Reaching that Next Level

Leveling up in Video Games is pretty easy. They give you a progress bar, you gain experience, when you hit the next level you’re there – maybe they give you some kind of bonus or tool or trick or something. But you get the idea, it’s a known quantity – you work towards a metric and then boom level up. It doesn’t happen like that in life, because we don’t know where the next level is.  We are constantly searching for it. It gets frustrating because we never know when we’re going to reach that “next level” and instead we

March 15, 2022

Greg Thomas

Tangibles vs the InTangibles

The Tangibles are the metrics, the numbers, the data, the things that you can’t argue about – “we delivered on time” or “we were late”. The InTangibles are the gut feelings, the thoughts, the ideas, the context.  You can’t measure them. The InTangibles are what people want to hear about because they generally provide the correlation and the context to the Tangibles. But you can’t talk about them until you have presented the tangibles. The job then becomes to make the tangibles known, as easily and as a quickly as possible so you can focus on what really matters –

March 13, 2022

Greg Thomas

Software Leadership Series: The Software Manager Minimum

I wrote this article a few months ago called the “Software Manager Minimum”.  It was a quick take on what Managers need to do as their baseline to get buy as leaders for their team. I remember my first month of being a software manager feeling completely overwhelmed – so much was coming at me – releases, performance reviews, yearly objectives, team cohesion,  code issues, etc, etc. At the time, I didn’t know what the base minimum was that I had to do, I didn’t know where to start. This is why I wrote this –  The Software Manager Minimum

March 12, 2022

Greg Thomas

How to Break your Funnel

Funnels are a numbers game.  You start at the top where it is wide and get as much high-level interest as you can.  The more the merrier, if it overflows, that’s perfect because the goal is to keep that top of the funnel full. Then it trickles down to the spout, you weed out what doesn’t matter until you get customers coming out the bottom. It’s a weird analogy because if you look at any funnel, as long as you don’t overflow it, everything goes down the funnel – all the water will eventually go down the spout. If you

March 11, 2022

Greg Thomas

The Teaser

Teasers are the sizzle on what is going to come next. Want to get your users excited. Give them a teaser, show them what is coming. If you are excited about it, so will they. If you show it as “the story I’m working on that you assigned”, they won’t be. That’s what teasers do, they make us excited, they create tension and anticipation for what is going to come next. The rest is on you.