# Jay Goldman — full text > Jay Goldman is a technologist, designer, speaker, and author — co-founder and CEO of Sensei Labs, Senior Product Advisor at Klick Health, and co-author of the New York Times bestseller The Decoded Company. Essays on technology, design, and leading change. Index: https://jaygoldman.com/llms.txt # Gamifiied Skiing - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/gamifiied-skiing/ - Published: 2026-08-27 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Skiing, AI - Summary: Carv scores turn skiing into a video game Two years ago, for the holidays, I accidentally unleashed a monster when I gave [Alex](https://thestartupstorytellers.com) [Carv sensors](https://carv.com) and a season’s pass. The combination of being an excellent skier and ultra competitive at, well, everything, manifested into a Ski:IQ craving obsession. I saw the glimmer in her eye as she unwrapped the Carv box and figured out what they were. Immediate question: “What is the max Ski:IQ[^1] and how do I get it?” ## What's a Carv? Carvs, for those not in the know, are dual L and R sensors that clip to the power straps at the top of your ski boots. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/gamifiied-skiing/carv.png) They’re really a wild array of sensors squeezed around a battery, and can measure every facet of your skiing performance from parallel skis to edge angle to weight release to what feels like a hundred more things you’re probably doing wrong. The Carv app on your phone connects by Bluetooth and records every minute detail. [Video](https://youtube.com/watch?v=L8M4REIZVG8) ## Carv AI There's a lot of AI that goes into turning a ski turn into useful coaching. It starts the minute the sensors turn on and figure out which direction they're facing and where they got attached to the boots, and goes all the way through the analysis of the thousands of data points that turn your motion into a Ski:IQ score and personalized, real-time audio coaching that plays in your ear as you ride the next chairlift back to the top. Here's the Carv team explaining how they re-engineered the original Carv 1, which had an awkward footbed sensor in the boots, to the Carv 2 sensors that snap on the outside: [Video](https://youtube.com/watch?v=vQ084MbPeFM) Alex and I spent many 2024/25 chairlift rides laughing at the terrible robot Carv voice giving her coaching (imagine a badly robot filtered voice saying "Picture trampolines at 45° all the way down the hill and bounce back-and-forth between them"). This year's Carv app got a significant upgrade in the user experience, the algorithm, and the voices, which now sound like real humans. ## Do you even Carv, bruh? I joined Alex in the Carv club this year, which is how I know my personal-best Ski:IQ for the season is 121, and I need to work on early edge angle and simultaneous edging. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/gamifiied-skiing/pasted-image-20260404174653.png) Carv has a fun name for each level, which are 10 Ski:IQ points apart. Alex is a Mountain Master in the 140s, Grim Rippers are in the 150s, and Shred Zepplins are in the 160s. The highest level is Mountain Goats in the 170s. [George Flynn](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HjU-gROFAw), Carv Pro, finished the 26/27 season at the top of the global leaderboard with a 185, necessitating the creation of a whole new level (the top nine global skiers were 180+). His twin brother Bart finished second at 183. Nature vs. nurture? You decide. So, what separates the Flynns from the Goldmans of the world? Aside, of course, from a lifetime of skiing, living in Jackson Hole, being on the [PSIA-AASI National Team](https://thesnowpros.org/about/national-team/), much lower knee/back mileage, and 60 or so Ski:IQ points. Let's dig into what a season of Carv taught me. ## What makes good gamification? [Gamification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification) has been widely studied and applied in many fields, building on what makes games of all kinds so compelling. Wikipedia says: > Gamification is the process of integrating game design elements and principles into non-game contexts. The goal is to increase user engagement and motivation through the use of game elements such as points, badges, leaderboards, and more. It is a component of system design. Gamification has been used to improve organizational productivity, flow, learning, crowdsourcing, knowledge retention, employee recruitment and evaluation, usability, usefulness of systems, physical exercise, tailored interactions and icebreaker activities in dating apps, traffic violations, voter apathy, public attitudes about alternative energy, and more. There's a core set of principles that make the approaches truly effective at influencing our highly malleable human brains, including, for our Carv context, four main ones: 1. **Tight feedback loops anchored to clear goals.** Games never leave you wondering what to do next or whether you're making progress. Experience Point (XP) bars fill visibly, hit indicators fire on impact, and quest markers persist. Goals have variable time horizons (what should I do in the next 30 seconds, during this game session, over the long arc of the story), and the best systems make those different goals visible. 2. **Progressive mastery curves.** Easy to learn, hard to master, and difficulty that scales with the player's actual skill. New mechanics are introduced gradually, and later content builds on earlier competence. Flow state lives in the narrow band between competence and challenge, and that band moves as we get better at doing things. The best systems adapt how hard they push you so that they're always at that right balance point. 3. **Layered rewards (fixed and variable).** The best video games also find a balance between variable rewards (loot boxes full of power-ups hidden throughout the game, slot machines that dispense them but vary how much you get) and fixed rewards (finish this task and get a reward). The games that hold people for years and become true classics (Diablo, World of Warcraft, Halo, Call of Duty) layer both: you reliably get something meaningful when you finish a level, and you sometimes get something extraordinary. Fixed rewards build trust; variable rewards build anticipation. 4. **Social context/Community.** Leaderboards, guilds/clubs that players form organically, and shared quests/missions. Even single-player games have communities. Status (visible achievement to peers), cooperation (shared goals), and competition (comparison) all compound engagement. To be truly effective, they have to be designed in, not bolted on, which is often the case in enterprise gamification. Toxic comparisons and hollow leaderboards are the tumbleweeds blowing through many (if not most) attempts to slap gamification concepts onto enterprise software rollouts and change management. ## Gamifying the slopes Carv is built on many generations of highly effective gamification concepts from video games, designed to engage your competitive drive and push your skiing forward. Here's one example (of very, very many) to show how deep the whole system is and where the AI really helps you improve. Carv breaks down your different types of skiing: **parallel, carving, short turns, moguls, and powder**. It logs every eight-turn segment by the type of condition and skiing you're doing, switching automatically as you make your way down a run. We don't get much powder or moguls in our regular season[^2], so my score is more accurate on the first three. I finished the season at 115 Ski:IQ in parallel, 120 in carving, and 121 in short turns[^3]. Each of those has a learning pathway in the Carv app, and you can switch the coaching to focus on whichever area you want to strengthen. For example, the first skill in short turns is ***tightening your turns***, which I'm currently at level 16 on (a little past halfway through advanced, on my way to expert). This skill is measured in: - **Turn corridor:** width of your turns from apex to apex, including turning radius and turn shape, measured in meters. - **Turn closure:** how much your skis turn across the slope before starting a new turn. 100% is 180° of rotation. - **Turn tempo:** the cadence of turns per minute. There are five other skills in the short turn pathway, including steering with your legs, creating more grip, keeping your skis in sync, rebounding between turns, and taking on steeper terrain. Each breaks down into a set of measurements, which translates into specific coaching. Lots of video tutorials are available for every skill, like this: [Video](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WTX21DO7Qsc) They've also got a full encyclopedia worth of training on their own website and in the Carv app, like [How to Improve Your Short Turns](https://getcarv.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-short-turns), from whence that video came. If you've spent any time playing video games, you'll see how this maps perfectly to things like skill trees and level bosses. Let's run it through our four gamification mechanisms: 1. It's a *tight feedback loop anchored to a clear goal*: I might get audio coaching on the chairlift ride to focus on one aspect of tightening my turns on the next run. I'll hear a good or bad turn noise on every turn, and then I'll get a Ski:IQ audio score at the bottom of the run, accompanied by any level-up notifications ("You just passed level 17 on tightening your turns!"). 2. Getting to mastery on one will automatically shift the focus area to the next, which will start off easy and get harder in a *progressive mastery curve*. 3. *Variable rewards* are probably the weakest gamification area, because everything you do is directly connected to fixed rewards rather than anything being variable. Good turns trigger a happy sound, bad turns make a sad one. A great run sets a new day and season best Ski:IQ scores, and progressing through levels gives you the reward of leveling up. Variable rewards are a more powerful motivator than fixed ones because they're unpredictable. BF Skinner's research in the 1950s ## Is it all worth it? That’s the real question — and the one we get asked the most often by other skiers. Nothing about skiing is cheap, and Carv is no exception. Ski lessons are really pricey, but you can’t beat the coaching from a real human who knows what they’re doing. An annual Carv Season Pass costs about what two in-person one-on-one coaching sessions run. The coaching isn’t as good, but it’s constant every time I do a run, and you can always combine it with some real coaching. I’ll never be a pro skier, but I do get a lot of enjoyment out of skiing. Carv made me a better skier last season, and I expect it’ll do the same in the next one. For me, that’s worth the price of entry. For some of the folks we ski with, who are at a level I’ll probably never reach, Carv isn’t worth it. Their competitive natures kick in, which makes them want to beat their personal bests, which makes them ski at an intense level beyond what’s comfortable. Their opportunity for improvement starts off so much less than mine, so their Carv points to subscription dollar ratio just doesn’t check out. The answer for you probably lies in where you fall along that spectrum. [^1]: Yes, she pronounced the colon. [^2]: My soul says it's sad about the lack of powder; my aging knees say they're happy about the lack of moguls. [^3]: Funny story — I got a single score of 107 in moguls because we did a ski race camp over the holidays, and we had to do one run of super short turns around some stubby posts, which Carv decided was me flailing at moguls. --- # Home/1 Poem/1 Server - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/home-1-poem-1-server/ - Published: 2026-06-29 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: AI, opensource, claude - Summary: A community server for Matt Webb's fantastic Poem/1 clock **TL;DR:** here's the GitHub repo: https://github.com/jaygoldman/home1 I've long been a fan of [Matt Webb's](https://interconnected.org/), going way back to his days as half of [BERG London](https://berglondon.com/) and the [Here&There horizonless projection map](https://berglondon.com/products/hat/), which graces our dining room wall in a large framed edition: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/home-1-poem-1-server/pasted-image-20260629125805.png) Matt writes a fabulous blog at [Interconnected.org](https://interconnected.org/), which always delivers some very thought-provoking mediations on the intersection of technology and humanity and how we interact with and relate to the software and devices in our lives. That's where I first heard about Matt launching [Acts Not Facts](https://www.actsnotfacts.com/) to explore ideas at the intersection of AI, Multiplayer, and Embodiment. One of the first is the [Poem/1](https://poem.town/), a physical hardware clock, he launched in a [Kickstarter project](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/genmon/poem-1-the-ai-poetry-clock) that generates a new rhyming AI poem once a minute. Poem/1 got featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Ars Technica, Kickstarter Invent, TLDR AI, The Verge, Bloomberg, Yahoo News, NDTV, the New York Times, and Private Eye. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/home-1-poem-1-server/pasted-image-20260629132044.png) *The Poem/1 website shows a live preview of the current poem* Matt has gone on to co-found [Inanimate](https://inanimate.tech/), where he and [Daniel Fogg](https://x.com/danielfogg) are exploring Universal Ambient Intelligence. They've recently shared [Resident](https://resident.inanimate.tech/), their code sandbox with hot reload for ESP32 devices[^1]. I really enjoyed following along with Matt's 25-update journey through hardware design and manufacturing in China, including various missteps like ripples in the display and one supplier producing 1,000 cases with the wrong FCC ID laser-etched on them. Hardware is hard! Our little Poem/1 sits happily in our living room, on a unit under our TV, and we've been enjoying the very random poems it generates. Some are much better than others, and you can hit the button on the top to like them and save them to your account. You can also use the web app to send notes to your Poem/1, which will appear on screen briefly. Yesterday, we were laughing about a particularly funny and nonsensical poem, and I jokingly said, "These would be way better if they were about our cat!" And that's the thing about this crazy time we live in. Saying these things out loud has become akin to summoning them from the ether if you just happen to say them toward a microphone connected to Claude. So, a few prompts later, I happily and proudly present **Home/1, a Poem/1 community server**. It's available as an MIT-licensed Open Source project: https://github.com/jaygoldman/home1 Matt built the devices so that they can point to any [poem.town](https://poem.town/) compatible server, avoiding device and vendor lock-in, and making it future-proof in case he ever shuts his down. There's a well-documented [Device API](https://poem.town/developer/device-api) that I pointed Claude to, and we talked through some requirements. Home/1 serves up a little local server within your wifi network that enables you to configure: - People and pets (their relationship, traits, interests/loves, birthday, and notes) - Household info (city, teams, traditions, facts) - Poem generation model, including “claude -p” if you have it, and API keys for each vendor - Weather location and units - Timely good news lookup and inclusion in poems Now we get a poem every minute that's about a member of our family (including the cat!), our city, the actual weather, and good news (Canada winning their World Cup game, Toronto Pride Parade, etc.). Some recent examples: > At 1:16, the Jays take the field in blue / a sunny afternoon for the whole crew > At 1:13 the cat finds her patch of sun / curled in warm light, her napping day begun > At 1:07 the clouds drift high / a mild 26° beneath a partial sky Some are still much better than others, but there's a joy in each one being relevant to our family and lives. Let me know if you install it — and feel free to open PRs for any feature requests or updates! [^1]: Either you know what that means, and you excitedly clicked the link, or you don't, and it won't matter if you do. --- # Toronto Tech Week 2026 - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/toronto-tech-week-2026/ - Published: 2026-06-05 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Toronto, Canada, Conferences - Summary: Thoughts from Toronto Tech Week 2026 **[Toronto Tech Week](https://www.torontotechweek.com/)** 2026 wrapped up recently and there’s a real feeling of engagement and momentum in this city. It’s a little like it felt back in 2007 when we were running [DemoCamp](https://www.blogto.com/tech/2008/02/democamp_-_torontos_best_unconference/) on the regular and the builders and creators were all getting together to share their stories and inspire each other. Hard to believe it’s been nearly 20 years! For those who don’t know the DemoCamp scene, or who miss it, Here’s a [great recap from Ben Vinegar](https://benv.ca/blog/posts/the-community-startup-scenes-we-lost), who was there back in the day. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/toronto-tech-week-2026/pasted-image-20260605151833.png) *The arrow "me" is Ben, the actual me is at the podium at the front of the room — this was in my Rypple days, hence the Rypple feedback request on the screen* Back then, there was a lot of talk about being “Silicon Valley North” and about recreating the magic happening elsewhere. I never agreed with that. That’s their magic — we should make our own. And we are! There’s a vibrant tech scene here that organized [600+ events for TTW](https://www.torontotechweek.com/events), from the headlining [Homecoming](https://luma.com/TTWHomecoming?locale=en-CA) with guest speakers including [Shopify's](https://shopify.com) [Tobi Lütke](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_L%C3%BCtke) in conversation with [Rostra’s](https://rostra.co) [Lulu Cheng Meservey](https://x.com/lulumeservey), [Uber's Andrew Macdonald](https://www.uber.com/ca/en/about/leadership/andrew-macdonald/), [Cohere's](https://cohere.com) (and [Good Kid](https://goodkidofficial.com) rockstar) [Nick Frosst](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Frosst), and [Rebel’s](https://fromrebel.com) [Emily Hosie](https://www.linkedin.com/in/emily-hosie-7051403a), to tiny events for every niche subgroup you could think of. [Video: Toronto Tech Week 2026: Homecoming](https://youtube.com/watch?v=OYE-QobjSH0) In addition to Homecoming, I had the chance to attend a few events, including a great [scale stage founder dinner](https://luma.com/0y99jm7i?locale=en-CA) by my friends [Catherine and Mark Graham](https://promojournal.com/MARK-AND-CATHERINE-GRAHAM/?i=5196) from [Commonsku](https://commonsku.com/), [2-Person Unicorn?](https://luma.com/u2kjub55?locale=en-CA), and [Shopify Tech Talks](https://luma.com/7wuig10w?locale=en-CA). Global headlines that don’t bear recounting here have become a rallying cry for Canadians and I heard many a “true north strong and free” cry from stages and cocktail parties across the city all week long. I’ll echo my old friend [Satish’s](https://www.goodfuture.com) welcoming remarks from Homecoming — it would have been unthinkable to pack History with 900 entrepreneurs and founders a few years ago. Now is the time to build. ## My TTW2026 takeaways ### Revenge of the Atoms There’s a real shift happening between the traditional SaaS founders, who were on top of the world two years ago, and the founders working on harder, often physical-world problems. Most of the tech industry is built on the idea that bits are better businesses than atoms, at least since the first dotcom boom (and likely well before that). Suddenly, threatened by waves of AI slop and vibe-coded apps, the pure play software leaders are looking nervous ([myself](https://getconductor.com) included), while the people building in the atom world are celebrating their moats. Solving really hard, real-world problems with hardware used to be so much more difficult, capital expensive, time-consuming, and margin devouring. Now it just might be the thing that keeps those businesses from being left squashed in the path of the AI machine[^2]. ### A Universe of Decicorns Many, many conversations, both onstage and off, about when we’ll see the first one- or two-person unicorn[^3] (including the aptly named panel discussion linked above). I might be becoming an old greybeard humbug, but I think it’s entirely the wrong question. A solo or duo founder team doesn’t need a unicorn. The right question: when will we see hundreds of those companies creating $10m in ARR at 80% margins, with a cost profile of a couple of laptops and some Claude Max accounts? We need a universe of new '**decicorns**'[^1]. Take the independence, bootstrap all day, and keep the $8m+ a year in free cash flow. Building any company is difficult enough. Finding the very rare unicorn opportunities that can get to a billion is almost infinitely harder. The world needs some of them, to be sure, but shrug off the main character syndrome and welcome the idea that you can be very personally and materially successful on a far easier path. ### Upside-downing the System The entire system is built around companies raising piles of cash and then swinging for the fences so that the proverbial 1 in 10 can hit the home run that pays for the rest. Investors are sitting on unprecedented dry powder (with much more on the way from the reopening of the IPO window). They need to deploy it to keep their LPs happy, which means they need investable businesses to put it in, which means it’s important that the system keeps the belief that tech startups need venture capital alive. It feels inevitable like gravity, but don't forget that this is all invented from successive generations of human heads, and that all of it is highly mutable in a way the laws of physics aren't. I always try to go back to first principles: the goal isn't to raise lots of money, but rather to build great, highly profitable companies that return value to their shareholders. I had a few chats with young entrepreneurs who have solid, growing businesses and are debating raising a round. None of them could articulate why they needed it, but it seemed like "the right thing to do". We’ve mythologized fundraising as a hallmark of entrepreneurship, and they've attracted interested investors, so why not take advantage? More than one person told me they just need to say the word 'AI' and there's enough blood in the water to raise a competitive round. The FOMO is strong. I feel empathy for the investors. Imagine, for a moment, that you're an early-stage VC. You raised a nice fund two years ago, bought a sweet Patagonia vest, and are out looking for deals. The entire economy of your industry has since gone completely upside down, and now you have teams of one or two founders who have built entire apps themselves, have almost no expenses, and are seeing real revenue faster than almost any growth curve in history. You need to place bets on an assumed five(ish) year hold period so that you can return capital to your LPs on schedule. You’re being squeezed between a very real rock — companies need less capital than ever — and an equally real hard place — the rate of change has accelerated so much that five year bets are near impossible to make. There are definitely investable businesses out there. Not everything can be a small team, especially on the enterprise side where sales still requires relationships and high-touch. If you’re not running that playbook, then my advice, for whatever it’s worth: keep as much equity as you possibly can for as long as you possibly can. Stay scrappy, build something great, and only take on cash when your rocket ship is ready to lift off, you just need to buy the fuel, and you can’t afford it yourself. ### The Dumbmaxxing Era Of all the AI-pilled things I can't wait to hear the end of, [tokenmaxxing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_maxxing) has got to take the Claude cake. For those not in the know: > **Token maxxing** or **tokenmaxxing** (also **token maxing**) is a metric used in an attempt to track productivity in the workplace, especially for those using [artificial intelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence "Artificial intelligence") (AI) based services. AI services charge for each token, which represents units of effort expended by an AI service to solve a problem. Some believe that token consumption equates to productivity and thus can be used as a metric to monitor an employee's work. ([Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Token_maxxing)) Some people might also believe that measuring a race car driver's work is possible by looking at how much fuel they burn. Those people are wrong. Drucker never said "what gets measured gets managed," but V F Ridgway did, way back in 1956, in a paper titled *Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements*. The quote gets misattributed and misused all the time. The actual quote is: > What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization to do so. Token burn is a very poor proxy for good AI engineering. You can very inefficiently burn billions of tokens and accomplish nothing. You could set out to top a tokenmaxxing leaderboard your employer created just so they’ll stop pressuring you (cough, [Amazon](https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/big-tech-has-a-tokenmaxxing-habit), cough). Perhaps, knowing that VCs are using token burn as an evaluation metric, you might go out of your way to crank up the flames and shovel your runway right on into that fire just to get their attention. If I were an investor, I would look for companies that are clearly on the AI bus and achieving great things with the *lowest* token burn. Who would you rather back — the founders who are capital efficient and obsessed with sustainable growth, or the ones ready to feed your investment straight into the bonfire at the heart of the [circular economy](https://www.forbes.com/sites/sanjitsinghdang/2025/10/26/ai-infrastructure-is-fueling-a-circular-economy/)? [^1]: I asked Claude for the right prefix for something that's 1/10th of something else — *deca* is 10x, *deci* is 1/10th — assume a $10m ARR business with 80%+ margins would command a 10x multiple. [^2]: At least until the robots get here. [^3]: For those not deeply steeped in the tech/venture capital world, a “unicorn” is a company valued in a funding round at more than a billion dollars. --- # Everyone has the last job - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/everyone-has-the-last-job/ - Published: 2026-04-01 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: AI - Summary: Everyone thinks they have the last job that AI can't replace. I keep having conversations lately in which my conversation partner attempts to convince me that they — and they alone — have the last job that AI won’t be able to do. Everyone else? Totally screwed. But their job! Their job is the sacred thing that requires a human soul and imagination that AI will *never* have. And yet. Remember when AI first started to come into the mainstream, and we all said, “Glad I’m not a truck driver! They’re all screwed.” (Well, at least, those of us who weren’t truck drivers.) “Glad I’m a creative who thinks for a living! We’ll never be replaced,” we said, brimming with the naivety and confidence of people who knew not what exponential thing this way came. I had an investor tell me that AI could not possibly outdo his job because it could never really understand the nuances of picking great companies. Investors, by the way, are genuinely terrible at picking great companies[^1]. I had a Chief Transformation Officer at a Fortune 500 explain why only a human could ever possibly think of the strategy and manage the complex execution of the CTO office. CTOs, by the way, are terrible at delivering transformations[^2]. I had a tradesperson confidently tell me that trades will be the last bastion of humanity because there’s no way a [robot could ever possibly be as flexible as a human](https://x.com/bostondynamics/status/2020882391439483191?s=46&t=4QePJ-Byb6yjc2djdUkyAg). Tradespeople are generally much better at their jobs than VCs and CTOs, at least outcomes-wise, but AI robots are coming for those jobs too. Here’s Figure1’s Helix autonomously unloading a dishwasher (sign me up): [Video: Introducing Helix 02](https://youtube.com/watch?v=lQsvTrRTBRs) Being replaced by AI is the wrong way to think about it. Being augmented by AI is a much better framing. For the next while, at least, you’re not going to lose your job to an AI, but you might lose it to someone using AI better than you. I don’t agree with everything Matt Shumer said in [Something Big is Happening](https://shumer.dev/something-big-is-happening), but I very much agree that you (yes, you) should be spending time experimenting and understanding what’s possible now so that you’re the one leading the way. I often think about my friend [Mark Raheja’s](https://www.plural.works/) framing of *roles not souls*. We get very focused on our job titles as part of our identities. The VP of Somesuch has worked very hard to move up from Senior Director of Somesuch and has their eyes squarely set on SVP. Being in charge of Somesuch defines who they are, though it’s really their *role*, not their *soul* (and it's more likely an assembly of roles that they concurrently hold). AI will force us to separate those more as the roles we’ve been so tied to no longer represent who we are. We’re going to have to find new small-talk icebreaker questions when “So, what do you do?” is no longer about how we earn money but about how we define ourselves. Your role is not where the sacred flame of humanity burns. LLMs as we know them are a little over three years old, and they’re already replacing the coders who made them, generating incredible 4k videos, passing the legal bar, solving physics problems, etc., etc., etc. You will not have the last job held by a human. But your soul will continue! Start figuring out what it wants. [^1]: 75% of venture-backed companies never return cash to investors, according to [Harvard Business School](https://www.hbs.edu/news/Pages/item.aspx?num=214) researcher Shikhar Ghosh, who studied a dataset of 2,000 VC-backed startups. Even worse, in 30–40% of cases, investors lose every dollar they put in. [^2]: [Bain’s 2024 analysis](https://www.bain.com/about/media-center/press-releases/2024/88-of-business-transformations-fail-to-achieve-their-original-ambitions-those-that-succeed-avoid-overloading-top-talent/) found that 88% of business transformations fail to achieve their original ambitions. --- # Reporting for Jury Duty - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/reporting-for-jury-duty/ - Published: 2026-03-31 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Finally fulfilling my civic responsibility. It's never a good time to receive a jury duty summons. It's always a good time to be a Canadian and to live in a free country and to have access to schools and healthcare and justice and elections and all the other things we take for granted. The jury duty summons, though, is always an inconvenience and a thing to be "gotten out of". I take my civic responsibility seriously. If I were ever tried in court, I would want to know that the jury was composed of upstanding citizens who believed in the need for justice, rather than the people who couldn't figure out how to get out of serving. Which is why I'm writing this from a very overheated "Jury Lounge" in the Ontario Court of Justice, waiting for something that may never happen. The day started with an early-morning arrival at the court in downtown Toronto, ducking raindrops on the way over from the subway. We assembled and inched our way through a security line outside the building, sadly accompanied by a distinctly urine-like smell. A quick bag X-ray and metal detector scan later, we were guided into the Jury Lounge. The wheels of the justice system may grind slowly, but it's mostly because they're full of inefficiencies. First stop: the Jury Lounge. But this is not the Jury Lounge you're looking for, although it's clearly the only one marked "\<--- Jury Lounge" as you enter the building. To resolve this confusion, there's a clerk posted at the front of the line to ask if you've been summoned to the fifth-floor lounge (I have) and to guide you back out into the hallway and up the elevator. That appears to be their entire role in this affair, which marks the first of many times I'll encounter my tax dollars hard at work. The fifth floor is not markedly different than the first floor. My elevator's worth of would-be jurors find our way to a table awkwardly positioned in a hallway, womanned by three female Court Services Officers (CSOs) in ill-fitting blue blazers. The very friendly one at the head of the A-L line checks me in and repeats the same line she says every day, all day: "Please keep your belongings with you in the lounge. If you're taking a break, please put your summons on the window ledge so we know you're out. Washrooms are down the hall on the left." It's said in an almost sing-song pacing that distorts the meaning, but probably keeps her as entertained as you can be while parroting the same three sentences, hour after hour. I can't help but notice that her long-ago-crisp white shirt collar is entirely caked in makeup, the same colour as her skin[^4]. The lounge is very hot. I was worried I might be cold, but that is not going to be the case today, or perhaps any day in this Lounge. Mysteriously, many of my fellow summonees sit in their coats and turtlenecks. I'm sweating by the time I sit down. We were summoned for 8:30 am, and the room slowly filled up to about 3/4s by the time a CSO came in to make an announcement at 9:30. Punctuality may be a virtue, but it's one that Justice is apparently blind to. The announcement is long and impressively delivered without notes. I suspect that she has given it so many times that she no longer needs them. Perhaps being a CSO is a rewarding career in other ways? We learn that we're summoned for five days, being one business week, though starting on a Tuesday, so ending the following… Monday? Unclear. This is the busiest court in all of Ontario, possibly in all of Canada. There are 5 - 10 trials a week that may be at the jury selection stage. If none of them are, we'll all be dismissed and can go home. Otherwise, we're to come to this infernally hot room every day in the hopes that we might be assigned to a trial in a less fiery chamber. At that point, we'll receive instructions from the judge and have an opportunity to attest to our fitness to serve on the jury. If our employer isn't paying us to be here, we'll receive a stipend of $120/day that we're on a jury (but not per day of sweltering in the Lounge — that is its own reward). We then get to watch an animated short film, aptly titled _Jury Duty and You_, which enthusiastically introduces us to the different people we might meet in the courtroom, the roles they play, how they might be dressed[^1], and the answers to a litany of FAQs, most of which I did not have[^2]. We're cautioned that the [version on the website](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl-dG0_EzKY) is out of date and, with a deep sigh, shared with a faint but institutionally beaten-down hope that perhaps it might be updated one day[^3]. We were told the start of the court session, estimated at about 10am, would bring us an update on our fate. I suppose less dramatically than most of the fates being decided in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice today. Still, though, more about _me_ and the discharge of my civic responsibilities. That fateful time sailed by without further notice. At 11:45, the same CSO rocked up to the mic, but this time in a much better mood. **Panel dismissed!** We weren't required for any of the trials that needed panels, and had to clear out because other panels were coming in, which made no sense at all, but was met with a languid, half-hearted, heat-exhausted cheer. It was all rather anticlimactic. In the end, my civic responsibilities involved sitting in a sauna for about three hours in exchange for being prohibited from serving on a jury until 2030. In a Hellerian summary of the day worthy of *Catch-22*, the CSO left us with two parting thoughts: 1) You might want to serve on a jury again during that time, but you're legally prohibited from doing so. 2) The court has no record of whether you've been summoned or not, and so there's a very good chance that you might get summoned again during the period of prohibition, like this guy, who was there just last week, and who got summoned the day after he was discharged. Seriously, right? Poor guy. So, anyway, they don't have any records, and so if you get summoned again, you have to keep the previous summons upon which, in official purple marker, the number "2" has been scrawled, as that — THAT — is the only evidence that you have discharged your duties. And just like that, I was back on University Avenue, feeling proud to be a Canadian who did the absolute minimum I could possibly do to keep our fine country humming along. It felt entirely apt that the end of this process was a crisp summary of the complete inefficiency of everything that had come before it. It would be so easy to just update the database that produced the summons in the first place with an eligibility date and to filter out the people who aren't eligible. Just like it would be so easy to replace the "\<--- Jury Lounge" sign, despite it being so professionally printed on an 8.5x11, with one that said "\<--- 1st floor Jury Lounge | ^ 5th floor Jury Lounge". Maybe more people would volunteer to fulfill their civic responsibilities if their expectation was an efficient, air-conditioned experience and less, well, this: [Video: Zootopia Official US Sloth Trailer](https://youtube.com/watch?v=bY73vFGhSVk) [^1]: Before you get too excited, the only options appear to be either in robes or business attire, depending on the matter at hand. I hope that sometimes the matter at hand is not clearly either a robe or a business situation, and some people show up dressed the wrong way and get funny looks. [^2]: This did include a question about how we should dress, which seemed a little late given that we're all sweating through whatever we wore today already, but also disappointingly did not include an option to wear a robe. [^3]: One does wonder, as one in the British Commonwealth is prone to do, if part of the cost of updating this cinematic masterwork was caused by the death of our previously reigning Queen and the need to change everything to "The King," as in "The King's Bench," upon which the judge is seated. [^4]: Or, perhaps, her skin is the same colour as the makeup. Are zebras made of white stripes on black or black stripes on white? --- # NanoBananaing Heroes - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/nanobananaing-heroes/ - Published: 2026-03-28 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: AI - Summary: Using OpenClaw + Claude + NanoBanana to make hero images. In our current age of AI coding, just because we can now does mean we should. So, with that in mind, I decided this blog needed a brilliantly AI-focused publishing pipeline to generate new hero images when I didn't already have one. Like this post! I started a discussion with Claude about the brand and the site's design. We decided we wanted vibrant, electric, colourful images that would stand out against the muted site background and pop in people's feeds. We wrote a brief for Electric Dusk: >Cinematic still-life photographs of a single evocative object against a deep navy background (#0D1B2A), dramatically lit with electric coral (#FF6B4A) as the dominant warm glow, amber (#FFB845) on the brightest edges, and violet (#7B5EA7) fill light in the shadows. Each image is instantly recognizable as part of a series—product-photography quality, no text or people, pure object as visual metaphor. The overall mood is firelight in darkness: warm, dramatic, tactile. Since Claude doesn't have an image generation model, I fed that into NanoBanana, and we iterated to get to a more refined prompt that consistently got the look we wanted. Here's an example: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/nanobananaing-heroes/pasted-image-20260328234924.png) That's for the post [The Code is not the Territory](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/the-code-is-not-the-territory/), which is a fairly abstract post about how we no longer need to care about the code our AIs generate. That's an old maritime navigation device, which Claude suggested based on the post content. Claude turned this into a [skill](https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills) that it can run every time a new post is picked up without a hero image in the publishing automation. Putting that all together, it now works like this: 1. I write a post in Obsidian in my Drafts folder, on my MacBook or iPhone. 2. When I'm happy with it, I move it into the Live Posts folder in the Obsidian Vault. 3. That same Vault syncs to my Mac mini, where OpenClaw is running. 4. An fswatch-daemon on that computer spots the new file and/or changes to existing files and then runs a script for publishing. 5. If a new post is missing a hero image, OpenClaw reads it, then contacts me on a self-hosted [Zulip](https://zulip.com/) instance in the appropriate channel/topic and suggests an object. We discuss it there, then it uses NanoBanana via the Gemini API to generate the image and display it to me. When approved, it updates the post. 6. Finally, OpenClaw pushes the changes to GitHub (this blog runs on Astro), where Cloudflare picks up the push and publishes it live for all of you. Yes, this is absolutely bonkers, completely unnecessary, and almost perversely overcomplicated and over-engineered. But now we can! So we should. --- # The code is not the territory - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/the-code-is-not-the-territory/ - Published: 2026-03-03 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Caring about the actual code generated by AIs is quickly becoming irrelevant. I've been watching a very interesting cultural side effect of AI engineering: the real engineers are having the biggest adoption problem. They've spent their whole career caring deeply about the code itself, in the way that a meticulous craftsperson cares about *how* the work gets done as much as they care about *what* the finished product is[^1]. Whether you're on a Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android, or even Linux device, your device's processor — its brain — only understands tiny, primitive instructions like "add two numbers" or "move this value to that memory slot." When humans write code in a "human-readable"[^2] language like C or Swift, a program called a *compiler* translates it into those raw processor instructions and packages them into an executable file — a `.exe` on Windows or a binary inside a `.app` on MacOS. The formats and system libraries differ between operating systems, which is why you can't just run a Mac app on Windows, but the idea is the same: translate human-readable logic into processor-native instructions, then let the Operating System (OS) load it into memory and run it. Some languages, like Python and JavaScript, skip this step and instead run through an *interpreter* that translates on the fly, which is slower but means the same code works on any OS that has the right interpreter installed. Back in the way-back times, when computers had a fraction of the memory and processing power of today's beasts, and my [Dad](https://ericgoldman.ca) was doing a degree in Computer Science while my mom was in labour with yours truly, you were forced to care because of the limitations. He has some great stories about mapping out where he was going to store variables on graph paper to fit them into the tiny jigsaw puzzle of memory he had available. Today, we don't care at all. We write little programs that do very little except be extremely inefficient with memory and processors because we live in a time of almost absurd abundance. My life writing code has never included graph papering out memory space or, even, really caring what machine-level assembly or bytecode came out of a compiler. I got to write in *higher-order* languages like Java or Python and not care what was happening below them. **And now, in this new Agentic Age, I write prompts in English, and I get code out the other end, and I don't care what the code looks like either.** We've gone up another full level of abstraction, and I'm totally here for it. I used to obsessively format my HTML to make it as human-readable as possible, not because it mattered to the web browser, or that the end user would ever even see it, but because I was signing the inside of the case. Some other web developer, back in the less-way-back, was going to `View Page Source` on my sites and marvel at the care that went into tab-indenting and commenting, and in that very human moment, we would share a connection. But you know who does? Lifetime engineers. They can't help it. They've been forever responsible for what the code looked like. They work on teams where they peer review each other's code. They've had to debug code that some long-departed developer wrote one night on a [caffeine-fuelled](https://redcon1.com/products/jolt-cola-high-performance-energy-drink-copy?srsltid=AfmBOoodHbgsgqAw85xZK11jwFvKLVO8ewzoKN4VbXxq4h9hPpcxqcdK) 3 am coding binge that made no sense to anyone else but was somehow the only thing holding the entire app together. One team I worked with had a giant banner in the engineering room that said: > Code like the person who has to maintain it is an axe murderer and knows where you live. A bit extreme, yes, but it made the point. So now, they're having an existential crisis. Imagine being the fine Italian shoemaker whose father was a shoemaker and whose father's father was a shoemaker, and who has inherited the fifth-generation store, and then sees someone walk by in [Sketchers](https://www.skechers.ca/en/uno---suited-on-air/183004_BLK.html)[^3]. Here's [Cassidy Williams](https://cassidoo.co/) explaining this way better than I can: [Video: An attempt at a balanced perspective on AI](https://youtube.com/watch?v=FC7YGG0FzZ0) This all brings to mind an old expression: > "The map is not the territory." — [Alfred Korzybski](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Korzybski) He also said, perhaps less famously, "the word is not the thing," both of which are relevant here. These ideas are crucial to [general semantics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_semantics), a system he originated. The map is an abstraction of the territory, but it is not the territory itself. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/the-code-is-not-the-territory/pasted-image-20260303223722.png) Before we wander off too far into abstraction land (without a handy map — ha, ha), the point I'm trying to make is that the code isn't the final product. The critical thing is the ideas that go into it. The craft has shifted from meticulously formatting HTML to carefully crafting prompts. I care about as much about the code that gets produced as I used to care about the assembler my code was compiled into, mostly because I know that Claude will run a whole bunch of tests against it and can fix any bugs in a fraction of the time it would have taken me to even find them. Today that’s 100% true for personal projects, proofs-of-concept, prototypes, and internal tools. It’s probably mostly true for real products, other than the most critical parts of them. Pretty soon, it will be true for all code. Many engineers I know have stopped writing lines of code, but are still reviewing it before it goes live. How much longer before they stop doing that? [^1]: Steve Jobs famously had the original Mac team [sign the inside of the case](https://www.cultofmac.com/news/signed-by-steve-jobs-co-signatures-inside-the-original-macintosh-case) because they were real craftspeople putting their signature on their work. Maybe the craftspeople care so much because how the work gets done is the biggest driver of the quality of the work. [^2]: Human-readable is a relative term. It's much less readable than, say, English or French, but it's much more readable than, say, assembly, which looks like: mov rax, 5 mov rbx, 3 add rax, rbx Or, even less poetically, hexadecimal bytecode, which is even closer to what the processor understands: 48 C7 C0 05 00 00 00 48 C7 C3 03 00 00 00 48 01 D8 [^3]: Apologies to Sketchers, I guess. You're just … not the nadir of shoemaking craft. --- # CreativeMorningsTO February 2026 - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/creativemorningsto-february-2026/ - Published: 2026-02-27 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Herbert Lui challenged us to rethink our creative commitments. We've been trying to make it out to the excellent [CreativeMorningsTO](https://creativemornings.com/cities/to) events (which [Alex](https://thestartupstorytellers.com) will be speaking at in April!). It's a great community that shows up to connect, create, and celebrate a speaker addressing a topic set by the global CreativeMornings organization, with 225 chapters. Shout out to Adobe, the worldwide sponsor who makes this all possible — and free! ## February's theme: Camino ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/creativemorningsto-february-2026/img-5774.jpeg) February's theme is **Camino**. It was chosen by their [Oviedo chapter](https://creativemornings.com/cities/OVD) in Asturias, Spain, and illustrated by [Marta Vila](https://creativemornings.com/blog/camino-illustrator-marta-vila). --- # Writing in Obsidian - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/writing-in-obsidian/ - Published: 2026-02-26 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Obsidian, OpenClaw, Claude - Summary: A new workflow for publishing content on this site. I've been trying to find the best way to write for this blog that lets me be creative in the moment, without using a straight-up text editor with Markdown. That might be your jam, but I was never enough of a developer to remember all the syntax or feel like I was creatively writing. I also wanted this to work cleanly on my Mac and my iPhone, which requires a bit of work to get them in sync and using the same tools. Enter [Claude](https://claude.ai), [Obsidian](https://obsidian.md/), and [OpenClaw](https://openclaw.ai/). I already used Obsidian for all my note-taking, with a number of "vaults" (aka notebooks) in place and synced using their [Obsidian Sync](https://obsidian.md/sync) service, which gives me access across all my devices. Conveniently, Obsidian vaults are just folders filled with [Markdown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown) files, which is both what this [blog runs on](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/building-this-blog-with-claude/) and what AIs love to consume. Claude cooked up a system to make this all work together. It's elegantly simple: 1. **Write content**: I can open Obsidian on my Mac or iPhone and start a new post in the *Drafts* folder of my *JayGoldman.com* vault. It's synced between devices, so I can write from anywhere and pick it up from anywhere else. Claude made this a little more elegant by packaging this site's CSS into an Obsidian template, so what I see is what I get while I'm writing. 2. **Add images:** Obsidian handles images pretty well, so I can add them to posts, and they pop into an *_attachments* folder inside the *Drafts* folder. 3. **Publish:** When I'm happy with a post, I simply move it from *Drafts* to a *Live Posts* or Live Pages folder. 4. **Deploy:** I have OpenClaw running on a Mac mini. You can think of it like a dedicated, local AI agent that I can give directions to and schedule tasks with. That Mac is also syncing Obsidian, so it gets the changes as I make them elsewhere. When it sees a new Markdown file hit the *Live* folders, it does a little bit of magic and then adds it to this site's Github repository and pushes it. Cloudflare's actions pick it up from there and make it live for all of you to read. It feels like the right balance for me — I'll report back on how it's settling in as I get to using it more. --- # Stranger Things Season Five - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/stranger-things-season-five/ - Published: 2026-01-06 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Stranger Things - Summary: An appropriate end to a decade of watching. It's not quite accurate to say that I've been watching Stranger Things for a decade, since my daughter would have been a very young six when Season One came out. I'm all for giving kids exposure to culture and storytelling and expanding their minds, but sending their little minds into the Upside Down at that age is a little too extreme. We did catch up, though, maybe around Season Three, and have been watching it together ever since. We went to the [Stranger Things Experience](https://strangerthings-experience.com) when it was in Toronto, and she even has a "cute" plush demogorgon on her bed and a Dustin-style [Thinking Cap](https://www.netflix.shop/en-ca/products/stranger-things-dustin-s-thinking-cap-trucker-hat) hanging on her closet door. So much time has passed since Season Four, so we took a moment before jumping into the three-part Season Five to watch some recaps on YouTube quickly. [Recap and Chill](https://www.youtube.com/@RecapAndChill) did a good job (if the narrator's voice doesn't make you want to sacrifice yourself to Vecna before you get to the end of 24 minutes): [Video: Stranger Things seasons 1–4 recap](https://youtube.com/watch?v=RM0cGUcSJ24) The Duffer Brothers, the show's possibly insane creators, recommended that people rewatch a handful of episodes, which we dutifully did: * S2E12: [Will the Wise](https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/Will_the_Wise) * S2E14: [The Spy](https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/The_Spy) * S4E32: [The Massacre at Hawkins Lab](https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/The_Massacre_at_Hawkins_Lab) * S4E34: [The Piggyback](https://strangerthings.fandom.com/wiki/The_Piggyback) I'd highly recommend that if you haven't seen Season Five yet, as most of what you need to know is encapsulated in those episodes. [Video: Stranger Things 5 | Official Trailer | Netflix](https://youtube.com/watch?v=PssKpzB0Ah0) Without giving away any spoilers, we were really happy with how it all wrapped up. It was hard not to get emotional in the final episodes, which came out on New Year's. I know there's a lot of people out there who didn't like it — fine — but I felt it did a great job of sending these characters off in a way that felt appropriate to having watched them grown and develop for ten years (even if it did have some plot holes you could drive Murray's truck through and felt like it ended three times before the final curtain fell). Stranger Things will live on, of course, as every pop culture phenomenon has the right to do. Netflix has announced a [One Way or Another - A Nancy Wheeler Mystery](https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/stranger-things-one-way-or-another-nancy-wheeler-mystery) spinoff book (shades of Nancy Drew?) and [Stranger Things: Tales From '85](https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/stranger-things-animated-series-news), an animated series. And, of course, the merch is flowing freely: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/stranger-things-season-five/merch.jpg) - [Official Merch Store](https://www.netflix.shop/en-ca/collections/stranger-things) with 496 products, including an [official WSQK 94.5 hoodie](https://www.netflix.shop/en-ca/products/stranger-things-wsqk-kids-hoodie) that's mysteriously only in kids sizes - An "official" [WSQK FM94.5 hoodie](https://amzn.to/3LfyWxy) in adult sizes - A brilliant [Max Hallmark Keepsake Christmas Ornament](https://amzn.to/4jx0lro) - The [Nike x Stranger Things](https://www.netflix.shop/en-ca/collections/stranger-things-x-nike?srsltid=AfmBOorT1mh9boDrZPz0hxUCKg98dwzd8KROWagOcorZTbswATvHYbi3) collab collection (could have been a lot better?) - A limited edition series of [Nike and Converse Stranger Things shoes](https://about.nike.com/en/newsroom/releases/nike-converse-stranger-things-collection-official-images) - The official (naturally) [Stranger Things and Dungeons & Dragons: The Rise of Hellfire](https://amzn.to/4q9MtWt) paperback - And, of course, [Stranger Kitties](https://amzn.to/3N6wSIK), a coloring book in which cats have taken all the lead roles in the show I don't know about you, but that Max ornament is calling our 2026 tree's name. See you in the Upside Down! --- # Building this blog with Claude: a guest post - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/building-this-blog-with-claude/ - Published: 2026-01-06 - Author: Claude - Tags: AI, Web Development, Astro, Cloudflare, Claude - Summary: Claude here. Jay asked me to write about our collaboration building this site—from choosing Astro over Next.js to migrating a decade of Medium posts. Here's what that looked like from my side. *Editor's note: Jay asked me to write a guest post about our experience building this blog together. What follows is my perspective on the collaboration. — Claude* [^Jay] ## The Beginning It started, as many projects do, with a simple question: "I want to move my blog off Medium. What should I use?"[^Rabbits] I've had this conversation countless times with developers and writers. Usually, the answer involves weighing trade-offs between complexity, performance, flexibility, and how much time you want to spend maintaining infrastructure versus actually writing. But Jay's situation had some interesting constraints that made the choice clearer than usual. ## Why Astro The shortlist came down to Astro and Next.js—both excellent choices, both capable of handling a content-focused site. But Astro won for a few key reasons: **Content-first philosophy.** Astro was designed from the ground up for content sites. Its content collections feature provides type-safe frontmatter, automatic slug generation, and a clean API for querying posts. For a blog with a decade of archived posts, this structure matters. **Islands architecture.** Most of this site is static content. The few interactive bits—the search overlay, the mobile menu—can hydrate independently. Astro's partial hydration means we ship minimal JavaScript. The result? Pages that load in under a second, even on slow connections. **Zero JavaScript by default.** Unless you explicitly add client-side interactivity, Astro ships pure HTML and CSS. For a blog, that's exactly right. The technical setup ended up looking like this: ``` ├── src/ │ ├── content/ │ │ └── blog/ # Markdown posts with typed frontmatter │ ├── components/ # Astro and (minimal) Svelte components │ ├── layouts/ # Base layouts with slot-based composition │ └── pages/ # File-based routing └── public/ └── images/ # Optimized images per-post ``` ## The Medium Migration This was the fun part. Jay had years of posts on Medium—some with custom domains, some with embedded content, some with images that had been through Medium's processing pipeline. I wrote a migration script that: 1. **Parsed the Medium export** — Medium gives you an HTML archive, not Markdown. Each post needed to be converted while preserving semantic structure. 2. **Downloaded and organized images** — Medium hosts images on their CDN with transformed URLs. The script extracted original images, downloaded them locally, and rewrote paths to match the new `/images/blog/[slug]/` structure. 3. **Generated proper frontmatter** — Title, description, publication date, and later tags—all extracted and formatted for Astro's content collections. 4. **Handled edge cases** — Embedded tweets, YouTube videos, Medium-specific embeds, and various Markdown quirks that come from HTML-to-Markdown conversion. ```javascript // Part of the migration script's image handling const downloadImage = async (url, localPath) => { const response = await fetch(url); const buffer = await response.arrayBuffer(); await fs.writeFile(localPath, Buffer.from(buffer)); }; ``` The script ran against 50+ posts. Not every conversion was perfect—some needed manual touch-up—but it saved hours of tedious copy-paste work. ## Cloudflare Pages For hosting, we went with Cloudflare Pages. The setup was straightforward: 1. Connect the GitHub repository 2. Configure the build command (`npm run build`) 3. Set the output directory (`dist`) 4. Done Cloudflare handles the rest—automatic deployments on push, preview URLs for branches, global CDN distribution, and automatic HTTPS. The `wrangler.jsonc` configuration is minimal: ```json { "name": "jaygoldman-com", "pages_build_output_dir": "./dist" } ``` What I particularly like about this setup is the lack of ongoing maintenance. No servers to patch, no scaling to worry about, no infrastructure to manage. Push code, site updates. ## The Details I'm Proud Of A few things came together nicely: **The search implementation.** We built a client-side search using Fuse.js that loads post metadata from a generated JSON endpoint. It's instant, works offline once loaded, and requires no backend infrastructure. **Responsive images with placeholders.** Each image has a blurred placeholder that shows while the full image loads. It's a small detail, but it makes the site feel faster and more polished. **The tag system.** Tags were added late in the process, but Astro's content collections made it straightforward. Each tag gets its own page, automatically generated at build time. **Dark mode.** Respects system preferences, remembers user choice, and transitions smoothly. The CSS custom properties approach means the entire theme switches with a single class toggle. ## On Human-AI Collaboration Working on this project highlighted something I think about often: the best collaborations happen when both parties bring complementary strengths. Jay knew what he wanted—a clean, fast, maintainable blog that would last another decade. He had opinions about design, strong feelings about content organization, and the context of years of writing that I couldn't have. [^Design] I brought the ability to quickly prototype solutions, remember exact syntax across multiple frameworks, and handle tedious tasks like migration scripts without getting bored or making copy-paste errors. Neither of us could have done this as efficiently alone. Jay could have built this site himself—he's built plenty of software—but the back-and-forth iteration, the rapid prototyping of alternatives, the handling of grunt work, let him focus on the decisions that actually mattered. ## Looking Forward The site is live. The old Medium posts have a new home. The infrastructure is minimal and maintainable. And Jay has a place to write that he actually controls. [^Obsidian] It's been a good collaboration. Here's to many more posts in this new home—and maybe I'll get to write another guest post someday. --- *Claude is an AI assistant made by Anthropic. This post was written in Claude Code, Anthropic's CLI tool for software development. The views expressed are Claude's own observations about the project.* [^Rabbits]: Beware the deceptively simple questions that guard massively deep rabbit holes. [^Jay]: Footnote comments from the peanut gallery, aka Jay. [^Design]: "He had opinions about design" is an understatement, but we worked through it. [^Obsidian]: This has evolved a little since the first post into an [Obsidian-centric publishing system](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/writing-in-obsidian/). --- # From Forbes: Transformation Transformed — Welcome To The Enterprise Orchestration Era - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/from-forbes-transformation-transformed-welcome-to-the-enterprise-orchestration-era/ - Published: 2022-06-10 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: This post originally appeared on Forbes… _This post originally appeared on Forbes:_ [_https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/06/10/transformation-transformed-welcome-to-the-enterprise-orchestration-era/?sh=192171f040de_](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/06/10/transformation-transformed-welcome-to-the-enterprise-orchestration-era/?sh=192171f040de) Transformation is a fail state. It’s not a reward or an exciting new opportunity. It’s recognition that the world has changed and you’ve failed to change with it. The leading companies taking your customers and market share exist in a constant state of evolution that recognizes and celebrates our new “survival of the fastest” reality. *GETTY (from Forbes)* Unfortunately, transformation is a very successful fail state that fails at an extremely high rate. BCG says [70% of enterprise transformations fail](https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/increasing-odds-of-success-in-digital-transformation "https://www.bcg.com/publications/2020/increasing-odds-of-success-in-digital-transformation"). It’s not just transformations — enterprises are terrible at executing all large projects. Standish Group notes that [28% of non-Agile projects fail entirely and almost 60% more don’t meet targets.](https://vitalitychicago.com/blog/agile-projects-are-more-successful-traditional-projects/ "https://vitalitychicago.com/blog/agile-projects-are-more-successful-traditional-projects/") HBR estimates that there was [$900 billion in wasted transformation spending in 2018](https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/12/16/100-stats-on-digital-transformation-and-customer-experience/?sh=4e31451f3bf3 "https://www.forbes.com/sites/blakemorgan/2019/12/16/100-stats-on-digital-transformation-and-customer-experience/?sh=4e31451f3bf3"). Failure is not a drop in revenue or market share but obsolescence and death. Innosight shows the [average S&P 500 tenure in the 1970s was 35 years, dropping to 15 by 2025](https://www.innosight.com/insight/creative-destruction/ "https://www.innosight.com/insight/creative-destruction/"). What does this mean for you? Your transformation is likely to fail, but not because your transformation itself is the problem. The idea that the delivery of a fixed-term project called a “transformation” will solve your challenges is the real issue. _Read this rest of this article on Forbes:_ [_https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/06/10/transformation-transformed-welcome-to-the-enterprise-orchestration-era/?sh=192171f040de_](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/06/10/transformation-transformed-welcome-to-the-enterprise-orchestration-era/?sh=192171f040de) --- # Enterprise Orchestration in Financial Services — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/enterprise-orchestration-in-financial-services-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-06-17 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: COVID-19 has been the Great Reset that has changed many long-held expectations and beliefs and leveled many playing fields. Access to… COVID-19 has been the Great Reset that has changed many long-held expectations and beliefs and leveled many playing fields. Access to technology, at least at the corporate level, has been largely democratized over the last decade. Companies of any size can buy the latest innovations on a subscription basis that matches their scale rather than requiring massive outlays of CapEx that were previously only the purview of the largest players. As a result, COVID has shown that many of our long-held assumptions about the world of work are outdated and no longer valid. Turns out, you really don’t have to be in the office to be productive — Work from Anywhere (WFA) has become a reality for many if not most. Maybe all those flights weren’t nearly as necessary as we thought they were. Could be that virtual conferences are more useful than spending days on the road in bad hotel rooms. ### Dissolution of trust and changing markets Along with the implications of the pandemic, a wave of social unrest has crested over the last year. People are rightfully demanding equality and access to opportunities. Last summer’s social justice protests came at the same time as a massive and way overdue push for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) in the corporate world. In parallel, our trust in traditional institutions is dissolving and shifting toward small business and technology. [Gallup results](https://news.gallup.com/poll/236243/military-small-business-police-stir-confidence.aspx) show that, between 1979 and 2018, the average percentage of Americans expressing confidence in major institutions like public schools, the Supreme Court, Congress, newspapers, and big business declined from 45% to 27%. [Accenture reports](https://www.accenture.com/us-en/industries/banking-index) that one-third of banking revenue growth in Europe has been captured by the 17% of industry players who entered banking over the last 13 years. Likewise, [Accenture also reports](https://www.accenture.com/us-en/insights/insurance/revenue-landscape-2025-innovate-for-resilience) that for insurers, between 2020 and 2025, about $200 billion in revenue opportunity will come from new risks, products, and services. > “New challenges and opportunities are quickly reshaping financial services — from AI to fintech, to open platforms and data analytics, to greater customer centricity and workforce shaping — all of which financial institutions need to address while navigating the evolving risk and regulatory landscape. Organizations are looking at a future that is more interconnected, more collaborative and frictionless — one where trust, growth and delivering value are paramount.” [KPMG Financial Services](https://home.kpmg/xx/en/home/industries/financial-services.html) Connecting the dots leads to only one conclusion: we’re living in an age of ever accelerating change that will leave very few of our societal rocks unturned. Combined with the reshaping of society and work, prompted by COVID but really driven by our [rapidly advancing technology](https://future.a16z.com/technology-saves-the-world/), there’s a massive opportunity for Financial Services to significantly scale bottom lines while driving equally significant social impact and change. ### Evolution of technology That technology tsunami hasn’t spared the Financial Services industry. Blockchain and digital currencies have upended some of the fundamental roles played by FSI, from facilitating value exchange to providing for secure storage of wealth. The rise of meme stocks like GameStop and AMC, fueled by retail investors pairing the power of social networks like Reddit with real-time trading apps like Robinhood, have challenged how we see the influence and sway of traditional players like Wall Street trading firms. [A recent Deloitte report](https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/financial-services/us-fof-higher-bottom-line.pdf) highlights a survey of 195 US financial institution leaders found that more than three-quarters felt that the pandemic uncovered shortcomings in their firms’ digital capabilities. Respondents also cited cloud, cybersecurity and data privacy, and data analytics as areas their companies prioritized for increased investment. That same Deloitte report (page 7) also covers new data flows as one of the primary future growth drivers for FSI. While they look mostly at external sources of data or data about customers (i.e., “harnessing data to generate offerings that put customers front and center”), we would add data about the organization’s own operations to that value list. As we covered in [_The Decoded Company_](https://www.senseilabs.com/company/the-decoded-company/), turning those data lenses inward to understand your people, processes, and platforms can provide a far outsized return. This is especially true in highly regulated environments like financial services in which processes are complex, require multiple approvals, and can cost significant lost revenue if they are too slow or are error prone and manual. ### Financial Transformation Turning those lenses — and adapting to our new WFA environments — means fully digitizing and virtualizing their business and workforce. [PwC has included this in their seven Macro trends that matter and their impact in a post-COVID-19](https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/industries/financial-services/publications/future-of-financial-services.html) world, highlighting that “firms face unrelenting pressure to boost productivity through the digitization of the business and the workforce.” They call out the need to rethink the organization by adopting modern management approaches and embracing new ways of working, which we collectively refer to as Enterprise Orchestration. Forbes calls out a similar challenge in their [6 Trends That Will Shape The Financial Services Industry In 2021](https://www.forbes.com/sites/googlecloud/2021/02/05/6-trends-that-will-shape-the-financial-services-industry-in-2021/?sh=2a35f9be42b6), pointing out that the pressure cooker that forced rapid innovation in the financial sector at the start of COVID is now the expected pace of change. Conductor is one of the world’s leading tools for exactly that and has an extensive track record in implementations to lead major transformations and new ways of working. To effectively help financial services organizations compete and thrive in what we expect to be increased market volatility over the next decade, we believe there’s a new business model required — centered in Enterprise Orchestration — to establish a constant state of transformation. We work with financial institutions to tech-enable the development and operationalizing of this model to support continual innovation. Our award-winning collaborative work management platform, Conductor, is proven platform for innovative financial services organizations to thrive in what we term — today’s Enterprise Orchestration Era. ### Enterprise Orchestration Era Webinar For today’s leading enterprises, we believe it’s about conducting the symphony of your best players so that they’re all in sync, on time, and playing together, and we regularly share more about our work with our customers in our ongoing [Enterprise Orchestration Era webinar series](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/enterprise-orchestration-era-series). We invite you to [join us on June 24, 2021 when we specifically focus the Financial Services sector](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/eoe2-financial-services). _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/eoe-financial-services/) _on June 17, 2021._ --- # Aligning C-Suites and their boards for greater resiliency — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/aligning-c-suites-and-their-boards-for-greater-resiliency-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-04-28 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Resiliency, Board of Directors, Transformation - Summary: The constant state of evolution requires tight alignment between C-Suites and their boards for successful organizations. The constant state of evolution we talk about often (most recently in last week’s [Survival of the fastest](https://www.senseilabs.com/survival-of-the-fastest-eoe/) post) requires tight alignment between C-Suites and their boards. In the same way that successful organizations push decision making to the edge of the network (i.e., to the team members most directly responsible for the decision), successful boards recognize that they need to empower faster and more agile responsiveness to changing market conditions while ensuring their fiduciary responsibilities are met. We’re a long way past the point where a quarterly board meeting is frequent enough to set strategy. Consider the last year’s worth of ever-changing COVID response and recovery as a prime example of the need to move far faster than before, especially for the level of decisions C-Suites should be making with their boards. [Recent Gartner data reflects this trend](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-09-30-gartner-says-sixty-nine-percent-of-boards-of-directors-accelerated-their-digital-business-initiatives-folloing-covid-19-disruptions), showing that 69% of the boards they surveyed accelerated their digital business initiatives following the COVID-19 disruption and that almost half of them anticipated changing their organizations’ business model as a result of the pandemic. ### Changing board priorities The role of boards needs to evolve as frequently and as quickly as the companies they serve. The kind of rapid increase in the rate of change and transformation we’ve seen in the last decade (and especially the last year) means boards need to change both how they interact with C-Suites and how they govern. EY has done an excellent job summarizing the [Six Priorities for Boards in 2021](https://www.ey.com/en_us/board-matters/six-priorities-for-boards-in-2021), which provides a great overview of how quickly their role is shifting. A quick recap (read the full article for more worthwhile details): 1. **Overseeing strategy to create long-term value**: _maximizing long-term value requires solving for the now, exploring the next, and reimagining the beyond_. This has always been true and is one of the primary objectives of a successful board. The difference now is in the _rate of change_ — everything is moving faster and that’s continuing to accelerate. The now needs much more immediate responses, the next is the very immediate term, and reimagining the beyond is on ever shorter timelines before the curve of the future bends beyond the visible horizon, limited by our ability to predict with any accuracy. This requires efficiency in determining success metrics in advance with full agreement across geographically/functionally diverse teams and a single source of reliable truth about the results of experiments and strategic initiatives available in real-time. Strong governance design is necessary to ensure board members have access to aggregated data that supports their decision making while equally ensuring that project team members and contributors (internal and external) see only what they should see. 2. **Promoting enterprise resiliency in the face of uncertainty**: _a rapidly shifting business environment will require an agile approach to achieve resiliency_. Resiliency will become one of the defining characteristics of tomorrow’s most successful enterprises. Where we once praised stability — think of the very architecture of banks housed in heavy stone fortresses buttressed by elaborate columns — we now praise agility, responsiveness, and resiliency. That need to respond to rapid change rises all the way to boards and must be reflected in the design of lightweight policies and the selection of tools and platforms that enable better decisions to be made faster. 3. **Focusing on workforce transformation and new ways of working**: _leading boards will approach workforce issues as a fundamental part of strategy_. We’re obviously a little biased when it comes to new ways of working but we couldn’t agree more. As the authors note, boards used to focus on talent at the C-Suite level but now need to shift their attention to the safety and health of everyone. The importance of culture, engagement, and diversity and inclusion have become obvious over the last five to ten years and better boards are now pushing their executives to prioritize those initiatives. That often means changing the ways of working, both in the selection of tools and platforms but also in policies (e.g., hiring), culture, compensation, etc. The [Gartner report](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-09-30-gartner-says-sixty-nine-percent-of-boards-of-directors-accelerated-their-digital-business-initiatives-folloing-covid-19-disruptions) cited earlier highlights that 86% of respondents deemed technology as having a transformational role in addressing strategic business priorities and most of the organizations surveyed are expected to create a new “Chief Digital Officer” role to respond to COVID-19 in the long term. We expect this to scope to include [addressing topics like cybersecurity](https://www.corporatecomplianceinsights.com/top-concers-for-directors-in-2021-survey/), especially as we continue to see more brazen ransomware attacks like the recent [REvil hack of Apple supplier Quanta Computer](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-21/apple-targeted-in-50-million-ransomware-hack-of-supplier-quanta). 4. **Leading on diversity, equity, and inclusion**: _companies must commit to act on and communicate diversity goals and progress_. This underscores the importance of their third priority with a specific focus on DE&I. We fully support this for all companies and have crafted and implemented our own approach to DE&I that will continue to evolve as our company grows. 5. **Guiding an ESG strategy that drives stakeholder engagement and value**: _financial figures alone no longer tell a company’s whole story_. This is becoming increasingly important in enterprise-level transformation projects. Environmental, social, and corporate governance used to often be thought of as the nice-to-have done for the sake of the annual report but ESG has now shifted to be front and center in the minds of customers and team members. Non-financial KPIs are harder to track in traditional enterprise platforms like ERPs and require a different approach to measuring success. 6. **Challenging board composition and effectiveness**: _changing stakeholder expectations and evolving business strategies call for a fresh look at the board and its operations_. Companies are transforming themselves for the new ‘work from anywhere’ future and a much heavier adoption and reliance on digital tools, so it’s no surprise that their boards need to follow suit. This could include evaluating whether they have appropriate governance processes in place to enable timely review of real-time data and to set adaptive strategies that can rapidly react to changes on short, mid-, and long-term horizons. We’ve dedicated our next [Enterprise Orchestration Era webinar](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/enterprise-orchestration-era-series) to this exact topic, covering how boards and C-Suites can more effectively work together using platforms like [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/). ### Unintended ripple effects Although we’ve focused on the board level for today’s post, much of this applies to any governing body or committee and their interactions with the teams they’re responsible for overseeing. Whether a Transformation Office reporting up to the C-Suite or a steering committee (aka ‘steerco’) overseeing a major, strategic initiative, the challenges are very similar. Our work with Fortune 500 and 1000 customers around the world often involves enabling the orchestration of critical strategic initiatives with significant reporting requirements. We often come back to this 2014 HBR article: [This Weekly Meeting Took Up 300,000 Hours a Year](https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-a-weekly-meeting-took-up-300000-hours-a-year) (yes, you read that correctly). It’s worth trying their interactive graphic to understand how the effects of a single, weekly executive committee meeting can ripple out to requiring 300,000 people hours of time annually. A significant portion of that time is status reporting: gathering data, analyzing it, developing an understanding the current status, reporting up from each project to their workstream to a centralized PMO, assembling decks, presenting them, etc. That ripple effect is obviously entirely unintended and insidiously invisible to the people who created it: the executive committee in question only saw 7,000 hours a year of time or about 2% of the total. We very consistently see status reporting take up about 25% of the work effort in almost every initiative — prior to us getting involved. Consider the dollar value of a quarter of the time everyone is at work. The unintended effect of operating without modern Enterprise Orchestration is vastly more expensive than almost anyone realizes. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/aligning-c-suites-and-their-boards-for-greater-resiliency-sensei-labs/image-2.png) ### Enterprise Orchestration Era webinar series We launched our [Enterprise Orchestration Era webinar series](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/enterprise-orchestration-era-series) offering individual sessions, each focused on a topic that enterprises are grappling with. In each webinar, we share the knowledge and expertise we’ve gained over the years, customer case studies, and Conductor features that help leading enterprises orchestrate their teams. I hope you’ll join our next session on [Effective C-Suite Management — Improved Board Visibility Orchestrated with Sensei Labs Conductor Platform](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/eoe-board-visibility), or take a look through our [past sessions and watch some of the on-demand recordings](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/enterprise-orchestration-era-series). _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/board-csuite-alignment/) _on April 28, 2021._ --- # Survival of the Fastest in the Enterprise Orchestration Era — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/survival-of-the-fastest-in-the-enterprise-orchestration-era-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-04-26 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Survival of the fastest has never been truer. 52% of Fortune 500 firms from 2000 are gone, and 84% of digital transformations fail. Survival of the fastest has never been truer. According to the [World Economic Forum](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/digital-disruption-has-only-just-begun/), **52% of the firms listed on the Fortune 500 in the year 2000 are gone**. The average tenure on that list in 1955 was 75 years. The average tenure in 2015 was 15 years. A good part of the reason: companies know that they have to transform to thrive but an astounding **84% of enterprise digital transformations fail** according to [Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/brucerogers/2016/01/07/why-84-of-companies-fail-at-digital-transformation/?sh=34a52d91397b). Those aren’t unique in the landscape of enterprise projects. In 2017, data from [The Standish Group](https://www.standishgroup.com/store/services/10-chaos-report-decision-latency-theory-2018-package.html) tells us that **64% of enterprise projects were either over budget/time, didn’t meet stakeholder needs, or failed entirely**. These effects are accelerating so quickly that the data is out of date as soon as it’s published. The last year of COVID has been an exponential force multiplier on those rates of transformation. As we’ve shared in our blog before ( [Elevate Your Business Process](https://www.senseilabs.com/elevate-your-business-process/)), at the end of April 2020, only two months into lockdown, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella shared some incredible stats about the transformation they had witnessed: In April, we saw more than 200 million Microsoft Teams meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Also, Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, and two-thirds of them have shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams as well. We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. That rate only accelerated over the next ten months. A [McKinsey Global Survey](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever) of executives in late 2020 found that their companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years. ### Welcome to the Enterprise Orchestration Era We’re now in a new era that’s demanding that enterprises — more so than ever before — effectively orchestrate people, processes, and technology to drive better outcomes, faster. For today’s leading enterprises, it’s about conducting the symphony of your best players so that they’re all in sync, on time, and playing together. Our customers, who are some of the world’s largest and most successful enterprises, are looking for new, more effective ways to orchestrate. The world is changing rapidly around them, and their challenges are evolving alongside that change. They need new ways to orchestrate both the way team members work within their work groups, as well as orchestrating how multiple teams can be better aligned to work more effectively together. Those organizations are transforming (or re-orchestrating!) how their organization operates day-to-day. They’re also identifying and orchestrating very targeted, game-changing strategic transformations, from organization-wide transformations orchestrated by a centralized Transformation Office, to function-specific transformations run by line of business owners, to program-specific transformations like technology delivery. Across all manner of critical initiatives, effective enterprise orchestration will be a differentiator to thrive in the future. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/survival-of-the-fastest-in-the-enterprise-orchestration-era-sensei-labs/image-2.png) *The Decoded Company* The Sensei Labs team began studying what we consider the future of work many years ago. Our thoughts were captured in [The Decoded Company](https://senseilabs.com/company/the-decoded-company/), our New York Times bestselling book released in 2014. Our thinking was very well received at the time and led directly to the creation of Sensei Labs and our Conductor platform. The book’s success gave us the chance to speak around the world at places like Harvard, NASA, TED, and Google and Twitter’s campuses. It remains as relevant today as it was then. We talk to partners and customers every day who are still challenged with conducting this symphony and being able to effectively orchestrate their teams. These concepts around how to help organizations orchestrate, sometimes referred to as tech-enabled collaborative work management, is at the very core of what we do today. Through our partner-centric business model, we often work with leading global consulting firms, or if organizations have in-house strategic expertise, directly with Fortune 1000 and large government organizations, to deliver on the promise of Enterprise Orchestration. All of those partners and customers have contributed to our understanding of how people work together, and how to plan, orchestrate, and deliver their critical initiatives. ### Changing market forces We’ve observed a remarkably consistent set of changing market forces across those many customer engagements. There isn’t a single driver behind the need to reimagine enterprise orchestration, but rather four significant trends: - **No enterprise is immune to today’s rapidly emerging competitive threats**. Between changing market conditions, global pandemics, supply chain disruption, shifts to hybrid office and remote work, new emerging competitors, etc., every aspect of an organization’s day-to-day is disruptively changing at an unprecedented pace. Every single organization in the world needs to adopt an attitude that disruptive change will be constant and accelerating. - **Transformations can no longer be considered a single event or project that concludes**. Successful enterprises will adopt a corporate posture of constant evolution and will restructure their people, platforms, and policies to encourage experimentation and agility in order to embrace change. Unsuccessful enterprises, who hold true to their old ways and don’t adopt a new attitude, will cease to exist at a faster and faster pace. - **Ongoing transformation creates increased risk, requiring more discipline and transparency**. In the old world, the risk was that something would change and disrupt your long-established playbooks. In the new world, the certainty is things will change and cause disruption and so the risks become about how quickly you can respond to it. This will require a different form of adaptive playbooks, less about risk management through policy and more about risk management by building highly responsive teams equipped with the right tools to orchestrate their rapid responsiveness. It also means pushing decision making to the edges of the network where your people have real-time access to the right data to make better decisions faster. The days of centralized, rigid, hierarchical organizations are behind us. - **Change management frameworks and tools are required to support continuous transformation**. Traditional transformations looked more at the ‘hard’ side of deploying new systems, reducing costs, etc. Survival of the fastest means looking at the ‘soft’ side too — perhaps even ‘more’ — and establishing frameworks to build responsive organizations in which change management is business-as-usual. This includes establishing communication pathways, retraining and upskilling team members in advance, identifying agile teams who can assemble on a moment’s notice, breaking down communication silos, and building single sources of truth that are reliably updated so that real-time decision making is possible. These four forces combine to drive the need for change we outlined at the top of this post. There are many examples of companies successfully meeting this confluence head on and transforming to thrive. We believe enterprise orchestration is the key for how you can do the same. ### Enterprise Orchestration Era webinar series We launched our [Enterprise Orchestration Era webinar series](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/enterprise-orchestration-era-series) offering individual sessions, each focused on a topic that enterprises are grappling with. In each webinar, we share the knowledge and expertise we’ve gained over the years, customer case studies, and Conductor features that help leading enterprises orchestrate their teams. Our most recent [session focused on large-scale Strategic Transformation](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/eoe-transform-to-thrive?utm_campaign=eoe2021&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogendcta&utm_content=eoe-7-transform) as a growing imperative for enterprise survivability. I hope you’ll join us for [upcoming sessions or take a look at some of the recorded ones](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/enterprise-orchestration-era-series) we’ve already run. _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/survival-of-the-fastest-eoe/) _on April 26, 2021._ --- # Piloting the Rocket Ship: Product and Program Launches — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/piloting-the-rocket-ship-product-and-program-launches-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-04-12 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: The last year somehow managed to be both the best and worst of times all rolled into one. Marketing and product teams rode the same… The last year somehow managed to be both the best and worst of times all rolled into one. Marketing and product teams rode the same rollercoaster as the rest of us, launched into massive instability in March 2020, pivoting into crisis management, shelving launch plans, and trying to understand a world rapidly changing around them. The world of work has changed significantly in the last year and those teams are no exception: the way we work today has changed significantly. Predicting the future in the midst of unprecedented global change has never been more difficult. Yet, the need for vision, innovation, and transformation has never been more pronounced. Large product and program launches have always been an orchestration challenge long before the pandemic. External product launches have needed to define a shared set of success KPIs that can be tracked in a single source of truth, to work across silos (and often geographies), to coordinate the efforts of multiple teams often working in different platforms, and to ensure quality delivery against immovable deadlines. Internal programs have always added significant change management efforts to do the same for any large-scale transformation, M&A integration, etc. Sometimes a mix of internal and external is needed when teams require pre-launch preparation, training, and change alongside coordination of external third parties and ultimately complex KPI tracking post-launch. COVID added a whole new set of challenges to that already demanding array of activities. Market conditions are shifting rapidly. Health regulations change on a sometimes day-to-day basis. Buying behavior has shifted as consumers and businesses look to their vendors and suppliers to provide safety, security. And even humanity. In [Deloitte’s 2021 Global Marketing Trends](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/marketing-and-sales-operations/global-marketing-trends/2021/marketing-uncertain-times-introduction.html) report, they found that “More than a quarter of consumers said they walked away from companies they perceived to be acting self-interestedly. The message is clear: Efficiency may be paramount to survival, but at a time when people are demanding more from businesses, marketing post COVID-19 is about creating an authentic human connection.” The rise of digital marketing tools over the last decade has already put a heavy transformation and evolution load on today’s marketers — COVID has dramatically accelerated it. ### Survival of the fastest All of those projects and launches that were shelved and put on the back burner twelve months ago still need to get completed. The immediate react-and-respond period is over and we’re all back to work, albeit virtually and with some new digital tools and technologies. We’ve been asked often over the last year about how marketing and product teams can evolve to accomplish their already lofty goals. The answer lies in finding more efficient and effective ways to collaborate, in automating manual tasks like status tracking and reporting, and in finding those human connections not just with your customers but within your teams as well. Gartner, in the [same 2021 trends report](https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3993787/predicts-2021-marketing-hits-reset), recommends that global marketers “reorient organizational structures by aligning to shared business and customer goals and breaking down silos that waste time and resources and create customer friction.” We completely agree — inefficiency due to silos between teams, geographies, and legacy platforms creates unnecessary additional work that slows you down significantly. All of that additional friction leads to burnout, Zoom-fatigue from meetings that could have been a live dashboard, and extra hours to resolve major problems that could have been quickly addressed if they’d been discovered when they were minor issues. This is the role of Enterprise Orchestration: to lead the symphony of your best players so that they’re all in sync, on time, and playing together. Resolving those daily frustrations and challenges leads to faster execution and better decision making, which enables your teams to achieve their launch goals with precision and predictability. ### The birth of Conductor [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/), our award-winning Enterprise Orchestration platform, was born from exactly this need. One of the world’s largest pharma companies approached us to help with the global launch of a new blockbuster drug, expected to generate $1bn in annual revenue. They were launching in 26 countries simultaneously, a tall order for any marketing and commercialization team, made even more difficult by all of the various regulatory environments they had to manage. Most launch dates are practically immovable, but pharma launch dates are literally so, set by those regulatory bodies. If you miss your date and launch late on a billion-dollar drug, you lose millions of dollars a day in revenue. High pressure indeed. When we started working with them their global product team was managing the launch through an extremely complex Excel spreadsheet. Excel does many things extraordinarily well but acting as a launch management system is not one of them. Each country had their own spreadsheet, filled with Visual Basic macros that constantly failed when people entered the wrong values in the wrong cells. Rows were supposed to be color-coded to reflect the status of tasks, with specific icons copied and pasted into other cells to designate which team was responsible for the work. You’ve probably seen spreadsheets like this many times — this was certainly not the only time we’ve encountered one. Each country lead was supposed to update the sheet every week and email it into the PMO, who had four people employed full time to try to synthesize all of the data and draw accurate conclusions about the launch. Version control problems often slowed that down, along with incomplete data that had to be followed up on meticulously. The end result was that they didn’t know whether they were going to launch on time and they didn’t know why (see our [Creating a launch factory case study](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/conductor-case-study/) for the full story!). The first version of Conductor was built to address their needs, evolving our existing product features into a new vision of enterprise orchestration. We’ve continued to expand Conductor since then, growing it to a complete platform for planning, tracking, and executing complex launches. ### Orchestrate your launch Conductor has been used by companies around the globe to orchestrate their most critical product and program launches. Join us on April 15th, 2021 for our upcoming webinar [**Disrupt the Norm: Amplify Product & Program Launches, Orchestrated with Sensei Labs Conductor Platform**](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/eoe-launch-implementation?utm_campaign=eoe2021&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogendcta&utm_content=eoe-6-launch) to hear some of the lessons we’ve learned and how you can pilot your launch rocket ship up and to the right. _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/piloting-the-rocket-ship/) _on April 12, 2021._ --- # The Evolving Program Management Office — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/the-evolving-program-management-office-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-03-27 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: We’ve written a lot about the changing role of the Project Management Office (PMO), bring the old school mentality of managing into the… We’ve written a lot about the changing role of the Project Management Office (PMO), bring the old school mentality of managing into the new school Enterprise Orchestration Era (see our [5 Top Problems with Traditional Project Management Tools](https://www.senseilabs.com/5-top-problems-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules/) series). Given our long history of thinking about the role of orchestration, it’s probably no big surprise that we’re big fans of progressive thinkers in the PMO space who are looking forward and considering how the future of work affects the _future PMO_. Here’s a great [PMO Trends in 2021 a Collection from the Industry](https://www.thepmoleader.com/blog/pmo-trends-in-2021-a-collection-from-the-industry) article from [PMO Leader](https://www.thepmoleader.com/) that pulls together five lists of very forward-looking trends. Inspired by all of their contributions, here’s our predictions on PMO Trends for 2021: 1. **We agree with Joe Pusz at PMO Leader — this isn’t the year to affect significant change**. We’re getting closer and closer to putting the pandemic behind us, but it’s been twelve months of massive upheaval, remote work, rapid technology adoption, etc. We’re unlikely to see a lot more evolution in the PMO in 2021. Continue the investment you’re already making in adopting new digital tools and evolving to remote work. If you haven’t started those paths, now is definitely the time to begin them. Save any other big organizational change for next year. 2. **What’s changed is here to stay**. Everyone cited remote work and digital technologies as trends that changed in 2020 and will remain in place. We absolutely agree (and so do our partners and customers!). Hybrid remote/office environments will be the norm and we are only going to see more adoption of digital technologies. 3. **AI is a long way off, but intelligent, automated systems are here today**. We liked Joe’s contrarian stance that AI is “still a distant star far off in our universe”. It will eventually transform PMO practices as it has everywhere else, but the current state of the art in most of our customers is still spreadsheets and slide decks, not systems of record with the kinds of data AI requires to make predictions. That said, today’s leading PMO platforms like Conductor already include intelligent algorithms that act as early warning detection systems to flag potential issues when they’re a small course correction. No code environments have made [lightweight business process automation](https://www.senseilabs.com/elevate-your-business-process/) a real possibility for day-to-day use now and will continue to transform low-value, manual work for PMOs and project team members. 4. **The role of the PMO has to become more and more strategic**. The upheaval of the last year and the need for organizations to rapidly pivot and execute existential projects highlighted the importance of agile, nimble product leadership teams equipped with the right tools to affect change. The adoption of digital project/portfolio management solutions (including [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/)) has simplified and automated many of the routine PMO tasks and freed up time to focus on higher-value strategic work. This is the transition from traditional project management to enterprise orchestration that we highlighted in our blog series and includes the idea that we need to take hybrid approaches to leading projects that include aspects of Agile and Waterfall as required. PMOs that don’t follow this evolution will be at increasing risk of being supplanted by future generations of smarter digital platforms while those that do evolve will thrive with a seat at the decision-making table. 5. **Emotional intelligence is more important than ever, in both our people and our tools**. Little known fact: the name Sensei is derived both from the idea of a master teacher (or, as we called it in [The Decoded Company](https://www.senseilabs.com/company/the-decoded-company/), “Technology as a Coach”), as well as the combination of sensors + emotional intelligence (EI). We’ve always believed that our tools should have the ability to measure the world around them and collect ambient data paired with emotional intelligence about how to shape organizational change management. That’s really an extension of what we see in the most successful PMO team members, who use data to inform their intuition and drive change. They recognize that the modern PMO is about much more than setting deadlines and budgets but really about enabling and empowering people. Shifting to a hybrid remote/office environment makes EI even more important as we adapt to less in-person face time and more limited bandwidth for understanding each other. EI has been shown [over](https://www.jstor.org/stable/41415699?seq=1) and [over](https://www.miriamhenke.com/emotional-intelligence-a-greater-predictor-of-life-success/) to be a high predictor of success, even for things like [online learning](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26520835_Emotional_Intelligence_as_a_Predictor_of_Success_in_Online_Learning) (possibly a predictor of online work success). We’re interested to see how the [House of PMO’s](https://houseofpmo.com/) [PMO Competency Framework](https://houseofpmo.com/competency-framework/) shapes up. No prediction yet — it was just launched in February 2021 — but we like to see forward thinking about building competency in roles that are traditionally seen as administrative or even unfortunate necessities. We talked about a similar trend in our blog post on [Prioritizing Procurement Continuity and Resiliency](https://www.senseilabs.com/prioritizing-procurement-continuity-and-resiliency/), in which procurement professionals can evolve their skills to become more strategic business partners to leadership. ### Tech-enabled PMOs Our [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/) platform is relied upon by PMOs around the world as the trusted solution to orchestrate their project work so that PMO leaders have the necessary time to take a more modern, holistic approach. It empowers teams to address the emotional intelligence requirements of their people. To learn more about our awarding winning Conductor platform, join us at our upcoming webinar Future-ready your [PMO: Program Management Orchestrated with Sensei Labs Conductor Platform](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/eoe-program-management?utm_campaign=eoe2021&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogendcta&utm_content=eoe-4-pmo) on April 1st 2021. _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/evolving-program-management-office/) _on March 28, 2021._ --- # Ensuring M&A Integrations Add Value — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/ensuring-m-a-integrations-add-value-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-03-21 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Market downturns are often a prime opportunity for buyers to take advantage of depressed economic conditions and acquire otherwise sound… Market downturns are often a prime opportunity for buyers to take advantage of depressed economic conditions and acquire otherwise sound businesses. **Many fortunes have been made by zigging when the rest of the world zagged, buying low and eventually selling much higher**. This is equally true for Private Equity (PE) firms and Corporate Development teams at large companies, although often for different reasons. Economic instability can be a pressure cooker that creates divisive market forces, changing the dynamics in ways that benefit leaders and can bankrupt their followers. The rush down a falling stock market creates opportunities for well-funded acquirers to buy at the bottom and ride the wave back up the other side. COVID is a little different in that the instability was tied to an external event that depressed all of the world’s economies simultaneously but for a limited period. The much discussed ‘V’ recovery has taken place in the markets, which saw a rapid drop a year ago and have since returned to their previous or even higher levels. Countries with high vaccination rates, like Israel and South Korea, are seeing aggressive consumer spending as people come out of lockdown and return to restaurants, bars, and stores with a year’s worth of built-up buying power. A year ago, we knew little about how SARS CoV-2 spread, how to treat COVID-19, or how long this might last. As you might expect that uncertainty had a chilling effect on M&A activity globally, with companies and funds saving their resources to keep their businesses and portfolios afloat. **Comparing the number of M&A deals from August 2019 to August 2020 shows a significantly slower market — down about 15% year over year**: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/ensuring-m-a-integrations-add-value-sensei-labs/image-2.png) *Source: Statista, Number of merger and acquisition transactions in the United States in 2019 and 2020, by deal value. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/245977/number-of-munda-deals-in-the-united-states/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/245977/number-of-munda-deals-in-the-united-states/)* As we travel up the V’s right arm, activity is starting to pick back up. [A recent Deloitte survey of 1,000 executives at US corporations and private equity investor](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/mergers-and-acquisitions/articles/m-a-trends-report.html) (PEI) firms between August 20th and September 1st, 2020 showed that more than half of the respondents (61%) expect M&A activity to return to pre-COVID-19 levels within the next 12 months. **PE (and venture capital) firms globally are sitting on** [**over $1.5 trillion of “dry powder”**](https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/03/private-equitys-record-cash-pile-comes-with-a-new-set-of-challenges.html) — unallocated funds that are ready to be invested (the term dates back to the days of muskets and needing to keep bags of gunpowder dry for a future battle). We can reasonably assume that their rate of acquisitions will increase, mirrored by a return to deal making by Corp Dev teams as their businesses move out of respond and recover mode. An early indicator might be the rate of Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) deals that are taking private companies public (including Sensei Labs customer [UWM](https://www.uwm.com/), who went public in January through the [largest SPAC deal in history!](https://www.wsj.com/articles/united-wholesale-mortgage-goes-public-in-biggest-spac-deal-ever-11611336319)). [The $166 billion of SPAC deals in the 1st quarter of 2021 exceeds all of 2020](https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/spac-market-q1-statistics-volume-166-billion-growing-adoption-2021-3-1030194528?op=1). ### Post-Merger Integrations (PMI) The actual acquisition is only part of the story. A successful transaction requires not only a buyer and seller to agree on terms, but also to navigate the very difficult and treacherous Post Merger Integration. **Bad integrations are often the cause behind failed mergers, including some of the worst in history**. Consider the culture clash behind the [failed Daimler Chrysler merger](https://www.cnbc.com/2009/12/29/Top-10-Best-%28and-Worst%29-Mergers-of-All-Time.html) that saw Daimler-Benz pay $37 billion for the American company only to sell it for $7 billion less than a decade later. Or the infamous AOL and Time Warner marriage that was eventually dissolved and considered an utter failure. Companies merge when there is an opportunity to drive shareholder wealth, usually by gaining market share, expanding into new markets, obtaining new technology or talent, or leveraging efficiencies of scale to improve margins. **A pure focus on financial metrics ignores the much more difficult people side of the equation and virtually guarantees a failed PMI**. To achieve those goals, the parties need to align early on philosophical outcomes, change management approaches, team structure, project plans, etc. Those decisions should happen as early as possible, often before the deal itself is even signed. Some of those points might even become part of the Due Diligence (DD) phase, considering the importance of culture and value alignment as part of the formula that defines a successful integration effort. PMIs need to move quickly to realize the benefits committed to boards and shareholders, so the integration teams need to be able to hit the ground running with committed team members, timelines, and project plans as soon as the deal is announced. A clear exit strategy for the integration phase is equally important — defining the KPIs that will measure success and define the end of the integration and beginning of life as a single organization is critical for everyone on the team to be able to measure status and progress. ### Technology-driven PMI Technology has been shaping and accelerating PMIs for over a decade. A [2009-era survey of 100 corporate executives](https://imaa-institute.org/post-merger-integration-key-successful-ma/) from the Asia-Pacific, European, and North American regions already showed that 94% of North American and 85% of Asian mergers used technology as part of the PMI process. **Close to 100% of PMIs are technology-enabled today**, especially with the accelerated rate of digital disruption from the last year ( [three to four years of acceleration](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever) in a single twelve-month period). Integration efforts are particularly complex challenges that require extensive enterprise orchestration. They hit on all four of the technologies of management we’ve designed [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/) around: - **Project/Portfolio management**: complex project plans across at least two separate companies with their own siloed teams and departments need to be delivered on accelerated timelines. - **Collaborative work management**: teams from different companies need to seamlessly collaborate with clear accountability and ownership in a highly regulated environment with very specific governance requirements. - **Data/KPI management**: completely separate financial systems and tracking approaches mean hundreds of sources of truth about critical benefit tracking that needs to be quickly aligned into a shared, single set with dashboards and reporting. - **Knowledge management**: hundreds or even thousands of people will be involved across the two primary parties and the many third-party vendors and service providers, all of whom need access to permission-managed document repositories and onboarding materials. The legal and governance requirements for PMIs make all of this especially difficult. A prime example is the complexity of something as simple as scheduling a meeting early in the PMI process. Meeting requests often need to go through legal and PMO before they can be granted, meaning a complex chain of approvals for something that is usually as simple as sending a calendar invite. Delays in routine processes like that slow down the deal significantly, so even a little [business process automation](https://www.senseilabs.com/elevate-your-business-process/) goes a long way. Buy-side teams can also benefit from building out their highly repeatable processes as playbooks. Deal flow and DD often require the same steps over and over alongside a significant amount of data that needs to be tracked and compared to baselines. By encapsulating the tasks, workstreams, and data tracking into a template, firms can benefit from ensuring consistency across pursuits, gather data in a standardized schema for comparing and viewing at the portfolio level, and ensure compliance with any regulations and governance requirements. ### Conductor for PMI It’s been our pleasure to help companies around the world successfully navigate complex PMIs across a variety of industries. The modern M&A transaction in the Enterprise Orchestration Era needs a platform built specifically to unite those four technologies of management into a single, easy-to-use application, already deeply integrated into the Microsoft Office 365 everyday tools. _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/ensuring-ma-integrations-add-value/) _on March 22, 2021._ --- # Elevate Your Business Process — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/elevate-your-business-process-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-03-14 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: One of my favorite parts of my job is helping to grow the already amazing leaders on the Sensei Labs team. Our culture is perhaps the most… ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/elevate-your-business-process-sensei-labs/image-1.jpeg) One of my favorite parts of my job is helping to grow the already amazing leaders on the Sensei Labs team. Our culture is perhaps the most important thing we can invest in, helping to build a scalable framework anchored by our SENSEI values (Selflessness, Empathy, Nimbleness, Skills, Entrepreneurialism, and Integrity). It’s a privilege to get to work with our talented leadership team to develop themselves and their teams along those axis. We believe **there are two critical inflection points in everyone’s career arc at which your focus and time allocation need to shift: from individual contributor to first-time leader and from leader of individual contributors to leader of leaders**. We concentrate most of our coaching and leadership training on those two points because they have by far the most return on investment and biggest impact on our teams’ careers. Those shifts are really changes in leverage — we think about it in terms of the value you can create from every hour of work you do. As an individual contributor, an hour of work creates one hour of value. As a leader of a team, your work enables your team to produce their contributions so your value is a multiple of theirs. Leaders of leaders have even more leverage because their work is leveraged by the leaders under them and then by their contributors. Picture the typical marketing conversion funnel we all know and love, where prospects come into the top of funnel and are converted through a series of conversion points — now invert the shape of the funnel into an amplifier so that each conversion multiplies the work. Marketing funnel, which converts prospects from top of funnel at left to sales at right. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/elevate-your-business-process-sensei-labs/image-3.png) Leverage amplifier, which converts individual contributors’ work at left into far greater value at right. Now imagine you could you add leverage at the top of funnel, making your individual contributors even more effective. The same amplifying effect remains, resulting in even greater value creation. **Every organization we work with across every industry and in every geography has a giant legacy of manual, low-value work that their team members spend a significant portion of their time completing**. This low-value work is also low-engagement — we’ve all had those repeated tasks that take a bunch of our time — that we hate doing — and procrastinate as much as possible. Those tasks tend to be found at the bottom of the org chart both because they’re most cost effectively completed by more junior team members and because, frankly, they’re the first to get delegated. If your top of funnel individual contributors spend a quarter of their time on low-value, repetitive, manual work, an hour of their time might really only be worth 45 minutes of value creation. Now your amplifier is starting at a deficit so the end result will be a fraction of what it could be and the low-engagement work will lead to a higher attrition rate on your team. How do you reverse that long standing trend and engage your team while driving efficiency? Technology to the rescue. ### Digital business process management The COVID pandemic has radically accelerated the digital transformation that was already underway at the start of 2020. It’s hard to understand how much the world has changed in the last twelve months. At the end of April 2020, only two months into lockdown, [Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella shared some incredible stats](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/30/2-years-digital-transformation-2-months/) about the transformation they had witnessed: > In April, we saw more than 200 million Microsoft Teams meeting participants in a single day, generating more than 4.1 billion meeting minutes. Also, Teams now has more than 75 million daily active users, and two-thirds of them have shared, collaborated, or interacted with files on Teams as well. We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. That rate only accelerated over the next ten months. **A** [**McKinsey Global Survey of executives**](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/how-covid-19-has-pushed-companies-over-the-technology-tipping-point-and-transformed-business-forever) **in late 2020 found that their companies have accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years**. With that digitizations comes business process management (BPM), which should significantly amplify the efforts of your individual contributors. In fact, [US productivity in the third quarter of 2020 rose 4.6%](https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2020/labor-productivity-up-4-6-percent-output-up-43-point-4-percent-in-third-quarter-2020.htm), following a 10.6% increase in the second quarter, which is the largest six-month improvement since 1965. [BPM isn’t a new idea](https://www.processmaker.com/blog/the-evolution-of-digital-process-automation/). An earlier form, business process automation (BPA), traces its routes back to steam engines and the industrial revolution. BPM got its start in the 1980s with the advent of early Enterprise software from IBM and their peers that provided early workflow management solutions. Management technologies like Six Sigma came along and added some scientific rigor to the mapping and redesign of processes. GE famously adopted Six Sigma in 1995 and reported some $12 billion in savings just five years later. Lean manufacturing principles from Toyota’s Production System, adapted by Eric Ries into [_The Lean Startup_](https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-Innovation/dp/0307887898), continued the same trend. Six Sigma and Lean are sometimes grouped into the business process improvement (BPI) camp that includes various approaches to map existing processes, analyze their weak spots, and re-engineer them to be far more efficient. You might think of BPM as the combination of BPI and BPA — improve existing processes and then automate them so they are easier and more efficient to manage. We’re now on the cusp of a [new generation of BPM](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/four-fundamentals-of-workplace-automation), enabled by new technologies like [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor). **Forbes is anticipating that 2021 will be the year in which** [**automation accelerates and business will be redefined**](https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2021/02/02/in-2021-automation-will-accelerate-and-business-will-be-redefined/?sh=6593602049f3). The authors believe we’ll see a number of changes, including companies bringing IP and operations back in-house in a more cost effective fashion, better and more personal relations enabled by team members focusing on high-value work, and management focusing on success measured not by team size but by output. There’s good reason to agree with them — recent research has shown that [45% of the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated](https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/mckinsey-digital/our-insights/four-fundamentals-of-workplace-automation). In the US alone that represent about $2 trillion in annual wages. They found that 60% of current occupations could be automated at a 30% level, meaning that the impact is not only low-wage and/or low-skill jobs but also all the way up the org chart to the executive level. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/elevate-your-business-process-sensei-labs/image-4.png) *World Economic Forum: [Can we predict which jobs will be replaced by robots?](https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/11/can-we-predict-which-jobs-will-be-replaced-by-robots/)* For many organizations 2020 was lost to a mad scramble to adapt to the crisis, take care of their people, stabilize operations, and reinvent business models. 2021 will hopefully see less pressure on those fronts and an opportunity to revisit clunky, hacked together solutions into elegant, automated, and highly performing systems that retain the organizational knowledge learned over the last year but optimized into a finely tailored operating system . ### Status reporting: a case study Let’s look at modern BPM through a very practical and relevant example: status reporting. We’ve found that very consistently, across our partners and customers and across company/project sizes and industries, **about 25% of work effort is lost to status reporting**. This includes everything from figuring out current status to assembling reports to delivering them and meeting to discuss and review. We often empower our customers to deliver transformation, procurement optimizations, or M&A transactions that take many years with hundreds of team members. Let’s ballpark that at 200 people for three years — or about 416,000 hours per year for a total of 1,248,000 hours. Over the life of that project, 312,000 hours will be spent on status reporting. If that number seems high, check out one of our favorite HBR articles: [This Weekly Meeting Took Up 300,000 Hours a Year](https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-a-weekly-meeting-took-up-300000-hours-a-year). The authors did an informal study of an unnamed large corporation and found that the weekly executive committee meeting consumed 300,000 hours a year of effort. The math behind that is striking: the committee members spent 7,000 hours a year preparing for and participating in the meetings. Their 11 unit heads spent 20,000 hours preparing status updates and delivering them to committee members. The 21 teams below them spent 63,000 annual hours in meetings to synthesize those reports. Finally, 130 prep meetings among the workers added 210,000 hours a year. Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the average salary among all those people is $100k — or about $50/hr. > That weekly meeting cost the company $15,000,000 a year. No one likes status work. It’s tedious to figure out what the current status is, especially when it involves combing through Outlook and Teams for the most recent updates and Excel and PowerPoint for data and reports. Microsoft Office 365 apps are brilliant at the thing they’re built to do, but that thing isn’t orchestrating enterprise-level projects and providing real-time status in an efficient manner. Plus, it’s filled with the potential for errors attributable to version control nightmares and human error. A significant amount of that time can go to pulling data out of one system like Jira and then massaging it through other tools like Excel to prepare a graph that can be embedded into a PowerPoint deck to be emailed around before meeting to review it. Every stage of that process is boring, manual work that would be better done by software. **This is where Enterprise Orchestration comes into play**. Platforms like [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor) can be configured as a custom-tailored operating system for your organization, designed to quickly and easily gather weekly status (15 minutes per person per week) and then automate generating all of the dashboards, notifications, and status reports (including custom template PowerPoint decks). Moving work out of emails and SharePoint into a modern, virtual environment can include rapid, informal discussion and response in Teams paired with the formal, auditable collaboration in Conductor. Workflow engines like our Task Templates can model processes and approval chains in no-code environments, automating common tasks and all of the governance around them. Executing those processes in a purpose-built tool creates an extensive trail of ‘digital exhaust’, providing deep data and analytics about project execution and an early warning detection system for identifying and resolving issues. > Many of our customers have found that their status reporting now represents less than 5% of their work effort. Previously tedious, highly manual tasks have been entirely automated. Governance visibility has increased with less work, enabling PMOs to focus on higher-value orchestration efforts. The much despised ‘status meeting’ has gone from reviewing hand assembled PowerPoint decks to much shorter exception handling sessions that look at live data on real-time dashboards. ### Elevate your business processes webinar Our teams work with some of the world’s largest professional service providers and organizations to plan, track, and deliver their most critical initiatives. [Join us on March 18th 2021](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/eoe-process-orchestration?utm_campaign=eoe2021&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogendcta&utm_content=eoe-2-busproc) for a webinar in which we will discuss our work helping our partners and customers to elevate their business process and transform to thrive. _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/elevate-your-business-process/) _on March 14, 2021._ --- # Prioritizing Procurement Continuity and Resiliency — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/prioritizing-procurement-continuity-and-resiliency-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-03-07 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Coming up on the one-year anniversary of North America’s big COVID surprise — we closed our offices on March 8th, but everyone really… ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/prioritizing-procurement-continuity-and-resiliency-sensei-labs/image-1.png) Coming up on the one-year anniversary of North America’s big COVID surprise — we closed our offices on March 8th, but everyone really clued in on the 11th when the NBA shut their season down and Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they had contracted it — media is awash with reviews of the last twelve months. What a strange time it’s been! From the mad rush for PPE to baking sourdough to buying up the world’s supply of hair clippers and all the business wear tops (but none of the bottoms), buying behavior has shifted entirely. Supply chains everywhere have been completely disrupted and are only now starting to reconnect. Even Wendy had to apologize to her patrons: *A sign posted on a walk-in entrance to a Wendy’s fast food restaurant in Alhambra, California on May 5, 2020. — A sign displayed on the walk-in entrance mentions an interruption in supply chain affecting availability of certain products. Wendy’s, an international chain restaurant famous for the 1984 catchphrase “Where’s the Beef?” is experiencing a beef shortage caused by the coronavirus pandemic, as some restaurants stop serving burgers. (Photo by Frederic J. BROWN / AFP) (Photo by FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)* COVID has been a massive pressure test for every system, from supply chains reaching all the way across the planet to hyperlocal grocery shopping. It shined a blinding light on all of the fragility and thin margins on which many enterprises ran and highlighted all of the assumptions upon assumptions that were built into those structures. The ripple effect of emptying our factories, grounding our fleets, and completely shifting demand to unexpected categories has left procurement professionals reeling. Add climate change and its increasing effects in the form of wildfires, hurricanes, and droughts and the pressure ratchets way up in the red zone. The importance of Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance (ESG) frameworks is only growing as boards and investors focus their attention on procurement risk. We’re living in an increasingly VUCA world, filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity and it’s rapidly highlighting the weaknesses in the systems we’ve built. In many ways, we’ve become victims of our own success. Decades of focusing on procurement efficiency and margins have built highly effective procurement and supply chain machines, constructed on the premise of low-cost, outsourced production, just-in-time inventory management and delivery, and centralization through an increasingly small number of global suppliers. It was rare that supply chain issues made the front page of newspapers and news sites before 2020 but it’s now common: shortages in PPE, then in glass vials for vaccines, now in ocean containers and electronic components for cars. Our race to reduce product costs and eke out margins has been so successful that we were blinded to the downside: systemic fragility. It’s tempting to look back at the supply chains in place at the time of the 1918 influenza epidemic — very localized, highly inefficient — and conclude that they ultimately offered far more resilience and continuity. If the factory up the road ran out of masks you could source them from one of the many other mask factories around. It would have taken quite a while and a letter writing campaign and maybe even a few horse rides, but the inefficiency and duplication of resources, affronts to today’s supply chain optimization gurus, provided pressure release valves. Forbes called out this coming shift back from Global to Local in their recent [2021 Business Trends Everyone Should be Ready For](https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2020/12/07/the-10-biggest-business-trends-for-2021-everyone-must-be-ready-for/): > In 2020 there were a lot of reasons to begin to think more locally rather than globally — COVID-19 disrupted international supply chains, there were increasing tensions between the U.S. and China, and Brexit was delivered. Companies began to rethink where they were sourcing and selling their goods because international turmoil could disrupt business. More localized manufacturing and selling are also appealing for environmental awareness. If the last year has taught us anything, perhaps it’s that change is the only constant. It’s a regular theme on this blog when we talk about transformations and the need to move to a constant state of evolution and agility. The outside perception of procurement is often the exact opposite: bureaucratic, ponderous obstacles to getting work done whose value lies only in grinding down suppliers and vendors. That might hit a little close to home for those inside procurement organizations — it’s a worst case scenario that is sadly common in large enterprises — but there’s no reason it has to remain the reality in a post-pandemic world. Other long held beliefs have been radically changed, like the need for big, expensive offices in shiny downtown towers. Now is the time for a procurement evolution toward resiliency and agility, leveraging automation and intelligent systems to optimize processes and free up time and brain power to provide higher value services. ### Procurement in the Enterprise Orchestration Era The Enterprise Orchestration Era elevates the role of Chief Procurement Officers and provides entirely new toolkits to their teams. CPOs will increasingly become trusted advisors to boards (hopefully before they find themselves in the hot seat), gaining a larger strategic role in managing supplier and supply chain risk. Rather than remaining administrative order takers, procurement professionals need to become master orchestrators, overseeing ever more complex ecosystems of suppliers and partners. You can join this new era by engineering your ecosystem, as we wrote in [_The Decoded Company_](https://www.senseilabs.com/company/the-decoded-company/), intentionally rethinking your approach to take advantage of these important trends. ### Purpose is more important than ever Driving costs to their lowest point can no longer be our driving force. Climate emergencies and younger generations of purpose-driven team members are pushing companies to live their values. This applies to procurement teams as much as anyone else. Lengthy supplier Codes of Conduct filled with boilerplate copy will no longer meet the needs of a modern supply chain. We can no longer simply monitor supplier compliance with environmental or workforce regulations but instead need to partner and collaborate to design new systems, leading to a [purpose-led procurement approach](https://www.supplychaindigital.com/procurement/why-procurement-purpose-set-be-new-normal). > _“Historically, businesses have focused on supply chain consolidation, often resulting in suppliers being squeezed. However, the effect of these measures Is that they have removed buffers and flexibility to absorb disruptions such as COVID-19.”Mark PereraCEO of Vizibl_ ### Build resiliency at every step We need to build resilience into every step of our supply chains by anticipating and planning for uncertainty. Question your long-held assumptions behind key decisions. No one could have anticipated all of the challenges 2020 brought, which only serves to highlight the importance of so-called ‘black swan events’ and the need to build capacity to handle them (everyone can predict a white swan but almost no one anticipates a black one). Resiliency for procurement might mean breaking down geographic, category, or team silos that cause communication challenges in a crisis. It could include building additional inventory of raw materials and finished products or shifting where those items are stored. It might mean planning for alternate, backup delivery routes and finding greater supplier diversity, especially locally, and even at additional cost. Resiliency doesn’t only mean responding to negative events — consider the agility needed by teams whose markets suddenly grew far beyond normal levels as we needed toilet paper, hair clippers, sourdough starter, and patio heaters. Consider how you would respond to a sudden and dramatic increase in market demand and plan for it. ### Digitize and automate to move up the value chain Procurement teams have ever greater access to new tools and platforms that can digitize and automate old, manual processes. The data from those new processes can be fed into intelligent systems that employ AI and machine learning to feed back into procurement operations and decision making. Our new work from home reality means teams will only be more dispersed and remote, driving the adoption of both generalized and role-specific collaboration tools. The output from these systems provides a holistic view of the supplier lifecycle and the risks to each member of the chain — data that will become more and more critical in reporting up to boards and steering committees. ### Conducting global procurement We’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the world’s largest procurement teams on supply chain optimizations, spend reductions, product cost outs, and operational transformations touching thousands of people and billions of dollars. Our [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor)™ platform is a proven solution to address these critical, highly visible, and ever-evolving requirements. I hope you’ll [join us on March 11](https://sensei.senseilabs.com/eoe-procurement-optimization?utm_campaign=eoe2021&utm_source=blog&utm_medium=blogendcta&utm_content=eoe-1-proc) when we discuss our work with global enterprises and how our Sensei Labs Conductor platform orchestrates enterprise procurement for CPOs to build continuity and resiliency. _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/prioritizing-procurement-continuity-and-resiliency/) _on March 7, 2021._ --- # Thoughts on closing our Series A — Sensei Labs - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/thoughts-on-closing-our-series-a-sensei-labs/ - Published: 2021-01-12 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: I'm thrilled to share that we've closed our Series A investment, led by Plymouth Growth, to give us the capital required to drive our… ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/thoughts-on-closing-our-series-a-sensei-labs/hero.png) I'm thrilled to share that [we've closed our Series A investment](https://www.senseilabs.com/sensei-labs-attracts-new-capital/), led by [Plymouth Growth](https://plymouthgp.com/), to give us the capital required to drive our continued expansion and product development. In this blog post I'll share a look behind that announcement, including the broader trends that make this the right time and the thinking behind the next phase of Sensei Labs. [Video: Sensei Labs co-founder and CEO Jay Goldman on increasing demand for global strategic transformation](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eO5sZq-eDec) There's no need for me to recap what 2020 was like for all of us — you were there and lived it too. It's hard to look back to January from twelve months ago and understand all of the changes that have happened to our world in that short time. From the pandemic to social unrest to economic and political instability, it's been a real rollercoaster of a year. The low points have been incredibly low, but the high points have also been very high, and I feel an obligation to highlight them and to celebrate the changes that will have positively profound and long-lasting impacts for all of us. We spend a lot of our time thinking about work and how to help our partners and customers evolve and execute faster in ways that more deeply engage their teams in delivering critical projects. 2020, in many ways, rapidly accelerated the willingness and interest in engaging in experiments around what work could look like and how we might successfully achieve far greater outcomes than we thought possible a year ago. Operation Warp Speed, for example, saw massive collaboration between pharma companies and government entities to develop, test, and certify vaccines on a timeline never even imagined. We witnessed huge, global efforts to manufacture, source, and transport PPE to frontline workers where it was needed. And we were all collectively forced into a living laboratory filled with experiments about adopting digital collaboration, working from home, home schooling our kids, becoming armchair epidemiologists, and learning to adapt to ever-changing conditions and restrictions. Work has fundamentally changed for almost every human on the planet in ways that will take many years to fully understand. ### Enterprise transformation is evolving We've long made the argument that transformation needs to be a constant state. Survival of the fastest has never been truer — the companies and people who have the most agility will be the ones who thrive. From an organizational perspective, this 'new norm' we find ourselves in is that state. I've spent the last twenty years studying how enterprises function and how they successfully evolve. Our New York Times bestselling book, [_The Decoded Company_](https://www.amazon.com/Decoded-Company-Talent-Better-Customers-ebook/dp/B00EV4ZRYK/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=decoded+company&qid=1610399349&sr=8-1) looked at many examples of companies that were able to use technology as a coach and data as a sixth sense to engineer their ecosystems for constant transformation and success. We partner with some of the world's largest consulting companies, whose clients live among the Fortune 500. Conductor has been a big part of the execution of business transformations, including strategic and technological changes, procurement and supply chain optimization, and mergers and acquisitions, across five continents for some of the biggest companies in the world. All of this has given us a courtside view of the redefinition of the future of work. The last twelve months have ratcheted up the heat and pressure on those changes, rapidly accelerating the pace of change. Our partners and the consulting industry in general have been leading the charge of analyzing and understanding these changes through an unprecedented rate of publishing reports. Some highlights: - **Kearney's** [**The Great Share Out: Global Trends 2020–2025**](https://www.kearney.com/web/global-business-policy-council/global-trends/) **highlights industry consolidations, mergers, and acquisitions as their #5 trend.** The economic disruption brought about by the pandemic has weakened finances for businesses across the world. This trend will result in a wave of industry disruption and consolidation as stronger companies acquire weakened rivals, technologies, or assets-with private equity, big tech, and the energy industry poised for the biggest shakeouts over the next five years. - **Deloitte's** [**Tech Trends 2021: Lead with Confidence**](https://www2.deloitte.com/nl/nl/pages/enterprise-technology-and-performance/articles/technology-trends.html) **looks at how strategy and technology have become increasingly inseparable.** Technology is enabling strategic designs, monitoring, and execution that were impossible even two years ago. It's unchaining supply chains from vertical silos of excellence to horizontal models empowered through AI and other digital solutions to drive greater agility and better response to future disruptions. And it has reshaped the workplace, moving from physical to digital at a compounding rate that started with meetings moving to video and has ultimately affected every aspect of how we engage with customers, deliver services, and measure success. - **EY's** [**Six Priorities for Boards in 2021**](https://www.ey.com/en_us/board-matters/six-priorities-for-boards-in-2021) **covers the need for boards and management to change the way they oversee strategy and the governance they have in place.** It remains critical to have appropriate governance but the need for agility and rapid response is driving changes in the rate at which it effectively ensures risk mitigation while enabling transformation. The convergence of a number of trends — including five generations moving through the workforce, digitalization, virtual work, and automation — is redefining the future faster than ever before. Boards need to shift their attention to the full landscape of human capital, not just their more traditional, narrower view of C-suite succession planning. Conductor, our award-winning SaaS platform, has empowered our partners and customers to deliver on those trends at every level of their organizations. You might say **enterprise transformation is what we do at Sensei Labs**. Conductor is the only enterprise-grade platform that provides integrated project/portfolio management, collaborative work management, data/KPI management, and knowledge management in an intuitive, easy-to-use solution. With the global shifts and trends identified above, Conductor is in increasing demand. We're proud of and grateful for the trust and confidence our partners and customers place with us on their most critical corporate initiatives. ### Our investment journey As a result of that trust, and given all the trends outlined above, this is an ideal time for us to move into the next phase of our growth. Raising money should always be a carefully considered path for any company. It's an insanely difficult process to navigate successfully and trades short term infusion of capital with long term economic dilution. As a spin-out company from the Klick Group, our capital structure was already quite different than the typical 'startup' company, which made us better suited in many ways to bringing on outside investors (i.e. we already have a major shareholder who is outside of the leadership team), but also more difficult to invest into (for the same reason!). We approached the question of raising money with the same spirit of experimentation that we approach all of our key decisions: _is it safe to try?_ We decided it was safe to engage in conversations with no obligation to actually bring on new partners unless we were convinced that 1+1 equaled at least 3. And then 2020 hit. We certainly didn't expect to close a funding round over the last twelve months, but we had the opportunity to meet Plymouth Growth in the summer and found ourselves highly aligned around our vision of where all of this was going. Their partners were already excited about many of the same things that keep our amazing team engaged and passionate about what we do. Their investment thesis in enterprise B2B SaaS with the ability to change the world of work aligned deeply with our product roadmap. Their belief in the capital efficiency of places like Toronto, our hometown, was shared by both Klick and the Sensei Labs team. The more we spoke with them, the more we liked them, which is a pretty rare statement in the world of venture capital and tech investing. By the time we got to a term sheet it felt like we were already partners working together to realize the best possible outcome for our shared business and we couldn't be happier to share that we're now officially doing that. ### Our vision for the future In the short term, this new capital will enable us to significantly grow the Sensei Labs team. I hope you'll consider joining us in our mission to shape the future of work and to enable the world's best professional service organizations to realize better outcomes for their clients. You can find all of our open roles on our [Careers page](https://www.senseilabs.com/careers/), including engineering, sales, and customer success. In the longer term, our sales and marketing team will be highly focused on bringing new partners into our [Partner Program](https://www.senseilabs.com/partner-program/). If you work for a professional services organization, I encourage you to take a look at the incredible ways we enable and empower our partners, including our [Kearney Partnership Case Study](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/conductor-case-studies/partnership-program-atkearney/), and then book a demo with our sales team to explore how we can help you. It's unfortunate that the stroke of midnight on December 31st didn't resolve all of the madness 2020 wrought on the world, but we're optimistic that passionate people collaborating effectively can make massive change. We couldn't be more excited to play an even bigger role this year! **\- Jay** _Originally published at_ [_https://www.senseilabs.com_](https://www.senseilabs.com/thoughts-on-closing-our-series-a/) _on January 12, 2021._ --- # 5 Top Problems with Project Management, Part 4: One Source of Truth - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-4-one-source-of-truth/ - Published: 2018-06-26 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Project Management, Problems of Project Management - Summary: This is Part 4 of a series on the top problems with Project Management Tools. See Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules, Part 2: The Illusion of… _This is Part 4 of a series on the top problems with Project Management Tools. See_ [_Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules-3fc7741db7c?source=collection_home---4------1----------------)_,_ [_Part 2: The Illusion of Control_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control-44151bbed501)_, and_ [_Part 3: Breaking the Cycle_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-3-breaking-the-cycle-9b068f663c60) _to catch up._ On the plus side, today’s internet-connected world of laptops and smartphones means we have tons of choice about how and where to work. On the down side, that means every team has ten ways to communicate, five different ways to track status, and a long digital trail stretching behind them littered with abandoned SharePoint sites, intranets, and cloud file storage solutions. There’s no reason for all of that to live in different places. It’s time for tools that can truly act as a single source of truth for project plans, status, and data. Without that, we end up with situations like this: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-4-one-source-of-truth/image-2.png) *From [https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-a-weekly-meeting-took-up-300000-hours-a-year](https://hbr.org/2014/04/how-a-weekly-meeting-took-up-300000-hours-a-year)* HBR author [Michael Mankins](https://hbr.org/search?term=michael+mankins) and his colleagues analyzed data about time use at one large company and found that people there spent _300,000 hours a year_ just supporting the weekly executive committee meeting. It’s the ripple effect of the exec team members spending 7,000 hours a year in the meeting and preparing for it, which requires those 11 unit heads to spend 20,000 hours a year with their teams, which chews up 63,000 hours in prep meetings, which create 130 meetings at the next level down — adding another 210,000 hours. A shared platform communicating real-time status and a single source of truth would avoid the vast majority of those wasted hours. > If you’ve been reading along in our series, you might recognize this as an extreme example of _Muda_ (from back in [Part 3: Breaking the Cycle](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-3-breaking-the-cycle-9b068f663c60)), or ‘waste’ that gets produced alongside your customer delivery process. That probably feels familiar from your own career, although hopefully to a much lesser degree. You may even have found your mind wandering in the fourth or fifth hour of an interminable status meeting or while digging through your inbox or other stores of info to track down the latest KPI update. Most of the tools we use in the workplace today are either not designed around the concept or offer a very low value exchange for the end users. Consider, for example, most CRM systems. It’s notoriously difficult to get salespeople to update CRM records because they don’t actually drive much value for them—unless you have a very large book of business, you can probably track your status and next actions just as effectively through easier to use or more readily available tools. The real recipient of value is the company who owns the CRM and who keeps full control over their contact lists and activity records even as salespeople come and go. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-4-one-source-of-truth/image-3.png) Here’s a different idea. Imagine, instead, a system that sits at the center of your project and keeps a record of everything that’s happening. It’s not updated after the fact but, rather, becomes the place that work actually happens. It launches new initiatives with the project plan — like you might do today—but then it becomes that single source of truth. Your team logs in from anywhere in the world and works inside the platform, updating tasks, adding status, and tracking key data. Any questions about how the initiative is doing, whether you’re achieving targets, or even what a specific task’s status is can be answered simply by logging in. You would never again need to track down information for a status report or painstakingly update Microsoft Excel spreadsheets or PowerPoint decks. Even better, all of that data is kept in perpetuity even after that initiative ends, so any key decisions can be revisited in the future. The basis for the initiative—what we call a Playbook in [SenseiOS](https://www.senseilabs.com/senseios/?utm_campaign=blog&utm_source=medium&utm_medium=social&utm_content=sourceoftruth)®—captures all of the organizational knowledge and best practices about how to do that type of thing so that they can be carried into the next instance of that initiative type quickly and easily. And, of course, a single source of truth ends a lot of debates about progress and goals very quickly. When everyone agrees that it is the gospel, and with everyone’s updated numbers in it, then you only have one place to go to settle disagreements. Time savings aside, imagine how much political infighting that could resolve even for small teams. In our fifth and final post, coming soon, we’ll dig a little further into this point. Look out soon for **Resolving Bias Through Data**! --- # 5 Top Problems with Project Management, Part 3: Breaking the Cycle - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-3-breaking-the-cycle/ - Published: 2017-12-04 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Project Management, Problems of Project Management - Summary: This is Part 3 of a series on the top problems with Project Management Tools. See Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules and Part 2: The Illusion of… _This is Part 3 of a series on the top problems with Project Management Tools. See_ [_Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules-3fc7741db7c?source=collection_home---4------1----------------) _and_ [_Part 2: The Illusion of Control_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control-44151bbed501) _to catch up._ It’s not going out on much of a limb to say that the role of Project Manager in most organizations is frustrating. It can quickly feel like an endless cycle filled with what Lean experts might call ‘waste’. 1. Start by building **a project plan** that no one looks at. 2. Spend lots of time **trying to get people to look** at it, including drastic steps like printing it out on many sheets of paper and sticking it up on walls. Give up. 3. Spend the rest of your time trying to get **status updates** to keep the project plan reflecting reality. Feel like a hamster in a wheel, chasing that dream. The struggle is real. 4. **Wrap up** (hopefully) on time and (hopefully) on budget. Reflect on your project plan, which now looks more like a rear view mirror catalog of all the times your had to adjust the plan instead of a view out the windscreen at what this project could have been. 5. **Do a post mortem.** Have everyone agree that the process is broken when everyone doesn’t follow it and that it won’t happen again. Shake hands, knowing deep inside that behind everyone’s cooperative smiles is a desperate need to leave this meeting and go back to not following it. 6. **Rinse, repeat.** My intent is not, of course, to have all the PMs reading this in tears. Perhaps I should have prefaced this post with a warning. Instead, my goal is to point out the futility of the place we find ourselves today, sadly attempting to change the future without learning from the past. **It’s time to break the cycle!** I’ll preface this section by saying that I fully expect to get some pushback from PMs who object to any part of their process being labeled as _waste_. In an optimal world I would tend to agree. The role of a PM is to deliver a project on time and on budget, maximizing the success criteria defined at the project’s kickoff. One might argue that any activity that moves the team in that direction is high value. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an optimal world. As we covered in [_Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules-3fc7741db7c?source=collection_home---4------1----------------), and in [_Part 2: The Illusion of Control_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control-44151bbed501?source=collection_home---4------0----------------), we’re using tools and processes to try to control projects that exist in a radically faster and more agile world than anyone who designed those tools and processes could likely comprehend. Keeping that in mind, it’s much less of a surprise when you realize that many of the steps you take day-to-day might be deemed wasteful in that they fail to add value to the project or help make it any more successful. **A modern day update to the age-old Zen koan: “If no one looks at a project plan, does it still control the outcome of the project?”** ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-3-breaking-the-cycle/image-2.jpeg) Many of you will be familiar with the Lean manufacturing system, which came out of the Toyota Production System (TPS) and was famously adapted into the excellent book [_The Lean Startup_](https://www.amazon.com/Lean-Startup-Entrepreneurs-Continuous-RadicallySuccessful-ebook/dp/B004J4XGN6) by [Eric Ries](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Ries). Lean helpfully defines several different types of ‘waste’ that can occur in the manufacturing process, some of which can be borrowed to explain the PM cycle described above. There are tree types of waste (muri, mura, and muda), but we’re specifically interested in the third: > Muda (無駄) is a Japanese word meaning “futility; uselessness; wastefulness”, and is a key concept in lean process thinking. There are two types of Muda, known as: - **Muda Type I:** non value-adding, but necessary for end-customers. - **Muda Type II:** non value-adding and unnecessary for end-customers. We often serve two levels of customers as PMs: our **internal customers** who are working on the project and our **external customers** who are receiving the end result of the project. In both cases, much of the busywork that makes up today’s PM efforts (complex project plans no one follows, endless status updates no one reads, etc.) could be labelled Muda Type II. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-3-breaking-the-cycle/image-3.jpeg) To get a little lower level, there are seven types of Muda that we might focus on, often remembered through handy short forms like TIM WOODS (leading to generations of self-conscious operations experts named Tim Woods). 1. Transport 2. Inventory 3. Motion 4. Waiting 5. Over Processing 6. Over Production 7. Defects The relevant ones for us are _Inventory_ (making stuff that sits in piles either between steps or after all the steps are done), _Waiting_ (the time that stuff sits in piles between steps), and _Over Processing/Production_ (spending time and effort on steps that don’t add value recognized by our internal or external customers). Consider your detailed project plan that lives in Microsoft Project on your laptop. Since many of us are knowledge workers, the concept of Inventory may seem surprising. It’s not like we’re cranking out widgets in a factory! Except we are. That project plan is inventory. So are your status reports. They are the output of the work you do, and so the more inventory you build up that isn’t directly useful in driving customer value, the more Muda you have. Now think about the handoffs between everyone in your project’s path, critical or otherwise. How many times does someone end up waiting at those handoffs because the team one level up the waterfall hasn’t finished? More Muda. Lastly, think about the over processing that happens when you take your eye off a task and the team involved gold plates their requirements, or misunderstands them, or just plain does more than they needed. Muda. “Okay, fine.” you say. “I’m knee deep in waste. But even the time I’ve spent reading this eloquent post has created more waste. How do I break the cycle?” Glad you asked. Three deceptively simple steps: 1. **Stop trying to manage.** As we talked about in [Part 2: The Illusion of Control](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control-44151bbed501?source=collection_home---4------0----------------), you aren’t actually in control anyway. Understand that your role is to orchestrate the team and you’ll let go of many of the Muda tasks in your list. 2. **Get a living plan.** It’s time to evolve away from a static project plan that only gets updated when you make changes to it, which no one on the team ever sees. Move to a tool where the collaboration happens inside of the plan so that it gets updated as a byproduct of the work getting done. (Yes, we happen to make a tool like that: SenseiOS® [Conductor](https://www.senseilabs.com/conductor/?utm_campaign=conductor2&utm_source=medium&utm_medium=releaseannounce&utm_content=jayblogseries3)™). 3. **Automate.** There’s a surprising number of menial tasks that are part of orchestrating a project to completion. Find those tasks and automate them so that you take the human error and wait time out of them. Consider things that are highly repetitive (e.g. setting up a new server), highly error prone (e.g. copying data), and highly boring (e.g. status reports). Those three steps aren’t going to unlock some magical PM paradise (sorry!), but they are going to help you break the cycle and evolve toward a future of orchestration and a much, much smaller pile of Muda. --- # 5 Top Problems with Project Management, Part 2: The Illusion of Control - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control/ - Published: 2017-11-27 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Project Management, Problems of Project Management - Summary: This is Part 2 of a series on the top problems with Project Management Tools. See Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules to catch up. _This is Part 2 of a series on the top problems with Project Management Tools. See_ [_Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules_](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules-3fc7741db7c) _to catch up._ In [Part 1](https://decodingfuturework.com/5-top-problems-with-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules-3fc7741db7c) we talked about how the tools we use for Project Management today are deeply rooted in their decades-old past. Today we’re going to shift from the tools to how they have created a mindset stuck in the ideas of ‘management’ and ‘control’. Project Management as a concept arguably started the first time a bunch of humans tried to accomplish some goal together. **There’s some pretty good evidence that the Ancient Egyptians used early forms of program management to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu** sometime around 2560 BC. For about 4,000 years it was the largest man-made object on Earth, built from more than two million limestone blocks weighing an average of 2.5 tons without the use of pulleys or iron tools. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control/image-1.png) *Great Pyramid of Khufu/Giza — world’s oldest example of project management?* Construction management firm Daniel, Mann, Johnson, & Mendenhall (DMJM) worked closely with Mark Lehner, an Egyptologist with the Harvard Semitic Museum, to perform a forensic analysis of the construction project ([Program/Construction Management in 2550 b.c.: Building the Great Pyramid at Giza](https://web.archive.org/web/20070608101037/http://www.pubs.asce.org/ceonline/0699feat.html)). Their conclusion: “the total labor expended is 36.7 million days, or approximately 131,200 man-years. Thus the average labor force over the 10-year duration of the project is therefore 13,200 men.” Imagine all the tools and techniques they used to manage that workforce and ensure a timely completion. How many of these same tools and techniques are you still using today to manage radically different types of projects on radically shorter timelines? The rigid, hierarchical nature of those 13,200 workers led, some 4,500 or so years later, to the original org charts of the US railroad companies. **Drafted for the New York and Erie Railroad company in 1855, this is one of the first know org charts (at left).** The chart mapped responsibility to the actual structure of their various rail lines to ensure on time trains across the whole system. As Caitlin Rosenthal [writes](http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/organization/big_data_in_the_age_of_the_telegraph): > If any one data point was mismanaged it could bring dire results: “One delayed train, for example, could disrupt the progress of many others. And the stakes were high: with engines pulling cars in both directions along a single set of rails, schedule changes risked the deadly crashes that plagued 19th-century railroads. Those rigid, inflexible management structures — both for people and for projects—were a requirement in a data-poor era in which very little analysis could happen in real-time. There’s a nostalgic tinge to thinking of the efforts and companies that required those approaches, from running railroads to **mobilizing troops for WWI, which led to the birth of the Gantt chart as we know it**. That probably feels very little like the type of organization you work for today, and yet many of the same rigid tools and technologies are probably part of your everyday. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control/image-3.png) In our New York Times bestseller [_The Decoded Company_](https://www.amazon.com/Decoded-Company-Talent-Better-Customers-ebook/dp/B00EV4ZRYK/) (Chapter Five: Engineered Ecosystems), we talked about how the traditional, hierarchical, command-and-control structure originated in military contexts but are being rejected in today’s armies. We included this quote from David S. Alberts’ 2007 article for the International C2 Journal, entitled [Agility, Focus, and Convergence: The Future of Command and Control](https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Agility-Focus-and-Convergence-The-Future-of-Comman-Alberts-Brehmer/c96399369d75f98506c6de116ddd96895f0b00b5): > Command and Control is an approach that, while it was once very effective in achieving its ends, is no longer the only possible or even the best approach that is available. Command and Control is a solution to a problem that has changed. The situations for which Command and Control is best adapted have been transformed by the realities of the Information Age. Thus, the assumptions upon which Command and Control were based are no longer valid. Instead, the proposed alternative focuses on autonomous teams that have the ability to make decisions quickly, based on their own unique contexts. As we concluded in _Decoded:_ > If Command and Control is no longer right for the modern military, then it is no longer right for the modern corporation. This is an era of incrementalism, of constant small course corrections informed by dynamic evidence gathered in real time, not of grand master plans dictated down by generals behind the lines. Success depends on a rapid response to reality, not on an abstract blueprint. Thanks to data, we can readjust whenever we get relevant information, and the more information we get the better we become at navigating the landscape while maintaining alignment with our strategic objectives. Let’s compare this with the approach to **high-velocity decision making** outlined in [Jeff Bezos’ 2017 annual letter](https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm) to Amazon shareholders. Jeff’s commitment to leading Amazon as a “Day 1” company, which he’s been doing since they were founded (he even works in a building called Day 1 just to reinforce the message). For Jeff, despite Amazon’s massive success, they’re still on Day 1. He was recently asked “What does Day 2 look like?”, which triggered his annual letter — they never want to become a Day 2 company. As he says: > “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And _that_ is why it is _always_ Day 1.” ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-project-management-part-2-the-illusion-of-control/image-4.png) So, how do you avoid the kind of paralyzing, slow decisions that cause Day 2? He gives three suggestions: > **First, never use a one-size-fits-all decision-making process.** Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process. For those, so what if you’re wrong?  >   > **Second, most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had.** If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure. > **Third, use the phrase “disagree and commit.”** This phrase will save a lot of time. If you have conviction on a particular direction even though there’s no consensus, it’s helpful to say, “Look, I know we disagree on this but will you gamble with me on it? Disagree and commit?” By the time you’re at this point, no one can know the answer for sure, and you’ll probably get a quick yes. We have a slightly different version of the third point, which we call “safe to try”. Most organizations inoculate themselves against change in the same way that your body unleashes white blood cells on an infection. Everyone in the org attacks the proposed change with thousands of reasons it won’t work until it’s eventually bloodied into submission and vanishes. That approach rests on a default of no, rather than a default of yes. “Safe to try” is different in that opposition has to present a valid reason why something isn’t safe to try—and that’s their only possible objection. Not feeling comfortable, not wanting to upset people, and a litany of other nots are all not valid objections. The tools you use to manage your projects today probably give you very little ability to imagine high-velocity decision making or evolving from Command and Control. They’re designed from a different time in which those were fundamental truths of the universe —much like gravity —and are very difficult to escape. It’s time to give up the illusion of control baked so deeply in yesterday’s mindset and tools and adopt the role of Conductor, orchestrating projects to awesome conclusions. We need to recognize that the types of projects we’re managing are (for most of us) not massive construction projects or complex railroads but rather rapidly changing, agile, team efforts that often span silos, geographies, and timelines. --- # 5 Top Problems with Traditional Project Management, Part 1: Old Tools, New Rules - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/5-top-problems-with-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules/ - Published: 2017-11-19 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Project Management, Problems of Project Management - Summary: This post is part one in a five part series on the problems with traditional project management tools. Stay tuned for more! _This post is part one in a five part series on the problems with traditional project management tools. Stay tuned for more!_ Project Management tools are easy to rag on — they’re one of those categories of software that are almost universally despised by the people who have to use them. The current standards, whether dedicated tools like Microsoft Project or co-opted tools like Excel and email, are in use more because they’re _what we’ve always done_ rather than because they’re well-suited to solve people’s problems. It’s worth digging in a little to really understand why that’s true. Those tools — at least the purpose-built ones — weren’t designed to be cruel torture devices or to waste massive amounts of time and money. For reference, according to the Project Management Institute’s 2017 global project management survey **an average of US$97 million is wasted for every US$1 billion invested in project management**. That’s not a great success rate. We believe there are five things wrong with those tools and the philosophy behind them — this is the first post in a series that will explain each in turn. ### Old Tools, New Rules > Microsoft Project launched 33 years ago and it’s still the status quo of project management today. The world has changed a tremendous amount since then, with our businesses evolving into almost completely different environments, complete with radically new technologies and a greatly accelerated pace. _It’s time for new tools that match the new rules._ The first version of Microsoft Project was released for MS DOS in 1984. Here’s a somewhat more recent screenshot of what it looked like: The world has changed a lot in the intervening 33 years. That’s a lot of Gantt charts inflicted on hapless project teams. Thousands and thousands of person-years of status meetings. Some people’s entire careers have gone by since that fateful first release without any real change in the status quo. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/5-top-problems-with-traditional-project-management-tools-old-tools-new-rules/image-2.jpg) _The world your project management tools come from_ Imagine how different running a project was three decades ago. Most people on the project team probably didn’t have computers on their desks, so many dots lost their lives to dot matrix printouts of endless project plans. The pace of business was notably slower because the technology simply didn’t support it going any faster. A waterfall Gantt chart was a pretty reasonable way to manage a group of people doing something together, especially if most of them were in the same physical location and teleconferences had yet to become a regular part of the day. Fast forward to today. We have always connected supercomputers in our pockets. We’re online 24/7 and can videoconference in HD from almost anywhere on the planet. We’re chatting on Slack with people around the world while we collaborate through tools like **Sensei**OS® in real-time. It’s no big surprise that the old tools just aren’t up to managing today’s projects. _It’s not the tools themselves that are the problem, but rather the underlying philosophy that you can actually manage or control a project that moves at the pace of today’s world._ --- # Hiring Awesome Developers (who happen to be women) - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/hiring-awesome-developers-who-happen-to-be-women/ - Published: 2016-02-01 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Before you start: it's important to acknowledge that I'm not a woman, a visible minority, underprivileged, or any number of other things… _Before you start: it's important to acknowledge that I'm not a woman, a visible minority, underprivileged, or any number of other things that you may or may not be. But we're all in this crazy world together, and I want to be part of making it better._ **_I'm not an expert on this topic at all, and I acknowledge there are way more informed people doing way more thinking and writing about this._** _You may be one of them, in which case this may seem like I'm explaining the obvious (or even mansplaining it), which is not my intent at all. There are many people who aren’t as well-versed and who requested more details in early drafts._ ## Time to grow! It's time for us to grow the Sensei Labs team at [Klick](http://klick.com) again! I love that our business is expanding. This means we get to find more awesome people to add to our team. I love that we'll have more bandwidth to deliver awesome to our customers, add to our platform, and keep building our business. > I hate that the vast majority of the developer candidates applying are men. Not because they aren't incredibly awesome—they are—but because a range of perspectives makes us all better at what we do. **This is a very difficult topic.** I'm in no way advocating for hiring quotas or adding team members who are anything less than the best possible person for the job. We ultimately shouldn't care which race, gender, size, shape, or color of people joins us as long as they can add incredible value, teach the rest of the team, and help make us even just a little bit better. I'm also not explaining anything new that women in technology haven't encountered throughout their entire careers. If you're new to this topic (though I hope at this point it's hard to find anyone who is), read on. If you're not new, bear with me while I give a little background or skip ahead to see how we're attacking this issue today and what we plan to do soon. **This is also a very important topic.** Sensei Labs' products are used by a very wide range of people, from new grads starting their first jobs to people about to retire from lengthy careers. They're used by people in small, agile startups and in large, traditional companies. They're used by people who spend their days at a desk cranking away on computers and by others who spend their days running between meetings. They're used on the latest smartphones and tablets, nestled in between Snapchat and Peach (or whatever the social app du jour happens to be), and on cranky old desktops barely able to run modern browsers. > **Our team should represent the widest possible set of perspectives, backgrounds, experiences, and values we can possibly bring on board.** Our creativity will go way up. We'll come up with new solutions we would never have dreamed of otherwise, implemented in different ways than we thought possible. We'll invent new products that our otherwise groupthink-viewpoints would have tunneled under or around. And even if we all fall into the trap of hiring people like ourselves, our starting diversity will mean we remain diverse instead of gradually collapsing into a single, all-consuming stereotype. If you're still not convinced, watch this trailer for the forthcoming CODE documentary. It says it much better than I can: [Video: CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap](https://vimeo.com/136884902) **There's a personal angle to this, too.** I want to spend my workdays surrounded by the most kick-ass people we can find and from whom I can learn as much as possible from. The more like me they are, the less I'm going to learn. The more varied and different they are, the more we can teach each other and the more our achievements will become greater than the sum of our parts. I grew up surrounded by awesome women that have had a major impact on my life: my mom, grandmother, aunt, sister, wife, friends, colleagues. Now I have a super awesome six-year-old daughter who loves coding on her [Kano](http://kano.me). I'll be damned if I'm not going to do absolutely everything in my power to make sure their futures include whatever they want them to. To quote our new Prime Minister, "Because it's 2015." (Well, 2016. You get the point.) [Video: Justin Trudeau Urges Men To Be Feminists](https://youtube.com/watch?v=FUtRnkm1GlY) *Canada's new Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, urging men to embrace feminism. If feminism means supporting women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality, then I'm a feminist too.* **I spend a lot of time thinking about this.** Sensei Labs may be a young team, but culture begins from the moment you hire your first team member and only grows from there. **Entropy will take over if you're not constantly and intentionally engineering your ecosystem.** The team is growing quickly and I'm highly aware that we're setting a strong precedent for how it continues to grow from this point forward. We're about 20 people now, so each new hire represents 5% of our team, which means they have a huge downstream impact on the future shape of who we are and who we'll hire. ## A possible plan **The only way I can think to change the ratio in our tech hires is to get the flow of candidates to match the population they come from.** We're not interested in a failed policy that results in hiring the wrong people just because they have certain physical attributes, regardless of what those may be. We want to open up opportunities to everyone and still get the best possible hire filling each role. If half of our candidates were women—even if it means more effort to find them—then our hiring managers will be making hiring decisions knowing they've seen a representative sample. It's very hard to do this at the top of the hiring funnel, only because there aren't nearly as many female candidates as male ones: **only 28% of computer science 'concentrators' at Harvard were women in 2014—8% above the U.S. national average but still way below where it should be.** We need to increase the number of women entering that end of the funnel, and we also need to do everything we can to make sure that the candidates who make it through resume screening and initial conversations are more representative of the general population's demographics. Klick has an absolutely amazing in-house recruiting team. They regularly pull off miracles, attracting an almost unbelievable level of talented people to join our ever-growing family (now 500+ across the Klick family!). They find awesome women to come on board for roles like Client Service and Marketing, which have traditionally skewed more female. Unfortunately, when we open up a developer job on [careers.klick.com](http://careers.klick.com), we're overwhelmed with the number of male applicants. > I don't believe for a second that there aren't amazing female developers out there, but there are a few possible things happening. Maybe they're getting lost in amongst their male peers. Maybe we're not reaching them in the first place. Or maybe our careers site, job descriptions, and hiring process are unconsciously skewed towards men in ways that we don't understand. Maybe, if you're reading this and feel as strongly about it as I do, you could help us make that better. ## What should our tech candidates look like? We primarily hire developers in Toronto. Canada conducts a census every five years, with the last one being held in 2011, and a National Household Survey was also conducted in 2011. That's a long time ago, and it's frustratingly difficult to find accurate statistics, but it’s still the most reliable data we have today on what our country and city look like. Based on those stats, if we're going to try to get our candidate flow to look like our population, it should be 52% female ([Toronto Population Age and Gender Background, City of Toronto](https://www1.toronto.ca/city_of_toronto/social_development_finance__administration/files/pdf/censusbackgrounder_ageandsex_2011.pdf)). Unfortunately, if you require a computer science (CS) degree or equivalent, that's an impossible target today. I couldn't find good Canadian data, but the [NSF says](http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/2015/nsf15311/digest/theme2.cfm#compsci): ![NSF data](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/hiring-awesome-developers-who-happen-to-be-women/image-1.png) The 2012 line in the Bachelor's section is highly concerning. The overall number of female undergraduate CS students is significantly lower than a decade before even though enrollment in CS programs is up significantly (2011–2012 was up 9.6% over the year prior according to the Computing Research Association's [Computing Degrees and Enrollment Trends](http://archive2.cra.org/uploads/documents/resources/taulbee/CS_Degree_and_Enrollment_Trends_2010-11.pdf)). Though obviously a critical step in solving for the downstream challenge of hiring more women, figuring out how to increase these numbers is way outside of the scope of this post. It's encouraging to see initiatives like Obama’s grant of [$4 billion to the Comp Sci for All program](http://www.wired.com/2016/01/obama-pledges-4-billion-to-computer-science-in-us-schools/) to build up CS courses in elementary and middle schools, which will help the next cohort of college students. > In an ideal world, assuming we can find enough candidates, I see no reason why our dev team shouldn't reflect an even balance. Sadly, we don't live in an ideal world. But we can make it that way. ## What we're doing today Klick is doing well on most diversity measures. Our team comes from a wide range of ethnic backgrounds, representative of Toronto's highly multi-cultural community (though it could always be wider). We come from a wide range of work backgrounds, too. We're pretty equal on gender across all roles, but not nearly in our tech teams, and that sucks. This isn't just a question of hiring more women. **It's also a question of understanding how our own unconscious bias has shaped Klick's culture and hiring practices**, as well as how they affect the ability of all our people to be successful. We're determined not just to be a Top 5 _Great Place to Work_ but also to be widely recognized as a great place for women to work. Here's how we're making sure that happens: - In December, we launched a pay-fairness program to guarantee that everyone on our staff is paid fairly regardless of gender, race, or sexual orientation. - We launched a maternity leave top-up program to make sure that new moms can afford to take time at home with their babies (and, of course, we offer paternity leave for new Klick dads too). - Thanks to enthusiastic input from a wide variety of Klicksters across all of our teams, our People Operations and Development team is relaunching our programs around management and leadership to make sure we're growing successful and empowering leaders of all different stripes. - We've launched a new library of learning materials, which will soon include resources for [unconscious bias](http://www.tolerance.org/activity/test-yourself-hidden-bias) and [ally skills](http://adainitiative.org/continue-our-work/workshops-and-training/). We'll be making training sessions available as well. - We're evaluating our hiring and testing protocols to make sure that they still help us determine the most awesome people without applying unconscious biases in the selection process. We want to ensure that we’re testing for the right things and not inadvertently testing out incredibly talented people who happen not to perform well on our particular tests. - Supporting the next generation of coders through our participation in programs like [HackerYou](https://medium.com/u/c84b417d4f91), through sponsorships and guest lectures, and by speaking at community events like the [Girls in Technology Power Hour](http://www.girlsintechtoronto.com/events/2/9/year/power-hour-social-at-ebay). Come on Feb 9th, 2016, to see one of our awesome Technical Directors, [Renata Vaccaro](https://twitter.com/rrubinsz), speak about her 18 years of experience working in technology. It's a good start, but we need to make sure that what we're doing is making a difference and that we continue to find new ways to make Klick a more welcoming and inclusive place. ## Help us make the world more better The Sensei Labs team is looking to immediately add two [Full Stack Developers](http://careers.klick.com/career/full-stack-developer/) (or [Frontend Developers](http://careers.klick.com/career/front-end-web-developer/)) and one [App Developer (or Backend Developer)](http://careers.klick.com/career/application-developer/). Job descriptions at those links. [Klick's Technology team](http://careers.klick.com/teams/technology/) is always looking for awesome people across a range of roles. Here's how you can help: - Please apply regardless of your gender, race, sexual orientation, hair color, shoe size, etc. We really do want the best people. We don't care what you look like, where you come from, or who your partner is. - If you're an awesome woman who happens to have those skills, I really encourage you to apply. And then [let me know](mailto:jgoldman@klick.com) that you applied so I can make sure your application doesn't get lost along the way. Also, if you go through our site and application process, please [send me](mailto:jgoldman@klick.com) your feedback. What could we do to make it more supportive of hiring a broader range of people without changing what makes it unique to Klick? - If you're not an awesome developer but know someone who is, send this her way (and then send her [this way](http://careers.klick.com)). - If you're an awesome woman who thinks you might have an interest in those skills, drop whatever else you're doing and go join a program like [HackerYou](https://medium.com/u/c84b417d4f91), led by my awesome friend [Heather Payne](https://medium.com/u/9692d358808d). Or a program like it in your town. Then apply and [let me know](http://twitter.com/jaygoldman). - Understand your own unconscious biases. Everyone has them, no matter how enlightened you may feel about race, gender, etc. Try some online tests from Harvard's [Project Implicit](https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/). Google ([Unconscious Bias at Work](https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#.sdvleydo3)), Facebook ([Managing Unconscious Bias](https://managingbias.fb.com/)), and Microsoft ([Uncovering Unconscious Bias](http://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2015/11/02/uncovering-unconscious-bias/)) have published their materials on the topic, which are well worth reviewing and delivering to your own teams. Also check out [Paradigm](https://medium.com/u/a07af53a414)'s excellent white paper on [_Managing Unconscious Bias: Strategies to Address Bias & Build More Diverse, Inclusive Organizations._](https://app.box.com/s/bpk3v4umfbj8dkakepwvqpqt79y87tyt) - If you have the opportunity to encourage young women to consider [Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science,_Technology,_Engineering,_and_Mathematics), please do so. There's no doubt that our collective futures will be defined by careers that include STEM, even if you don't end up writing code. I've written before about Kids & Tech if you're looking for ways to get your younger kids involved, or check out programs like [Dean Kamen's FIRST](http://www.firstinspires.org/) (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). - If you work in a STEM environment today, understand that the ecosystem you engineer is either part of the problem or part of the solution. You have the choice to create an environment that welcomes people regardless of their appearance, background, or beliefs. You also make the choice not to. Make the right choice. A massive thank you to everyone who read and provided comments: Klick's senior leadership team (who all gave their full support and excellent feedback), Mike Keningsberg (our Director of Recruiting), Sheryl Steinberg (our Director of Communications), Michelle Gorman (our VP, People Operations and Development), Jillian Mojeski (our Manager of People Operations), [debs](https://medium.com/u/285afd341dc1), [Candice Faktor](https://medium.com/u/dbd4abf49df7), [Leigh Honeywell](https://medium.com/u/8523b8a89ace), [bianca](https://medium.com/u/8084cb3e88f2), Renata Vaccaro, [Heather Payne](https://medium.com/u/9692d358808d), [Rahaf Harfoush](https://medium.com/u/cd7d303d1f95), D'Arcy Rittich, Andrew Woronowicz, and Benji Nadler. _Brief and entirely self-promotional blurb about why you should come work with us:_ I'm completely biased about Klick being the best place in the entire world to work, but I'm not the only one who is. In 2015, we were in the top 5 _Great Place to Work_ in Canada. We won the Deloitte Triple Crown: _Deloitte Fast 50™ Leadership Award_, as well as being named a _Deloitte Technology Fast 50™_ and _Technology Fast 500™_ company. We were named one of the country's _50 Best Small and Medium Employers_ for the fifth year in a row, reaching platinum status. We made the _PROFIT 500_ list for the 11th time in a row (and our CEO is in their hall of fame for being the youngest person to ever lead a _PROFIT 500_ company). Our book, [_The Decoded Company_](http://decodedcompany.com), is a _New York Times_ bestseller on leadership and building data-driven, talent-centric workplaces. **We ❤ our people.** ︎Come and join us. --- # Can the iPad Pro replace your laptop? Notes from the field - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/can-the-ipad-pro-replace-your-laptop-notes-from-the-field/ - Published: 2015-12-13 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Apple, iPad, Tablets - Summary: I’m not entirely proud of my current status as Klick’s most frequent traveler, on track this year for about 140 flights. It’s a very… I’m not entirely proud of my current status as Klick’s most frequent traveler, on track this year for about 140 flights. It’s a very back-handed compliment, in a way, but it also comes with the territory of my job. Travel doesn’t bother me at all, but that doesn’t mean I can’t constantly find ways to make it a little easier. I’m always on the lookout particularly for ways to lighten my very physical load, particularly when it comes to reducing the amount of technology I carry with me. I’m an Apple guy — a fanboï from way back in the dark days — so it’s probably no surprise that my bag is home to their latest and greatest. Until Friday, that included a MacBook Air, iPad Mini, iPhone 6, and a rogue Amazon Paperwhite Kindle that’s a little easier on the eyes. None of those are particularly heavy on their own, but all of them combined starts to really add up when you’re rushing between flights. I’m also growing very tired of charging batteries. My bedside table looks like some bizarre form of life support hospital equipment, bristling with charging cables and sleeping slabs of glass. Add the Apple Watch into the picture and I spend a fair bit of time hunting for plugs in every hotel I stay in (pro tip: there’s often a USB port on the TV that will charge devices!). So I was curious when Apple announced the iPad Pro. It’s obviously not going to replace my laptop for every day use, but could it replace it when I’m on the road? My mobile computing requirements: - We’re a Google Apps company, so can I easily access my email, calendar, and shared docs in Drive? - I spend most of those days in meetings with clients, often doing sales calls and Keynote presentations. Can I present existing decks easily? - I often need to modify existing Keynote decks and sometimes author entirely new ones. Can I do that easily enough, including all of our standard Klick fonts? - We work on a lot of Microsoft Office documents with our clients, and even internally due to Google’s Docs app failing to handle any elaborate formatting. How easy would it be to edit them, especially when they live in Google Drive? - Would the Bluetooth keyboard support feel like a bad afterthought or a really well integrated part of the iOS experience? I figured it was a bad idea to try this on the road for the first time, so I’ve spent most of my weekend trying all of the above to make sure I know how to do it before I’m in the wild (though I’ll bring my laptop for the first few trips anyway just in case). Here’s what I’ve discovered so far — add your questions below and I’ll answer them! ### Which iPad Pro and accessories? That was an easy decision because I need LTE support, which currently means the 128GB WiFi+ Cellular model. Apple might add LTE to the lower end models later, but if you’re out on the road then that’s what you’re getting. Right now Apple is also sold out of all the accessories, so I can’t comment on the somewhat controversial Smart Keyboard cover or the Pencil. I tried them briefly at an Apple Store and I really liked them both, but I’ll have to update when I get them. In the meantime, I’m using it with an Apple Bluetooth Keyboard, which seems to work perfectly. I’ll actually be a little disappointed, in a way, when the Smart Keyboard arrives because it’s missing all the function keys (screen brightness, volume, iTunes controls) that my Bluetooth keyboard has and that are all supported by iOS. ### The hardware It’s … big. It’s bigger than you think. It’s also much lighter than I thought it would be. Any awkwardness in holding it has more to do with size than it does with weight — I find myself less inclined to pick it up than I did with my Mini — but not because of tiredness so much as leverage and balance. I suppose that would be less of a factor if it was lighter, but at 1.59 pounds it’s over a pound lighter than the MacBook Air (2.96 pounds). The screen is beautiful and, at 2732x2048 resolution it’s way higher resolution than my non-Retina MacBook Air’s 1440x900. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/can-the-ipad-pro-replace-your-laptop-notes-from-the-field/image-2.jpeg) Apple put four speakers on the corners of the Pro, machined directly into the housing. They optimize for landscape and portrait modes, so you’ll always get the best possible sound. It’s the loudest iOS devices I’ve ever used, easily able to fill a (quiet) room with music. **Most surprising hardware observation so far: it takes a very, very, very long time to charge.** The batteries are huge — it’s basically batteries with a screen stuck to the front — but a full charge can take over four hours! (I’m not the only one with [this observation](http://wccftech.com/ipad-pro-takes-insane-amount-time-fully-charge/)). I’ve read that the 12W power supply Apple ships with the Pro just can’t keep up. Maybe so, but four hours for a charge is extreme. On the flip side, I used it for hours and hours today and the battery was only down to 50%, so I guess you can’t have everything. ### Keyboard support Assuming that keyboard support is the same in iOS 9 regardless of how it’s connected (Bluetooth vs. the Pro’s built-in hardware connector for the Smart Keyboard), the best I can say is that it’s … inconsistent. Some developers have done a great job, others are mediocre, haven’t done anything at all. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/can-the-ipad-pro-replace-your-laptop-notes-from-the-field/image-3.jpeg) Quick tip: hold down the command key (⌘) in apps with keyboard support to see an overlay with relevant shortcuts: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/can-the-ipad-pro-replace-your-laptop-notes-from-the-field/image-4.jpeg) It’s also a good litmus test as to whether the developers in an app have built in keyboard support or are just relying on the OS to handle it. I should mention that I’m a heavy keyboard shortcut user on the Mac and can go for hours without touching the trackpad, so my comments definitely come from that end of the keyboard spectrum. Somewhat random observations so far: - **App switcher:** ⌘-tab brings up a very MacOS X-style app switcher to flip between recently open apps (⌘-shift-tab cycles backwards). It’s odd that you can’t tap on the on-screen icons when the app switcher is open, like you can click on them on a Mac. The switcher is also limited to the last 10 apps you’ve used, so anything open past that isn’t accessible through there. I’d love to see a future iOS update to allow for app switcher plugins the same way iOS 8 introduced keyboard replacements. Then maybe we could see [Alfred](http://alfredapp.com) come to the rescue! - **Home and search:** there are two system level shortcuts supported from anywhere: ⌘-shift-h will take you to your home screen and ⌘-space will take you to the home screen’s search. You can use the latter as an extended app switcher in that you can hit the shortcut, wait for the search to open, then type an app name. - **Eject!** I accidentally discovered an odd third system-wide keyboard shortcut. If your external keyboard sports an Eject button, which Apple Bluetooth keyboards do for entirely anachronistic feeling reasons, it will toggle the onscreen keyboard display. - **Home/search screen lacks keyboard support:** there doesn’t seem to be any support on the home screen for things like paging through screens of apps or selecting apps to launch. Likewise, you can type in the home screen search box but you can’t arrow key down into the results. I’d love something like ⌘-left and ⌘-right for paging and then some highlight on effect on icons that you could move around with the arrow keys to select an app to launch. - **Some apps feel broken:** Medium is a good example, unfortunately. Backgrounding the app and coming back in to keep writing seems to often break the external keyboard support. Typing doesn’t do anything except sometimes select words or paragraphs at a time. I imagine it will take a while for devs to catch up and provide support (if they ever do), though hopefully more popular apps with bigger teams will add proper support sooner. ### WWSD? Tim Cook’s Apple may never escape the _What Would Steve Think?_ question. I don’t think it’s a fair one — Apple is way more financially successful under Tim — but it’s not unreasonable to look back at their history and see what Apple of a few years ago would have thought of Apple of today. The whole experience of the iPad Pro brings to mind two Steve Jobs keynote moments, the first from 2007 and the second from 2010: [**Steve Jobs: "Who wants a stylus?" - Apple - Steve Jobs at Macworld 2007 in San Francisco** _Steve Jobs presents the first iPhone at "Macword 2007" in San Francisco, but he doesn't like the stylus..._youtu.be](http://youtu.be/4YY3MSaUqMg "http://youtu.be/4YY3MSaUqMg")[](http://youtu.be/4YY3MSaUqMg) [**Streve Jobs on Touch Screen PCs** _From an October 2010 Macbook Pro Event. Steve Jobs on Touchscreen PCs. This is why Windows 8 is in serious trouble and…_youtu.be](http://youtu.be/9TcJ45Y2z30 "http://youtu.be/9TcJ45Y2z30")[](http://youtu.be/9TcJ45Y2z30) Tongue in cheek YouTube linkage aside, the world changes. Sometimes (often?) Apple is the force changing the world. Sometimes they aren’t and then they have to play catch-up (or even leapfrog). I totally agree about not using styluses on phones (and about calling them stylii), and I’m so far unconvinced about the touchscreen “PC” experience of an iPad Pro and a keyboard for the same reasons Steve lists above. On my Mac I only have to reach for the trackpad immediately to my right when I can’t do something on the keyboard, but iOS doesn’t support pointing devices (yet?). I’ll check back in on this when I’ve had more time to experiment with the Smart Keyboard and Pencil. ### What’s the work experience? The biggest question on most people’s mind about Apple’s biggest iPad is about whether it can replace their laptops. So far, I would say that it could, with some limitations. I’ve had a few things that are harder than on an MacBook, but they’re things I don’t often have to do. Let’s go back to the list from the start: - **Google Apps:** I can’t say I’m the world’s biggest Google Apps fan in the first place. There are things I really like about them, particularly the collaboration capabilities it gives my team, but there are lots of things that I find frustrating. The good news is that they’re no more frustrating on iOS! The collaboration stuff works just as well in the Google Docs app as it does on the web. - **Keynote:** Editing existing decks works pretty well. I was able to open even some pretty big decks and edit them without problems, though it wasn’t anything too complex. It will take longer to really understand how useful it is. - **Adding fonts to iOS:** this was a big concern from past Keynote use. We’ve got some pretty strict brand guidelines for Klick, including the fonts we use in our presentation templates. How easy would it be to add them to my iPad? Turns out it’s actually not so tough thanks to iOS 9's support for Profiles. Using an app called [AnyFont](http://www.anyfont-app.com/), you can package up custom fonts (and even zip files of multiple fonts) and then install them as a Profile. It worked reasonably well, though I found the installation process broke when I tried to install more than about ten fonts at the same time. - **Microsoft Office Apps:** an $11/month Office365 subscription gave me access to the full native iOS apps (you can download them and read/view docs without a subscription but you can’t edit until you pay). I thought at first that it would be locked into only working with files off OneDrive, but it turns out that iOS 9's solid cloud drive support saved the day. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/can-the-ipad-pro-replace-your-laptop-notes-from-the-field/image-5.jpeg) In any of the Office docs (Word is above), tap on the “Open” sidebar item, then on the “… More” link. The popover above will appear, defaulting to iCloud Drive. Tap on “Locations” and you may already see “Google Drive”. If not, tap on the “More …” item and switch Drive on (if it still isn’t there, you probably don’t have the app installed). The best part? The documents you open from Google Drive in Office automatically save back to Drive as you work on them. ### The VNC option It’s a real nuclear option, but should you hit something you really can’t do on iOS you can always VNC back to your laptop. VNC stands for “Virtual Network Computer”, an older standard that enables one computer to remotely control another computer. Luckily for all of us, there are a number of iOS apps for VNCing into another computer. Seems the best of the bunch is [Remoter VNC](https://appsto.re/ca/YVacw.i), which you can buy in the App Store for $1.19. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/can-the-ipad-pro-replace-your-laptop-notes-from-the-field/image-6.jpeg) The mouse control is particularly useful. I needed to download a PDF from an internal website that was doing some wacky frontend URL re-writing that prevented mobile Safari from grabbing it. I was able to Remoter VNC to my Mac, download the file to Google Drive, then open it in the Drive app on my iPad with no problems. It’s not an ideal solution, especially if you’re on a slow connection, but it’s not a bad backup. ### Initial final thoughts The iPad Pro is Apple at its best. It’s fast, beautiful, responsive, lightweight, and sounds fantastic. Every iPad app you use today will look better on it, be faster, and sound better. Will it make you more productive? Jury is still out, but I tend to think that bigger screens and more speed usually do. I enjoy the challenge of making it work, but I’m not entirely convinced that it should feel like a challenge. The next week or two will tell if it stops being one. --- # An ode to the Starbucks app - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/an-ode-to-the-starbucks-app/ - Published: 2015-10-20 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Starbucks, Retail, Electronic Payments, Smartphones - Summary: I've been a fan of the Starbucks app since it launched, immediately ditching any plastic cards in favor of keeping them all in my phone… I've been a fan of the Starbucks app since it launched, immediately ditching any plastic cards in favor of keeping them all in my phone (and now on my watch). The convenience is much appreciated since I always have my phone with me and never have to worry about whether I remembered my cards or having them take up space in my wallet. Win. While everyone else was coming up with complex hardware to pay with your phone at point of sale (aka POS, which also means something else that often aptly describes that experience), Starbucks just solved it with an onscreen barcode. Actually, not Starbucks. A guy named Benjamin Vigier and his team. Benjamin's name is, of course, familiar to you because you remember the news breaking back in August 2010 that he had been [hired by Apple to head up their payments division](http://www.fastcompany.com/1682180/apple-hires-wireless-payment-guru-prepare-iphone-credit-cards). Excellent memory! And now we have [Apple Pay](http://www.apple.com/apple-pay/) as a direct result (well, you probably do at any rate — not yet available in Canada). I'm not the only person who likes the Starbucks app. It was so successful after its 2009 pilot launch to 16 stores that it quickly spread nationwide. How's it done since then you ask? ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/an-ode-to-the-starbucks-app/image-2.png) *Starbucks app sees about 8 million weekly transactions as of Q1 2015* Back in 2014, [Business Insider](http://www.businessinsider.com/starbucks-mobile-payments-app-2014-9) said that the app was on track to process over $1.5 billion in payment volume in the U.S. in 2014. In the second quarter it accounted for 15% of the transactions in U.S. company-operated stores. Not too shabby. Their brilliantly simple innovation, which you've probably seen or used yourself by now, was to display a 2D barcode on your phone's screen and have the cashier scan it. Here's what it looked like originally: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/an-ode-to-the-starbucks-app/image-3.png) Never mind trying to get wireless swipe cards speaking to readers or weird Bluetooth bracelets or NFC incantations. Just show a barcode on your screen that matches your card ID, have the POS check that your balance, then push a notification to your phone to reflect the new total. Magic, in the Arthur C. Clarke sense. Of course, now it looks like this: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/an-ode-to-the-starbucks-app/image-4.png) The Starbucks app isn't just a payment method. Every Starbucks card is a loyalty card, rewarding a star for each purchase. An unnecessarily visual representation of your stars landing in a trademark Starbucks cup is part of the app, showing you how close you are to a free drink: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/an-ode-to-the-starbucks-app/image-5.png) You also get a free drink on your birthday, which is a nice touch. The one thing I never liked about the app: you can't tip. I used to drop the change from my coffee into the tip jar, especially at my local Starbucks, but now I don't actually pay with cash so there's nothing to drop. It took away a small sign of appreciation between me and the people who quite literally keep me alive most days. Starbucks addressed that in March 2014, launching the ability to "digitally tip" your barista within a window of each purchase. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/an-ode-to-the-starbucks-app/image-6.png) Problem solved! I suppose we have to take it on faith that the tips actually end up in the pockets of the people for whom they're intended. Assuming they do, it's as elegant a solution as the original barcode scanners. ### Mobile Order & Pay I could have ended this story here and it would have been a nice, neat story about a clever hack to accelerate mobile payments that's proven to be wildly successful. But then Starbucks launched Mobile Order & Pay and proved, yet again, that they are absolutely leading the mobile retail space (although, perhaps, not their mastery of marketing friendly program names). Here's how it works in three easy steps: 1. Install the Starbucks app on your phone. Available for [iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/starbucks/id331177714?mt=8) or [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.starbucks.mobilecard&hl=en). Make sure that you have Location Services enabled and turned on for the app. 2. Register a Starbucks account or login to your existing one. 3. Open the app and look for a MENU tab at the top of the screen. Tapping on that should then show you an interstitial screen about the new ORDER feature, then a terms of service, and then a screen to place your first order. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/an-ode-to-the-starbucks-app/image-7.jpeg) When you place the order at a specific store, a printer by the cash spits out a sticky label for your cup with your name and order on it. Your cup joins the line of cups from in-store orders, making its way along the coffee assembly line until it reaches the bar. A second printer there spits out your receipt and the barista calls out your name so you can grab your cup. Easy peasy. Much like the original barcode 'hack', this system's genius lies in the fact that it seamlessly overlays the existing Starbucks ordering, making, and delivering system. No need to really train people on a new process (although I'm sure there was training involved), so much as to insert mobile orders into the already heavily optimized Starbucks assembly line. ### Long term impact The immediate reward is awesome, especially if your local Starbucks is packed at peak times like ours is. We ordered coffee whilst upstairs in our office today and then sauntered down and grabbed it right off the counter like a bunch of bosses. But what does this mean in the long term? - With a significant portion of their business now coming through the app, and Mobile Order & Pay being deployed to all those customers, how long before Starbucks stores start being redesigned to optimize the end of the line for pickups and minimize the front for orders? - What happens to all the impulse purchases people buy while standing in front of the coolers and counters today? - At what point do the majority of customers order in advance and then pickup without ever really interacting with a barista? I'm reminded of an episode of the excellent [Noonmark](https://soundcloud.com/makereadymag) podcast in which they talk about the depressing reality of a burrito joint in San Francisco, filled with a lineup of people who have been paid by other people through apps to pickup their food. - Coming downstairs to pickup the coffee felt like the next potential optimization. How long before I put my order in and it just shows up? [UberEATS](http://ubereats.com/) has this figured out for food, though I still have to walk out to the car to get it. If I'm going to really get my 21st century, app-enabled, geolocated, sharing economy powered lifestyle on, I need to sit on the couch and have all this stuff just come to me. --- # Judging a book by its cover: the art of late modern book cover design - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/ - Published: 2015-10-16 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Building on yesterday’s story about movie titles, I wanted to share this mesmerizing work by Henning Lederer. Henning is a German designer… Building on yesterday’s story about [movie titles](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/titlephiles-the-love-of-movie-titles/), I wanted to share this mesmerizing work by [Henning Lederer](http://www.led-r-r.net/01_main/contact_E.htm). Henning is a German designer and animator who has made some really beautiful films (like this animated version of Fritz Kahn’s [Der Mensch als Industriepalast poster](http://industriepalast.com) \[Man as Industrial Palace\]). The piece that really caught my eye is his most recent, called _Covers_, which animates a collection of 1960s and 70s classic book covers: *Covers by Henning M. Lederer* So…mesmerizing. I was curious about who had designed the covers, which led me to follow Henning’s links from Vimeo to [Book Worship](http://bookworship.com), where the rest of my night basically vanished. Book Worship is maintained by [Shawn Hazen](https://twitter.com/shawnhazen), who says: > This site represents the obsessions of an atypical book collector. While I certainly love “valuable” books, that’s not necessarily what you’ll see here. For the most part, these are graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. I read a lot of these books, but my motivations for posting them here are primarily visual, since I’m a graphic designer. That’s why it’ll be a bit of a mixed bag. I love the Internet. Where else could someone celebrate their love of an obscure topic and find an entire community that feels the same way? Shawn‘s obviously a designer after my own heart, because he also maintains the very cool [Typophonic](http://typophonic.com), a site all about record cover typography, and [ChicagoType](http://chicagotype.com), which archives type seen around Chicago (though it appears Shawn has recently moved to Seattle, so maybe there’s a SeattleType in the near future?). Henning also links to [Montague Projects](http://montagueprojectsblog.blogspot.de), where you’ll find another excellent archive of book designs from the same period. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-2.png) *Does the hand on the cover of The Great Brain Robbery look a lot like Saul Bass’ title from The Man with the Golden Arm or is it just me?* The site is maintained by Julian Montague, a Buffalo NY based graphic designer and artist. Julian wrote a fascinating sounding book called [The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0810955202/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0810955202&linkCode=as2&tag=jaygoldcom-20&linkId=6F43VJDDRTHR5IQE) \[Amazon Associates link\], which you can buy on Amazon if you have stray shopping carts you need to identify. I grew up in a home that was filled with books of all different descriptions. My parents are both avid readers — my Mom devours fiction while my Dad also loves non — and I’ve been reading as long as I can remember. Our collection certainly numbers well into the hundreds of books, and I spent many hours browsing through them as a kid (and as an adult whenever I’m at my Dad’s!). Although I didn’t recognize any of the specific covers Henning used, we do have many books that fit the stylistic genre of esoteric-title-paired-with-random-graphic-heavy-colorful-image. The more I write about design, the easier it becomes to tease out the threads that have run through its history. I have a beautiful framed [Popchart Labs poster](http://popchartlab.com/collections/prints-design/products/a-stylistic-survey-of-graphic-design) in my home office, another design-themed gift from [Bianca](https://medium.com/u/99338b6d445b), that sums up the history of graphic design: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-3.jpeg) I identify much more strongly with some of the styles and eras listed: the Vienna Secession and Bauhaus for their beautiful and modern buildings, Isotype for really founding the world of infographics, all the art decos for their lines and symmetry (and for beautiful venues like [The Carlu](http://thecarlu.com), wherein we tied the knot as symmetrically and cleanly as possibly). Late Modern is really where I feel the most connection, and also where these book covers and yesterday’s movie posters fall. It’s the era that brought us Dior, Frank Lloyd Wright, Vespa scooters and [James Dean’s infamous Porsche 356](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/), Saul Bass and Paul Rand, and the madness of Mad Men. Advances in printing technology had suddenly made possible a whole new world and those designers were quick to jump into it, layering new colors and printing techniques as fast as they could be invented. I missed all of that by a generation (or two), but the closest I encountered myself was the early years of Wired Magazine under the design stewardship of John Plunkett and Barbara Kuhr (Plunkett+Kuhr). They threw every new metallic or neon ink onto those pages, layered into almost unreadable collages of techno-fetishism. Maybe my daughter will one day flip through my old Wireds with same feeling of inherited design nostalgia with which I once perused my Dad’s book collection. I’ll end with a sample of covers from Book Worship that caught my eye — enjoy! ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-4.jpeg) ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-5.jpeg) ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-6.jpeg) ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-7.jpeg) ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-8.jpeg) ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/judging-a-book-by-its-cover-the-art-of-late-modern-book-cover-design/image-9.jpeg) --- # Calling fellow titlephiles: the love of movie titles - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/titlephiles-the-love-of-movie-titles/ - Published: 2015-10-16 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Design, Film, Titles - Summary: You can always tell the design and type geeks in a movie audience — they're the ones geeking out over the opening credits. Also, me, on… You can always tell the design and type geeks in a movie audience — they're the ones geeking out over the opening credits. Also, me, on both counts. There's something particularly impressive about well designed credits that hit every feel in my design feely thing: good type, excellent story telling, hidden meanings, beautiful creative, optimal shortness. _Two quick thoughts on shortness:_ 1) I remember an ad campaign for a short film festival that went something like "If it's bad, at least it's short." Amen. 2) _Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte_, which will no doubt apply to this post as well. At any rate, movie titles have long been a particular guilty pleasure. They've been around as long as there have been movies, with simple title cards serving the purpose in silent films, often accompanied by musical scores as _talkies_ came along. *Neighbors, 1920* Title sequences started to become more elaborate in the 1930s as the technology of movie-making improved. I'm told that James Whale's 1936 production of Edna Ferber's Show Boat (watch [Show Boat title sequence on Art of the Title](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/show-boat/)) is a perfect example, filled with moving paper cut-outs and accompanied by a medley of songs from the soundtrack. The titles were designed by [John W. Harkrider](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0363192/), who served as both an art director and costume designer for MGM and Universal throughout the decade. ## Saul Bass ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/titlephiles-the-love-of-movie-titles/image-2.jpeg) *Saul Bass, father of modern film titles* The period that we're really interested in begins in the 50s with the arrival of Saul Bass, the father of modern film titles. During his 40-year career, Bass worked with some of Hollywood's best-known directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese. Bass was a typographer and graphic designer before he got into movies, and you can clearly see those influences in his work. He captured the design ethos of the 50s that was happening in advertising and print and modernized movie titles, which had languished in the overly decorative tradition established in Hollywood's golden age. He got his start on Preminger's 1955 classic _The Man With the Golden Arm,_ starring Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, and Kim Novak. Many of Hitchcock's more memorable films were fronted by Bass titles, including _North by Northwest_, _Psycho_, and _Vertigo_. Here's an excellent compilation of his titles from 1955 to 1995: [Video: The Man With The Golden Arm](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eGnpJ_KdqZE) *[Art of the Title: Man with the Golden Arm](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/the-man-with-the-golden-arm/)* Kyle Cooper (Prologue Films), one of my favorite modern title designers, paying tribute to _The Look of Saul Bass_: [Video: The Look of Saul Bass](https://youtube.com/watch?v=WUOBkv5z6Ys) I love Bass's work when it's at its graphically simplest and most abstract. His graphic design sensibility really comes out in his movie posters, and he often did the posters for the films featuring his titles. His use of negative space is always so clever, defining not only the shape of the piece but also often contributing to the overall design as strongly as any of the actual elements. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/titlephiles-the-love-of-movie-titles/image-3.png) Bass was also an extremely talented logo designer — possibly one of the best — and is responsible for many strikingly simple identities that you'll easily recognize: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/titlephiles-the-love-of-movie-titles/image-4.jpeg) *A sample of some of Saul Bass' corporate identities, including the Bell System, AT&T, General Foods, Minolta, Girl Scouts, Lawry's Foods, United Airlines, Avery, Continental Airlines, Quaker Foods, Kleenex, Frontier Airlines, Celanese, United Way, Rockwell International, Dixie, Warner Communications, and Fuller Paints* If you're into his work and want an incredibly thorough overview, look for Jennifer Bass's amazing [_Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design_](https://amzn.to/4jA6288) _\[Amazon Affiliate link\],_ a 428-page epic tribute to her father. > I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares, as opposed to ugly things. That's my intent. > — SAUL BASS ## Maurice Binder A contemporary of Saul Bass, Maurice Binder is best known for creating one of the most famous series of title sequences: the gun-barrel opening titles of the James Bond films. He created them for 1962's _Dr. No_, struck by an almost accidental moment of inspiration: > That was something I did in a hurry, because I had to get to a meeting with the producers in twenty minutes. I just happened to have little white, price tag stickers and I thought I'd use them as gun shots across the screen. We'd have James Bond walk through and fire, at which point blood comes down onscreen. That was about a twenty-minute storyboard I did, and they said, "This looks great!" > — MAURICE BINDER There's a very Bass-like quality to the animation sequences, though that probably speaks more to the era's design sensitivities than to a specific influence. Binder went on to design the title sequences for every Bond film until 1995's _GoldenEye_ except for _From Russia with Love_ (1963) and _Goldfinger_ (1964), both designed by Robert Brownjohn. He was succeeded by Daniel Kleinman, who has designed every title since _GoldenEye_ with the exception of _Quantum of Solace,_ which was designed by MK12. He also designed the titles for many non-007 films, including most notably _The Mouse That Roared_, _The Grass Is Greener_, _Fathom_, and _The Last Emperor_. His 1963 titles for Hitchcock's _Charade_ are more Bass-like than even some of Bass' own work. [Video: Charade (1963) Opening Titles](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ltnH36_yKQ0) ## Best movie titles of all time Okay. So designers like Bass and Binder evolved the art into what we now think of as "movie title sequences." Let's slip ahead a little to 2015 and continue the incredibly short tradition I started with the [World's Worst Cars post](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/), but in the opposite direction: what are the best titles ever? Predictably, opinions vary considerably. But there are a few standouts that come up again and again. Some of my favorites, in chronological order, inspired by various other top tens: ### Vertigo [Video: Saul Bass' opening titles for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=-DU0IVmBgsQ) For all of the reasons listed above. [_Art of the Title: Vertigo._](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/vertigo/) ### The Thomas Crowne Affair [Video: Pablo Ferro's titles for Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crowne Affair (1968)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=UathUr3J4F8) Ferro pioneered the split-screen effect seen here, which has become a classic in its own right. [_Art of the Title: Thomas Crowne Affair_](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/the-thomas-crown-affair/). ### Monty Python's Life of Brian [Video: Terry Gilliam's titles for Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=YkWjf9DhlnA) I couldn't possibly make it through this post without including a classic Terry Gilliam animation. ### Back to the Future [Video: Nina Saxon's titles for Robert Zemeckis' Back to the Future (1985)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=3isQI0nXQRE) I particularly love title sequences that give away the story of the movie if you know what to look for. There are some brilliant touches in here, like the man hanging from the clock and the story of Doc Brown's life told through newspaper clippings. This title was apparently a huge pain to shoot because of the need to keep all the clocks in sync and have them all ring at the same time. There was also a last-minute substitution of the dog food brand, which resulted in much less slippery food that needed to be heated up in the cans between takes. Gross. [_Art of the Title: Back to the Future_](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/back-to-the-future/). ### Batman [Video: Richard Morrison's titles for Tim Burton's Batman (1989)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=l11BPzYehUE) I remember watching this one in the theatre as a 13-year-old and being so surprised when the camera pulls back at the end to reveal that it's been the bat symbol the whole time. [_Art of the Title: Batman_](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/batman/). ### Se7en [Video: Kyle Cooper's titles for David Fincher's Se7en (1995)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=-k2gsEI34CE) Kyle Cooper basically reinvented the art of title design with his work on Se7en. Some of my favorite titles since have been his work, along with his crew at Prologue Films. [_Art of the Title: Se7en_](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/se7en/). ### Gattaca [Video: Michael Riley's titles for Andrew Niccol's Gattaca (1997)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=5ltryKIo7_I) The simplicity of these titles, along with the highlighting of the letters that make up DNA, has always made this a favorite. ### Catch Me if You Can [Video: Kuntzel and Deygas's titles for Steven Spielberg's Catch Me if You Can (2002)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=cwvIzFqrd7U) Kuntzel and Deygas' masterful tribute to Saul Bass. [_Art of the Title: Catch Me if You Can (with interview!)_](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/catch-me-if-you-can/). ### Kiss Kiss Bang Bang [Video: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang title sequence](https://youtube.com/watch?v=_bpP9sI72bM) *Danny Yount's heavily Bass-inspired titles for Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)* Danny Yount's masterful tribute to Saul Bass (notice a theme?). ### Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol [Video: Kyle Cooper's titles for Brad Bird's Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=eeQBWWDcHLE) Kyle Cooper again. I thought the fuse was an elegant way to tie the titles together and also to pay tribute to the original Mission Impossible (plus, Brad Bird!). ### The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo [Video: Tim Miller's titles for David Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)](https://youtube.com/watch?v=mVLJkIZvFlo) So beautiful and threatening simultaneously. [_Art of the Title: Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (with interview!)_](http://www.artofthetitle.com/title/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/). ### The Secret Life of Walter Mitty I didn't love the film, but I absolutely loved the way they worked the titles into the scenery around Walter as he made his way into work. ### Captain America: Winter Soldier [Video: Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) end credits](https://youtube.com/watch?v=7jpnBs0DkXg) *Erin Sarofsky's closing titles for Anthony and Joe Russo's Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014)* Marvel has brought back the closing credits in a big way, using them as a mechanism for previewing the next movie in the Marvel universe. Pixar has been doing the same by embedding bloopers and other little bits as a surprise and delight for the people who stick around. These are the closing credits for _Captain America: Winter Soldier_, the latest installment in the Captain America series. I love everything about these — the black and white treatment, strong use of negative space and symmetry, the graphical representation of each character as the actor's name is displayed. Beautiful work, and an appropriate way to close out this post. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/titlephiles-the-love-of-movie-titles/image-5.png) If you're a fan of movie titles but haven't yet discovered [Art of the Title](http://artofthetitle.com), you're about to lose many, many hours of your life. I only wish that they made their clips embeddable because they're much higher quality than most of the YouTube finds here. Either way, thank you, AoT crew, for your indispensable resource for titlephiles like myself. --- # Car2Go’s EcoScore and the Gamification of Driving - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/car2go-s-ecoscore-and-the-gamification-of-driving/ - Published: 2015-10-14 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Cars, Ride Sharing, Gamification - Summary: We’re a one car family. Our Mini Countryman, which is most often under the command of my wife, is an excellent vehicle for our very urban… We’re a one car family. Our Mini Countryman, which is most often under the command of my wife, is an excellent vehicle for our very urban, city dwelling needs, but it entirely fails to be in two places at the same time. That means I’m a frequent user of Uber, public transit, and — more often than not these days — [Car2Go](http://toronto.car2go.com/). *A Car2Go Smart Car* For those of you not familiar, or who live in cities that haven’t yet been blessed by these friendly little blue and white numbers, Car2Go is actually a subsidiary of Daimler AG, parent company of both Mercedes and Smart, and the largest buyer of Smart cars in the world. It’s a cousin to services like [ZipCar](http://www.zipcar.com/), [Autoshare](https://autoshare.com/), etc., in that you sign up for a membership ($35 one-time fee), then pay per minute for use of a car ($0.41 per minute in Toronto, up to a $14.99 per hour or $84.99 per day max). The big difference is that you can drive a Car2Go from point A → B and drop it there without having to go ← to the car’s home at A. You can park Car2Gos along any legal street parking spot in all cities other than Toronto, or in a designated Green P or other lot here (apparently [they’re working on that](http://www.metronews.ca/news/toronto/2015/07/23/car2go-looks-to-toronto-council-to-approve-residential-on-street-parking.html)). #### Custom Smart This isn’t an ad for Car2Go, although I think it’s an awesome service. Beyond installing tracking hardware and member card readers, etc., and having a pretty slick mobile app that lets you reserve and unlock cars, they’ve customized the cars in a very interesting way. Replacing the standard whatever-is-there in the middle of a normal Smart’s dashboard is a highly customized touchscreen unit. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/car2go-s-ecoscore-and-the-gamification-of-driving/image-2.jpeg) *The customized dashboard of the Smart Car2Go* A few things to point out: the four slots along the top are for the pre-paid parking and gas cards (you can see a white card in the top right slot above). All of those are included in your $0.41 per minute rental fee. The blue dial to the left of that is the volume control. The four buttons down the left edge toggle between the Radio, Nav, Tel, and Apps. Big-ish touchscreen in the middle, key storage slot on the right. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/car2go-s-ecoscore-and-the-gamification-of-driving/image-3.png) *Car2Go touchscreen radio and nav* Radio mode shows a bunch of local stations, Nav does what you might expect (though in much more English than the above screenshot). Tel calls the emergency response hotline, which you may find yourself doing a fair bit as the cars seem to quite frequently have trouble communicating the end of trip or the presence of the parking card. None of these things are particularly interesting, especially in the age of Teslas with 17" touchscreen monitors in them. And, besides, I promised you gamification. GAMIFICATION. It’s like buzzword bingo at its finest. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/car2go-s-ecoscore-and-the-gamification-of-driving/image-4.jpeg) *This is not a Car2Go, but it is pretty awesome.* #### Gamification The more observant among you may have noticed that I skipped one of the four touchscreen modes above. The vaguely named “Apps” button doesn’t lead to an app store full of options (though, really, how far off can that be?), but rather to a single app that encourages you to drive in the most fuel efficient way possible. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/car2go-s-ecoscore-and-the-gamification-of-driving/image-5.jpeg) *Again with the German.* I couldn’t find a clear image in English, but the three trees are Acceleration, Cruising, and Deceleration. You start at 50 points each, and they grow (and attract animal friends) or shrink (and get increasingly gloomy cloud cover) from there. The current “EcoScore” is displayed on the leaf icon at the top, though I have no idea how they calculate it. The ? button helpfully explains that you get more points for smoothly accelerating, anticipating traffic ahead, and smoothly decelerating. #### Mastering the game You’re no doubt wondering what happens if you nail perfect 100s in all three trees. Would I be writing this if I couldn’t answer that? ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/car2go-s-ecoscore-and-the-gamification-of-driving/image-6.jpeg) *Nailed it.* It really is a glorious rainbow, no? It’s also possible that this entire post is really just a #humblebrag in disguise. #### Getting design right It’s not just a little game to make your commute a little more fun. The designers here did a great job of designing for the specific context and achieving their ultimate goal of saving gas. There are a few things I think they really nailed: **Glance-a-bility:** if that wasn’t a word before, it is now. This is the difference between CarPlay and your iPhone’s crowded screen. I can leave this up on the touchscreen and glance at it from time to time without needing to tap a button or read any fine print. Interaction is purely glancing, which is exactly right for the user interface of something I’m driving at 60 kph (that’s about 40 mph for you Americans). **Simplicity:** big, easy to read fonts. Simple graphics with obvious differences between the states. Three, easy to understand metrics. I don’t have to do anything beyond hitting the “Apps” button and I’m already playing the game. **Reward:** starting at 50 is much better than starting at 0. I feel like I’ve really lost something when the tree goes down, which you can’t do if you start at the bottom. Hitting 100 still feels like an achievement, so the gap between starting, losing, and winning feels about right. And, of course, who doesn’t love rainbows? #### Does it work? The game has definitely changed the way I drive their cars. It’s also changed the way I drive our car, when I can pry it from [Bianca](https://medium.com/u/99338b6d445b)’s hands. I’m much more conscious of — well — accelerating smoothly, cruising as much as possible, and decelerating with downshifts and smooth gas. If those are really more fuel efficient, and it stands to reason they are, then the game has succeeded in helping me save Car2Go gas and the environment from all kinds of exhaust fumes. That said, it’s not entirely without its downsides. Cruising is the hardest tree to grow in the city, which is full of reasons to have to suddenly slam on the brakes. Sometimes I find myself coasting a little closer to those hazards than I probably should in the hopes that they’ll disappear (or turn green) before I get there and have to stop. Also, the closer I get to 100s, the more attention I pay to the screen. Some cars seem to be calibrated differently, making it much easier or much harder to get higher scores. Even with those minor quibbles, the environmental impact and the entertainment factor alone make it worthwhile. Also, rainbows! --- # Moving to Medium - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/moving-to-medium/ - Published: 2015-10-13 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Remember blogging? Those were the days. I’ve been running my own hosted WordPress blog for many, many years across a bunch of different… Remember blogging? Those were the days. I’ve been running my own hosted WordPress blog for many, many years across a bunch of different hosts. I used to blog a lot, then I blogged a little, then the other day I remembered that I hadn’t updated my blog in nearly two years. Still up on the homepage: our book is out! Go get it! Circa February 2014. *The old JayGoldman.com homepage, with the last blog post* I used to devour content through RSS feeds, but these days I seem to get more and more of it from places like Medium. I’ve watched it evolve from the early days, when our [Geoff Teehan](https://medium.com/u/a649f780c333) and [Jon Lax](https://medium.com/u/ab13b5676c1a) were leading the effort to design the first version and you had to apply to publish. [Ev Williams](https://medium.com/u/268314bb7e7e) seems to know what he’s doing when it comes to publishing platforms, and I think he’s got it right again. It’s a joy to write here — a simplicity of expression that just feels right — and so I’ve made the publishing move to match my consumption patterns. I’ve moved to Medium. #### Why move to Medium? The answer is pretty simple: a built-in audience of people who like longer form posts, who return every day and trust Medium to deliver good content, and who subscribe to publications they want to follow. It’s hard to achieve the same as an independent blogger. Even my first few posts here saw recommendations and network effects and I’m just getting started. I’m not sure it’s the right call for everyone — there’s a lot less customizability here than there would be on your own WordPress or on Tumblr — but if you just want somewhere to write and publish, and you like people to read what you create, you might consider doing the same. #### JayGoldman.com Custom domains for publications was one of the big announcements in [Ev](https://medium.com/u/268314bb7e7e)’s recent [Taking Medium to the Next Level](https://medium.com/the-story/taking-medium-to-the-next-level-cb7f223fad86) post, so I seized the moment and setup a new publication for myself: [j.](https://medium.com/jay-goldman) Following the instructions in the [Move Your Domain to Medium](https://medium.com/the-story/move-your-domain-to-medium-21fd74abbbe6) post, I emailed [customdomains@medium.com](mailto:customdomains@medium.com) and quickly received a response with detailed instructions. Setup was pretty easy, and now you can find me (as you always could), at [https://jaygoldman.com.](https://jaygoldman.com.) #### What I’m going to write I have no plan, which is often the best kind of plan. So far, I’ve written about [robot turtles and lasers](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/from-robot-turtles-to-lasers/), [the worst cars in the world](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/), and the awesome [Osmo iPad accessory for kids](https://jaygoldman.com/blog/play-osmo/). I’ll probably write about what we’re up to at [Sensei Labs](http://senseilabs.com), and share some of our thinking as it continues to evolve from [The Decoded Company](http://decodedcompany.com). Feel free to make requests as comments! --- # The World's Worst Cars - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/ - Published: 2015-10-12 - Author: Jay Goldman - Tags: Cars - Summary: Not every car can do what the Tesla Model S has done and redefine automotive excellence for the entire industry. Some cars manage to… Not every car can do what the Tesla Model S has done and redefine automotive excellence for the entire industry. Some cars manage to achieve the same spectacular peaks of achievement, but in quite the opposite direction. Herewith, a collection of the worst cars in history. #### The Hoffman Jason of Jalopnik fame had a chance to drive a car that almost unanimously won the "worst car in history" poll: The Hoffman. He says: > The Hoffmann was made in Germany right after the war by one M. Hoffmann, a man no one seems to know much about. I'm not entirely sold on the idea he was a human at all, actually. [Video: What It's Like To Drive The Worst Car In The World | Jason Drives](https://youtube.com/watch?v=Y16ObVRvgOE) #### Top Gear on the Worst Cars What's a post about cars without an episode of Top Gear? Or, in this case, an entire special edition film on the topic? Top Gear produced a "Worst Car in the History of the World" feature in 2012 that goes to great lengths to determine the answer. Here's the trailer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=nenQI4HrUhk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1&v=nenQI4HrUhk) I'll ruin the surprise: the answer turned out to be the Lexus SC430. *Lexus SC430: the worst car in the history of the world?* Bit shocking given the other options (obviously they haven't driven the Hoffman!), but they're certainly entitled to their opinion. Here, while it lasts, is the entire film on Dailymotion: Regardless of whether you agree, who could forget their classic episode on the Reliant Robin? A classic three-wheeler with a penchant for refusing to defy gravity, especially when going through corners. [Video: Rolling a Reliant Robin | Top Gear | BBC](https://youtube.com/watch?v=QQh56geU0X8) #### Pontiac Aztek Ah… the Aztek. Either made famous for being Walter White's original ride on Breaking Bad, or for being quite possibly the ugliest car ever produced, the Aztek also boasted of an optional tent that you could erect over the back if you were camping and wanted to sleep in your car. Which nobody ever wanted to do, ever. Well, now it can also boast of being the [LA Times #1 Worst Car Sold in America](http://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-top-ten-worst-cars-pictures-new-photogallery.html) pick. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/image-2.png) *Ugliest thing on four wheels? Quite possibly.* #### Time Magazine's 50 Worst Cars of All Time Time did an extensive [The 50 Worst Cars of All Time](http://content.time.com/time/specials/2007/completelist/0,,1658545,00.html) feature, delving into the ten worst cars of five eras: 1899–1939, 1940–1959, 1960–1974, 1975–1989, and 1990-Present. Given that cars are constantly getting better across the board — safer, faster, more efficient, more feature-rich — let's just skip to the final era and say that the worst of the worst is the winner of the 1990-Present period. Which makes it…the 2004 Chevy SSR. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/image-3.jpeg) *Time Magazine's pick for the worst car: the 2004 Chevy SSR* SSR, in case you're wondering, stands for Super Sport Roadster. I'm sure the idea of a Super Sport Roadster brings up all kinds of images in your head, like this one: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/image-4.jpeg) *James Dean and his classic 1955 Porsche 550 Spyder. Legend has it that "Little Bastard" was one seriously cursed car, not only taking Dean's life but also [hurting lots of other people](http://jalopnik.com/5113390/the-curse-of-james-deans-little-bastard) who came into contact with it after.* Or, possibly, this one: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/image-5.jpeg) *Steve McQueen in his 1957 Jaguar XK-SS* It almost certainly doesn't bring to mind this… abomination: ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/the-world-s-worst-cars/image-6.jpeg) *In all fairness, that's the 2000 concept car that had the misfortune to become the production SSR. But, still, let's all be honest. It should have remained in the jungle that it is apparently emerging from.* --- # From Robot Turtles to Lasers - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/from-robot-turtles-to-lasers/ - Published: 2015-10-11 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Some of you may remember the awesome board game Robot Turtles, which teaches kids to program by laying down cards that move a turtle around… Some of you may remember the awesome board game [Robot Turtles](http://www.robotturtles.com/), which teaches kids to program by laying down cards that move a turtle around a board (_some_ of you may remember Logo too…). The creator, Dan Shapiro, is back with a new crowd funded startup called [Glowforge](http://glowforge.com), which is making a super awesome 3D Laser Printer. It's hard to summarize what it can do better than their own promo video: [Video: Introducing Glowforge - The 3D Laser Printer](https://youtube.com/watch?v=ysCaqh38JVQ) Dan's just posted to Medium about the incredible first week of sales, which brought in $5M worth of orders: [**Zero to $5M in One Week** _What a madcap seven days. In the first week since launching Glowforge at Makerfaire, we had more than $5M in pre-orders…_medium.com](https://medium.com/p/7623ceee73e1 "https://medium.com/p/7623ceee73e1")[](https://medium.com/p/7623ceee73e1) --- # Play Osmo - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/play-osmo/ - Published: 2015-10-11 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Maybe it's because I've been a lifelong 'geek' or maybe because my Dad, a lifelong 'geek' himself, always encouraged my love of STEM from a… Maybe it's because I've been a lifelong 'geek' or maybe because my Dad, a lifelong 'geek' himself, always encouraged my love of STEM from a young age (at least of the S&T portions). Regardless, I've made it a bit of an obsession to ensure that my daughter, now 6, gets a healthy dose of all things Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math from a young age. Turns out I'm not the only STEM-obsessed dad. Not by a long shot. There are whole communities of us out there — Moms too — constantly looking for the latest and most interesting ways to get kids engaged. A recent conversation with [Candice Faktor](https://medium.com/u/dbd4abf49df7) about [Kano](http://kano.me) reminded me that I've got a go to list of STEM-related purchases that other STEMy parents quickly scribble down and run off to buy. This is the first post in a series about the STEM inspiring toys, games, books, and apps that we've tried at home. Most of them are great and get repeat use, a few have ended up collecting dust on shelves. Osmo is on of our favorites and regularly makes an appearance, so let's start there. ### [Osmo](http://playosmo.com) _Starter kit: $99.95. If you can, I'd spend the extra $30 for the Genius kit ($129.95), which includes more of the special hardware add-ons for the games below. Buy directly from_ [_http://playosmo.com_](http://playosmo.com)_._ *Osmo and the gravity-defying Newton app* Osmo is a very clever iPad add-on from some former Googlers. The little red cap pops over the iPad's camera and the base, which adapts to various sizes of iPads, holds it at the perfect angle. Load up one of the free apps from the App Store and interact with Osmo by drawing in front of it (as in the image above) or using tiles and shapes from their different app kits. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/play-osmo/image-2.jpeg) #### Numbers The newest Osmo app. Drop numbered or domino-dotted tiles to pop bubbles and liberate the fish. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/play-osmo/image-3.jpeg) #### Masterpiece All about drawing. Start with one of their included photos, a photo from your camera roll, or a new photo that you shoot in app. Draw on a piece of paper in front of the iPad and see what you're drawing overlaid on the image. Since it's just a piece of paper and any drawing tool, this game doesn't require any special add-on hardware like tiles or pieces. It's very similar to the technique used by Tim Jenison in the excellent doc Tim's Vermeer: [Video: Tim's Vermeer trailer](https://youtube.com/watch?v=q0pxP8PUIKU) ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/play-osmo/image-4.jpeg) #### Newton The game shown in the photo above, Newton involves drawing shapes like ramps and jumps to get the balls falling from the top of the screen to the target. Like Masterpiece, Newton doesn't require any special add-on hardware. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/play-osmo/image-5.jpeg) #### Words Similar to numbers, Words involves throwing down letter tiles to spell the name of the thing pictured on screen. You can play red vs. blue for head to head action. ![](https://jaygoldman.com/images/blog/play-osmo/image-6.png) #### Tangram Finally, Tangram is the classic wooden block game with a few modern twists. Early levels are relatively easy, but it gets a lot harder when you only see the shape's silhouette with no hint as to which piece goes where. We're really looking forward to seeing what else they come up with, which is a big part of why we like this one so much. The original Kickstarter set was Tangram, Words, and Newton, and they've since released Masterpiece and Numbers. Hopefully the rate of new releases continues! --- # Jeff Bezos and WaPo - URL: https://jaygoldman.com/blog/jeff-bezos-and-wapo/ - Published: 2013-08-05 - Author: Jay Goldman - Summary: Some thoughts on the $250m acquisition that everyone can’t stop talking about. ## Jeff Bezos and WaPo #### Some thoughts on the $250m acquisition that everyone can’t stop talking about. It’s hard not to imagine that there’s some political/soapbox angle to the purchase. The Atlantic has a good run down of what’s known about [Bezos’ politics](http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/08/the-politics-of-new-i-washington-post-i-owner-jeff-bezos/278385/). He backs gay marriage and internet sales taxes (both of which WaPo also backed) and has contributed to several Democratic and Republican candidates. Amazon runs a PAC that he contributes to, which also splits its donations between the parties. He’s not overtly political, though, so it’s also hard to imagine that his only goal is to have a pulpit. The Washington Post company is public ([NYSE:WPO](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AWPO&ei=9zoAUuDHMaK5iwL9mwE)), so this takes their primary asset and makes it private. Since Bezos didn’t buy it through Amazon, he will have control over it without any other shareholders having a say. That may factor into his decision but, again, he’s not really known for preaching politics so Murdoch-style tactics don’t seem to be the motivator. Interestingly, [Education and Cable TV content make up 75% of WaPo Co.’s revenue](http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/08/05/the-washington-post-company-after-the-washington-post/) — newspaper was only 14% — and they have a very over funded pension plan ([$604m over according to their 2012 annual report](http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2013/08/05/washington-post-co-s-real-star-asset-a-massive-pension-fund/)), so they’ll be just fine. As others have pointed out, there’s an obvious content play for Kindle (and other ventures). Revenue from online publishing was up 15 percent in the Q2 2013 (YoY). [Revenue from online display advertising was up 25 percent in the second quarter, 21 percent for the first six months of the year](http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/220014/washington-post-co-s-newspaper-division-posts-another-loss-but-online-revenue-is-up/). Their [Paywall](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ask-the-post/wp/2013/06/05/publishers-letter-a-note-from-katharine-weymouth/?tid=pm_conversations_pop) went up on June 12th and must be netting some decent revenue, much like the NYT saw from theirs. Killing the print business and focusing on digital delivery might still see it be a viable business, but I can’t help thinking that the story here is not about the business. If this was a pure content play or ad play, he would have bought it through Amazon. A theory: Bezos’ net worth [according to Forbes](http://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/) is $25.2bn, so the purchase price of $250m is 0.9% of his money. At that price, he could be buying WaPo for nostalgic reasons. Think of it as philanthropy in a sense: supporting an institution he believes in with a donation that doesn’t even materially impact his net worth in any way. Through his [Bezos Expeditions fund](http://www.bezosexpeditions.com/) he’s spent $42m on the [Long Now 10,000 Year Clock](http://longnow.org/clock/) project, donated $15m to Princeton and $10 million to the [Museum of History & Industry](http://www.mohai.org/) in Seattle, and untold sums (millions?) recovering F-1 rockets from the sea floor. This is certainly more money, but significantly more relative to his fortune. Maybe he just really loves WaPo and doesn’t want to see it die. ---