He was using it in the same sense as a similar phrase: career-limiting move: an action, behavior, or colossal screw-up that leads to your dismissal, which in turn necessitates your generating revised resumes as you start a new job search.
“Resume-generating event” also has another meaning: a major warning sign at a company (examples: an ominous all-hands meeting, a merger or acquisition, a Boeing-style product failure) that causes employees of a company to start looking for work elsewhere.
Given the current work environment, assisted by the culture’s general slouch towards authoritarianism and the balance of power favors management, expect to see this phrase used more often.
It’s going to be an abbreviated, but very intensive program is perfect for B2B software startups that are less than 9 months old. It will cover strategy, product development, and market validation and is for first-time startup founders, who could benefit from the planning activities and tools, and aren’t ready to commit to a full-time program.
The tl;dr
What: IdeaSprint Bootcamp
When: Wednesday, January 15, 5:00 — 7:30 p.m.
Where: Tampa Bay Innovation Center (1101 4th St S, St. Petersburg)
Application deadline: Apply by Friday, January 10!
First-time tech innovators with an idea for a tech product
What should attendees expect?
Expert-led workshops
Peer-to-peer learning
An understanding of Tampa Bay’s ecosystem of tech resources
What categories of startup are eligible?
Enterprise software (including SaaS)
FinTech
MedTech
AgTech
SpaceTech
Energy storage & management
Robotics
Please note:
TBIC’s elevator was damaged by the storm and will not be accessible. Attendees must be able to use the stairs.
This in-person event is open to founders located in the Tampa Bay region.
This program is limited to 20 companies; applications must first be approved, and founders will be notified via email in advance of the program. Please make sure your contact information is correct.
This program is exclusively for product companies, consultants or service providers will not be accepted.
My third experiment for 2024 involves trying out the ideas from Noah Kagan’s new book, Million Dollar Weekend.
ℹ️ In case you’re wondering: my first experiment of 2024 was to turn my layoff experience into a series of articles; the second was to take a chance working with a pre-seed startup.
Why conduct such an experiment? For now, let’s just say that current circumstances make it necessary, and hey, if anyone can pull off this kind of thing, it would be me.
The general idea of Million Dollar Weekend is that you can start a lucrative business by doing the following:
Identify a problem that you can solve
Solve that problem in a way that is hard to resist and profitable
Test your solution at low (or no) cost by preselling it before you build it.
The prerequisite for the Million Dollar Weekend process is a certain amount of unmitigated gall. Time and again in the book, Kagan states that two things hold people back from starting businesses:
Fear of starting
Fear of asking
Kagan’s methodology is to start by trying out an idea, seeing if someone will pay for that idea, and then either refining that idea or coming up with a new one and repeating the cycle.
The methodology anticipates rejection, and in fact, it says that in selling your idea, you should aim for plenty of rejections. The idea is that if you’re getting rejected often, you’re asking often, and that’s what eventually leads to success.
I’ll write more as I continue with this experiment, but for now, if you’re curious, here are some resources I can point you to:
You might also find these interviews with Kagan interesting:
ℹ️ Also in case you were wondering: This is NOT a paid promo for the book — neither Noah Kagan nor his businesses have any idea who I am or how to deposit money into my bank account. I wish they did!
Are you trying to start or build a UX practice in your organization? Have you run into a brick wall when trying to get support? Are you constantly trying to “sell” UX to your executive team? Nothing speaks louder than being able to show a return on investment (ROI). In this edition from our UX Fundamentals series, Phil Doughty will show us how we can put UX into terms that make sense to the C-suite; dollars and cents.
For about an hour, Phil, a Customer Success Manager at UserTesting, led the group through his presentation showing how to speak the language of stakeholders in order to convince them of the necessity and value of UX in software and services. He was assisted by his coworker Christian Knebel (also a Customer Success Manager), who teleconferenced in from Dallas.
In the end, Phil argues, you have to account for stakeholder needs. When talking to the C-suite, that often boils down to dollars and cents. You need to convince them that good UX either…
Increases the money you make, or
Decreases the money you spend.
Phil spent a fair bit of time on Google’s HEART framework. It’s a powerful tool tailored for UX teams, empowering them to prioritize and enhance distinct facets of the user experience, while also enabling the establishment of clear objectives and user experience metrics to measure their achievements.
HEART, as the acronym suggests, is made up of five key elements, each representing a different aspect of user experience measurement:
Happiness: This element gauges user satisfaction and overall happiness with the product or service. It often involves surveys or feedback mechanisms to assess user sentiment.
Engagement: Engagement measures how actively users interact with the product. It can involve tracking metrics like the number of visits, time spent, or specific user actions within the application.
Adoption: This aspect focuses on user acquisition and the rate at which new users are embracing the product. It assesses how effectively the product is attracting and onboarding new users.
Retention: The rate at which users continue to use the product over time. It helps assess whether the product is successful in retaining its user base and preventing churn.
Task Success: A measure of how efficiently users can complete specific tasks within the product. You can measure this by tracking success rates, error rates, or task completion times to identify usability issues.
HEART’s five elements collectively provide a comprehensive framework for evaluating and improving the user experience of a digital product or service. You can apply them to a single feature in your software or service — or ideally, to the whole thing.
If there was one slide that everyone should have taken a picture of, it’s the one above — Metrics vs. KPIs. This makes it clear:
A metric is a qualitative measurement of how your product, service, and experience, and specific initiatives are performing.
A KPI — short for key performance indicator — is a kind of metric that measures critical, organization-wide business outcomes that reflect that oragnization’s goals and vision, typically from a financial perspective.
For example, an ecommerce site’s conversion rate — the percentage of website visitors who take a specific action, such as making a purchase — would be a metric, but it wouldn’t be a KPI.
However, that site’s monthly revenue growth — the increase in revenue from one month to the next — is a metric that also qualifies as a KPI. It’s a KPI because it reflects the site’s core business objective: to increase revenue over time.
Typically, a free meetup will get half the people who registered to actually show up, but this one was different — we had a packed room, and it appeared that at least two thirds of the registrants were there! It looks like the result of interesting presentations and an involved, active tech scene.
The Tampa Bay User Experience group has these upcoming events:
