The customer is not always right. The truth is you have to sort out who’s right and who’s wrong for your app.
If you try to please everyone, you won’t please anyone.
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Standard isn’t the first WordPress Theme to have a tab widget on the sidebar – it’s almost standard boilerplate when comes to boilerplate blog themes.
But we weren’t satisfied with that being the case with any of our products. Just like the time it took to build handcrafted icons we slaved over the decision of how to best incorporate a tabbed widget that would satisfy most bloggers as well as impress our own sensibilities.
Let me tell you how difficult it can be to do that! Our desire to provide the most progressive and robust experience without distancing our mainline publisher is difficult!
But I think we landed solidly for the next version (WordPress.com already has these in place while v3.0 is coming shortly!).
You can see it in action here.
Part of what makes working in a technology environment and having technology be your business is that it’s always available – I am constantly connected to the devices that help me to achieve organizational success and especially with the advancement of cloud computing solutions we are perpetually “wired in.”
It doesn’t help that you add the molotov cocktail that is “startup” world and mix it with a healthy dose of ambiguity and the constant anxiety of keeping things moving forward and into the land of milk and honey (being “profitable”).
But the same cocktail that would kill a greener entrepreneur is life-giving with the right team who’s weathered and experienced. Our growing team will always have access to the tools and the tech that they need and the fact that we don’t have office hours is a good thing – in fact, we’ll never really have anything close to that “thing.”
Sure, we make time to meet together physically because it’s good for our own health and then some but you’ll never see punch cards for time.
Never.
One of the best parts of my job is the fact that I have the freedom and flexibility to dream new realities for my team and organization – I get to spend a good deal doing this.
It’s not that my teammates and partners are unable to do this themselves – our aptitude scores show that we’ve got a number of high abstract and cognitive thinkers! And it’s not about the fact that I may (or may not) be the “best” at it in our team, rather, it’s the fact that we’ve agreed that it’s part of my explicit role and responsibility.
I know a lot of people wish they had a job where they could get paid to dream up the future – idyllic, right? I didn’t think it was possible until I met these guys and we agreed to build killer products that would change the world. It just so happens that it’s going to be the publishing industry today.
Tomorrow? Who knows. But we’ll get there.
Now that Standard 2 has officially hit sunset, and we have successfully launched Standard for WordPress.com, the time is right to give an update on a few things here at 8BIT.
Here is what I will cover:
- Standard 3 Official Release Window
- Standard Preview 3
- 8BIT.io Redesign
I couldn’t believe it when I saw it – I literally LOL’d in my car as I stopped in the middle of an intersection to snap this shot (no one was behind me or needing to cross… I think.).
Now, I wouldn’t actually visit their website as it contains malware, so don’t try going there please.
But, here’s the point of this somewhat point-less (not pointless, but a post with less of a point) post: Internally our team latches on to catch phrases. We often create them from scratch, but are unafraid to adopt them from pop culture. We have a new one in high rotation lately and it’s used synonymously with being productive, staying on task, and just going heads-down when it’s time to get stuff done.
We hashtag our internal communication tool with #DOWORK.
Empowering your team to make the right decisions and trusting them to execute them well is tough business but completely necessary.
In fact, I don’t believe that there is really any other good model that exists for management other than empowering their employees to do their best work. Although my particular situation is a bit different in that my “staff” are actually my partners it’s just semantics at this point – I empower them and they empower me.
It should be this way, right?
One of the neat pleasures that I’ve had over the years that I’ve been in startup world and entrepreneurship is the opportunity to interface and work with some of the best and the brightest.
And let me just cut to the chase on this blog post, shall we? The team that I’ve got here is the best self-organized and high-performance team that I’ve ever had. The thing is that we knew that but we’ve been using a tool that I’m helping to build out that has helped qualify what we knew in a quantifiable form.
If you see the above picture you’ll see the team’s Action & Influence Team Matrix – a view of the team’s individual A&I Score that showcases how each of us act and influence each other as well as our unique communication styles.
Here’s what are the major patterns in this team:
There are a few things that you may never notice about Standard Theme (right now the WordPress.com implementation, but the self-hosted is coming along quite nicely…) but we’re very proud of them.
In fact, it’s one of our own internal goals to have most users not notice the care and attention immediately – I know, that seems a bit backward, right?
The point is that we’d rather make it so seamless, so natural, that the only question that they have floating around in their mind is something to the affect of:
Why can’t all WordPress Themes be like this?
In time they may come to recognize the hours and hours that we’ve poured into our products but if they don’t then that’s fine as well.
