May 9, 2024

s18e09: Doing What’s Important; Hidden Reasons; When They Tell You, Etc...

0.0 Context Setting

It’s a sunny, warm (promising to be hot, even?) Thursday 9 May 2024 in Portland, Oregon.

No, you getting two newsletter episodes in a row the other week was not a mistake or a bug. Or, rather, it was a mistake: I did it, me, I was the problem. I apparently wrote an entire episode and forgot to send it, and in my brain-addled state also decided to send two episodes at once. Thank you to the people who got in touch to check if something had gone screwy with email which, to be fair, is something that often happens with email.

I, um, accidentally found about 35gb of sheet music on the Internet Archive that totally should not be on the Internet Archive, so that kept me busy last night.

0.1 Events: Hallway Track, and Pulling the Cord

Hallway Track is still on hiatus.

Pulling the Cord, my plain-speaking guide to stopping traditional technology procurement is gearing up for its first non-test session, likely in May.

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1.0 Some Things That Caught My Attention

1.1 Doing What’s Important

This is something that’s caught my attention based on my recent client work. Here’s the pithy version:

Your¹ problem is:

1. You can’t decide what’s important
2. You can’t articulate what’s important
3. You can’t prioritize what’s important
4. You can’t change what you need to change so that you can do the above
5. But wait: yes you can, it’s just that doing so is really hard, but not impossible.

And also:

• If it were important, then you’d be doing it
• So why aren’t you doing it?

Sometimes not-deciding what’s important is down to psychological reasons like being afraid of what will happen because it will involve change (see: 4. “You can’t change what you need to change” etc) and change necessarily involves the chance that the change won’t go the way you want. But that way lies growth and improvement, and you definitely don’t get better without changing what you’re doing!

Sometimes not-deciding is down to unpleasant consequences and the pain of having to make a decision in the first place. Let’s assume that you have a very long list of very important things that need to be done, and that lots of people contribute to that list. Some of those people are at least as important as you, some of them may be more important than you.

You can’t do everything, though. You just can’t. You can avoid confronting this reality (a tactic many people use both professionally and personally!), but deep down you might understand that not choosing is also making a choice.

The best you can do, at a high level, is to do one thing at a time². When you have done that thing, then you move on to the next thing. You can deal with too-many-things-to-do by getting other people with whom you have obligations to agree to prioritization.

(This prioritization only works well if you’ve got a demonstrated ability to reasonably deliver on the things that have been prioritized. If you don’t, then... you’re back to trying to do everything for everyone, but “badly”, or even worse)

Deciding what’s important is hard work! On the one hand I get that people want to retreat to go do it. You totally need to concentrate. It’s also a consequential decision!

But once you’ve done that, then you need people to understand what’s important (whether they like it or not!), and then figure out what you need to change to achieve those important things. And those things might also be significant changes.

One of the reasons that deciding what’s important is hard work, I think, is that it’s also... emotionally draining? You need to have a certain degree of resilience (and the capacity, at that time, for that resilience) and to have pretty good boundaries! Because not only is your work interpersonal and inter-relational (you are, after all, working with other people), but it is work and not your life. At least, I hope so. There is something more important than your work.

The emotionally draining part is that you may need to confront a whole bunch of things that you wish weren’t true. In Most Regular Human Beings Who Aren’t Unnaturally Mentally Healthy, “not being good at something” easily brings up feelings of guilt and shame, of which your two responses are essentially: hide/freeze and get-the-fuck-out-there-and-kill-something. (Don’t do the latter, it either results in jail time (hopefully! who knows these days!) or yelling (being abusive: not great)).

People, in general, don’t like confronting stuff they don’t like.

Here’s an example: they may not like confronting stuff they don’t like so much that not only do they not know what their current performance is, they will not be open to or actively resist measuring how they’re doing in any way, even helpful ones. They may have good reasons for this: the last time it might have happened they might have been yelled at or fired or whatever. Also they likely were yelled at when they were a kid when what they needed was a hug. I’m serious. Of course it’s reasonable then to not trust someone who comes in and says “hey, let’s find out what we’re doing, I promise no bad consequences”.

(You should probably unionize.)

No wonder deciding what’s important and then acting on it is hard.

That’s before you get to obfuscatory language like, uh using the word “obfuscatory”. This is super easy to spot from a distance when, for example, you see a slide that says:

1. We are late
2. We don’t know how much later we’re going to be

But actually uses a couple hundred words and several graphs and 2+ slides that also include lines that are going up and to the right.

There may be totally understandable reasons for being late and not knowing how much later you’re going to be, but it’s still really hard to be candid and clear.

I mean, another example which goes straight back to the pithy opening, is this statement:

1. We don’t know what’s important
2. We can’t decide what’s important
3. We aren’t treating what’s important, important.

That’s what your problem is! You don’t need to write more. If you’re writing more, you’re most likely avoiding pain.

What’s not funny is that everyone mostly knows this is the problem in the first place, it’s that nobody wants to say it out loud, so you get situations where if you’re lucky, someone will go first and then the floodgates open and everyone is relieved that the elephant in the room is suddenly visible. Like, you can see the physically palpable relief in body language.

I bring this up because I’ve been doing it again lately, and it’s super fun. At least, it’s super fun with the clients I work with, because they appreciate the clarity (very much so) and I’m honest that part of what they’re getting is someone from the outside confirming a lot of what they already know. Turns out that when you’re stuck, that’s worth a lot of money for where it gets you, given your default alternative is to not do anything. Which works out pretty ok for me, to be honest.

1.2 Hidden Reasons

So here’s what caught my attention with Sonos, the set of speakers that don’t work well with Apple products:

• They launched a new mobile app³
• It doesn’t do things that some people use a lot⁴
• They’ve got some new products coming out^{5 6}

One way of looking at this is “why did Sonos launch a redesign of their app that lacks critical functionality for people”. I’ll set aside the entire “the internet exists for people to complain about stuff” and instead ask a question like: what would make a product manager decide that this feature set was acceptable?

Here’s what Sonos said in their community forums:

The redesigned Sonos app was built from the ground up to support both modern and future Sonos experiences, and as part of that, we’ll be implementing ongoing improvements and enhancements over time. On May 7, the app will have basic support for screen readers, allowing you to swipe through and read through all items on the screen. Following launch, ongoing improvements to the accessibility of the updated mobile app will remain a top priority. A software release available May 21 will improve screen readers so you can select items on screen in any order. Further improvement will be added to the experience regularly until we reach parity with the S2 app by late June.⁷

I read this as a long version of: “we are updating the app over time and adding things back to it over time”, which is a bit like the “we determined this feature set was what was minimally viable for launch and we’re doing the regular thing of just iterating over it, hopefully with updates that are more significant than “bug fixes and performance improvements””.

Anyway, over a long period of time I’ve learned:

1. The word “just”, as in “this is just a case of”, or “why don’t they just”, or “you just have to” is a load-bearing word, i.e. frequently hides or hand-waves a shit-ton of work
2. You don’t know the internal reasons why decisions were made

I’m thinking about the second one, the hidden internal reasons about why the decision was made to ship the Sonos app in this way. As a caveat, we’re totally open to disagree with the resulting decisions. But it’s worth it, I think, to understand why (from our point of view) the wrong decision was made. For good reasons, I think, that I’ll get to if I stick this landing.

I chatted about this with Rod Begbie on Threads⁸.

There’s one really easy reason:

1. They had new hardware coming out.
2. The new hardware needed new software support.

But now your software that supports the new hardware isn’t as feature complete as you’d like. So you have to make a decision:

1. Delay the hardware release (until the software is feature complete for existing products)
2. Release the hardware (and wait for the software for existing products to catch up)

The hardware makes money for the publicly listed company. The software doesn’t.

The hardware will be built into revenue expectations.

The hardware is atoms either being moved around, which costs money, or being stored somewhere, which costs money, and has been made, which also costs money.

There’s a couple other entirely understandable and relatable factors as well. In the thread⁸, Rob pointed out the shocker that the estimate for software delivery was likely off, and Charles Wiltgen pointed out that Sonos are doing a rewrite with Flutter⁹. That post was from May 4, 2022 -- two years ago! -- which also handwavedly lines up with “it takes a long time to get hardware right”. If you want advice about whether you should do a ground-up rewrite, one person you should check with runs a bar in San Francisco¹⁰. (There’s a bit of this in Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert’s writeup of Yet Another Ruby JIT and how “rewriting” works better when it’s done inside something else¹¹; an adjacent govtech/enterprise tech version of this is “don’t do big bangs”¹²).

I digress.

The reason why the software was released in the state that it was was because of money was because of business. That’s it. That’s all there is.

This next bit isn’t really a hidden reason, it’s more of a bit of a rant about “are you kidding me?!”

Charlie Humble-Thomas did a great bit of work for as part of his Masters in Design Products at the RCA; there’s a writeup in Core77 ¹³ of his “How long should objects last?” project¹⁴.

It’s thorough work! And I think it has a giant glaring blind spot?

Here’s a bit of a description of what he was trying to do:

Conditional Longevity asks the question, 'How long should objects last?' through the medium of umbrellas. If we hope to move towards a truly circular economy and rethink traditional consumerism, a better understanding of the consequences of the choices designers make is crucial. Each umbrella explores a unique take on approaching longevity, and users are presented with the impact data, downsides and benefits of each. The aim is to open up the debate on which strategies in product design are truly 'best' suited to our needs.

The project does this thing where it presupposes that having a conversation about the issue is a good thing. There’s a lot of stuff to go in the conversation!

This project looks to start a richer conversation around our problematic relationship with the material world and the objects we own. It's about challenging our preconceptions, and unpicking our beliefs around what is 'right' or 'wrong'.

and

The most profound conclusion this project has given is that we must begin to assess how proportionate the objects we use are to their intended use. Their impact can be expressed as a ratio expressed below:

I feel like I am being stupid here. The decision about how long an object should last is, right now, made by businesses in an economic environment that, in the west, has not so much a laissez-faire attitude as a, well, something even more extreme than that. (Yes, sure the Biden administration is flexing its muscles at, for some reason, late in the game, presumably for Headlines close to election season; yes the EU is doing, well, exactly what it is that the EU does in terms of autocratic paternalist mostly-good, mostly well-intended regulation).

Who is this conversation with? It kind of frustrates me in that it looks like designers dancing around what can design do and the responsibility of design when I think the clearer issue is design only has agency in what’s permitted by the economic environment. Right now, as a designer, it seems like people will pay attention to you if you generate revenue. This is what put this beside/close to the whole Sonos deal in my head.

1.3 When They Tell You, Etc...

Look, Threads is not a replacement reverse-chronological social network for following only the people you want to follow. It is an advertising platform for Meta. That much has been clear. It is doing things that are open in as much as they make sense to Meta (for a variety of reasons), and also appears to be doing those in a deliberate way that aren’t entirely shitty in terms of “federating”.

But, look at this surprise from Threads’ product director:

It’s important that people understand how their Threads posts perform, so we’re rolling out the ability to tap anywhere on a post to display its total view count. We’ve got more work to do, but I think this is a great first step in giving creators the some of the data they’ve been asking for.¹⁵

When people tell or show you what they are, then... that’s what they are?

1. “It’s important that people understand how their posts perform” versus “people have told us it’s important to understand how their posts perform”
2. “This is a great first step in giving creators some of the data they’ve been asking for”, i.e. prioritizing the needs of “creators”

There is no evidence, I think, that Threads has chosen to apply anything learned from shitty creator-driven experiences on other platforms, including ones they own.

This is a strong signal that I’m going to see more shitty copy-pasted spam/scam farming accounts reposting stuff from elsewhere, never mind providing a tighter feedback loop for generative AI slop.

I thought before that Threads would win because it was the Mall that everyone would go to, that all the Brands would be in and would be a Safe Place, and yes, I think that’s still coming to pass, but in the most anodyne, boring way possible, which I guess makes total sense if I’m calling it a Mall. Which I am, so there.

It’s a Mall Meta owns. Mall owners make money by:

• renting the space out to people who sell stuff in it

Landlords, duh. Sure there’s finer points here like “making sure you get the best retailers in because you get people who spend lots of money so you can charge the most for rent”, but eh.

But! Computers mean we can make everything worse if we want to!

So this is a Mall with:

• infinite space for sellers
• that will make money on advertising
• that will likely make money on providing retail services to sellers
• and generates engagement data to fuel the totally net productive internet advertising market

One of the deals with launching a new social network is that when you sign up to it there’s nothing there, and if there’s nothing there, then you leave. People running social networks don’t like that because a) running them is expensive, and b) if there’s nobody there then you don’t get to make money. Sure.

Threads dealt with this by... just showing you what appeared to be random shit that you might or not be interested in, or worst case, that you definitely were not interested in and would rage-bait you.

At this point, in my default Threads feed which of course is not the reverse-chronological “just people I’m following and the stuff they’re doing” feed, I’m seeing replies from people I follow to accounts that have, like, 20 followers. And have 3 posts. And the people I follow aren’t following those accounts. And those accounts are clearly spam/farming accounts. So I have to ask: how did those posts even get in front of people I know

I mean, I’m not interested in how, that doesn’t matter. I’m not even interested in why; I already answered that question above.

I’m just... tired? Sad? Spending time there anyway, as well as on Bluesky and Mastodon?

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Oops, that was long. Sorry. But at least it was a while since the last one.

Hey, did you know I sell stickers now? You should buy some, they’re great.

Oh, right. How are you doing?

Best,

Dan

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