Fred's Blog

When working with a big group of people there is sometimes a tendency to spend lots of time coming up with theories and ideas, without anything real to show for it.

Here are some words you want to avoid when assigning tasks at meetings: “Look at”, “Investigate”, and “Study”. Instead you want to give people tasks with words like “Solve”, “Fix”, and “Do”.

For example, compare these two projects:

1. Improve the speed of X 10%
2. Investigate how we can improve the speed of X

Which one would you rather work on? Number two feels a bit safer, but I guarantee that number one is way more fun.

The Minimum Viable Product is a great idea when developing a new product or service. The idea is to create a real product with just the absolutely necessary features, and get it out to real customers as quickly as possible.

There are two main goals with this approach:

1. Avoid wasting time on features that will change
2. Get real feedback from real customers as quickly as possible

You can do market research until the cows come home, but there is only one way to really test the market for your product. Get it into the hands of your customers and see how they react. And more importantly, see if they will actually pay for it.

Market research is useful, but it is never the real thing. There are things people say they won’t pay for and they will, and there are things they say they will pay for and they won’t.

So, get your big marker out, scratch out 80% of your new product’s planned feature set. Then go ahead and launch your next great Minimum Viable Product.

I like this quote:

It is easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission

If something seems like a good idea to you, go straight ahead and make it happen. Most of the time people will love what you have done. And in the odd case when people are not happy it is easy to say sorry.

Much bigger and cooler things would happen if we all stopped asking for permission, and just got things done instead.

I must confess, I am a massive iPad fan. The iPad is great for games, but it is also great for business stuff.

Here is a list of the apps I regularly use on the iPad for business:

• Note Taker – for hand-written meeting notes. After each meeting I email these notes to Evernote, which means the handwritten notes can be searched online.
• GoodReader – to read documents for meetings. It connects to our Google Docs, Dropbox, email, and shared files accounts, so I can easily get to any document.
• Reeder – to read a handful of online blogs.
• Toodledo – for my ToDo list.
• FastEver XL – to quickly save notes to Evernote.
• Mindmeister – for planning and organising with mindmaps. All mindmaps are stored online, so I can update them from the computer as well.

What other great iPad apps do you use for business? I’d love to know, so please add your comments below.

A few months ago I ditched my paper meeting notebook, in favour of a techie (and nerdy) solution on the iPad.

Some people type their notes directly into the iPad with the onscreen keyboard, but I type too slow, so I needed a different solution.

That is when I found the brilliant Note Taker app. It lets you easily write handwritten notes on the iPad screen. It has a clever way to let you write your notes quite large, and it automatically makes your handwriting smaller.

You can write the notes directly on the screen with a finger, but I use a small pen, the PogoSketch. It makes the writing quicker and easier.

After the meeting I email the note to Evernote. That way the note is automatically backed up, if the iPad is lost.

Also, Evernote is pretty good at understanding handwriting and makes the notes searchable. This is handy when I am looking for an old note a few months later. Just type a word into Evernote and it shows all my handwritten notes that contain that word. Easy-peasy.