Sunday March 19, 2006 / 1 Comments

Is your product or service T-shirt worthy? Hold that thought.

First Things First
If you haven’t yet discovered the Creating Passionate Users blog, do so now. It’s chock full of really good, fun-to-read articles that cross a lot of different fields.

While I’ve read and even forwarded several good articles from this site, I didn’t really know anything about the authors, until last week. Hands down, Kathy Sierra’s How to Create Passionate Users was one of the best presentations at SXSWi 2006. I believe this was a 1 hour condensation of a 3.5 hour workshop she ran earlier in the week at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference. If you can track done either podcast, do so. Though most of it won’t mean much if you don’t have the accompanying slides.

Some key phrases you’ll hear:

Getting users past the suck point

Help your users kick ass

And this little gem:

T-shirt-first development (This is the one I want to explore)

By the way, if these phrases sound a bit, err, un-businesslike.. great! Kathy Sierra has a knack for translating obtuse learning theories and insights from social sciences into simple statements that resonate with people (she is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series from O’Reilly—practicing what she preaches). She makes the boring interesting. Take note, corporate speak.

Back to T-Shirt Worthiness.
By ‘T-shirt-first development,’ we have to answer: “Is our offering so vibrant, so exciting that people want to wear a t-shirt for our company?”

The example she used was sold out JAVA t-shirts at a developer’s conference. Obviously, there’s still a community there. And numerous examples abound. What branded t-shirts do you have in your closet? Firefox? Apple? Nike? Polo? That indie band you hope takes off? Even on the way back from the conference, Jared bought a t-shirt from Chuy’s Mexican food. A T-shirt for a restaurant.

Is My Company T-Shirt Worthy?
So, this led to some interesting conversations. Especially in light of our recent merger.

I would venture to say that Bright Corner was becoming T-shirt worthy, at least for our employees. When you have people leaving stable jobs, relocating, and taking pay cuts—all to work with a group of people—that’s pretty flattering. We’re not there with our new [combined] company. Yet. Which raised the question— “what keeps us from being t-shirt worthy?” I won’t share the details… but, this line of questioning led to a thought:

Being T-Shirt worthy (or not) is not a binary thing.

While being T-shirt worthy is pretty self-evident, there are degrees of not (yet) t-shirt worthiness. It’s really more of a continuum, moving from embarrassed (publicly) and frustrated (internally) to tolerant to satisfied to passionate (t-shirt worthy). Sort of like this:

While a lot of things have to change to move something into T-shirt worthiness, you do end up working on things in isolation. One of the first projects we started with is revamping the web site. For the record, we’ve only moved it from an embarrassed state to a tolerant one. For embarrassed, roll the clock back a few weeks at archive.org.

Why This Is Useful.
A lot of really great things are happening inside Geniant. On a lot of different fronts.

With regards to the web site, I needed a way to explain that the recent site refresh is nowhere near where we want to take things (passionate), nor where even the next revision will end up (satisfactory). This continuum makes sense of these changes— why we are not done. We now have a tool to explain where the changes are landing us each time.

Never Satisfied = Passionate?
By the way, I mentioned Bright Corner might have been T-shirt worthy. One surefire indication that we had passionate employees is that we were never satisfied with where we were, with doing things as usual, or resting on our laurels. If you’re never satisfied with something at your work, and you’re constantly working to make it better—especially on your own time—you’re probably at that passionate state. Your are intrinsically motivated to lead change.

Similarly, this middle spot (tolerant or satisfied) is the most dangerous and easiest place to settle. It’s also know as mediocrity. These are easy places to get stuck at. Which is why I am so excited about this new litmus test:

Are we t-shirt worthy yet?

It’s a dead simple question, with a simple yes or no answer. And we will all know yes when we’re there.