Articles for category: Drive

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.

March 10, 2022

Greg Thomas

Works on My Machine

I’ve been having this happen with a client for the last few deliveries of software and all it’s derivatives… “Works on my machine.” “Works in DEV.” “Looks fine over here.” But it doesn’t, it never did, the problem was always there.  Maybe your machine had the right CPU to get past that race condition or maybe that day when you did your test that spike in memory usage wasn’t your youtube video but your app itself. Works on My Machine is a challenge to figure out what went wrong with your code and not be satisfied with a Gremlin lurking

March 6, 2022

Greg Thomas

Taking that Step Back

The Urgent Crisis of the Moment has shown up in your inbox in the form of a bug that is going to destroy the company if we don’t get it fixed today. At the moment, there is a surge in pressure to resolve the issue now because it is “hurting” things – maybe not you, but someone else who is dependent upon it. In these moments, there are two things to be done; Alleviating the hurt now. Make sure what you did doesn’t hinder things going forward. Alleviating the hurt now is a pretty straightforward proposition – triage the issue

March 4, 2022

Greg Thomas

Think Like a Farmer

You can’t skip days being a farmer. If you want to sell food at the market in September, you need to till the soil in April, plant in May, water and tend throughout June and July, and pick in August. I most likely have some of the actions and durations mistaken, but you get the picture. You can’t show up in August and do all those things that you should have done months before and expect it to be as good as if you had followed the plan to build up to the big sale in September. Some vegetables would