Being at the right place at the right time. Opening the door even thought you are not sure what is on the other side.
Sometimes you are lucky and sometimes you are really lucky. At some point during your very early years, dad walked into the apartment with what looked like a Singer sawing machine. It was not a sawing machine, but a computer. In fact, it was an Osborne-1. It was for sure a lot more mobile than the Control Data punch cards computers he spent his days with. And he brought it home. Best.Toy.Ever.
It must have been at some point between 1981 and 1983. Your memory is not exact on the year, but it does not matter. This was before you saved enough money for an Atari 800XL, that happy moment was 1985. But we digress, the Osborne-1 stood on the dinner table in the living room and was the coolest thing you ever saw. The keyboard opened from the bottom of the machine and it wad a tiny green screen. Way to get a pre-teen kid excited.
For some reason you think there was a game in there which was all the reason to learn how to operate the mobile computer. With rudimentary soap opera English at best and no typing skills yet loads of pre-teen time on your hands you still remember the excitement of getting the game to work (was it pong?) and the feeling of joy at figuring things out yourself.
Not much has changed. Building new things (teams, programs, products, solutions) and figuring things out, even the hard way, is, to this day, as exciting as getting that Osborne-1 to play a game.
If you have a modest home on a beautiful lake, why not put a full size transformer on your front lawn? Sometimes, you have to prioritize and sometimes you just go for it.
The Deutsche Bahn (DB, the German train company) is running a campaign to increase the public’s perception that they are a “green company.” They advertise 150 new and specific actions around climate and nature protection as well as resources and noise protection. Trains are certainly a great environmental friendly mean of transportation.
But is it that green?
A few weeks back yours truly tried really hard to travel from Berlin to two different places with a bike on the train. If ever there was a green initiative it must be taking your bike on the train to another city. You can avoid taking any taxis in your destination and be even more green than just taking the train. Everyone wins.
As it turns out, the German train system has some serious limitations in helping customers reach this next level of “green.”
First, the DB Navigator app allows one to specify “carriage of bicycle”. This is great, but the option is hidden several menus deep. Unless one knows that the option is there, the app does not seen to provide an option for such esoteric condition. Once clicked, the app shows a large selection of connection. One can click through several options, including one nicely named “Continue to bookings”. The feeling of “yey, I am about to buy a train ticket for myself and the bike” washes all over when you click on the continue to booking button. There are a few more menus to click through and there, at the very end, once you get to the “payment” and have already clicked on the pay now icon, you receive a message saying that all the bike places are taken. You are even asked if you would like to continue with the booking just for yourself and not for the bike.
Mind blown.
Did the Product Manager ever speak to the UX designer? The app asking if you’d like to still book the train ticket, without the bike, is as close as you ever got to being insulted by an app. What was the expectation here? “Sure, I’ll leave the bike at home since I went through all these menus and you just told me at the end that I can not take my bike?”
What should happen? When a customer asks to buy a ticket for herself and a bike, the app should show all train connections that answer this simple criteria. The search algorithm should take into account from a to b with bike and only show the valid options. Why bother showing any connections that can not accommodate the customer ask?
In order to investigate the gravity of the issue, you actually swing by the central station to ask the service center if they can find a ticket for yours truly and the bike. As it turns out, the answer was….yes! How? Manually. The system being used by the kind people at the Travel Center was no more smarter or easier to use than the DB Navigator app. The poor service person had to click each train to see if there were bike places available. “No worries, I’ll wait” yours truly proclaimed and the poor fellow just clicked slowly through.
Eventually, the bike and the rider made it, but not before spending way too much time for a very simple ask. Since bike places on a train are numbered, much like seating, it is unfathomable that building such a function is so difficult, Once this “feature” is actually fixed, the Deutsche Bahn can actually advertise their 151th green initiative: take your bike on the train without spending hours of compute cycles in trying to find a train.
As teams grow in size, so do the artifacts that the team create. This year, slightly before the virus started spreading, and everyone was forced to work remotely, you experimented with the team in an attempt to increase collaboration.
6 months into the experiment, the team is more collaborative, more open and way more productive. How did we get there?
So now the team is much more collaborative. A recent launch worked so well, that 3 different folks contributed to the same partner quote sheet and were often fixing each other typos as the text was created – from three different continents. Another great example was a last minute preparation to an analyst briefing that included live editing of a deck which using a chat tool to agree on the content. The efficiency, trust and empowerment the team feels is a great testament to a collaborative culture.