Noel Tate

Over the last few month, I have been working with Eoin Redmond to build and launch GetHouseSurvey.ie.

The website is now live and we are open for business!

GetHouseSurvey.ie is aimed at people who are purchasing a new or second hand house and require a structural survey. (This is sometimes referred to as a pre-purchase survey or a building survey.)

We know from first hand experience that buying a house in Ireland is a long, complicated, stressful process with lots of steps. We want to remove just a small bit of that stress for buyers by getting them hooked up with a surveyor as as quick and stress free way as possible.

To achieve this, our site works in a similar way to Uber. You give your details and the details of the property you are buying and we then match you with a qualified, experienced surveyor in your area and they handle absolutely everything else from booking access to the property and getting the completed survey returned to you. All for a set price with zero hidden extras.

Our surveyors also provide their email and phone number so the buyer can contact them at any time with concerns or questions.

All of the surveyors we work with have 10+ years experience, carry professional indemnity insurance and are members of one of several governing bodies. 

The survey itself is a visual inspection and report on the general condition of the property. It will list any defects, damage or concerns which the surveyors can observe. Most of the time the defects are minor and can be repaired easily. But occasionally larger issues can be spotted.

Sometimes banks require this survey to be complete before releasing funds from a mortgage but even if they do not request it, it is generally good practice to have a professional surveyor inspect the property. It might just save you a lot of hassle and heartache.

The website is powered using a combination of Wix and HubSpot, with the latter handling all of our customer’s details securely. Our payments are handled securely by Stripe. 

For our surveyors we offer a number of benefits. Firstly, we do all of the marketing so they don’t need to promote themselves. We collect all of the details from the buyer and we also take payments up front and so they will never need to spend time chasing invoices. 

So if you are in Ireland and are in the process of purchasing a home, get your survey from https://www.gethousesurvey.ie

A product manager’s guide to building an analytics culture

“If you can’t measure it, don’t do it”. This was one of the first lessons my first mentor in product taught me. It is advice which I have remembered ever since, advice which I have occasionally ignored, but advice which has almost always turned out to be true.

Good product analytics is vital if you want to consistently improve your product and grow. Every time you make a change to your product, you need to how how that change has impacted your users and your KPIs.

Your product analytics tool should show you key events over time, allow you to view different types of user cohorts and show your core user funnels (i.e. signup, login, purchase etc.) and where the drop offs in each step of that funnel are. This enables you to know where to point your team’s focus to get the best impact.

These are my top 3 tips on how you can empower your whole team with product analytics, build an analytics culture and ensure that you keep focus on your goals and measure what you are doing.

Tip 1: Give every member of the team access to your analytics Analytics isn’t just for product, it’s for everyone. Ensure every product manager, product owner, designer, developer, dev ops, QA, support agent, sales person - you can see where I’m going - Make sure everyone has access to your product analytics tool.

Ideally you should be using a product analytics tool which requires no query writing or coding of any kind. But if you are not there yet, make sure everyone has at least enough basic training to be able to measure your key events and user journeys. Then set up some dashboards so everyone can view important events and trends at a glance.

This will; 1: Ensure everyone can explore their own ideas or hunches without waiting on someone else to pull the data for them. 2: Save you time pulling reports for people. 3: Result in more well thought out product suggestions being submitted to the team. 4: Gain extra insight for their own role. For example, your sales team can see which features different user types get the most use out of.

Tip 2: Share charts and insights regularly on Slack As a product manager, you should be obsessed with how people are using your products, what they do well, what their biggest pains are, which funnel has the highest drop-off etc. More than that, it’s your job to keep everyone up to date on how your product is performing and how our users are using it.

So, every time you discover something interesting or the team has made good progress towards a target, share the graph showing it internally to try and generate discussion around it.

This will; 1: Get everyone thinking about analytics and the customers affecting it. 2: Get some good group discussions going. You’ll find lots of people have great insights and just need something to prompt them to share. 3: Keep everyone on the team and wider teams up to date with what is happening. 4: Keep everyone accountable. If your product isn’t improving, there is nothing like sharing that with other teams to get the creative juices flowing on why it isn’t.

Tip 3: Include analytics with every backlog or roadmap item When a ticket goes into the backlog, you should have success metrics defined. Something like “introducing this feature should increase signup conversion by 15%”. In addition to just listing the success metrics, also include a link to a dashboard which shows those metrics over time.

This will: 1: Ensure that everyone throughout the process who handles the backlog item has visibility on what you are trying to improve. 2: Keep focus on the correct goal all the way through design, dev, QA and release. 3: Stop people getting creative in the wrong places and makes the “saying no” part of product management really easy. 4: Make measuring success in most cases as simple as opening the dashboard and looking how the numbers change.

Back in April, I was invited to speak at ProductTank Dublin. This was the 2nd ProductTank event in Dublin and after attending the 1st event and seeing the quality of speakers and attendees, I was excited, happy and humbled to accept the invite.

It was taking place in The Vaults at Dogpatch Labs. This space is a redeveloped wine and whiskey storehouse which has been turned into a 100 seat theatre, 6 meeting rooms, large and small informal breakout spaces and a bar. The vaulted stone ceilings and lighting result in a relaxed, informal atmosphere which is perfect for this kind of event.

I was on stage first, speaking right before Rich Mironov, a product management guru who was speaking about his Four Laws of Software Economics. This was a very interesting and thought provoking talk by someone I can only describe as a rockstar of our industry. I won’t do his talk the injustice of trying to summarise it, but I would highly recommend watching it!

For my talk, I decided to speak about the concept and effects of a process for organising your sprints called the ‘3:2:1 Ratio’. It involves taking 3 stories from your product backlog, 2 stories from your target backlog (flexible backlog for hitting targets, tackling surprise projects etc.) and 1 dev’s choice story. I was really happy with the reaction from the other attendees and I got involved in some interesting follow up discussions afterwards. 

Here is my talk with slides, It’ll take up about 17 minutes of your time, but hopefully you’ll pick up an idea or two that you can experiment with in your agile workflow.

The Background

Since iOS 9 was launched, Siri has been given some cool new features. One of these, which has not got much attention, is her (yes my Siri is a she) ability to predict sporting events. You simply ask her a question like, “Hey Siri, will Watford beat Arsenal this weekend?” and she’ll tell you the most likely outcome in a very statistical kind of way. Here have a look:

The Experiment

This got me thinking. Placing a bet requires a bit of effort. It involves looking through all the odds, trying to find the value and then forming an opinion on whether or not it is worth placing. Apart from the fact that most people are terrible at it, it can also be time consuming.

So, what if I just let Siri do all the work for me? Surely she can’t be worse than I am at picking winners? So I decided to find out.

There were 10 Premier League games this weekend. I asked Siri who would win each match and then I put €10 on her prediction. A total of ONE HUNDRED euro was on the line. Mega bucks for me, but it was all in the name of science… kind of…. okay I was just bored.

As I mentioned, Siri gives her predictions in a statistical kind of way, e.g. team X to win by 0.5 goals. So I decided to apply simple rounding. If she predicted a team to win by 0 - 0.4 goals, I would bet on the draw and if she predicted a team to win by 0.5 goals or more, I would bet on the team to win.

Just for a little added fun, I placed €1 on a Siriacca* (Accumulator with all teams). I didn’t expect to see this €1 ever again… Spoiler alert - I didn’t.

For convenience I took all my odds from Paddy Power as they are generally quite good. If I really wanted to I may have been able to get slightly better odds for a few of the selections elsewhere. Which by the way is what you should always do when betting!

The Results

As you can see, we got a return of €135.35. Minus the €101 stake we placed that is a profit of €34.35 with a hit rate of 6/10 results and an ROI of 34%.

Not bad considering there was zero research or effort put into the predictions.

Conclusions

Siri seems to be calculating the prediction based on odds from somewhere as opposed to stats or form and so she is never going to offer you a big outsider - which anyone who has worked in gambling will tell you is a good thing in the long run!

Siri doesn’t like or dislike any teams or players and so emotions or “I have a gut feeling” never come into the equation. This is a also a good thing.

As this has only been based on 10 outcomes, these results are far from statistically significant. If just 2 of the winning results went the other way, we could have lost money and if it were a week with a lot of upsets, we would have lost most of the €100. But they are promising enough to try this again next week! #fingerscrossed

tl;dr

Stop reading articles on productivity and go get some shit done!

Long Version

(I'm posting this as a dig at and reminder to myself)

Today I've spent about an hour reading articles on productivity tips, tools, tricks, you name it! This is something I do regularly. I read articles and books. Lots and lots of articles and books. Some of these are excellent, really interesting reads that dive down into the human brain and how it works, why some people, even if not as skilled, can be more productive than others and why we procrastinate. I've learned a lot. But it has also taken a huge amount of my time over the years.

This has me wondering; how much is too much time to spend reading and learning this topic?

Even today as I read articles and as I write this, I have a room upstairs that needs to be decorated and a garden outside that needs some serious work done. Would my afternoon have been better spent just getting up and doing these jobs? Or is what I have read for the last hour going to serve me better in the long run?

I experienced a moment of sadness today. I was sitting in a restaurant having breakfast while looking out the window. After a few minutes I noticed a homeless man in a blue sleeping bag sleeping on the other side of the street. Now, seeing homeless people is not a new thing for me, I pass many every day on my way to and from work and in the last few years I have spent a number of months working in San Francisco where you could pass literally hundreds of homeless people within one block.

What was new for me, was that I have never sat anywhere where I was watching a homeless person for more than a few seconds. As I finished my breakfast, it struck me that in the amount of time I had sat there, of the hundreds of people who had walked by, not one person even looked at the man. He was lying at the corner of the busiest pedestrian street in Ireland, right outside a very busy cafe and not one person even noticed.

Then I realised that normally, I don’t even notice. I never see the homeless man or woman on the side of the street as I walk by on my way to work. They are just an obstacle to dodge in my busy day. That is when I felt sad, not for the man sleeping on the street, but for my failure as a human.

I believe, which is sometimes an unpopular view, that most homeless people are homeless entirely of their own fault. Yes some people are addicted to drugs, alcohol or gambling. But they are the ones who chose to start the behaviour that turned into an addiction and they are the ones who did not acknowledge and admit they needed help before it was too late. Yes some people are homeless through economic circumstances which caused them to lose their home. But they are the ones who chose to buy a home they could not afford which resulted in them having little or no savings or assets to fall back on.

But homeless people are human and humans can and are allowed to make mistakes. It is how we learn, it is how we improve ourselves and it is how we ultimately learn compassion and empathy. I’m far from perfect. I’ve made lots of mistakes in my life. Some I would go back and change if I could, but some I gladly chalk down to learning. But when I did makes these mistakes my family and friends were there to help me get through it and get back on track.

So when these humans make mistakes which get them to this situation, why are we as a society of humans so reluctant to help them?

In Dublin there are homeless hostels, shelters and food halls. But they are awful and beds and supplies are limited. Also, feeding someone poor quality food and giving them a bed in a room with 20 other people or putting a family up in a hotel room indefinitely, is not going to help them get back on track.

Every once in a while, the government of the day will launch some new initiative, a new hostel, more funding etc. These do sometimes help people get back on track. But mostly they are badly executed plans, which are not followed through and their effectiveness is never reviewed and analysed. As a result, the situation is now worse than ever and we are not learning from our mistakes.

I have no idea what the correct answer to this problem is. But I do know that people are humans and humans will always make mistakes. Should we try to minimise mistakes that get people to this point by educating people from a school age about how to manage their lives, how to manage their finances and how to have back up plans? For those who are homeless already, do we need better quality schemes to get them clean, educated and skilled up?

I’m not an economist or political expert, but what if (and please bear with me), what if everyone paid their water charges and it got to a point where we were supporting the water infrastructure, maintenance and supply of the water we use without the need for the reassigning of other taxes to pay for it. And what if the government of the day then chose to use, what would only need to be a fraction of, these taxes to end homelessness. Wouldn’t that be something to be proud of as a nation, to say that we ended homelessness in our beautiful little country? But sadly, this government and most likely the next will not do this.

I’m writing this post to share an experience I had today with anyone who reads it and to share some of the thoughts I had on it. This blog post will not end homelessness. But what it will do, is start to make me notice homeless people. I’m not going to start buying every homeless person I see meals, but what I will do is occasionally, when I can spare it, buy another human a sandwich, cup of coffee or whatever, just to help them through it until we find a way to help them get back on track. I’m going to write notes to my local and city politicians asking them to notice too and I’m going to encourage other people to do the same.

I’ve been working with agile software development for about 5 years now.  I’ve seen it work well and work badly. The great thing about agile is when it does work badly (or just not perfectly), everyone involved gets a chance to analyse why it didn’t go as expected and change some things to fix this for the next time. This ensures that the next sprint will go a little better and if this is repeated every sprint, eventually you have a team that is working at optimal efficiency who is both focused on the task(s) at hand and responsive enough to deal with curve balls.

It is hard to get used to, involves a lot of teamwork and commitment, but once you start seeing features roll out most people agree that it is well worth it. Personally, I love agile!

So, back in September when my fiance and I found out our 2nd baby would be arriving earlier than expected and we had just one week to turn our old storage/ironing room into a nursery, I decided to use what I had learned from agile software development and apply it to the DIY process.

The room we were faced with needed to be completely stripped. It then needed new floors, new furniture, several coats of paint new fixtures etc. So I started to make a list of everything that we needed to do. I turned out, there were 21 tasks and 7 days to do them in so it worked out nicely at 3 tasks per day. That in itself was reassuring, knowing that if we finished just 3 of the tasks each day, we would be finished on time.

I then transferred each of the tasks onto a card and created “To Do”, “In Progress” and “Done” cards to mark the ‘swimlanes’ to give visibility on the progress of the week. There were no ‘epics’ although some of the tasks naturally fell together e.g. one trip to the hardware store would cover several of the tasks. Each morning we spent 1 minute deciding what tasks we should do that day - this was the equivalent of a ‘daily standup’.

The week started quite well, with 3 or 4 tasks being complete on each of the first few days. On about day 3 we added some scope creep with the addition of some new tasks. After all, what kind of product manager would I be if I didn’t scope creep :) Luckily, as we had completed 4 tasks on some of the first days we were able to accommodate without letting the completion date slip.

Ella helping get her new sisters room ready!

On day 6, when we should have been getting ready to put together the new furniture and crib, we realised that we had not built in any time for touch up painting or indeed those unavoidable family things that use up your time. This resulted in a big rush on our last day, but in the end we got everything complete and ready for our new daughter to move in a few days later.

Nothing more satisfying than a complete scrum board...

About 1 weeks worth of baby supplies.

Overall, I would consider my first attempt at using agile for DIY a success. One of the best parts was the lack of stress at the beginning when we realised we only needed to do 3 tasks per day to complete the room in 7 days. Sure we could have worked like crazy and got everything complete in 3 or 4 days, but I was working full time, my fiance was 8 months pregnant and we also had a 4 year old that needs lots of attention.

I’ve decorated lots of rooms and this was by far the most organised I have ever felt. The simple fact of being able to glance at the scrum board and see exactly what is left is very reassuring. The daily standups ensured that we were constantly in sync and this enabled us to plan out other things we needed to do to get ready for baby.

The next time I do it I will definitely change some things like adding extra tasks for snagging or building in some time to give a little extra breathing space and ensure that the last day is not rushed. The scrum board was easy to enough to maintain but the project was relatively small and I think next time I would use an online tool like Trello so I can access the board from anywhere and share with whoever is involved.

But, that is the great thing about agile. We continually get to learn from and adapt our process until it suits us perfectly and there is no 100% right way to do it. I’d highly recommend trying this for your next DIY project.

I love winning. Probably a little too much. Whether its team sports, individual sports, work related or just some dumb computer game, it doesn’t matter. I want to do it the best and I want to win. I love how it makes me feel superior, I crave the adrenaline that sometimes lets me perform better than I normally would and I thrive on how it feeds my ego.

But I’m honest about it and I’d never cheat to win. I’ve also learned to be genuinely humble about it and if I do win at something, anything, I like to be a good winner. If appropriate I thank my competition and try not to celebrate too much.

So overall I contain my ego quite well and use it to my benefit and try not to piss people off. However, last year I started running. Running is a very interesting sport. Because it is measured over time and distance, by just having a smart phone, you can compete against yourself, you can compete against the times of olympic champions or you can just try to reach a target distance, duration or whatever goals you like.

I quickly found that I love competing against myself. I love when I get a PB (that’s running lingo for ‘Personal Best’), I feel disappointed when I have a bad run and I love when after weeks, or months or working hard I hit a goal. 

My only problem with running is when I enter a race and my ego wants me to win. Now, I’m no fool. I know that if I enter a 10km race with 8 thousand runners which include some professionals, that I’m not going to win. I’m not going to come a close 2nd, I’m not going to finish top 100 or even top 1,000. What I do know, is that I will have a time I can achieve and because I am in a competitive environment I’ll get that little hit of adrenaline that could potentially shave a couple of minutes off. But, as every runner knows, I need to be smart about it. I need to know what pace to run at, keep it steady and for the last few km, if I’m feeling good I can turn it up a notch. And last week at the Great Ireland Run in Dublin, that’s what I had planned. Until my ego kicked in.

The race was 10km and so far this year I had run this distance twice in just under 50 minutes (a 5.00/km pace), so I thought I’d try to aim for a PB of 47 minutes. My plan was to start off at a pace of 4:50/km, keep it steady at that for 6km, access how I felt, try to kick it up a gear and finish strongly. Before the race I felt full of energy, I felt confident and I wanted to hit my PB and target time. I wanted that win!

I lined up at the starting line with thousands of other runners, I was close enough to just about see the pros up front who were made up of olympians, European and world champions. Around me were were a selection of men and women of different sizes and different looking fitness levels. As I scanned the crowd I thought to myself “I could take most of these”. Ahhhhh, my Ego had arrived. I reminded myself that I have a target pace and I need to stick to that, "I’m not here to race other people". I repeated that to myself a few times and then set my watch ready for the start.

When the race stated everyone slowly took off through the starting line and there was a melody of beeps as everyone’s timing chips activated. When we passed the starting line there was more space and as the crown started to thin out the pace picked up and we were moving! I strode along with the group of people around me and when we got to the 1km mark I felt comfortable but when I checked my watch it showed a pace of 4:20. Whoops! I had got carried away with the start and ran too quickly. “No bother” I assured myself, “I’ll slow it down a bit and balance it out before I get too tired”. But, as I slowed down, the group of people I had started with didn’t slow down. They kept moving at their pace and they moved further and further away from me. But then, people who were behind me from the start, began to run past me.

This was when my ego popped up again. I began to feel like these people were already beating me and I needed to do something to stop it. As every person passed me, I felt more and more like I was losing and so, completely against my better judgement, I picked up my pace until people stopped passing me. This felt fine and after about 3km I started to pass people out. Now, with just 7km remaining, I felt as though I was winning. I started to get that rush of adrenaline, I no longer felt as though I was running, I felt as though I was gliding. I could keep this up forever! Until I hit about 5km...

When I got to the 5km mark I though “wow, that felt quick” so I checked my watch. It was very quick! I had ran the first 5km at a pace of 4:15 which was just a few seconds slower that my fastest ever 5km and I still had 5km left to go. I forced myself to slow down, but it was too late. At this point in the race we were approaching a few big hills. Halfway up the first one I felt my legs starting to buckle, so I slowed down. When I got to the top of the first hill we had covered just over 6km and I was barely jogging anymore, I felt out of breath, my heart was pounding and my head and all my limbs were feeling heavy. I was suffering, badly and I still had almost 4km left.

I tried to focus, I had suffered while running before and I had managed to get through it then, so I picked a pace that I felt comfortable at and I kept moving, but I was moving too slowly. I was now running at a pace of 5:40 and by doing some quick math in my head I realised that, despite my super quick first 5km, I would miss my target time. So, I tried to focus and regain my energy, but just as I was about to pick up the pace to try and get back on track, the 2nd series of hills arrived. 

The next 2km were probably the toughest physical thing I have ever done. There were several times when I felt like just sitting down. I looked at some of the fields we were passing and imagined the bliss I would feel if I were just to pass out on one of them. But no, I couldn’t give up, because that would be losing to myself. So I kept plodding along, running slower and slower. Until, just before I got to the 9km mark I spotted a friend of mine who had promised to come and cheer me on. 

“Come on Noel, just one 1km left. COME ON!” he shouted. I realised that this was the first time (since sports day in school) that someone was there to cheer me on in a race. I got a surge of energy and I focused on the line. For the last kilometer, every 100 meters was marked out and every time I passed one of those markers it felt like a small win. 

With just 500m left I could see the line in the distance and I could hear the crowds cheering people on as they passed the line. At this stage, people who had ran their correct pace were having strong finishes and in the last  500m about 100 people passed me out. But, by this stage my ego had submitted, it was beat, humiliated by the last 5km and it no longer wanted to show its face. Just before the finish line I spotted my family who had also come out to cheer me on and I managed to smile. I kept moving and I crossed the finish line, in agony and well beaten. 

I had lost. Not to the 1,569 people who finished in front of me, but to myself. I set myself a target time and pace and had a plan but I totally ignore it in a childish and futile attempt to prevent people who I didn’t know and who I would never see again from running past me. I felt like an idiot and I knew exactly what I had done wrong.

I found some space and I lay in the grass hoping to find some of that bliss that I imagined earlier in the race. It never came, until my 4 year old daughter ran over, jumped on me, kneed me in the chest, gave me a big hug and excitedly exclaimed “Daddy, I saw you running!”. I picked myself up off the ground and let her tell me about the last hour since I saw her. Then, I drove home and tried to put my defeat out of my head.

In the end, I finished the race in 51:08, a whole 4 minutes and 8 seconds off my target time and my slowest 10km this year. I was fit enough to run my target time, I had prepared well enough and I had a good plan. But because of some little voice in my head that didn’t want to let other people beat me I messed it up. I’d like to pretend that this was an isolated incident, but I had done the exact same thing 10 months earlier in the Dublin Pride 5km run. I started off too quickly because I didn’t want other people to pass me out, suffered for the 2nd half of the race and on that occasion, I came very close to vomiting and missed my target time by a measly 20 seconds. All because of my ego.

What’s next in my attempt to be the best runner I can? I plan to complete the Dublin marathon this October and if I do the same thing I won’t just risk losing to myself by missing my target time. I risk the ultimate loss of not even finishing the race. Thinking about it now, there is a very real chance I won’t be able to control my ego. There will be hundreds, if not thousands of people who pass me out. Will I be focused enough to let them pass without a fight? Can I stick to my plan and ignore better runners passing me? Can I win?