Software Misdemeanours

I went to a ThoughtWorks live event in May 2013 ‘Thriving in a fragmented future', where CEO of pizza giant Dominos – Don Meij, shared some pearls of wisdom from the Dominos mobile app successes, crediting solving customer problems rather than copying other successful retailers as key to increasing uptake.
You can see this by checking out the Domino’s web site and mobile apps to experience how straightforward it is to order your pizza this way. Their original app triumphed over major competitor Pizza Hut in 2009. The Dominos app had less features, but it could be downloaded from anywhere. In contrast, Pizza Hut had a large and complex app that required the user be connected to Wi-Fi to download, its uptake was severally limited as a result. The Dominos app became the number 1 free app on iTunes within 5 days of launch. 
It made me think about how often our organisation’s websites get carried away with the creation of fancy features before they address their customer’s basic needs a…

For our final ‘all hands’ meeting of 2013 in our department, we wanted to do a ‘year in review’ activity that would engage all.
We plastered the length of a wall with a long sheet of paper [you can tape many sheets together but a long roll of butchers paper or brown paper works best for this]. We seeded the paper by marking in the months of the year as a horizontal timeline, and also a handful of events that had happened during the year such as the department turning 1 (Illustrated with a baby with a cake and candles), the Christmas BBQ and a few other events.
We piled coloured markers along the floor and asked the teams to gather in their ‘home teams’ or the teams they had spent most time with, to reflect amongst themselves about events of the year. We did the same as a leadership team.
We then asked the teams to capture some of their events, achievements and reflections on the paper, along with the instructions: “Use colour, write big and draw pictures if you wish.”
The exercise inspir…