How To Get To The Crux Of It When Innovating

Relying on experience is not always a good thing. Don't get me wrong. I'm a big fan of experience. Experience is the sum total of all our good and bad decisions. . . mostly the bad ones. It lets us know what worked in the past so we can apply it to the present. 

Experience is usually a good thing. 

But, not always.

Sometimes it just gets in the way of progress. That's what the expression, "Looking at it with fresh eyes," means. 

Sometimes, fresh eyes aren't enough either. 

You need a fresh mind. You need a whole new approach. The danger lies in looking at a situation through a lens colored by past successes and failures. Often, we are too quick to jump on a "solution" that may well spawn new problems.

Often, that "solution's" new problems outweigh the issue we were trying to solve or improve.

Here's an example

I'm constantly fiddling with myTweetPack.com trying to implement improvements members suggest. Sometimes I just see something that could be better and tackle that. 

I don't intend this post to me an ad for myTweetPack.com. The example I mention came up during our system improvement initiatives. It is cited as an example.

It is my intention to bring my bounce rate to 100% for members. If members pop in and pop back out quickly, that means they got their job done in record time. 

That's a good thing.

I also want to reduce member page views. The ultimate time saving is doing nothing at all but getting the job done anyway. Our RSS and ATOM feeds go a long way towards making that happen. So does automatic top-up of daily posts.

Sandra Smith made me think of something else.  

Sandra didn't have a large enough inventory of tweets to automate a top-up. The obvious solution would be to share other tweets. By storing a shared tweet and scheduling out a week's worth of tweets, her inventory would quickly rise.

But, that meant . . .

• Find something to share
• Click Share to Twitter
• Copy the share text
• Pop over to myTweetPack.com
• Log in
• Navigate to EZ Shortcuts
• Click on One-and-Done Store and Schedule a Tweet
• Paste the text
• Hit "Go"

All that can take a whole minute! It made me think. 

Why use a minute if seconds will do the job?

This is Where Experience Bit Me on the Butt

The "obvious" solution was to build a Chrome extension that could automate the process. A member could install the extension once. 

Then they could . . .

• Find something to share
• Click Share to Twitter
• (optional) Edit the text the way they like
• Right-Click in the share window
• Select "Store and Tweet"

Much better. 

I timed it. Excluding the extension installation, it took about 13 seconds. 

Eureka! Problem solved!

Then I thought of Lisa Gallagher and Susan Rooks. Lisa and Susan are two of my favorite ladies. They are also quite possibly the least techie people I know.

Would either Lisa or Susan install the extension? Probably not. I figured I could just lend them a hand.

I moved to the testing phase.

OMG!!! I was appalled. 

That beast was a security risk of epic proportions. It had more holes than a colander. Heck, it was a screen door!

Experience took another bite

Maybe it wasn't "experience." Maye it was stubbornness. Maybe it was arrogance. Maybe it was wishful thinking. 

Whatever it was, I started plugging holes. I didn't want to chuck more than 150 hours of coding into the trash. Besides, Experience did say that the first pass is not the final pass.

There are always tweaks.

Result: another 100 hours wasted trying to salvage the first 150. 

That's when I remembered a saying from my tournament poker days, "Check your balls, with your coat, at the door." 

It was time to fold my pocket Kings. It was time to cut my losses. That's very hard to do. I folded them anyway. 250 coding hours went bye-bye.

Three Lessons Learned

1 - When something doesn't work right, it doesn't work. Change tactics.

2 - When faced with very many adjustments, see #1. Sometimes, fixing things is a bad idea.

2 - When faced with #2, quantify what you need to do. Use cold hard facts. Leave your ego out of it. That's what, "Check your balls at the door," means.

I still wanted to fix that "issue," but how?

I mean no one complained. No one even suggested an improvement. People were fine with the existing process. It really wasn't a problem that cried out for a solution.

It bugged the heck out of me anyway. I'm a big believer in Kaizen. Lots and lots of little improvements strung one after the other makes for eventual excellence.

That's when I put the idea away for a little while. Okay, I put it away for two whole weeks. Often, letting a problem simmer in your subconscious is all you need do to find a solution.  

Stepping back lets you see the forest instead of just a bunch of trees.

Last night the solution came to me.

The solution doesn't need any heavy coding. It doesn't need a Chrome extension. It doesn't need an installation process. 

It just works. It's live right now.

The Crux of it

Make sure you are solving the problem, not just the symptom. That sounds obvious. I was so busy solving symptoms that I moved away from solving the problem. 

The real problem was not how to create an extension that would interact safely with my secure password-protected servers. 

The real problem was how to cut down the time it took to store and schedule a tweet share. The solution had to work on any site, anytime, anywhere. 

It also had to be Lisa-proof. 

I implemented it in 45 minutes. Sometimes a major fix is simple.

Members, Here's What You Need to Do

• Find something you want to share
• Click the Share to Twitter button
• (Optional) Edit the text the way you like
• Add #pack! somewhere in the text.
• Tweet it

Example: "Announcing new beBee ambassadors ! @javierbebee https://www.bebee.com/producer/@javierbebee/announcing-new-bebee-ambassadors via @beBee " becomes "Announcing new beBee ambassadors ! @javierbebee https://www.bebee.com/producer/@javierbebee/announcing-new-bebee-ambassadors via @beBee #pack!" 

That's all there is to it.

The system will scan your timeline for "#pack!" in your tweets. When it finds it, it will remove "#pack" and store the tweet for later reuse. Then it will schedule out 35 tweets over a week.

It doesn't even matter to the system if #pack is freestanding. "A Good Read#pack!," will work just as well as, "A Good Read #pack!."

I timed this method too. It took 8 seconds with no editing and 14 seconds with some editing.

Not bad at all. Now my "problem" is solved.

Lessons for the future

1 - The "obvious" solution is not always the best.

2 - Nothing is ever wasted if you keep your eyes open. Those 250 hours of coding pointed out a big market gap. Google documentation for building extensions is sketchy at worst and overly complicated at best. The web is full of contradictory advice, stale-dated advice, and stuff that is so simplistic as to be useless. 

Simple is good. Simplistic? Not so much. 

There are few books available on the subject. Only one is worth buying and that one is written in techno-gobbledegook. There may be an opportunity there. Feel free to grab it if you like.

3 - Kaizen is a wonderful concept, but it can also be a bitch. Is your improvement a real improvement or just an ego-boost? 

4 - Don't "fall in love" with an idea. There's another one right around the corner.

What about you?

Have you ever had your experience turn around and bite you?