Introductions
Willow Brugh: Tell me, who are you?
Kav: Kav Latiolais
Willow: What are you into? What sorts of things do you do?
Kav: S lot of stuff. I do a lot of consulting around [inaudible 00:20] start up, customer development, design competing, a little bit of what they call liberating structure, which is a really cool thing, you might want to talk to the folks who created that at some point. That would probably be good. I’ve facilitated a lot of Start-up Weekends.
Willow: How did you get into facilitating Start-up Weekends?
Kav: It was interesting case. I had a buddy who was going to go to the one in Portland and I was at Microsoft and he’s, “You should come, it’ll be fun.” I agreed to go with him and we ended up taking the train down with the CEO, at the time, who was the facilitator for our event. This was back when they were first getting things off the ground.
I went to an event in Portland and I had a really amazing experience. I had a team of six or seven people. They just did a really amazing amount of work in two days. There were definitely arguments about stuff, but we were, in general, pretty well organized.
It felt like, a little bit like night and day compared to my day job where just planning to get the amount of work done, that we had gotten done over the weekend would have taken at least three days.
I was really excited about that. Mark, who was the facilitator, also the CEO, said, “Dude, I really liked how you ran your team, you did a really great job. Can you coach the next event and help some of these teams with their project management stuff?” I started coaching at different events.
I coached the one in Seattle, the weekend after the one I did in Portland. Probably, two months later, I coached another one and then I think I coached one more. Then, they asked me to go start facilitating, or to organize one and then start facilitating because they want you to organize one first.
I organized one at Microsoft in Redmond. Next I actually ended up flying out as the backup facilitator. It was really like a technical facilitator, that event I did in Tel Aviv, a joint Israeli Palestinian event. They had a facilitator already, but the budget had money to bring out a technical expert, so I came out then.
I ended up doing a lot of the facilitation there. The guy who was their facilitator was a great guy. He just didn’t have the relationship with a lot of the Palestinian folks I did, because I spent a few days in Ramallah, while working on them on some stuff.
• Hackathons
Willow: Cool. Tell me what you think about hack-a-tons.
Kav: It’s an interesting model, and it’s more talking about start-up weekend specifically, and its relationship to hack-a-thons. I grew up in [inaudible 03:24] culture as most developers my age did, where a lot of people got into coding was to scratch their own itch. I got into programming, because I was really frustrated with a video game, I was playing and I wanted to make it easier, which is not at all how programming works but I was 12-years-old then.
We grew up writing apps, to entertain ourselves, and to make our lives easier. The hack-a-ton model has really grown out of that, the idea of I want to build a utility for this or I want to build a framework that does that, because it’s a problem I keep running into and I don’t think anyone has really solved this problem.
It used to be that hack-a-tons were very much like get some pizza, get a bunch of people together and we’re just going to geek out on scratching our own itch. That was fun. I did maybe one, maybe two of those. Sometimes they’re around a particular technology, so it was come to this hack-a-ton on this new technology. It’s sort of an experience, like you take a course on doing that thing.
Interestingly, I never really got into that. I think, part of it is because the crowd that gets really into that, is into solving technical problems for their own sake. Then, I think the other interesting historical world is the business plan competition. The business plan competition, being the place where as someone who has got an idea for business, you sit around for a month or whatever and write up your business plan.
It’s this 1,500 page monstrosity full of made-up shit, and then in the business plan competition, you go up in front of an audience, pitch all this made up stuff that you’ve got and then everyone decides who’s idea seems like it’s most realistic, or most likely to make money, or whatever and they give you a reward. A lot of Start up Weekend is about bringing those two things together, to get rid of the lame elements of both.
Let’s build a product that’s focused on an actual business, and let’s learn about what that business might actually look like, and then from the business side let’s make sure we’re actually validating real business concepts, instead of making shit up. I think, as start-up weekend and similar events have matured, they focus more and more on really weeding out the stuff that doesn’t make any sense.
I think I’ve seen that with a lot of other stuff around, civic hack-a-tons will follow a very similar model, where they’re very much focused on the end-user or end customer, rather than on a programmer scratching their itch. I think, an interesting thing is in the field in general, of software in particular. Although I think technology generally could be stated this way, we’ve reached a point where scratching your own itch is no longer sufficient to build a business.
I think, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, sure. MS-DOS was great, because it helped Bill Gates do this thing, and then he sold it, because everyone else wanted to do that thing too. Any solution to a problem was an awesome solution, whereas know there are already a million solutions out there, so you’ve got to be building something pretty awesome.
Willow: Yeah, I haven’t thought of it that way.
Kav: And with that, you have to actually look at the human beings you’re building for, and I think that is a lot of what was being changed in the world of hack-a-thons, in the last few years.
What do you think the purpose of a hack-a-thon is?
Kav: The purpose of the traditional hack-a-thon, is like sword sharpening and skill practicing. It’s really all about doing your katas, so to speak. Getting better at the stuff you do, or learning something new, or solving a problem that has been on your list forever, and you just haven’t gotten around to it.
It’s very easy, as a developer, to get an itch for something where you’re like, “I have this idea. I want to work on it.” But without people around you who are also working it’s hard to motivate yourself.
I think more and more, we’re seeing really interesting stuff, where these hack-a-thons are turning into business generators of one kind or another. I don’t think probably, five years ago, people were asking the question when they left start-up weekend or a hack-a-thon like event.
I don’t think they were asking the question “How can I make every day of my life look like this?” Whereas I think more and more people are asking that.
More and more young people are saying, “I want to work on something that’s fulfilling. I want to work on something that’s inspiring. I want to work on the kind of thing that I would volunteer my weekend to work on. Not because I intend to volunteer all my weekends to work on that, but because I want to be that happy about it.” I think that’s really one of the most important things that has changed.
I don’t think a lot of actual companies come out of start-up weekend and I don’t think that the projects people work on necessarily continue on, but I do think their appetite for that kind of work really gets blown up.
It’s creative and I think once that appetite, for that kind of work, has been created it’s hard to turn it off, which means these people are now demanding work environments that are more empowering, and allow them to work faster in smaller groups, more effectively, on interesting problems.
Historically in the large corporate environment there’s a certain amount of, “Well this is the way it has to be, because this is the way it has always been, and there is no other way.” I think, more and more you’re hearing in the corporate environment, “This is the way it has to be for us, because of this concern and this concern and this concern.”
I think the large corporate development cycle, is very much becoming not something that people are successfully able to argue is the right way, but they’re now arguing it’s the right way for them because of some special extenuating circumstances. Now, of course, everyone has special extenuating circumstances which makes them not all that special.
What do the projects look like for your events?
Kav: They’re all over the place, depending on what part of the world you’re in. I think, in general, for start-up weekend, it’s a lot of proto-businesses. At the beginning of the weekend, they often look like, “Hey I have an itch, I want to scratch around, not a technology problem I have”, like, “Oh my market is really good” by converting capital letters to lower case letters.
“Every time we go to a bar, it’s really annoying to wait in a long line at the bar, and it’s hard to get a drink, so I want an app to help do that. Tonight’s thing is over the course of the weekend, that office goes away right, because if you actually invested in the problem of “there’s always a line at the bar, it’s hard for me to get a drink”, there’s no business in solving that problem because the person who would pay to have that problem solved and that’s the bar.
That’s not a problem for them. They’re probably partnered or grouped with each other. They don’t give a shit if you have to wait.
In fact, optimally, someone is always about to wait or just waiting.
They start out quite often, like personal, itch scratching and then they tend to turn, if the folks actually do the work over the weekend, they tend to turn into concepts that make significantly more sense as a business.
There are some perennial favorites. We kind of joke, and this is a horrible thing to admit to, but we kind of joke that there should be a start-up weekend drinking game, where you drink every time, someone pitches and idea targeting affluent, young, white men.
Because every one that you go to, it’s like, “I want to build a dating site, it’s hard to meet women.” Well building a dating site is not going to solve that. “I want to build an app that makes it easier for deciding which restaurant to go to. I want to build an app that will help me find cool plans.” I think there’s a lot of good stuff there. Quite often [inaudible 12:36] at a restaurant.
Willow: Interesting.
Kav: A lot of it is micro-optimization of middle class to upper middle class white, young men.
Willow: I remember that, from one of the ones I was at.
Kav: Yeah, the dating app,for example, is exactly that. I understand it. Part of it is because you’ve got a weekend, you’re not going to really get too crazy about anything real. One of the one’s on my list, is I want an app where I can text it that I’m about to start drinking, and it will text me every hour, to ask me if I’ve had water recently, or to remind me to eat.
Then when I’m safe at home I text it, “I’m home, stop bothering me about water and stuff.”
That’s not a universal problem, the fact that I drink too much while not paying attention and forget to drink water and forget to eat. I don’t see that as a hit, but it would be an entertaining thing to build over a weekend.
I think hack-a-thons still keep to their roots a little bit in that, even though people are pretending to thinking about businesses, and pretending to be thinking about customers that are not themselves, I make a lot of info [inaudible 14:05]
What ends up happening to some of the projects after the event?
Kav: Franck will give you a bunch of statistics that he collected at the start-up weekend offices, to hear the actual numbers of how many teams continue on, how many projects continue on. I’m not certain I believe those numbers, but it would be worth getting them.
I think a lot of times, and I have no quantitative data, but from observation and my qualitative experience of it, a lot of the times, the teams keep working on the projects they’re working on. Particular teams that either placed, or really executed well over the weekend, they have a tendency to continue to execute well.
Their progress slows to almost nothing though, unfortunately, because they don’t devote enough time to it, and the people who are most valuable on those teams, are the people who are most over-committed already.
Another thing, there is it’s difficult for a start-up weekend project to turn into a real business, because the teams are quite often five to six people and investors are not going to give money for a founding team of five. Invariably also you pick each other because you met on Friday night. There are team personality and dynamics issues. There are competence issues with some of the people in the group.
Navigating that particular “Tetris piece” is quite often not something people succeed at. I think the ones that do really do a great job though.
The teams that are able to say, “Look dude, you didn’t help over the weekend, you were kind of a pain in the ass then. While you are the person with the most available free time, to be working on this, none of the rest of us have any time. There’s a reason for that, and we don’t need you, so goodbye.” I think teams that effectively say that, are the ones that can kick ass.
What are the attendees of your events like and what do they get out of the event?
Kav: I think, a lot of what they get out of the event, generally before I talk about the specific categories, in general, a lot of them meet people they want to work with in the future. A lot of it is a power networking thing. One of my favorite app pitches that you see time and time again at start-up weekend, is an app to help you more effectively network with people at events so you can make better connections.
If you look at start-up weekend, that’s exactly what it is. Everyone who is on the team, together, builds a pretty good bond. I’m definitely still in contact with all of the people from my first start-up weekend team, and I’m in regular contact with most of the people I’ve ever worked with at a start-up weekend on anything.
Some, more so than others, but, in general, we all keep in touch and we’re pretty close because of that shared pressure, shared past, shared struggle, shared striving towards the goal.
I think the networking or community building aspects of it are often undervalued. In terms of building a successful technology community, start-up community, any of these things. Like the value of having a group of people who worked together, even for just a few days, and know what each other are good at and bad at, and excited about, and not excited about, and how everyone responds to stress.
Do you become really mean? Do you over communicate? Do you under communicate? I think that’s really valuable.
As opportunities arise, we now have a network of people, who are well-connected to each other, but also who really, truly understand each other’s capabilities, and help move the right people in the right place at the right time.
I think, specifically, shape of attendees…We have three different attendee types at Start-up Weekend, traditionally, software developers, designers, and business people.
Business people is a bit of a catchall, and what I want each to get out of the event, I have three separate goals for each of those groups.
For me, [inaudible 19:01] Start-up Weekend experiences, one where you actually learn all of the lessons, even though they don’t apply or they’re not, specifically, the one lesson I want you to have learned for your role.
If you come in there and you’re a developer, I want you to learn just how fast you can build stuff, and how you could take an idea from zero to a working, awesome application in two days, because I think a lot of developers work in environments where they’re restricted, or with tools where they’re restricted, and they just don’t understand how fast they can actually build something.
You want the business people to understand that; it’s not their ideas that matter, and that to be successful in business, is not about you being really smart, or you having really good ideas. It has everything to do with your humility, and your ability to listen to your customers, and learn from them, effectively.
For designers, I want them to understand that not all the work that they could possibly do in the world is to spec. Not everything is agency work. They don’t have to act like they’re a slave to someone else’s vision.
Quite often, it’s hard to get designers to come to Start-up Weekend because they perceive it as an event where they’re going to go and work for someone else for free all weekend.
As developers, we don’t have that perspective at all. Developers see it as an opportunity to build something that they own that’s theirs. I want designers to gain that perspective as well .
Now, whether people learn those lessons or not, whether they take that away…Sometimes they learn what you want to teach them, and sometimes they have a more important lesson to learn.
Do you have a favorite story?
Kav: Well, my very favorite story. This is the big, “Why do I do this? Why is it exciting to me?” At a fundamental level actually it did happen at that first Start-up Weekend in Tel Aviv.
Part of it was, “I want to facilitate a lot more”, and probably why I’ve gone all over the world doing it now. I was in Ramallah giving a talk on using Visual Studio for startups because I was on the Visual Studio team at the time.
It was probably my fifth or sixth talk of the day, which was crazy because I had been told I was just going to go meet with some people, and shake some hands, and informally chat with a few people, and every company that we went to, there were like a million people there.
As a result, by the end of talking to a million people, I developed this pattern of questions that I would ask everyone in the audience, as they were coming up and thanking me for the talk.
I’d say, “What idea are you going to pitch at Start-up Weekend. Are you going to go? What idea are you going to pitch”?
There was this girl, who I asked, “Are you going to go to Start-up Weekend?” She said, “Yeah, maybe. Some of my friends are going, but I’m not really sure whether I want to.” I said, “Well, what idea are you going to pitch”? She was like, “Well, I have an idea, but it’s not any good. It’s a really bad idea.”
I’m like, “You should pitch it anyway.” She said, “Ah, you know, I don’t know. Like, it’s really not a good idea.” I said, “It doesn’t matter. Most of the ideas are going to be bad ideas. Just pitch it anyway. I’m sure it’ll be fine. It’s a really great experience to do it, so you should definitely come, and definitely pitch.”
She was like, “Well, maybe I’ll come.” Fast forward a few days. I’m at the start-up weekend, and I see that she’s there so I’m like, “All right. Are you excited to pitch your idea? You know how to take care of all that?”
She was like, “Well, no. I’m not going to pitch my idea. I definitely not. I came. I’ve gone that far. I’ve done that thing, but I’m not going to pitch”. I’m like, “Well, you should, even just for the practice of standing in front of a room full of potentially, honestly, hostile strangers.”
It’s really character building. I do hate to say it, but it is character building. It helps you get better at doing that again, and again, even if you just go up there and, basically, talk nonsense for a minute, and it’s only a minute. At Start-up Weekend the initial idea pitch is only a minute.
You can endure anything horrifying for a minute. I tried to sell her a few times, as people were networking, and she was like, “No. I’m not going to do it.” I was like, “All right, fine.” We go up and I look at the line, and she’s definitely not in the line of people pitching. They pitch. There are some good ones.
There are some really bad ones, including one by this guy. He was not particularly good, but he was like already bragging about it, honestly.
She gets up on stage because we let people go on after the beginning. She gets onstage, and pitches her idea. It’s actually a pretty good idea.
A social network thing, for people with kids who are trying to find…I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I think it was find activities for the kids. I’m not quite sure. She pitched her idea, and then everybody went to vote. They all vote. Her idea gets picked it turns out.
It comes to team recruiting time, and I’m just walking the room keeping an eye on everything. People are recruiting their teams, and I see that she is standing there, kind of by herself looking a little upset. I walk up to her, and I’m like, “Hey. What’s going on”?
She says, “Well, now, no one wants to work with me because I’m Palestinian. All the Israeli people are ignoring me.” The problem here is that, when you’re recruiting teams on start-up weekend you have to hustle.
It’s not something you can just expect people to come join your team. You’ve got to be like, “Hey, what do you do? You should be on my team. Hey, what do you do? You should be on my team.”
She really wasn’t doing that. She was standing back, and she was really saying like, “Oh, this is bs. Nobody wants to be on my team. They just voted for it because they were trying to be nice, but now they hate me.”
We took her around, and we talked to a few different folks who hadn’t found a team yet, and we got her a team of like four or five people who were decent, but one of the people was this arrogant, egotistical guy whose idea, of course,didn’t get picked, and let them go.
They were working, and I went to check in on them a few hours later, and they were working on the arrogant guy’s idea. He had taken over her team.
I was like, “Huh. This isn’t good,” but that’s part of the learning experience. We gave her a little bit of coaching, but didn’t really directly interfere, and then backed off again.
We found out about an hour later, that she had actually sat down with him within that hour, and said, “Look. Your idea didn’t picked, dude. Mine did. So we’re working on my idea. If you want to work on your idea, you can go do that somewhere else.”
She kicked him out of her team, which was really kind of awesome because she went from being afraid of everyone in the room, to being able to tell somebody, “Look. This isn’t what we’re doing.”
She then recruited some of the folks in Ramallah that hadn’t been able to get the permits to come into Tel Aviv. She recruited them and worked with them over Skype. She got her whole team working pretty solidly on the design page. They built a lot of stuff.
The thing they built was a pretty comprehensive, there was even a lot of crazy animation and stuff. There was a lot of good stuff there. She went and pitched it on Sunday, and did a marvelously great job, and it ended up coming in second or third place for the event. I think second place, and totally deserved it.
There was no like, “Oh, this is a Palestinian girl, we should give a Palestinian a slot on the winning teams.” No. She totally killed it. We finished up the event. We were celebrating and stuff.
We went out into the town, and I bumped into her a little bit later, before she was on her way back, and she said, “I just wanted to say, Thank you. Because before, whenever I wanted to try to do something, there was this voice in my head, or whatever, that would tell me, It’s probably not going to work. You’ll probably fail at it.”
She said, “I just wanted to thank you, because I know that voice is wrong. Like, I’ve seen it now. I did something I didn’t think I could do, and that’s awesome.” She was like, “It’s changed the way I think about what I’m capable of doing.”
Willow: Well, that’s fucking awesome.
Kav: I was like, “Fuck yeah. That is awesome.” I was like, “I want to do more of this.” I want to do more of empowering people, who don’t think that they are going to succeed here, to succeed at these things. Right?
Those are my favorite Start-up Weekends. It’s part of why I like to go to crazy countries that no one in the US has ever heard of. Yeah, it’s cool to a crazy country no one’s ever heard of, but the reason I really like it, is I feel like they’re a lot of people there who get ignored. They get overlooked, I guess. You know?
Willow: Mm-hmm.
Kav: Kind of an underdog nation. As individuals, I don’t know that they always see that, but there’s definitely, always, a little bit of a like, “Well, if we were in the US, this would be so much simpler.”
It’s like, “Guys, you actually have great opportunity here. In the US it’s like being in the middle of the ocean filled with sharks. Every little micro optimization already exists in the US. You have a huge opportunity.”
“Your country is, quite often, just getting mobile devices in everyone’s hands. You could be creating significant businesses that operate in this country or this region, that just wouldn’t be viable stateside.”
• Big Picture
Do you see yourself as a part of a wider movement?
Kav: I would like to. The very deep reason I do a lot of the things that I do, both at work as a part of Start-up Weekend, this is very short version of the phrase is, “I want to end the industrial revolution.”
What I mean by that, is that we’ve created all of these systems around what work is, and the making of things is built on this model of optimization, and consistency, and streamlining, and quantification.
I read a great article the other day. It was something about how Google doesn’t ever want to hire anyone who stands out too much because, of course, if they did, then they would have keep that person forever, because what would happen if that person moved on.
They would lose all the value and, potentially, the things that that person had created would unmaintainable. I just want to get rid of that mindset. I just don’t think that that’s healthy.
Attempting to treat people in a reductive manner, takes away some of our humanity. A big part of the movement that I see myself as a part of, is ending this idea of leadership, as this ivory tower job.
Not ivory tower, because ivory tower is education, but very distant from the front line. I want to bring all of the strategic thinking, all of the leadership to the workers, so that they, as groups, can make the right choices. Maybe that sounds communist.
That’s really what I believe. I believe it’s time for the Protestant Reformation of work. The idea that the boss is the one with smart ideas is ridiculous. I see this time and time again.
I talk to new, cool managers at all these companies. There are people who used to do the work. They used to be software developers. They’ve gotten into a project management, whatever the lead role, and you talk to them about their work.
They’re like, “Yeah. Sometimes, I really love just doing the work, but what I really want to do is influence what work gets done because I have all these ideas, because I’ve been so close to the front lines.”
“I’ve been so close to the customer. I know what the customer needs. I don’t have that strategic scope to make those decisions. So, I’m going to work my tail off so that in 10 years, I can have the reach to control in what direction we move.”
For me, that just seems ridiculous. First of all, by the time you get there, you’re ten years out of date. There’s some other new kid who’s sitting there thinking, “Jesus, we’re executing on a strategy that’s ten years out of date.”
“I’m going to get into the leadership track so that I can reach the point that I can have a say on product strategy.” We need to get into this mode of including everyone more into strategy and leadership. I think, it’s more fulfilling. I think, it’s more effective.
Do you think that hack-a-thons are accomplishing that idea?
Kav: To some extent. I think, they’re showing people what a world where small groups of dedicated individuals with access to the tools to develop strategic insight, what those teams could look like.
I worry a little bit about them, occasionally, being prescriptive. Part of it is we really want to be prescriptive. We’re trying to break another pattern. I do worry about any pattern that’s learned, rather than discovered, as seeming a little forced.
I do think, in general, it’s because it’s exposing people to that way of working. I do think it changes that.
A lot of the hierarchy that exists in organizations today, is about maintaining a perfect picture of what’s going on across the organization. I think, that seems like a valuable thing, when you don’t recognize the cost. Flexibility, you’re paying for. I think hackathons [inaudible 34:22] help teams understand what it would look like, if they weren’t spending so much of their time focused on tracking the work, and would just focus on doing the work, and making sure they’re doing the right work.
Do you have anything else you want to add to it?
Kav: Probably, but I think that’s good. If you think of anything that seems like I [inaudible 34:57] .
Willow: One of the things that’s come up is the difference between…First of hack-a-tons, were in hacker spaces and hacker cons.
Then, you have ones emerging around the same time out of the open source community, and out of businesses that wanted to do work sprints. It seems like the groups that are doing the entrepreneurship are even newer than all that.
How do you feel about the tie-back to roots. This is not a part of the formal interview, but I’d still like to know your input on it. How does this tie into open source or hacker e-source, or whatever else?
Kav: I didn’t mention this in the earlier part, but it’s worth mentioning. A big part of the “seeing how fast you can develop things” comes from leveraging open source platforms, rather than whatever legacy, corporate, proprietary crap their company’s been using.
I think, that the hack-a-ton, is as much as space to explore a business concept that you’re not familiar with, as it is a space to explore technology that you’re not as familiar with. An opportunity to explore different technology stacks in a low-cost way.
I think, people are making smarter decisions, about what they want to use. As a result, I think there are actually two classes of developers these days.
There are developers who are keeping their ear to the ground, in terms of what new tech is coming out, what’s interesting. What frameworks might be worth playing with? Who’s going to make their lives easier?
They’re kind of dialed into the open source community. They’re trying early versions of stuff. They’re giving feedback. They’re submitting pull requests. Sometimes, they’re even really heavily engaged in the community. They’re giving talks on this stuff.
Then, there are developers who are like, they learned to program years ago. They got a job doing .net stuff, java stuff, or whatever. That’s what they do. They don’t see it as their responsibility to be aware of the latest stuff.
Quite often when they do look at the latest stuff, they find a reason why it’s dumb, rather than really being open to the exploration of new technology.
Given the way the open source community has leveraged all that contribution that it has, it’s actually becoming this generational difference in the capabilities of developers.
Developers who are stuck on an old stack, and aren’t investing in learning new stacks, are slow hands. There’s often trade-offs. They’re code is often more stable, but the idea that you can produce anything in a weekend is insane to them.
They just operate on a whole different time scale. Meanwhile, these others that are getting really into those stacks, contributing, see themselves as part of the larger software community, that helps each other build better software are getting faster and faster and faster, and better and better and better.
Willow: I was typing.. It’s OK.
Kav: I think, that ties into a lot of the philosophical arguments around waterfall, agile, and even some of the post-agile stuff. I think, agile software development methodologies are being pretty heavily co-opted by the system, to turn into waterfall.
Big corporations keep modifying agile, so that it works with their business. What works for their business often means, it goes back to being exactly what it wasn’t really meant to do; which is project out how long it would take to develop software.
Two years, in advance and plan out a feature map and all this… It’s just stuff that was… Agile was really meant to support the developer community, and encourage everyone to be more honest with each other. I’ve seen implementations ignore all that.
Meanwhile, the other guys are starting to ask the question, and it’s the question we focus on, [inaudible 39:47] on delivery product. Making no accountability for what product is built, why, is unacceptable.
Just having the customer representative come to my meetings, and tell me what priority the feature is; that works if I’m a waiter. As a responsible software developer, I shouldn’t think of myself as a waiter. I should think of myself as a doctor.
I’m not somebody who takes your order for an application you won’t want, and gives you that application. I’m somebody who diagnoses your problem, and develops the right application through software.
Willow: You’re so great.
Kav: Thanks. I think the more developers think of themselves that way, and the more the community that works on software thinks of themselves that way, the better our software will be, and the better we’ll be at solving the real problems that we have in the world. instead of this stupid, made-up shit.
I do think hack-a-tons help with that a lot, because if you can get people out of the building. If you can get them talking to customers, they begin to understand it. Their vision of what the problem is, is not correct.
Just asking the customer, “Hey, what’s your problem?” is not going to get you a meaningful answer. There’s the apocryphal story, that I’m sure you probably heard. If not from me, then from somebody else about NASA and space pens.
It’s not a true story, but it’s a perfect example of life. You don’t ask people what they want, as a solution. You ask them what they struggles with, and then you design the solution. You’re the designer. The rise of the problem-solving designer, rather than the visual designer or the interaction designer. I think it’s going to be a really interesting goal in the next few years.
Willow: That’s what I’ve got.
Kav: Hopefully, it will replace the stupid scrum master role. Scrum master should not be a job title.
