Lurking in my weekly round up mail from 37signals was this gem from @joulee on medium.

Are there others to add to this list or ways to refine? I have to say, she has captured the essence of good management in collaborative, digital focused teams.

A Manager’s Manifesto

10) Always get the full story before making a decision.

9) It’s incredibly easy to ‘flip the switch’ and start writing people off after a few bad experiences. Resist at all costs. You were bumbling once too. You made poor decisions. You learn and grow, and so does everybody else.

8) Sweep up the crumbs. Wipe the tables. Turn off the lights. Plug the holes that need plugging—even if it’s menial, even if nobody will know you did it. Do it in service of the product, the company, and this wondrous, magical thing you are all building together.

7) Recognize you can’t do everything. Close your eyes, fall backwards, and learn to trust.

6) Clearly, there is a more efficient way to do the things you do. How? Ponder that on your daily drive home.

5) Figure out which people rely on you and how you can help them be self-sufficient. You may feel important having a monopoly on salmon provisions, but if the whole village learns how to fish, it’ll free you up to do something else. Like figuring out how to grow wheat. Or how to domesticate those cute wolf-pups.

4) Don’t say anything if it’s not actually contributing to the discussion. Your voice is not so melodious that it absolutely must be heard.

3) Making the best decision is not as important as putting in the right processes to ensure that the best decisions get made.

2) Dole out thanks and encouragement like you dole out opinions.

1) Above all, this: never, ever get in the way. It’s better to twiddle your thumbs and squint up at the clouds than to obstruct progress for the sake of that stupid, childish thing called ego.

Some great articles to read:

Marketing and product design are the same thing by Seth Godin

“knowing what product to build is something that both product designers and marketers need to understand intimately in order to do their jobs…the designers in order to design the product and the marketer in order to share the story.”

The newsonomics of a news company of the future by Ken Doctor

“Yet news sites need a continuous discovery flow of would-be customers, poured into the top of their data-analysis funnels by Google, Facebook, and others. The great majority are one-and-done “readers.” It’s those who know the publisher brand but aren’t yet ready to fork over several hundred dollars that bear the most attention. For the FT, that middle-of-the-funnel crowd now includes 4.8 million registered users; if you register, you get a little access beyond the FT’s paywall. Readers among that group are the likeliest to become paying customers, and in the meantime can be monetized with better targeted advertising as well. It’s an important point in an increasingly paywalled world: Build registration as well as subscribers.’

Inside Facebook’s Internal Innovation Culture by Reena Jana

“1. Encourage everyone — even those in the C-suite — to learn by making

2. A winning mobile strategy

3. Physically mix up your work environment on a regular basis. “

When the story goes digital

“Analogue systems are small packages of causality. This means that they contain a set of components that are related to each other either chronologically or by way of a hierarchy. Analogue systems give you the whole picture containing all these components and then you have to decide which parts you want to focus your attention on. Think book. Think audio cassette. The various different content units in these media are united by a common theme or source or idea.

Digital systems are cropped versions of these packages. Instead of giving you access to the whole picture, they narrow things down and make you focus on only one thing. This helps avoid clutter and simplify matters by reducing cognitive choice, but it also does away with a lot of context. Think single short story (as opposed to a thematic collection). Think single MP3 file instead of a CD.”

Editor, product manage thyself

“As an editor who gets to work on the product team, I’m empowered to help determine what I think other editors need to tell the story the right way. And when I’m wrong, I’m empowered to go back and try again. This is all quite new at my company, especially when it comes to the Internet, and there are a lot of other pieces to the puzzle I’m still learning about. But it feels like the right direction.”

When people get confused about “BS metrics’

“What is important about a key metric is that it is uniquely tied to the business value of the company and indicates there is some set of growing adoption and usage of that company’s products.”

Interesting to see that the latest research in relation to multiscreen experiences (from TIme Inc) tells us that people show a greater emotional attachment and engagement to the content on the TV when they are using a companion experience on a mobile or tablet device.

This makes sense, as the companion experience heightens the awareness of the content and also immerses the person more in the experience of the TV show. But, also interesting is that this experience is heightened when shared with another person, either in the room or remotely via social tools.

Also, audio is key to triggering a reaction from the viewer around advertising and this is becoming the same on mobile, tablet and PC as audio becomes a stronger interrupter in peoples daily lives.

Will be working through what this means for the ability of these devices to sense activity and the experience the customer is engaging with, and also what this may look like for mobile, tablet and TV experiences of the future … the screens will all connect, but the emotional attachment may differ based on the moment, task or mood of the viewer.

Here is the infographic from the research … some very interesting jumping off points here:

Liking the entwining of the statement into something which always changes

’nuff said basically …

I have to admit, I have not visited Medium for a while to see what new thinking and opinion had been raised there. So, it was refreshing to be interrupted on my Sunday morning by their weekend reads email. Simple, targeted and understanding what is important to me, it hit the spot and lead me to these 2 great pieces:

Editor, Product Manage Thyself
from Paul Smalera

readers are being trained to expect simple yet elegant complexity in their online experiences. Woe to the media company that is not scrambling to deliver both.

When people get confused about “BS metrics”
from Josh Elman

What is important about a key metric is that it is uniquely tied to the business value of the company and indicates there is some set of growing adoption and usage of that company’s products.

I have been working (and thinking through) both areas over the past 2 weeks in my new job, and there is a start of a tide change within the world of journalists and media companies to understand that it is the experience they are providing to their customers that is most important, not just the content. Also, that using vanity (“well, I got loads of readers”) metrics is great, but pointless, if you are not keeping a close eye on the actionable metrics that drive the business or acquisition, activation or retention/referral for customers.

Lots to be gained (and lost) if journalists and also media focused product managers understand that it is a focus on the customer experience and the convenience of this to the customer that will delight readers/customers and those that matter … a little like the Medium email that drove me to these reads in the first place.

Technology is to some still a little daunting, but too nearly all people it has changed fundamentally how we live everyday. Think about the time before you had a computer in your pocket? Think about the time when you had to arrive on time for appointments? (and you should still do!) Think about how you would go about selling an old chair? etc. etc.

This infographic provides a very good view of what technology has bought to our lives, and how we no longer have to worry about some things, to be replaced by others … like, where is my mobile?