more about ali asaria
alicia, aka our “queen of order processing”, is leaving us to go to business school.
she bought me this mug as a reverse going away present on her last day. the message is really meaningful to me:
When I was young…
My first job in the tech-industry was an internship at RIM back when I was only 19 years old. My manager was the best kind of manager you could have at that age. He did something really neat — he gave me this really cool title of “Engineering Development Manager” even though I was young and fresh (and I didn’t manage anyone). His philosophy was two-fold: 1) if he gave me a good title, it would help me out in the future; with essentially no cost to him. But 2) giving me a bigger title would allow me to say to customers that called “I am the manager” when they asked to speak to a manager. (!)
Soon after my work-term ended I heard that HR at RIM told my boss he’d have to stop giving new students such big titles — it was making the other managers jealous.
But that big title at such a young age gave some much needed beef to my resume at a time in my life when finding things to put under “past experience” was a struggle. (Now my biggest concern is what colour of glitter to glue to the outside edge of my resume).
Now that I am a manager, titles are something I think about. If you run a startup, you may soon have people working for your company and this will be of concern.
Some of the patterns I’ve seen in startup title-giving include:
Here’s what I think of each option:
Overly formal titles
The problem with giving overly formal titles is it seems like you’re pretending. Everyone knows, when you’re a two person startup, that no one is really Chief Financial Officer and no one is really a Managing Director. Sure you might be able to fool old-classmates who see your title on Facebook but all they have to ask is “how big are you?” to know its a joke. Investors will understand but probably still chuckle behind closed doors.
Humorous titles
I’ve seen a bunch of companies do job postings for silly-sounding jobs that sound like “Chief software Monkatech,” and “Super-Duper Code Debungler”.
These are positions your staff aren’t really going to put on their resumes, you are not actually going to use when doing investor talks, and are funny for all of 1 week.
No, I get it, the companies that use these titles are trying to show that they aren’t like other big, serious companies that use overly formal titles. Still…
Not giving titles at all
Etsy‘s CEO has a great post about not giving titles. He says:
We’ve deliberately ditched the corporate lexicon that cherishes its “Departments” and “Managers” [....] There are exceptions to this, though: sometimes when talking to people from other companies it’s beneficial to call Matt something weighty like VP of Communications; and on paper for legal purposes I’m the CEO & President [...]
Ditching titles is a great idea, I think, and the quotation above shows how there can be exceptions. Read the full post from Etsy’s blog to learn more about how they use teams and team leads as their structure.
My advice
What works well for us here is, instead of giving titles, we use sections. So instead of saying “Senior Software Developer” beside a person’s name on a business card or profile page, we might say “Software Development” — this makes it clear where they work, without specifying their theoretical “level”.
We do use titles here when we feel its necessary. We try to make sure, however, that titles are never used internally to assert hierarchy over other staff. No one should think they have more power because of a title — this goes with the team idea. At the same time, people need to know what they are responsible for.
But seriously, stop worrying so much about titles and get some work done ;)
This is cool.
One of my favourite upcoming features in the new Well.ca is improved search.
With more than 3000 products, we can make navigation really good but search has to be the dominant way to find products.
More accurate search results means more people will find what they’re looking for. That translates into more conversions and happier customers.
Our current search sucks. The suckiest part is how it does spell check. Medical words and the names of drugs are hard to spell. Words like “Aspirin”, “Reactine”, “Immodium”, and “Hemorrhoids” are not easy to spell. I am not sure I spelled them correctly just now.
So way-back-when I hacked up a solution using levenshtein distance–it calculates the proximity between words based on permutations.
Right now, searching for “ali asaria is my best friend” results in:
NO!
chris, the new lead developer at well.ca, did some wicked hacking to use php’s pspell to do a much better spell check. many people on the net have been searching for a way to implement a method similar to google’s “Did you mean?” feature on their search pages using PHP. chris’s way of creating a custom dictionary for pspell is the best way i know to do it.
if you’re interested in doing a google-like “Did you Mean?” feature in PHP on your search page, read chris’s post on how he implemented it.
sure we test our code. but we’re a web app. for everything that doesn’t have anything to do with security or financial transactions, we can make quick fixes later.
if i was making a bank machine. however, things would be different. what is the acceptable error threshold for a bank machine? it can fail 1/1,000,000 times, maybe?
and even if a bank machine does fail. it should do so gracefully.
as a customer i NEVER want to see a bug.
this is what the td bank machine told me yesterday when i deposited my paycheck:
“err”????
um. how ’bout display nothing instead of saying “err”. i don’t feel comfortable with my bank machine saying “err”. how do i submit a bug to td?
so the entire team has been working super-hard and overtime to get the new site launched. so far we have:
chris and i are working on the software part. as we fix and build closer to launch, we keep finding new little bugs and requirements. work work work.
one thing we’ve found is that we both like to work on new things, and we both don’t like fixing bugs so much. a programmer’s world is filled with a good deal of boring tasks and then a few golden tasks that she or he actually loves. the trick is balancing those. we always have one pet project that we work on in one branch of the project tree while we are simultaneously working on fixing tasks that need to be done but aren’t so fun. we monitor ourselves to we don’t end up working too much on the fun things, ignoring the boring things. as deadlines creep up, or right after bug meetings (when it sinks in just how much needs to be done), we usually sway more towards working on the boring but important tasks. i have found that, personally, the majority of the little boring tasks get done between 5 and 6pm, right before the office closes — that’s because i check the bug list and notice i haven’t been “productive” for most of the day.
you don’t care about our boring tasks. but do you want to see some of the fun things we’ve been working on?
well i’ve been working on some of the new designs for our new store which we’re internally calling “/beauty” because the address is well.ca/beauty:
robin, kate and kiela have basically finished entering in what i think is like 2000 new products each with tens of hand sampled and hand typed colour swatches (amazing job, dudes). yeah this is what we’re most excited about; you’ll hear more when we actually launch.
but did you notice something new in the top right-hand corner? no you didn’t, but it’s still the greatest thing ever: chris has been working for the last couple days on a totally re-done shopping cart that resides on every page. check out a screenshot (it’s not done yet, we need to get a graphic for “checkout”):
as you can see from the screenshot, the shopping cart will display an estimated shipping cost on every page — saving our user’s time if they want to know how much the final price will be without having to go through the arduous process of creating an account, etc. (yeah, we’re working on making that simpler too!). you might also notice the neat little canadian and american flags to select your country. a big improvement from our ugly drop-down box. great job chris! (and please don’t kill me for releasing this sneak preview without asking you first… oops.)
my baby for the last while has been that neat jquery-accordion menu i was working on. here’s what it is looking like right now:
an accordion menu lets us display more information in our menus in less space. it’s so easy to use — i really don’t like flyout menus on webpages because they can be finiky.
want to see one more funny thing? check out this funny animated gif of what may one day happen when you add a product to your cart:
heheh. hope you like it! that’s all i have to show you for now. i need to get back to work!
by the way, i implemented a new rule at work where if anyone says the phrase “greatest thing ever” (which i do a lot myself), the thing shown must really be the greatest thing ever. i think i will have to add this to the list of failed rules i’ve tried to implement at work. other past failures include:
…. Some psychologists propose sending an all-female crew to Mars. Even if women become irritable, they are less likely to commit suicide or murder each other than men are. ….
quotation from the economist, jun 18th, 2007
yesterday, chris suggested i consider using an accordion menu on our new, improved left navigation (not yet released). i was sort of “meh” about it — i don’t like extra UI, moving things, extra javascript, or things that don’t work on our customer’s old versions of internet explorer -1.2.
but whatever, i thought i’d take a look.
4 lines of code later, and no changes to the actual css or webpage, i had a working accordion menu:
and to make it slide up and down, i did this:
jQuery is awesome. awesome. the documentation is clear (there will always be a learning curve for a tool like this. i feel their demos and tutorials aren’t that good in terms of figuring out where to start, but once you get the hang of things, the docs are great for finding what you need, quick.)
i might do a talk about the awesomeness of jquery at the next guelph democamp. i am totally in love with this AJAX and DOM scripting javascript toolkit.
i have used prototype.js in the past, but heard great things about jQuery. we started using it internally about 3 weeks ago, and are considering using it on the front-end of our site in our next version.
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UPDATE:
just figured out that i could’ve used [...].slideToggle() to toggle sliding. dunno why i didn’t see that.
i hate how our site looks.
i designed the templates and look for the site from my apartment way back when we started. i always promised myself that i would redesign it soon, but things got busier and busier.
when i show off the site to people, the first thing i say is:
yes, we know it’s ugly. but that will change soon
less than a month ago, our new developer, chris, started. my plan was to simultaneously get a designer to make new html+css templates for us so we could use re-engineer the designs to update the look of our site. but i couldn’t find a designer that i liked. i did email the one company that i thought was great. their quote for the cost of redesigning html+css+icons for 10+ pages was more something like $130,000.
i haven’t emailed them back.
so this being the long-weekend, i spent the whole time working on designs when nothing else could bother me. here are some sneak preview graphics of what i want the site to look like when we launch under the new domain name (shh… the launch is a secret right now).
these are my first draft and just me playing around (so who knows what will happen…). but i still wanted to show you what we’re working on.
for example, here’s our current product listing page:
and here’s my idea for the new site:
and here’s a current (and ugly) pic of a product info page:
and here is my idea for the new site:
yeah, i am excited about this. i can’t wait to have a design we’re all proud of.
i got a chance to look over at chris’s monitor last week and there are a bunch of exciting things planned for the new checkout procedure, some well-placed ajax/javascript.
i’ll let you know when there’s more to show! let me know what you think of the look and style.
a couple weeks ago, i emailed the business man and ceo that i respected most in my area and asked if he’d like to meet. it couldn’t hurt to ask for a few minutes; my guess was that he’d say he was too busy.
he emailed me back on a sunday, asking if i’d like to come in on the monday.
in that meeting, perhaps the top business person in my town sat down with me for a full hour. he took me behind his desk, showed me stuff on his personal computer, and was genuinely kind. he even took notes as i spoke. (which, by the way, i’ve learned, is a great sign of respect to someone that meets with you.)
in following emails, he offered me advice, connected me with some of his contacts, and spent an amazing amount of time reading my business plan and offering point-by-point advice.
when things like that happen to some little guy like me, all i can say is “thank you SOOO much”. and, to myself i say: if i ever have the chance to help a new person when i am older and more experienced, i will remember what others did for me.
over the last year of our company’s growth, we’ve had a lot of people be not-so-nice to us. that’s fine: i mean, no one owes us anything and who’s going to believe in a bunch of kids from guelph who are new to the business world? but there have been a few people — gems — who have offered kind advice and support (and on a few occasions, a caring flick to the head) when we needed it most.
for all of those people, both the nice and the not-so-much-so, our company is focussed on one thing: we impatiently await the day when we can email you with news of great successes (defined in many ways). we can’t wait to email our many advisors and aquaintances with emails that read:
hey friend. thanks for your advice. check out these figures/pictures. give us your address so we can send you a box of cookies and beauty products as thanks.
so yeah, thanks everyone for your help so far in growing well.ca. we’ll be making some announcements soon so stay tuned. we’re not sure how we can repay you all but we believe in karma so…
