I have just seen a tweet from Scott Hanselman about the amazing sarcastic Jon Stewart grilling Apple for their very aggressive move on Jason Chen.

 

I will not talk a lot about it, the fiasco has been already allover the internet. But I want to express about a thought:

 

I never liked Apple. Even before I had a computer, I always see them as arrogant & cocky. Google is being on that thin line between the spirit they’ve started with (Go No Evil) & fall into the arrogance hole, but apple did which is always the beginning of the end. 

 

Apple reminds me somehow with the model of cheerleaders in US high schools. the type who is bitchy to everyone else (friends, geeks, & even teachers).

The question is: Is this really the beginning of the end of Apple’s image as the unique slick stuff who refuse to cooperate with anyone else in the world?

Apple has a very powerful brand, a very loyal & huge users. However, with this kind of exposure, arrogance mistakes like Jason Chen’s will amplify these mistakes & gradually people will let go of apple to a younger, more “good” product.

 

Apple won’t go down in the near future, but making enemies & negative public opinion was never good for any company/person in the history. Microsoft learned the lesson & they’re trying to do good. Apparently Apple still has a way to go in that!

I am going to tell you a short but real story, so please imagine that you’re us down there:

I went out for dinner with Yasser Makram, who joined recently DashSoft, last Friday. He recommended a Chinese restaurant that has great noodles. We went in hoping to get one awesome authentic Chinese meal.

 

An Egyptian waiter came along with the Chinese waitress, telling her to “be silent” so he can deal with us. We ordered 2 noodles soup and one beef stripes that looked very delicious “in the picture”. Service was fast, noodles came , then the beef. we actually couldn’t call it beef “stripes” we called it beef “threads” it was a very thin piece of meet with a crust over it inflated by a huge amount of air between them.

 

We were very annoyed, because the target was to “eat” a big portion of beef, not “see” a big portion of beef while it’s empty on the inside.

We asked the waiter to change it with chicken (hoping it would be good this time). He kept convincing us that “this is the Chinese way & there’s no mistake in the beef”.

After “4 minutes” of arguing. We asked him to get the restaurant manager. He went & them came back alone & said “The manager said that this order is already out & we can’t change it”.

 

That was pretty depressing for us, however, we insisted not to be treated like that. While thinking of that, a Chinese waitress came and asked us to meet the manager. The manager says with a big smile “I am Chinese, This is Chinese food and how we make it. In all cases, I am sorry and we want to see you here again. Thank you!”

 

Beside the type of business and the place we couldn’t find any differences between a Chinese restaurant and a software house. However, we found out many similarities between the waiter and the developer (I put all of them between “” in the story) :

 

1. “Be silent”. – Developers can communicate in front of customers in the exact same way they communicate between each others while working. That would give a HUGE bad image to the customer about the vendor.

2. Under-promise, over-deliver. – Developers could promise very good thing to be delivered as “in the picture”, however, instead of the specifications, you find something way different in the value “beef threads, not beef stripes” EVEN IF It’s done the RIGHT way.

3. Customers look always about the business value in the product, while developers look how the product is being done. The developers would keep defending their quality of work without having the customer perspective that (in our case) This perfectly-made-Chinese-way-beef doesn’t not provide the value for a hungry customer.

4. Resisting customer change requests would always lead to customers leaving. By resisting customers change requests, even if we deliver things 100% the-developers-right-way. This will lead to customers leave. That’s why good developers always try to apply concepts like YAGNI, DRY and Agile to be flexible enough to accept customers changes and implement them in a “feasible” timeframe.

5. It’s not about the situation, it’s about you handle it. I have just heard that sentence for a very experienced guy I care about his opinions, right before we go to the restaurant. The sentence kept popping up in my head when the waiter was talking to us and when the manager was talking to us. You don’t have to be the owner or the manager to have high ownership. Whatever you do if it aims to customer satisfaction is very appreciated by both customers and management. Always keep in mind that you have to talk to your team about your decisions, so that you don’t lead the whole team to a bigger mess.

 

One last thought, Some customers do usually abuse the vendors. These notes/guidelines above would really help them eat up the teams with no real appreciation from their side. The key is how to smartly incorporate those guidelines within your lifestyle, this comes with experience , so, if you don’t have enough experience, always try to ask more experienced people about what would they do in the situation.

 

Enjoy…

Last Thursday we had another working outdoor day. it's an idea to work outdoors, in a cafe or somewhere like that. We did our first day at city stars too (check it here). This time it was a bit different, a new UK fashion store had their official opening by running a fashion show. that featured super cool dresses on super hot models!

 

At the lunch break we went to the food court , had some nice Burger king & KFC & on our way back we had some photos with the Fanta dude:

 

Shehab El Hadidy went right over there & ask them to have a photo with us. We met Deepak Kumar (AKA D). the Fashion Show Stylist, a very nice Biritsh dude although he & the models were a bit disappointed that we didn't know him (They understood later that we're computer geeks!).

Unfortunately most of the DS guys have left already not knowing what they're missing ;)

 

Here's what they're missing: (excuse my bad HTC camera):

 

After the photo shoot we went to Golden Stars Cinema and enjoyed X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and we got out just in time to watch the start of the fashion show. We enjoyed the show, they really had great dresses coming up, watched the whole show and went back home insisting on having another day like that soon!

So, I was sitting yesterday with DashSoft's General Scrum Master, Ahmed Nasr (AKA Nasr) talking about how can we improve DashSoft even more.

We've had our growth pain. We've grown up 300% the past year and we're still growing. We've learned in the hard way that controlling or should i say "regulating" that growth and preventing it from changing the company culture is even more important.

Actually I learned about the company culture a while ago. I've been talked and learned about by Stephen Forte, Remi Caron and Joel Semeniuk. however, I've never really understood the importance of it until we faced a massive growth in a relatively short period.

Generally, the company culture is a set of values that produce a specific mind set. You can know that you built a good culture in your company when you ask various individuals at your company the same question "What would you do if ...." and you get mostly the same answer. So the answers you get are mostly flowing around a central core. This core is the value that you have built in your company.

So the values could be technical, ethics, or commitment values. They can be a way of treating customers, a way of treating fellow employee, or even a way of treating yourself when you face a challenge and so on.

In order to track your progress of building a culture, you need two things: a set of tools to measure the culture aspects and a set of standards to compare your measurements to.

I am going to demonstrate an example we are doing currently in DashSoft now. 

Interviews

So the first step we did is that we raised our interview levels standard. we become more picky on the ethics aspect more than the technical one. DashSoft is well known with its high technical level, and smart developers would be up to speed in no time.

Defining Culture

You need to define "very" clearly what is your target, you need to show the teams first, the benefits they're going to have when they try to have these values within them, teams believe more in things if they know the reason why.

Start planning a road map

Now everyone is agreed on the What and the Why, we need to agree on the how. Consult your upper management, share your vision and process their feedbacks. Come out from those meetings with a roadmap on how should the company, the management and the teams do in order to have a healthy culture and work environment.

Release a guide on how to improve yourself and doing periodical evaluation meetings with the teams is always a good thing to put them on the right track and everyone makes sure that they're on that track.

Evaluation

Most important part is find a way to "measure" those improvements. So you and your teams can understand if they're working right or not, if not, you'd be able to figure out what's wrong and save yourself lots of time trying to implement a wrong part that potentially would affect the company in a bad way.

Incentives to keep growing

So, yes, you have the teams that willing to do a change, they're smart have high endurance threshold and you can really depend on them to create a solid company. What happens if some bad apples slipped inside ? or people getting lazy ? What's the incentive they would have to start getting up again ? A word I have learned from a dear friend Vassil Terziev a year ago & it's still ringing in my head, "Peer Pressure". Teams should be self sustainable, people are up should help the ones are down. It's not your job to get people up on their feet. It's your job to create the culture that will make everyone feels that its his/her duty to help others.

So beside the guidance and supporting people , everyone will see the "Improvement Progress Chart"

 

Simply it has all the names and all the values we agreed on. each value (V1,V2,...) has a link on how to improve yourself on this specific value along with examples and cases we faced or we would have.

 

Each team member (Name 1, Name 2, ....) has a √ at the values he gets and nothing (-) at the values he does not have it fully yet. The trick is what is the standard you are going to go by that would say from 1-3 is nothing & from 4-5 is something ? It's tricky because you need to realize your team capabilities and you need to understand how far can they endure to be better person. Think of it like a gym. If you are going to train someone, he'd be in pain (good pain) but can he run for 1 hour from the first the first month or day or from the first year.

 

The last part is: if the team member's leader see he should learn something. He would find a message at this specific value he doesn't have yet that is visible only to him telling him how to be better as a tip, that's beside the guide on how to be better on the value that is visible to everyone.

 

One last thing. If you are going through that, you need to have a great faith in your team. I do. I have the reputation of being a tuff person in technical projects management. So whoever can survive me for that long surely he/she is a pretty great person. I have a team of people who can survive me, and I do have the faith in them that they won't let the me down. You need to make sure of that first before going forward with building a culture.

 

I will keep you posted on how this goes.