justdrew

The Art of Speed

Great panel @ SXSWi about how fast a company can and should go. Subtitle: How to do big things in the smallest time possible.

There was some discussion about the nature of speed and how fast things can happen in your business. Many examples from the panelists included impressive results in successful business enterprises were shared. The panelists tried to enunciate ways to increase speed.

Twitter was an example. I’m still not sure why that tool is successful. Microblogging seems odd to me, but there is no doubt it has achieved a critical mass. Achieving buzz within the tech community was a big reason for its widespread adoption.

An example from a successful pod-caster (Lewis: GeekBrief) cites “community & passion” as her two reasons for success. Hard to argue with that, but it was hard to map that back to speed.

How do you get to market quickly? Streamline product feature set. Throw it out there and watch what people like. Usability testing: people talk about it but don’t do it. You should sit with random users and get them to talk out loud about their experience.

Mistakes: what are common mistakes that slow people down? Building the team is critical, but don’t get hung up on costs and miss attracting the stars. Hiring issues: get paperwork done first so the new hire’s first day is truly hitting the ground running. Set the tone for the pace.

Times to slow down: interpersonal issues. Speed can kill here.

Advice: build relationships with as many people as you can. This will help you seed your talent pool in a way that will help you when you need it- rather than trying to build key relationships when you need them.

Tim spent a lot of time promoting his work, which is fine- that’s what this forum is for. Apparently he just redesigned his blog. There’s a lot of good stuff there which I highly recommend.

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