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SXSW Review: The Lean Startup

Eric Ries' book The Lean Startup was on debut at SXSW 2o12.  Ries gave an interesting presentation that discussed how to bring some of the ideas of lean manufacturing, famous by Toyota, into the startup/entrepreneur/software business.  He spoke about a number of his failed startup attempts (primarily There.com) and how being an entrepreneur is all about learning in quick, fast bursts.

Ries spoke about how you want to release the smallest, minimal product requirement to customers as early as possible to see if they are even interested in your idea.  This practice of releasing software quickly is known as Agile software development.  He said that many people are afraid to put the bare minimum product out to customers because their afraid customers will hate it or that competitors will steal their idea.

He continued on to speak about how the launch of The Lean Startup book came to fruition.  Ries launched a couple of small marketing pages a year before the book was ever launched to see if anyone was even interested in the book.  He made a button that was, in essence, a Learn More button where he measured click thrus and overall site traffic.  He also provided a program to allow early interested parties to get the beginning chapters of the book as he completed them for user feedback.  These same ideas needed to be applied to all projects.

The three pilliars of the methodology are Build, Measure and Learn.  You quickly build the bare minimum product that will get customers to try your product.  Then, you measure how many actual users you receive, what they are doing on your site and other metrics.  Then, you learn how to take the metrics from what you built, come up with new ideas and build more of what customers want / need...and the cycle continues.  In the perfect world, this process is weeks/months and not months/years.

Ries is a solid speaker and his presentation was good.  I am interested in reading his book, though, it falls down my list a bit.  I actually came across his marketing pages over a year ago when he first put them up.  D&B, the company I work for, has been in a lean/agile methodology for over three years now and I was doing more research on the topic when I stumbled across his site.  Many of the principles in Ries' presentation seemed natural to me as they follow a number of the methodologies we already use.

One key phrase Ries kept using was, "Stop wasting people's time!"  Ries contends that companies (especially startups) waste too much time building features customers don't want or need.  That companies build for too long before launching and that few collect the proper data and learn from that data.  I couldn't agree more.  I've seen this scenario in case after case for multiple companies that I have worked for over the past decade.  Thankfully, Big Data and warehouse solutions are coming to the rescue and helping us to make better decisions BEFORE we build a feature.  As a fellow developer, there is nothing more frustrating then feeling like you have wasted weeks of your life building a feature / product that no one will use.  However, if you could spend two days, launch it, see what customers do, collect data and then iterate, the feeling of time waste shrinks.  I love this agile concept and I love the principle, but so few companies are truly developing software this way.  We need to do more of this type of product development.  It's what our user's expect.

All and all, a good presentation and it did drum up interest for me in the book.  I'll likely give it a read sometime this year.

SXSW Review: The Secret Lives of the Brain

While at SXSW 2012, I saw David Eagleman give an interesting talk about his book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.  Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor Medical School who made the point that your conscious self is only aware of about 10% of your brain, and that under the hood of the unconscious mind are aspects of neural function to which we have no awareness or access.  What does all of this mean?  It basically means that what you consider your "self" is really less than half of the story.  That before you think up an idea, your mind has been stewing, cooking up the data for that idea for weeks, if not months, before your conscious mind becomes aware of it.

Eagleman discussed the idea of perceived realities.  He demonstrated this by showing some optical illusion photography that showed the audience two pictures of an airplane and asked us to raise our hand when we saw the difference between the photographs.  Some hands slowly went up in the air after 12-15 seconds of back and forth image quick flipping. What was missing?  A giant engine on the left hand side of the plane.  Less than half of the crowd saw it before he told us what was missing.  Another photo showed a couple holding hands at a table.  He quick flipped for 12-15 seconds.  The only piece of the photo that was changing was a horizontal metal bar that was moving 3 inches up and down the screen between flips.  Again, less than half of the crowd got it during the time.  So, what was the point to the demonstration?  That people see different things and miss major details.  Eagleman discussed how each person has their own reality, own facts, own thought about what really happened, but we don't see the real truth.  The main point - the eyes are not like a camera.  The eyes don't take a snapshot of exactly what was happening at a certain point and then send it to the brain.  Instead, our eyes take a snapshot and then the image is deciphered by the brain...sometimes into our own (not so correct) reality.

Another interesting study he discussed was how men were shown pictures of multiple women's faces.  They were asked to rank the women in attractiveness from 1-10.  After the study was completed, the men were shown to have favorably scored women whose pupils were dilated to higher scores.  Why?  Because women whose eyes are dilated are more fertile.  The men were not told of this fact, but they still picked those women's photos as being more attractive.  Eagleman stated that there was a a subconscious part of the mind at work.

Eagleman compared the brain to all of the news going on in the world.  You don't care about what a maid in Kansas is doing or a bartender in Nebraska - unless there is something newsworthy.  The conscious mind wants facts, ideas and summaries of all of the information that the unconscious mind is processing.  We want the headlines, not all of the little tidbits of every story in every person's life.  All of that information that our brain is processing would overload us, or worse, we wouldn't understand even if we could access it consciously.

He also spoke about synesthesia which he said effects about 4% of the population.  Synesthesia is when one sense triggers another sense in the brain.  People with color synesthesia are capable of seeing colors when they think of numbers or letters.  Ordinal linguistic personification is when letters, numbers and/or days of the week can take on a personality.  Eagleman spoke about super memory capabilities that some people possess that allow them to measure 200-300 decimal places to the famous PI constant.  He said in almost all of these cases, these people were synesthetes.  That they were wired to place colors and personalities to each number in PI to tell a story.  This story helped them remember things more than the average person thus giving them better overall memories.

Eagleman also spoke about a man who suffered from pedophile who both were related to brain tumors.  In the pedophile's case, he was married with children when he all of the sudden began having pedophile issues.  After going to the doctor and having the tumor removed, the man actually went back to a normal life.  Years later, the issue arose again and the man's wife took him back to the doctor where they found more tumor that had to be removed yet again.

Eagleman also spoke about Charles Whitman (UT Tower shooter) and said that Whitman had left letters stating that he felt strange, different and fearful.  After seeing psychiatrists to no avail (it was 1966 after all), he shot his wife, mother and then went on a shooting rampage at UT.  In his suicide note, he asked for all of his bills to be paid off and then the rest donated to psychiatric study.  He also asked for an autopsy to be done on his brain.  The autopsy revealed that he had a tumor that was causing his issues.

One of the key things that stood out for me was how Eagleman spoke about the brain.  He called it an alien material unlike anything ever seen.  That is was self-healing, foreign, alien.  That the brain was more fascinating that anything in the universe.  That we didn't even have a full understanding of what we had with our three pounds of alien material in our heads.

He also spoke about how his research team believes they are close to finding the chromosome that causes synesthesia.  It would be neat to have the ability to expand your memory by having an ability to put colors to numbers/letters or shapes to materials - almost like a built in  mnemonic device...only not something intentional.  It actually reminds me of Dr. Emma Coolidge in Heroes.  She played the deaf doctor who when she played the cello could see colors instead of hearing music.

All and all, Eagleman was a great presenter.  His talk was interesting and he has been one of the better presenters that I have seen so far at SXSW.  He's very energetic and works well with the crowd.  I plan on buying his book and giving it a good read.  This year at SXSW, I am seeing a pattern of quite a few sessions on psychology in the event, especially how it ties to memory and also how to learn the inner psychology of yourself, your employees/coworkers, and most importantly, the user.  It's nice to break away from the technical presentations for a bit and learn something different.