need a little check and/or balance. That’s hard for me to write since we computer programmers are not well known for our outspoken natures. Suffice to say, I have worked on many projects where the client was adamant that everything was top priority and absolutely everything needed to get done. While I have no doubt that this was absolutely true, these clients, sadly, did not have control over the number of hours in a day. They did not end up with the positive result they desired and/or deserved, and I feel that this outcome could have been avoided had the client entrusted a project manager with the authority to assess the workload and tactfully, yet firmly, keep things in check. It’s difficult to make the dispassionate judgment calls that most technical projects require when it’s your idea and your money on the line and the computer doesn’t care if you or I cry and scream at it. (I know this to be true because I’ve tried it many times.)

An incomplete list of techniques for managing a technical project

Whether you’ve decided to ignore the previous 1,000-something words and manage your project yourself, or whether you are going to hire someone but want to be more knowledgeable about the process, this list will help you. I have never (officially) been a project manager, so I can’t say which tools any given project manager would use, but I’ve had good success with all of these techniques:

Milestones

When beginning a new project, most people intuitively know that it’s important to split the project into slightly-more-manageable chunks, with each chunk ranging from a couple of weeks to a couple of months worth of work. At the beginning of the project, it’s good to have a kick-off meeting to establish these milestones. It’s OK to be a little vague on how you’ll reach them, the most important thing is to keep checking in after each milestone so as to benefit from everyone’s enhanced understanding of the project, and to make sure that the project’s milestones are still (roughly) the same size as initially believed.

Time Estimates

We programmers absolutely detest estimates because we know they will be wrong and we know they will be used against us. It’s OK that they’re wrong because, by definition, they’re based on a handful of unknowns. It’s also OK that they’re used against us because our jobs are pretty cushy and it doesn’t hurt to have the whip cracked every now and again.

So feel free to ask for estimates every time work begins on a new milestone. You should expect a line or two for each major feature along with a rough estimate of how long that feature will take. I usually make an optimistic estimate, then double it. More often than not, this extra time accounts for unseen pitfalls.

User Stories

User stories are brief descriptions of a single piece of functionality within the app. They are useful as a record of important features and should be bite-sized, able to fit on an index card and often accompanied by a little drawing. More importantly, they serve as a bridge between what the client wants and what the programmer has to tell the computer. They are simple enough for you, the client, to knock out in a couple of minutes, but detailed enough for us, the programmers, to sink our teeth into.

For some quick info on user stories, I found these tutorials by Mountain Goat Software and Roman Pichler to be high-quality and succinct. For more information on the entire philosophy of “Agile Project Management”, try this Toptal blog post The Ultimate Introduction To Agile Project Management by Paul Barnes.

Compositions (mock-ups)

This is not an article about why you need a designer because I feel like most clients already understand that, but it bears repeating because you will see enormous productivity gains if you slap a concrete, well-considered design in front of your programmers. Every time we have to make a design decision we have to leave “the zone,” and every time we have to go back and change something because we weren’t provided with the final draft, well, you do the math… I’m not complaining because design is fun, but in my experience, this is the No. 1 source of avoidable, extra billable hours.

Most designers provide compositions, also known as comps, in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, or Sketch. If you are doing it yourself, you can use one of the countless online tools such as Balsamiq or InVision. The comp doesn’t have to have the same colors and styles as the finished product (since these can be easily changed later), but please take extra time to ensure that all UI elements are present and accounted for.

Related: Hire the top 3% of freelance UX designers.

Stand-Up Meetings

Long meetings are sometimes unavoidable, but you really don’t want to overload your programmers or take up more of their time than is necessary. I’ve had clients who seemed to expect me to remember everything that was said during a two-and-a-half hour meeting; they were sorely disappointed. A stand-up meeting is generally limited to 15 minutes, and it’s customary to stand for the duration. The standing aspect is supposed to ensure that everyone is participating, as well as to keep the meeting short.

During stand-ups, everyone goes around in a circle to provide a brief status report, keeping all team members up-to-date on each others’ progress. You can find more about stand ups at ExtremeProgramming.Org. If you all work remotely and don’t want to get everyone on Skype every day, you could try a fun tool such as 15Fiveas an alternative to stand-ups. 15Five lets team members provide their input whenever it’s convenient for them, and it will prompt them with survey questions to tease out more in-depth responses.

Ticketing system

While anyone can maintain a system of sticky notes and Google Docs (with everyone’s tasks highlighted in different colors), it’s really not necessary; plenty of people have tried to solve this problem for you. Basecamp and Trello are famed for their ease-of-use, while Pivotal tries to encapsulate the whole “agile” philosophy into a very slick package. Whatever your choice, a good ticketing system will allow you, at minimum, to:

• create tasks
• assign priority and due date
• link tasks and subtasks
• assign different resolutions such as “completed” or “failed testing”
• show all tasks assigned to a certain user

When a project manager shows you 40 bright red top-priority tickets all due on the same day, you will truly understand the value of this bird’s-eye view of the project.

You don’t have to use sticky notes to track open bugs.

Source control

You may never even look at the code in your project’s version control system, but source control (or versioning) is one of the most important tools at our disposal, the greatest backup system imaginable.

Most modern projects use Git, although sometimes you’ll run into Subversion (SVN) when working on projects that have been around for a while. Github allows you to host unlimited public repositories for free (plus, it contains most of the world’s open-source projects), while Bitbucket allows you to host unlimited private repositories and is therefore the favored choice for commercial projects.

Whichever version control system you choose, it stores our code remotely in case anything happens, plus tracks each time we “commit” code to it while forcing us to write a little message describing what we were working on. This prevents different developers from overwriting each other’s code, it lets us see all changes that were made over a given time period, and it lets us create new code branches to store features that aren’t going live right away. It even has a command called “blame” that shows who was responsible for a given line of code, and when it was committed.

Source control is the greatest.

Test-driven development

This is a relatively expensive practice, which means it’s not frequently employed in projects where the budget is limited to a couple of freelancers. So you, as a start up, shouldn’t feel too bad for not doing this, but I must dangle the idea in front of you because it provides the ultimate defense against bugs. Basically, your programmers spend additional precious hours writing tests (small code blocks) that ensure certain parts of the app behave in specific, predictable and repeatable ways. For example, I might write a test asserting that when the “login” button is clicked, a popup opens with a username field in it.

The beauty of tests is that once I’ve written them, I can run them all with a single command. If I have 200 tests written, I can run them after releasing a new version of the app to make sure that no bugs have been introduced into any of those 200 features. It’s not perfect, but it’s as close as we can get to guaranteeing bug-free (bug-lite, at least) apps.

Wrap-up

That’s about all I know about project management. I’m not sure how much of this would pass muster over at the Project Management Institute, but it’s all stuff that I’ve picked up by working on web projects over the course of the last decade. Of course, I recommend that you hire someone in order to get the benefit of his or her experience, but I hope you find this information helpful even if that’s not something that you’re able to do. You will be the ultimate authority on this project, so the more you understand about its inner workings, the more likely you are to lead it to victory.

The original article was written by ETHAN JAMES - FREELANCE SOFTWARE ENGINEER @ TOPTAL and can be read here.

Be A New Age Entrepreneur - Follow Your Passion

The Best Organizations Are Moving Towards Greater Employee Empowerment

Global economy is evolving , new business models are emerging and this all is leading towards a new order of new age employee psychology. This is the time when it is becoming increasingly difficult to hire and retain the best talent. The sought after human resource is not easily available, expect the difficulty of hiring & retaining the best talent to increase with time. The best organizations realize this and are moving towards greater employee empowerment and employee friendly work place policies and culture

The Present Day Human Resource Practices Will No Longer Be Effective

All this brings us to a juncture where the freedom of human spirit to go after their passion and dreams will be far more evident than it has ever been. This poses new challenges to the present day businesses to adjust their systems to the new reality or they will be shocked to suddenly wake up in the new age reality , where the present day human resource practices will no longer be effective and may spell doom to the sleeping giants , who fail to make note of the changing world order

The Dilemma Faced By The Corporate Employees

Lets have a look at the 20% performers from the 80:20 rule of the Pareto Analysis , which means that the 20% employees(read leaders) in any present day corporate carry the burden of the balance 80% employees(read passive & even including counter productive passengers) in that corporate. This also explains the essence of the dilemma faced by the corporate employees who despite having the best intent and skills either are not provided with the necessary resources or are subjected to harsh situations , because of the vested interests of the few, who misuse their chair to serve their vested interests at the cost of the organization, in sharp contravention to the business objectives, of the organizations ,which they are supposed to serve, which are relegated to the last rung of the priority ladder.

Most Employees Get A Raw Deal

Most organizations fail to check this unhealthy trend leading to the exodus of good talented employees ,or even if they continue they are made to perform at a level which is far below their potential, thus the speed & effectiveness of the business gets considerably reduced, and the year on growth rates of such corporate giants are compromised to the extent that either these businesses fail in the long run or they just provide growth to the business owners and the few with vested interests and powers , but the most employees get a raw deal comprising exploitation, instability and a sense of worthlessness. These companies are left with the passengers which find difficult to run the show and they contemplate move to another express organization where the same story is repeated. This is a bitter truth of the corporate life , which even the most successful corporate executives have been subjected to at least a few times during their corporate life in the past. They are able to surmount these unfavorable harsh situations only by sheer application of their resilience & emotional intelligence and by putting in their best energies to manage their survival at the cost of their core job objectives.

Most People Still Believe That Entrepreneurship Is Not For Them

The question that arises here is  why do these star performers continue in their jobs despite such difficult and unfavorable situation. These reasons have a great deal of truth and the responsibility is highly diffused, so it becomes every body's responsibility, these include

1. Despite resentment and frustration, they continue in their jobs because they have seen their colleagues moving out of the line and got into a worse situation
2. The action plan is not clear to them , in terms of what they are going to do once they step out of the comfort zone of their monthly salaries
3. The belief that they are made to grow with, through their early childhood, that they are good enough only to secure good grades and work as an employee for another employer. This is the result of our education system which is designed to churn out best and extra ordinary employees

These reasons have had such a great impact on the psyche that despite the talk of the start ups and entrepreneurship, most people still believe that entrepreneurship is not for them

Follow Your Passion- Be An Entrepreneur

This gives us the break up of the working population into various categories and out of these categories , there is the one where the people realize that the time has come for them to be their own boss as the job doesn't hold the promise it used to once hold and they wish to follow their passion which needs them to hang up. They want to take some time to plan quitting their job but they are not too sure of what exactly do they wish to pursue next.  

What ever may be the constraints that you see as barriers between you and your dream business, we can be the bridge to take you to your entrepreneurship dream land. If you feel that your passion is bigger than your dreams , you may contact us at admin@successnsynergy.com and we shall work closely with you to work out the best solutions matching your skills , interests and expertise.

Sanjay Sharma

Bootstrapped: Building A Remote Company

If you ask me, working remotely rocks. I’m currently writing from a small beach bar located on a remote island in southern Thailand. Looking up from my laptop, I see nothing but the endless ocean and its crystal clear blue waters. I’ll be enjoying this morning undisturbed and focused on my work because the rest of the team hasn’t even gotten up yet. Time zones work out really well for distributed teams.

My colleague Thomas recently talked to 11 thought leaders in project management about the impact of remote work on a company; some scrum experts argued that distributed teams could work together effectively while others came out strongly against it.

I understand the concerns; you can’t just open up the office doors and release everyone into the wild. It’s not guaranteed that you’ll end up with a thriving business. Marissa Mayer at Yahoo famously axed remote work in 2013 after feeling that some employees abused it.

So how does a tech company get this working remote thing right? Read on. The following is based on our story at Planio and how we made it work.

Enter Planio, my remote company

There are a number of things which motivated me to start my current company. Breaking away from client work while retaining all the benefits of being a location independent freelancer was one of them.

In 2009, I was sitting in the shadow of a cypress grove situated in a beautiful Mediterranean-style garden overlooking the rolling hills of Tuscany, working hard on a new side project of mine: Planio.

It’s a project management tool for people like me: developers. Planio helps make client projects more organized and transparent all while reducing the number of tools and platforms needed to do the job. Planio is based on open-source Redmine (an open source Ruby on Rails-based software project), which I’ve used remotely with my own clients since its very beginnings. So, in a way, remote work is already in Planio’s DNA.

Fast forward to today, and my small side project has grown into a real company. We’re a team of 10 now, serving more than 1,500 businesses worldwide. We have an office in Berlin, but many of us work remotely.

In this article, I’ll dig into the principles, tools and lessons that have helped us along the way. After reading it, I hope you’ll be able to architect your software company so it’s remote-friendly right from the start.

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.” - Linus Torvalds

Every Thursday we have an all-hands conference call where we discuss what we did the previous week and what’s coming up next.

At the beginning, we spent a lot of time discussing ideas before deciding on what to do, but we found that it’s a lot harder when some team members are on a poor quality telephone line and you can’t see them.

Now, we often just “build the thing” and then discuss it – we create a working prototype with a few core ideas and then discuss that. For instance, we recently hit some performance issues with our hosted Git repositories. Instead of discussing and analyzing all the possible ways in which we could potentially save a few milliseconds here and there with every request, my colleague, Holger, just built out his suggested improvements in a proof-of-concept on a staging server to which we directed some of our traffic. It turned out well and these ideas are going into production.

This method focuses everyone’s minds on action rather than talk. The time invested in writing code is paid back by less time spent talking in circles.

Use Text Communication

Real-time communication punishes clarity. Instinctively calling a colleague when you need something is very easy, but it’s not always your best course of action. I can’t remember the number of times I’ve started writing an email or a Planio ticket for a problem only to solve it myself just while writing it down.

Zach Holman, one of the first engineering hires at GitHub, agrees: “Text is explicit. By forcing communication through a textual medium, you’re forcing people to better formulate their ideas.”

Text communication also makes you more respectful of each other’s time, especially when you’re living multiple time zones away. Immediate communication can be disruptive; the person might be in the middle of figuring out why the last deployment went wrong. With an email, s/he should be able to consider your write-up at a more convenient time.

Be as Transparent as Possible

Time spent worrying about office politics isn’t conducive to shipping working software, and transparency promotes trust. It’s no coincidence that many remote-by-design companies, such as Buffer, have radical transparency. In the case of Buffer, it shares revenue information and the salaries of all its employees.

Automattic, the company behind Wordpress.com, also emphasizes transparency. In his book, The Year Without Pants, Scott Berkun shares his experience working remotely for Automattic, and that all decisions and discussions are internally available to employees in its P2 discussion platform as part of its emphasis on transparency.

The chat feature in Planio works in a similar way. Discussions are open for everyone to see and chat logs are linked automatically from the issues discussed so nobody is left out; even new hires can read up on what previous decisions were made and why. When I started building the chat feature, I considered adding a feature for chatting privately with others, but when we discussed it as a team, we ended up leaving it out because we wanted to keep team communication as transparent as possible.

I think transparency is critical for remote teams. For example, imagine you’ve just joined a team of remote developers. Perhaps you’ve never met your new colleagues. You don’t know the unspoken rules of behavior. You might be worried about whether you’re doing a good job. Are your teammates actually being sarcastic or do they really mean their compliments? Is everyone privately discussing how good of an engineer you are?

Digitalize Your Systems

We choose our services based on what they offer by way of online platforms, from telephone providers to banks (many of them will even offer a small financial incentive for going paperless, plus it’s great for the environment, too). I’m lucky to have a lawyer and an accountant for Planio who are comfortable sending emails or messages with Google Hangouts instead of summoning me to their offices. (I strongly recommend you ask about this at the first meeting.) Bonus points for getting them to sign up with your project management tool and become a part of your team!

We’ve even digitized our postal mail; at Planio, we use a service called Dropscan that receives our letters, scans them and forwards the important ones to the appropriate person. You don’t want to your friend to pick up and read them out over Skype. If you cannot find a mail-scanning provider for your city or country, some coworking spaces offer virtual memberships to maintain a physical mailing address while you’re away.

For those companies sending out mail, there are services available so that you never have to visit a post office again. We use a German printing company with an API that automatically sends a letter along with stickers to each new paying Planio customer. It’s something people love, and we don’t have to print and mail a thing. International alternatives include Lob and Try Paper.

Should You Have a Digital Presence Mandated?

In a co-working space on the tropical island of Koh Lanta, Thailand, I noticed that someone in a support role for a major e-commerce platform was constantly on a live video feed with the rest of the team. Sqwiggle offers a similar “presence” functionality for remote teams.

I suppose mandating that all employees are on video while working might be based out of a fear that employees abuse remote work arrangements. In my experience, that’s not the case. At the tropical co-working space, there’s a certain urgency in the air, despite the laid-back clothes and coconut drinks. People are quietly focused on their laptops; it’s as if they want to make sure remote work delivers results, so they can stay out of a fixed office for good.

We found that we don’t need a digital presence because we have a great level of trust among everyone on the team. I also think that it’s paramount to respect everyone’s privacy. If your company is moving from an all-on-site setting to remote work, a digital presence might help the more anxious managers to overcome any trust issues.

Choose Bootstrapping over Venture Capital

Most venture capitalists are looking for outsized returns, so they’ll prefer an intense short burst of 12-months’ work from a team over a more sustainable pace. Front App, a startup funded by the Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator, rented a house in the Bay area for their three-month stint in the Y Combinator accelerator program. The goal is to optimize for evaluating a business idea quickly.

Given the outsized return mindset, you may have a hard time convincing a venture capitalist to fund you when you’re working from a beach in Cambodia. This is why many venture-backed startups (such as Buffer or Treehouse) that use remote work built leverage first. Buffer was profitable before taking on investment while Ryan Carson, the founder of Treehouse, had already proven himself with a previous startup.

Here’s a better way than venture capitalism: bootstrapping. It means financing your company with revenue from initial customers. In my opinion, it’s by far the superior approach because it enables you to build your company on your own terms and remain in control. However, it often requires working two jobs or freelancing on the side while you get your company started. It took me about two years working on both Planio and client projects (via my software development agency LAUNCH/CO) to get going, but it was well worth it.

Bootstrapping also forces you to build a business that generates revenue from the very beginning, which I find much healthier. Hint: Building a B2B SaaS makes this much easier than creating a consumer app because businesses are far more willing to pay monthly subscriptions if it adds value. You have to sell a lot of consumer iPhone apps at $0.99 to cover monthly payroll for even the smallest of teams.

Bootstrapping forces you to build a business that generates revenue from the very beginning.

Price your Products Strategically

One of our first clients was a massive technology company with billions in annual revenue. Obviously, I was delighted that they’d choose us over much bigger, more established competitors. They’re still a happy customer, but we have moved away from very large enterprise accounts; I’ve found that they require a lot of hand-holding and in-person meetings before they’ll become a customer.

As Jason Lemkin points out in his article on scaling customer success for SaaS, when you have big enterprise accounts, someone will have to get on a jet to visit them twice a year. If you’re a small company of two or three people, that person is going to be you, the CEO, the CMO and the CSO all rolled into one overworked hamster.

Keeping your pricing model within the rough bounds of a $49/$99/$249 model as suggested by developer-turned-entrepreneur Patrick McKenzie means avoiding having to hire an enterprise sales team, and having to earn the massive amount of capital required for it. You, the customer, don’t expect the CEO to pop in at Christmas with a box of chocolates when you’re paying $249 a month.

Build on Open Source

A venture-backed business based on proprietary software is great when your play is a “Winner Takes All” game and own the market. When you’re a bootstrapped company, open source software can give you reach and leverage you could never have achieved, otherwise.

There’s precedence of profitable tech companies building a business around open source software; Basecamp famously open-sourced Rails, guaranteeing themselves a supply of highly qualified engineers for the rest of eternity. GitHub has become a unicorn, leveraging the open source project Git that Linus Torvalds started to manage the Linux kernel sources. Our friends at Travis-CI started as an open source project, ran a crowdfunding campaign and then turned it into a remote-focused bootstrapped business (which also campaigns for diversity in tech through its foundation).

Planio is based on Redmine and we contribute many of our features and improvements back to the community. This works great in multiple ways; our contributions and engagement in the community help advance the open source project and Planio gets exposure to potential new customers. For us, it’s the most authentic way to build a brand; by showing our code and taking part in open technical discussions, we can demonstrate that we know our stuff!

Hire Proven Professionals

Hiring a fleet of interns every year makes sense only if you’re intent on scaling up your employee count as soon as you hit the next round of funding.

Outsourcing tasks is easy if it’s copy-and-paste, but you don’t want to outsource your DevOps to someone with the lowest hourly rate when you have thousands of customers relying on your servers. You’ll want proven professionals, such as those at Toptal.

Matt Mullenweg, the founder of the popular open-source blogging platform WordPress, stated that by focusing on quality means that his company, Automattic, predominantly hires experienced candidates who can handle the unstructured working environment of a remote company.

That means it “auditions” candidates by paying them to work on a project for several weeks, then hire them based on performance. Automattic has found this method is far more effective in finding the right candidates than traditional CVs and cover letters.

Emphasize Quality of Life

Work takes up a massive amount of our time, year in and year out. It should not be something that you just do to be done with; you’d probably end up wasting a huge chunk of your life. The best source of motivation and the main ingredient for great results is a work environment that’s inspiring, enjoyable and fun. Travelling, learning and engaging with people from different cultures makes work feel less of a sacrifice or necessary evil (at least in my life) than when working a nine-to-five office job.

Work takes up a massive amount of our time, year in and year out. It should not be something that you just do to be done with.

It’s not just about travelling the world, though, there’s the personal freedom aspect. Parents get to spend more time with their kids, thanks to avoiding a two-hour commute. You don’t have to live in Silicon Valley to earn San Francisco wages. Maybe, your significant other gets a great job opportunity abroad, too. You’re not faced with the painful choice between staying at your job and continuing your career or becoming a “trailing spouse” with limited career options.

At Planio, even though many of us work remotely, we all try to meet up at least once a year in a fun location. Last year, we spent a few weeks of summer in Barcelona, and several of us met here in Koh Lanta, this year. I’m still looking for ideas for the next destination, so let me know if you have any travel tips!

What tools, ideas or techniques have you found that make working remotely easier and more effective? Leave a comment below.

The original article was written by  JAN SCHULZ-HOFEN - FOUNDER & CEO @ PLANIO and can be read here.

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