March 2013
1 post
Inspiration vs. Motivation
One of the things I love about coming to work at Shutterstock is helping people on our teams succeed. Over the years leading teams of technologists, designers, researchers, sales and customer service I’ve learned a helpful distinction - the difference between inspiration and motivation. Great leaders know the difference between inspiration and motivation. As a leader, you’ll need...
January 2013
1 post
How to Build a Team That Builds Great Products
This article originally appeared August 2, 2012 on The Hired Guns .
Hiring is a topic I’m passionate about because I like to work with bright, enthusiastic people who challenge me every day. I’ve spent the last decade building teams (most recently a product organization that includes designers, researchers, and product owners), and I’ve learned a number of lessons in that time. Let’s focus...
October 2012
1 post
Betting on Mobile at the Workplace
Mobile is reinventing how people work by moving previously complex tasks to smaller portable devices. This work process reinvention is one of my bets on where to place your development resources in the next few years. Lets review the facts illustrating the changes we’ve seen recently.
* Smartphones outsold PC’s in 2011 and PC sales stagnate while mindshare moves to other devices. Users...
June 2012
1 post
Authentic User Conversations
Let’s have more thoughtful, authentic conversations with our users, and let’s start with surveys. Your survey IS a bad user experience. It has no character, I don’t enjoy taking it and I don’t understand how it will benefit me to finish it. Paying me won’t help either. With payment, I may actually try to finish it, but don’t mistake that for caring about...
April 2012
1 post
6 ways to foster creative product teams
I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with teams that built great products at Shutterstock the last few years (previously at Beatport and the team at Native Instruments as well.) The word “great” can be a little ambiguous, let’s refer to products that have disruptive attributes - stuff that’s ground breaking, profitable and/or deemed by it’s constituency as...
March 2012
1 post
Childlike Curiosity
I enjoy coming to work at Shutterstock. The people I work with are bright, hard working and inspire me to believe that we can build things that make people happy - that’s awesome! The qualities of great co-workers are vast, but a few of my favorites are humility, a willingness to learn and a childlike curiosity (or Shoshin in Zen Buddhism). When we are childlike, there are no dumb...
