Week 215

Last week was pret­ty busy.

The first few days were tak­en up by our first inter­mit­tent deliv­ery for SANMA. I put togeth­er our ideas in a slide deck main­ly made up of scans of sketch­es and pho­tos of white­boards. A lot of this was aimed to pro­voke more than to solve. We went through the deck with the client in a Skype con­fer­ence. Some parts we’d come up with were pret­ty much spot on and ready for elab­o­ra­tion. Oth­er parts were way off mark, but that’s OK: by being unam­bigu­ous­ly so, we had some real­ly use­ful dis­cus­sion about an alter­na­tive direc­tion. Provo­ca­tion lead­ing to clar­i­ty. Good. We wrote the main points from the call up in a debrief, shared that with the client and are now ready to start the sec­ond pass.

We also iter­at­ed once more on Beesten­bende. These are some final adjust­ments to the cur­rent ver­sion, which runs on iPods/iPhones. After deliv­er­ing this, we’re going to switch to a big over­haul tar­get­ing the iPad Mini. We feel this device hits the sweet spot in terms of porta­bil­i­ty and share­abil­i­ty. Beesten­bende is played by fam­i­lies using one device. The iPad are too bulky to walk around with for pro­longed peri­ods of time, but the iPod’s screen is just too small for a group of much more than three per­sons to see. The iPad Mini seems to offer a good com­pro­mise between the two.

On Tues­day we took a few hours to review how the com­pa­ny is doing using the OKRs we’d set for the third quar­ter. OKRs (objec­tives and key results) are a method alleged­ly in use over at Google and this was the first time we reviewed them. It was fun scor­ing each, being harsh with our­selves and see­ing where we were doing well and where we need­ed to step up our game. A side-effect I had not antic­i­pat­ed was that it made appar­ent which part of the com­pa­ny we have more or less instant insight into, and which parts are a bit opaque. Hav­ing reviewed our OKRs we set new ones for the final quar­ter of the year and broke them down into tasks in Asana. I look for­ward to see­ing how we per­form at the next review.

All of this hap­pened and also quite a few sales calls, meet­ings with col­lab­o­ra­tors, writ­ing of pro­pos­als, etc. Like I said: busy!