Kiran’s Weblog

What Software Developers can learn from Toyota's mistake

Unless you have been living under a rock by now you must have heard the acceleration issues with Toyota and their production and sales halts. You can catch up on the story here

Toyota has always been a leading and reliable car manufacturer, innovator in manufacturing processes and known for bold initiatives like 'andon cord'. I have read references to Toyota's processes in web/lean development books where the Toyota example is used to explain/promote importance of a single employee, importance of lean development etc.

Here is a snippet from the above article about 'andon cord', its a very powerful concept, which proves that how much a company cares about employees and end product quality.

In Toyota lore, the ultimate symbol of the company’s attention to detail is the “andon cord,” a rope that workers on the assembly line can pull if something is wrong, immediately shutting down the entire line. The point is to fix a small problem before it becomes a larger one.

 

However in this acceleration case Toyota was in denial and now its blow out of proportion causing loss off billions of dollars revenue.

But in the broadest sense, Toyota itself failed to pull the andon cord on this issue, and treated a growing safety issue as a minor glitch — a point the company’s executives are now acknowledging in a series of humbling apologies.

The lesson to be learned here is to not get into 'denial' phase without a deep understanding of the problem. When engineers get onto help customers using their software, you hear things like 'we tested the exact same scenario on a very similar hardware/network setup, this does not seem to be our software issue", huh ? That is denial and can get the 'software owners' into big trouble at the end. The right approach is to assume there is a software problem but still evaluate holistically and drill down to the specifics, if you go with an attitude of its not my problem one would never find the problem, Toyota is your proof. You could have the best brains building the software with the most advanced development processes but there are always issues. 

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Are You a Manager of Something?

NYT has a thought provoking interview with Mark Pincus, it asks "Are You a C.E.O. of Something?". Mark Pincus has some great advice to startup CEOs about leadership and building teams. I liked his approach of making every one of his employee a CEO of some one thing. It really struck cord with something I do at work with my team.

I managed product development teams in both Hyperion and Oracle and one thing I always have done is give my developers ownership of some one thing and many of times more than one thing. How do I know it works and its useful? Because I used to be a developer and I used to get excited and motivated to work on things that my manager gave complete ownership on. I used to go above and beyond to get those things done. When I was asked to do something specific in a specific way without giving me a big picture or complete ownership, those things are just tasks that I used to get done but with lot less excitement. So now when I manage development teams, I ensure everyone has the big picture and everyone gets ownership of some one thing and when integration teams, QE, documentation team has questions about that, they will be directed to the owner.

For startups Mark's approach will apply how about mega corps? For big companies, its the managers that come into play, that directly deal with 'individual contributors' i.e the programmers, designers, testers. My belief is that these direct managers should give their reports manage some one thing, it gives ownership to individuals, it increases team motivation, it increases productivity and in the end helps build better team and products.

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I was disappointed that there were no tricks yesterday but .....

Like all Apple fanatics and many techies I have been following every little rumor, prediction over the last couple of months. I have been waiting for the day when 'The God' would show us his vision of a Tablet. Expectations were very high, possibilities endless and then on the 27th reality set in, iPad was launched and its nothing more than a bigger iPod Touch. Along with million others I was disappointed. Disappointed that Steve did not have any miracles and his tablet concept was predictable. I have been reading many articles, comments on peoples reactions. I have been trying to figure out myself how to react, why Apple has chosen this path, I started to slowly understand what happened.

• Camera: Right I will be taking a photo with a big block. I can see a use for the frontal camera for video calls but not a show stopper
• Closed system: As a consumer I have never had a problem with Apple's closed system. I get all the apps I need. If that poses a problem give me a web app solution (Google Voice). Read up Chris Dixon's take on this. I agree with that. In fact if closed is what it takes to give me an iPhone type experience, I much rather have closed system.
• No flash: Yes No flash, so what.
• Limited space: I use 3 GB of my 8GB iPhone space. This is the cloud age, local space is irrelevant
• No multi-tasking: Hoping it would be enabled as a software update

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Lean Resolutions for 2010

Couple of months ago I ran into Matt Cutts 30 Days project. I followed his August and October projects and was impressed and inspired. It really made me thinking that resolutions only work when those are attempted for a shorter time, like 30 days instead of a full year. So I decided I will try out some 30 day projects of my own before the new year. So in October I took a challenge to read couple of books (you know the real ones that you can touch and feel), so I managed to read one full book 'What Would Google Do" by Jeff Jarvis:) I read a lot of blogs online but I barely read any physical books so reading a book is a big deal for me. Then in November I took up a 30 day challenge to not drink any cola. This was huge for me, I am addicted to Pepsi at work. Every day after lunch I have to have a Pepsi (they dont have Coke at work).  It was harder than the book challenge, much harder but I finally completed it successfully. 

So with that prototyping I was confident that my 2010 resolutions are going to be lean, not the body weight kind but the duration kind. Just like the leanstartup concept of Eric Ries, my resolutions are lean. Start small, evaluate often, learn, iterate and keep it going! I never was serious on the yearly resolutions, a year is too long to act on. So many things happen in a year. 30 days is manageable, measurable and more importantly something that I can commit to and follow through.

My resolution for 2010 is to have lean resolutions throughout the year, which I am sure will tweet about.

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got my monoprice iphone battery backup

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how I handle my gadgets

     

Click here to download:

how_I_handle_my_gadgets.zip (405 KB)

Sent from my iPhone

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The slow road to digital receipts

I used to have lot more hope for digital receipts than I have now, read on to find out why. I keep thinking about them every once in a while. I see people (yeah even Fred Wilson) getting excited about them when they see Apple has implemented it in their stores. This even came up as an idea in the comments for Fred Wilson's post about Internet is alive and well. 

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Liaise indirectly shows what's coming with Google Wave

People are excited about Google Wave for several reasons. Some like the real time collaboration part of it, some like the federation part of it and some like the tools (gadgets and robots) part of it. 

Google Wave based real time collaboration is quite advanced but might be little too advanced for it to catch up with the mass. For what little I have used, its seemed extremely confusing, uber-cool but confusing. I can only imagine with more users in the conversation the worse it is. Federation aspect of Google Wave really brings a lot of possibilities for mixing private, protected and public environments together. I am excited to see how corporates and others will take advantage of it. However, I am super excited to see what developers will cook with the tools mainly the robots. I developed a simple hello world robot and was getting ready ( Its another issue that I got busy with my daytime job and never did anything after that) to build a todo list app and possibly a small thymer style task/project management app .

The key thing with the robots is Wave allows regular Java/Python and hopefully in the near future other language developer to hookup with the conversations and write tools. Now that might not sound that big but think about Liaise , readwriteweb calls it 'possibly coolest email add-on ever' and I agree. Check the video for yourself, I haven't seen anything like that as an email client extension. Now Outlook and other email clients have been there forever and there have been plugins in that ecosystem but with Google Wave add-ons like Liaise will popup much much quicker as the Google Wave robot API is simple can be written in standard popular programming languages and gives real time access to the conversations. I hope that Liaise will build these add-ons for Gmail, thunderbird, Wordpress and Wave. Whether they developer for Wave or not, I see a lot of such cool automated tools coming to Google Wave.

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Sharing from Google Reader - Now with endless possibilities

Google Reader just added a feature which lets you share with twitter, facebook, delicious etc. However, the biggest feature for me is the custom link. Its an extremely powerful feature for developers. The custom link basically allows you to take the title, url, etc and call any HTTP GET APIs with these parameters. Here is what I just did for example I wrote a Web App (using the Google App Engine for Java) that takes in the the articles title and short url and I created several types of shares. Share to twitter with a prefix- liked, with a prefix- Reading or with a Prefix- Share. I also created a shareType to allow me to quickly tip @techmeme the articles I like and I think will be breaking news material for techmeme.
I also created an API to post to my posterous account. This is another interesting thing to note. Posterous gives an awesome ability to auto post to tons of places that you can take advantage.

For basic users the default sendTo Twitter etc will work great! However for developers custom link creates endless possibilities to share. The default sendTo twitter requires authentication, the Twitter share I created for myself using a web API does not even require that, I use a private key to identify myself.

Google Reader keeps getting better day by day. Awesome Google Reader Team!

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Its the product stupid

Good post by MG Siegler of TechCrunch about the why Jason Calacanis got many things wrong in his analysis. Its important to understand the motivation. MG touched on some great points to show that some of decisions are made for better customer experience by building an eco system. 

The problem with Jason's argument of ending the relationship with Apple completely seems odd. I buy a Mac because Iike its stability and the interface, I like the complete eco system of the iPod, iPhone and the Mac. I did not buy a Mac because Windows is monopolizing the OS market. I use Firefox because I like its stability, I like all the flexibility I get with its extensions. I do not use firefox because IE is dominating the market and I want to give them a boot. At the end I use or buy a product because I want to.

I could not care less if my mp3s that I bought from iTunes dont get into other players easily. Its not like iTunes is the only interface to manage music or to buy.

I agree that with App Store Apple is messing up by not being explicit about the rules, rejections etc.However, that will change, it will get better. Its just been a year with App Store and the developer community has grown rapidly.

I think this backslash is normal and its probably important to keep companies on tab.

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