Tag: personal

Personal-ish

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

A few days after completing an insurance claim for my dog, who had knee surgery three weeks ago, I got the nicest email.

Subject: Checking on Birdie

Hi Sasha,

We were wondering how Birdie is recovering from her major leg surgery? We’re sorry to hear she had to go through that and send wishes for a quick recovery!

Please send a quick email letting us know how she’s feeling and give her a great big hug from us!

This pretty much blew me away. Not only did they reimburse me for the surgery, they actually care!

So, I replied. It’s been a stressful time, and I was touched that any company would even bother to ask.

Hi Leslie, it’s a big surgery but she’s coming along all right, thank you. 10 days in and she is walking with a limp and annoyed at her confinement!

And in reply I got:

Hello,

Thank you for your email. We’ll review your claims submission and contact you shortly.

Please visit us online for Frequently Asked Questions and answers about the policy at…

Cue the record scratching and the music stopping.

Here’s the thing: there is no such thing as “personal-ish,” it just doesn’t exist. There are two and only two paths:

The path of efficiency: in a modern, email-driven world, what we care about is a scaled approach that will work enough to hit the bar on our ROI calculations.

The path that’s personal: your experience matters to us. There’s no math to be done because I can’t calculate the value of trust on my spreadsheet.

Now, there’s an interesting question that emerges in the world we’re just entering. Soon, AI will be able to create an experience that feels personal but isn’t. It will walk and talk like trust-building at scale.

I don’t know how we’re going to manage through all of that.

How soon until we cross the uncanny valley, when we can no longer tell the difference between something that was programmed to act like it cares and human caring? My guess is that we will manage to give more people the experience of feeling trusted, and, when we see the wizard behind the curtain, the sense of betrayal and disappointment will be even larger, unless we are very, very transparent.

Regardless of how AI plays into all of this, if the last 30 years have been any indication, there will always be a space for personal—not in spite of its inefficiency but because of it. Raising the ante on trust, doing something surprisingly wonderful…these are the things that make you stand out.

And if you’re like the person at my pet insurance company who had the idea to make something personal, but then couldn’t line up the ducks to deliver that experience, your job isn’t to accept that something’s better than nothing.

Your job is to say “there are only two paths here, we have to pick one of them.”

The Inefficiency is the Point

~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

My 13-year-old daughter has been working her way through writing 75 thank you notes for the too-generous gifts she received for her Bat Mitzvah.

Note by note, one at a time, in the mix of cursive and print that is the hallmark of an early teen.

If she really concentrates, she might be able to 5 or 6 of them in one long sitting.

So much of our professional time is spent finding the last 10% of efficiency: the hacks, the shortcuts, the things we can strip away.

And, indeed, “frictionless” is valuable most of the time.

But, unless (and even if) you are running a fully scalable, 1000x software company, what’s going to make the difference, and what’s going to make them remember you, isn’t (just) how hassle-free it was.

What they’ll remember are the personal touches.

The effort that shows through.

The smudges.

The corrections.

The imperfections.

The one-of-a-kind patina that shows that you really, truly care.

Seth Godin’s Manifesto for Small Teams Doing Important Work

~ Sasha ~ 2 Comments

File under: Things I wish I had written & Things to print and have up on the wall.

The question this makes me ask is: is there ever a time that I’m not part of a small team? Is there ever a time when I’m not working on a tight deadline? Is there ever a time when the work isn’t important?

And, if no, then here are the rules of the road around communication, making and keeping promises, having a real Plan B, and keeping it personal, all while remembering not to question goodwill, effort or intent.

Thanks Seth.

A Manifesto for Small Teams Doing Important Work, by Seth Godin

We are always under tight deadlines, because time is our most valuable asset.

If you make a promise, set a date. No date, no promise.

If you set a date, meet it.

If you can’t make a date, tell us early and often. Plan B well prepared is a better strategy than hope.

Clean up your own mess.

Clean up other people’s messes.

Overcommunicate.

Question premises and strategy.

Don’t question goodwill, effort or intent.

“I’ll know it when I see it,” is not a professional thing to say. Describing and discussing in the abstract is what we do.

Big projects are not nearly as important as scary commitments.

If what you’re working on right now doesn’t matter to the mission, help someone else with their work.

Make mistakes, own them, fix them, share the learning.

Cheap, reliable, public software might be boring, but it’s usually better. Because it’s cheap and reliable.

Yesterday’s hierarchy is not nearly as important as today’s project structure.

Lock in the things that must be locked in, leave the implementation loose until you figure out how it can get done.

Mostly, we do things that haven’t been done before, so don’t be surprised when you’re surprised.

Care more.

If an outsider can do it faster and cheaper than we can, don’t hesitate.

Always be seeking outside resources. A better rolodex is better, even if we don’t have rolodexes any more.

Talk to everyone as if they were your boss, your customer, the founder, your employee. It’s all the same.

It works because it’s personal.