Building things (teams, products, websites, etc…) isn’t a flawless process. In fact, you’re likely to create your best work when you fail. Failing helps us re-think our approaches and gives us experience to build upon. Having a campaign fail will give you a lot of data to analyze and make decisions with.
You change your underwear right? So why do smelly, unkept processes in your department go unchanged? I think the answer lies in our inherit fear of changing what has worked (or seemingly worked) in lieu of a new process, technique, employee or methodology. The fear of disrupting a current situation is what prevents many people […]
Researching – clarifying – designing – creating – managing
There has been a lot of discussion recently regarding agile marketing. Basically you apply the concepts that have traditionally been for development to your projects and tasks. Rapid prototyping, testing and usage takes precedent over stale processes, spray & pray and stiff design. As an internal marketing department I can say that we have inherently […]
Imagine that you bought a new Ferrari 612 Scaglieti. Your new 6 speed Italian sports a V12 and is capable of reaching a top speed of 199 mph and rests on amply padded 19″ wheels. You just dropped $250,000 on this bad boy to get you from A to B, you know, the things you […]
I recently wrote about planning for software service outages, (I work in the SaaS software space) specifically the emails/message center updates that need to go out for the good, bad and the ugly. But what happens when things are going bad, cats and dogs start getting along and the bottom drawer vodka is about to […]
This is a black hole for organizations sometimes. The messages that get sent before, during and after scheduled or un-scheduled outages are often last minute and not thought out. Also, these messages sometimes get delegated to technical and support staff that can have the tendency to rub people the wrong way. So, marketing types, take […]
With our new plan for 2011 we are really focusing on breaking up working into small, digestible chunks. Ideally we’ll complete quick “sprints” of work in two week blocks. Marketing depts. have the problem of running projects long, so I’m hoping this historically development approach can reap dividends for us. We have mapped out 3 […]
Our project creation/management methods were in need of an overhaul recently so the whiteboard was cleaned off and a map began to emerge. For me, I like to keep the project scope short and simple with tasks beneath for completion by the team. Naming conventions can get carried away sometimes, so for us we stuck […]
This is just a quick though that was bolstered today by a post I read on Fast Company . The thought that business software has to ignore consumer “level” features and usage is ludicrous. Making something easy-to-use and actually functional should outweigh endless configuration and confusing interfaces. Consumer software (mint, facebook, twitter) focus on the […]