 1. Email makes you feel productive, but you are not. Just observe yourself when you check your email … you’ll probably realize that it’s happening when you’ve hit a “stuck” point on whatever you’re working on. You’re probably at that point in need of your micro-dopamine “hit” so you can get a false sense of achievement, and then you feel better and you go back to your original task. Rings a bell? This would be fine if it happened to you once an hour or more, but I guarantee you it’s happening to you many, many times in an hour. If you’ve got an iPhone, look at the “screen time” and see the number of your mail app “picks” per hour. This should shock you. And the result is that a task that should take you a certain amount of time does take you way longer because of your email “addiction” 2. Email is the most inefficient way of internal communication Email forces you to be reactive. Period. It starts with the first batch of emails you check and respond to at the beginning of your day, then emails beget more emails, as eventually you’ll end up encouraging useless email “conversations”, always ending emails with a question that needs an answer, rather than trying to bring an issue to a quick resolution. Most often this reaches a level of absurdity when you realize that your discussion involves two or more people that seat almost right next to each other in the same office. 3. The case for banning email from work We all agree that email stresses people out and it’s a colossal time suck. I will argue that face-to-face is still the best way of communicating efficiently: it’s the highest bandwidth form of communication and it includes visual sub cues that are essential for thorough understanding, from body language and facial expressions, leaving an impression; to bonding with coworkers. As such, any leader who wants to foster cultural shift from an individual mindset to that of a community will come to the same conclusion as I have: ban internal email! Replace with face-to-face and instant messaging. My experiments and research on those who have done it have experienced the following changes:
Sounds like a shoo-in to me! Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader
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 Over the past few months, I have been asked quite a few times about two things: my thoughts on building a startup in the healthcare industry and how to approach a brand new industry from scratch. Obviously I don’t have a magic recipe however I thought I would share a little bit of my thoughts so far, after 4 years …. Why? because I feel that first, I am at a junction (I’ll elaborate in future posts) but also because
I am going to make this short: only three points. To get this started, more than ever, I am a big fan of setting clear strategies for success, in particular being absolutely intent on creating the right teams at any level, tying products to services in an efficient and value driven way and most importantly execute, execute, execute! (and be kind, compassionate and have lots of fun too). Now, here are my few points: First of all, I think healthcare SaaS will require you to build high-touch services in order to deal with extreme variability in your customer’s operational environments - for example, make sure you build across a large product surface area (if you’re “just an app” you will fail) and transactional depth (scheduling, payments) to immediately show utility, value and ROI and make a really airtight case for your risk-adverse buyers at any level. Second, about the other end of the funnel — it’s critical that the customer-facing front line is stacked not only with industry insiders who understand the culture of your users and customers, but most importantly, these insiders also must be absolutely fluent in technology and be able to understand and diagnose issues quickly and efficiently to your internal dev and product stakeholders. In other words, if your customer service folks are awesome with doctors but have no idea about the ins-and-outs of your API stack, prepare for a lot of hurt and wasted opportunities. As a result, extend your engineering and product teams to include field application engineers and run away from low quality, cheap call centers. On the engineering side, hire world class engineers and data scientists who have a deep knowledge of the latest and greatest techs but also have the patience and courage to want to deal with age-old legacy systems that you will have to — without any doubt — integrate with. And lastly, make sure you’re super specific in defining your target market segment because this will immediately define your sales and service delivery model, pricing strategy and sales team profile. But most importantly, you will have to clearly anticipate extra long sales cycles and heavy buyer education needs … As a result, you must be clear (at least in your mind) to favor and prioritize evangelist customers ahead of revenue: they will help you communicate a strong vision and having excited customers who can see the long term “end game” is super important for your survival. As a conclusion, I think that healthcare tech is not for the faint of heart … Check your hubris at the door, be humble and work hard. And most importantly, always aim at building products and services that will delight your customers and change their lives! Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader This weekend I went a little bit overboard with photoshop and smart objects (for play), I thought I would share a little ... Enjoy!       Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader  It’s Easter Sunday and I feel like I am turning a major page and as such I thought I would gather my thoughts around products creation and dev. Of course I am always in continuous learning mode, so I may change my mind down the line, but as the way we interact with products is being radically changed by software, data and machine learning, right now, I think it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the progress we’ve made in the past 20 years. The first thing I have encountered along the way are all the flavors and even in-between of engineering-driven, design-driven and product-driven product and user experiences. Not that any of it is bad per-se, times have changed and we have evolved from a hardware-driven world very much so into software and data-driven in tech over the past decade (yes software is still eating the world @withfries2). And as a result, I have come to the conclusion that today it’s all about being absolutely and fiercely product-driven when it comes to user experience. I’d like to thank Allen Zhang (CEO of WeChat) is at the forefront of this philosophy and his drive to make it front and center in product teams today. Thanks! #1 We view our users front and center. This means we have the honesty of building products with the most sincere best intentions for our users: this genuine empathy in treating our users will result in our products to be used for a longer time. This also means that processes aren’t really the way we design products today, rather, we optimize continuously using the data we gather from usage and other sources. Process optimization will never solve for the unpredictable and the most mischievous users. #2 Technology is for efficiency. Every day I am dealing with clients who are not immersed in the Silicon Valley tech groupthink and most definitely don’t need or want to place technology at the center of their lives. In fact I think technology is only of value when it’s absolutely not interfering with anything or anyone’s life, it just makes things better and more efficient. I remember my motorola razor’s 300 page user manual … As I said before, today we don’t use products, we train them …. In other words, the mission of technology is only to improve a user’s efficiency and delight. To that extent, the vanity usage metrics we’re using today to measure success are very flawed. Instead we should care about the question “Are we the most fast and most efficient” with our product, and do we enhance our user’s lives without interfering with them. Small nudges are humble and this is precisely where we should be. #3 KPIs are indicators, not drivers. I am seeing many senior managers, including board members, being absolutely obsessed with key metrics - this is in fact counterproductive. It’s of course very important to track metrics however we need to always put them in context, and most importantly they should support the product strategy instead of driving it. As a result, we can put user needs more front and center, instead of traffic acquisition and retention for example, because our job is to create the best products, not the best traffic - organic and natural growth is the most important vector of adoption. In short, KPIs are secondary only; intuitive, user-friendly product is paramount and at the core of every decision. Conclusion Of course this approach can be taken with a grain of salt, and some will immediately say that a challenging aspect of a strictly product-driven philosophy is that it’s more long-term driven and may not be very compatible with the short terms requirements of company survival, investor patience or even team harmony: how can an opinionated product creator not become an issue for their team, when “design by committee” will necessarily contain a lot of different opinions and fragment the product’s character? But just the act of considering such product-led principled thinking can push us to new ideas, frameworks and innovations, such as — in what ways can these principles be adapted for different business models? Let me know what you think! DM me @philippemora
My name's phil mora and I blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech and anything holistic. Head of Product and VP Engineering. thinker, doer, designer, coder, leader. |
i blog about the things I love: fitness, hacking work, tech, Experiences and anything holistic.
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