#playhaven

This essay is inspired by this week’s Startup Edition topic, “How do you prioritize?”

To do:

Respond to support emails

Fix bugs

Send email newsletter

Update pitch deck

Write a blog post

Update homepage design

Experiment with Twitter ads

Create new on-boarding flow

Attend marketing event

There are so many things to do in a startup. The things you choose to do and don’t do, ultimately determine success or failure. Prioritization is crucial. Unfortunately, not everything on the to do list is fun. Sometimes you have to do “shitty” work.

More Than Your Craft

I recently spoke with a solo founder of an early social product. He shared his challenges building the business:

I built the product in just a few weeks. It wasn’t hard. But getting users is tough! It’s been four months and I haven’t figured it out. I don’t enjoy marketing. I just want to code.

I hear this often. We gravitate toward our craft - the things we’re good at and enjoy doing. Coders like to code. Salespeople like to sell. Designers like to design.

But successful startups require attention in all areas. You may not have a marketing title but someone has to figure out how to acquire users. If we’re not careful, we prioritize things we like to do over the things we should do. We prioritize our craft because it comforting. It’s what we’re best at. But our craft isn’t what’s needed in the company at all times. I’ve certainly made this mistake.

Wireframes to Nowhere

Early at PlayHaven, as the sole product manager, I was responsible for designing new product concepts. Eagerly, I spent nights and weekends creating wireframes of new ideas. I toiled over the alignment of text fields, copy, and other things that didn’t matter one bit at the time.

I spent days crafting this wireframe for a consumer app discovery concept that we (thankfully) never built. In reality, we should have validated the market need and business feasibility rather than waste time pixel shifting for a product no one wanted.

I created high-fidelity wires for features I thought our customers wanted instead of first talking to them. I should have elicited feedback from engineering to get their input on my product ideas and better understanding of technical limitations or tradeoffs before jumping into design. I should have sketched first and used paper prototypes to bring my ideas to life in less time. My priorities were off. I shifted product pixels before I knew what the product should be because I enjoyed it. Wireframing was fun and the results were rewarding. It felt like progress.

Fake Progress

My beautiful wireframes were a trophy, a tangible reward for the late nights of hard work. Or so I thought. In reality, I wasted a lot of time, often having to adjust my pretty pixels after speaking with engineering and the team. Many of the concepts I meticulously wireframed were never even built because they simply weren’t important enough or needed after speaking with customers. If I prioritized better and done the important things that weren’t as fun, I would have saved myself and the company a lot of time.

I’m certainly not the only one that’s fallen into this delusion of progress. My entrepreneurial friend described the sensation of writing code:

It’s incredibly satisfying to build a product, to see my code instantly translate into something tangible. Each GitHub commit feels like progress. So I keep coding even though I know I should be focusing on marketing and figuring out how to get more users.

Like the wireframes I carefully crafted, the output of coding is incredibly rewarding: a functional product. The beauty of programming is in its responsiveness. One can write code and immediately see the results of their working product. Despite inevitable bugs and unexpected results, programming is relatively predictable. When you write the function, “alert(‘Hello World!’);”, the application responds with “Hello World!” when executed. That is satisfying.

People, on the other hand, are often unpredictable and non-responsive. Their tastes, expectations, and context continually change. This introduces less certainty of results and delay of reward when working on non-technical crafts like marketing or sales. This can reduce one’s motivation to invest in these “non-rewarding” activities, especially if it’s not what they enjoy doing.

Combatting Fake Progress

The best way to avoid the fake progress trap is to hold yourself accountable. Each morning as you review your morning to-do list, ask yourself why. Why should I create wireframes for a new landing page? Why should I add Facebook integration? Why should I attend the Lean Startup Conference? This simple, honest question may have saved me a lot of time and effort.

"What’s important about startups is the speed." - Paul Graham (source)

If speed is a startup’s most valuable asset, then prioritization is paramount. Building a successful product and startup is all about knowing what to do and what not to do. And sometimes that means you need to do shitty work.

Read other responses to the prompt, “How do you prioritize?" in this week’s Startup Edition.

Next week I will be leaving my full-time role at PlayHaven in one of the most expensive cities in the world - by choice. I’m paid well, the company is growing, and I work with an amazing team of friends. I still ask myself, “What the fuck am I doing?”

Here’s my story…

I moved to San Francisco to join PlayHaven as #10 nearly three years ago. Silicon Valley has always attracted this native Oregonian and the opportunity to join the visionary Andy Yang in the booming mobile gaming space made my decision a no-brainer. But honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. And soon I found out, the team didn’t either.

We had a product with traction but revenue and adoption were nearly stagnant. We needed to change something. Those first five months were some of the most exciting yet scary times in my life, debating what to do next as our cash reserves dwindled. Layoffs were imminent.

I had a conversation with Andy over beers shortly before the layoffs. He told me what was coming and that I might be out of a job in a few weeks. What had I done? I moved from my comfortable hometown to this unfamiliar city to join a dying startup? “I guess I’ll just ride this out and move back home,” I thought.

But I survived. The company downsized a few weeks later, and I sadly said goodbye to my friends and coworkers as they packed their belongings. And then there were six of us.

Fast-forward three months, things began to pick up. We set out on a new, inspiring vision. The team was excited.

We put our heads down, scrapping nearly all existing code to rebuild the product. As the sole product manager, I worked with a small team of five engineers. It was largely a collaborative effort. It had to be. In between answering support requests, sending the occasional marketing email, and other miscellaneous obligations, I was responsible for defining the user experience, creating wireframes for the new dashboard. I had done similar work but nothing at this scale. I had to learn on the job and fast. We made great progress thanks to an exceptional, hungry engineering team, but still, revenue was almost non-existent as the clock continued to tick. We set a goal to do a private launch at Casual Connect in July of 2011.

The preceding month was hectic and thrilling. There were long nights of excruciating pain but passion is a powerful drug that can get you through hard times. Rushed to bring the product into a usable state, strapped with few resources, I (a mostly non-technical person) setup a local environment of the dashboard we were building and began squashing bugs. Each GitHub commit delivered a rush of dopamine and satisfaction of progress.

It was 2 A.M., the night before an important demo with a large client. Without a QA team (or even a single QA person), I hammered on the product late into the night, uncovering and sometimes, fixing more bugs. It was incredibly unscientific but we didn’t have time for “process”. We just had to Get Shit Done. Eventually, the product was delivered in a usable state, and we landed our first big client. This was huge, and we celebrated our first major win.

Since our humble beginnings, the team has grown to 85. We’ve acquired several thousand customers, generating multi-million dollar revenues. We’re operating in a booming market with an amazing vision (that I strongly believe in to this day). Things are going well.

So why leave a good thing?

As I’ve shared before, my #1 priority is to learn. I’ve grown a ton in the past three years, especially during times of discomfort when I am challenged the most.

My time at PlayHaven has taught me so much. Methodologies for discovering what people really want. The importance of building the right (minimal) features. Processes for bringing an idea to market. How to scale a company. The criticality of hiring the right people and building an aligned culture. And more.

But I’m ready for my next challenge, eager to accelerate my learning. My friend, Nathan Bashaw recently told me:

When you look back at yourself six months from today and don’t feel embarrassed by your naiveté, there’s a problem. That means you’re not learning, growing.

As the company has grown, my role has transitioned into more specific areas of focus. We’ve also hired a UX designer to relieve many of the responsibilities and (fun) challenges I used to tackle. In short, my role has become more specialized from my generalist roots.

But if I am to be honest with myself, I’ve lost passion for the market and industry we’re in. I attempted to remedy this, taking a (long overdue) two week vacation three months ago but the passion didn’t return. Over the years, my interest in video games has dwindled. I grew up obsessed, micro’ing marines in Starcraft hours at a time, throwing profanities after getting disconnected in the middle of a heated Team Fortress Classic match, and blasting grunts on Halo into the A.M. Today, I rarely play even casual, 2 minute distractions on my iPhone. Instead, I invest in myself, reading, writing, and working on side projects/experiments.

Today, I have strong ambitions to build a product that I am the consumer of. If you follow my writing, you may have noticed I never write about the industry I work in: gaming. This is very telling.

Additionally, I am not a game developer nor do I have the motivation to become one. People that build products for themselves have a tremendous advantage because they are their own user. They don’t have to “get inside the user’s head” to understand the problem. Their ability to persevere is strengthened by a motivation to solve their own problems.

Despite these feelings, the decision was far from easy and difficult to tell my friend and boss. I could barely utter the words, “I’m leaving.” I cried. It’s still hard to swallow but deep down, I know it’s the right move for me.

I’m grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given, the support from my friends, and mentorship from those in the entrepreneurial community (you know who you are). I have many to thank.

As I spend my final days at PlayHaven and think about my next adventure, I refer to these questions as I evaluate new opportunities:

Is this really what I want to do?

Am I (strongly) passionate about the product, market, and vision?

Will I be challenged, learn, and grow to my full potential?

I hope others can learn from my experience and feel encouraged to take a chance themselves and reflect on their own personal goals.

If you’ve gone through similar challenges, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at [email protected].

I joined PlayHaven nearly three years ago as a small team of 10. As with any early startup, I wore many hats. Although my title was Product Manager, I was involved in nearly every aspect of the business: resolving customer support issues, writing website copy, instrumenting marketing outreach, building end-to-end wireframes, testing the product, and even burning the midnight oil making last minute commits to GitHub before relaunching the platform. I can't say I've enjoyed every aspect of this (ahem QA), but it has given me broad exposure and understanding of various roles.

This varied experience comes with tradeoffs. It's difficult, if not impossible, to become a domain expert in something when spread so thin. And now that we've grown to nearly 95 team members, I've resigned several hats to focus on more traditional product management. As we've hired more Product Managers, I'm now able to focus on specific verticals of the product.

More than ever before, I have the bandwidth and opportunity to become an expert, to acquire comprehensive knowledge and skill in a particular area. This may seem like the next logical step in my career, but should it?

The startup environment changes rapidly. The skills of today may not entirely translate to the future.

You might be a "master growth hacker", but will those tactics and methodologies remain relevant as platforms and user behavior (inevitably) change?

The SEO game is in constant flux as evident by Google's Panda update a few years ago and the growing shift toward native mobile apps. Best practices and "flavor of the month" skills today may not be applicable in the future.

Jack Altman states this eloquently in Startup knowledge decays quickly:

The startup industry in its current form is relatively young and poorly understood. Compared to other fields, there is a small amount of data about cause and effects for startups. What's worse, the data exists in an incredibly chaotic system where isolating individual variables is often impossible.

In other words, most of today's startups knowledge is probably wrong.

Perhaps investing in generalist, evergreen skills will have a higher return on investment. Skills such as leadership, communication, user psychology, and various soft skills.

These skills are timeless and transferrable, no matter your career goals or how the market changes. Read, write, ABL (always be learning), and work on a side project to invest in evergreen skills.

Being a curious generalist is what got me into product management to begin with. My career in the gaming industry began as an unpaid marketing intern. I was given the bandwidth to explore various aspects of the business and used this opportunity to study the gaming market and provided input on how we might improve the product. I was offered a role as a Product Manager and eagerly accepted. My career path might look much different if I had solely focused on marketing.

I'm not advocating you to disregard investment in expert skills. The world needs experts. Just be aware of where you spend your time and learning as those specific skills may not be as relevant in the future.

Experts are important. I just don't want to be one.

Playhaven, a startup that helps mobile game developers monetize their player bases, acquired a small three-person startup called Staq.io to beef up their analytics offerings.After raising $8 million more from GGV Capital last fall, the company has been staffing up by poaching COO Charles Yim from Google Admob and a head of European operations from Angry Birds-maker Rovio.

After hearing the countless debates and discussions surrounding Adria Richards and a few developers from PlayHaven I have the following opinion or advice to share for all who wish to work in the Tech industry as a professional:

If you post on the internet, whether on a personal or public blog, assume everyone has access to it and will read it. Calling someone out publicly is within your rights of free speech, but is not how a professional would handle a situation.

A sexual joke, reference or innuendo is never appropriate for the workplace, no matter how innocuous. Making a dongle joke won't hurt my feelings, but it also won't gain my respect. A professional would not make such a joke.

I recently commented on a blog post I read about the PyCon incident (this is the original post). For some reason, even though my reply took no sides, was not sexist, was not harassing, was not apologetic, was not abrasive in way, and backed up points with links, my comment was deleted. I figured this was a mistake, as I don't believe I violated any rules, so I posted again. This time it was immediate deleted, I was banned, and people began to comment about people trolling the site. I'm sorry, but my reply was rather long and thought out. It backs up points and it defends neither side explicitly. I spoke with the person who runs the blog via twitter and her response was simply along the lines of "you didn't read the policy." She wouldn't tell me why my comment had been removed, simply that it had and that there was "no way" I had read the terms. So, here is my comment that was deleted, which offers my general take. Thank you.

Oh I don't know about this. I don't really like the idea of any defending either party in here. There are two sides and I can see both sides here.

A guy made a job. Inappropriate to some, acceptable by some others. Whether or not it's acceptable in this instance is the question. The issue here is that someone overheard a comment that wasn't specifically directed to anyone, and was offended by it. She essentially overheard a private conversation in a public forum. Again, the question is whether speaking in this manner was okay here. That's subjective.

Why is it subjective? According to the person who made the statement, the forking comment was not a sexual reference, and is in fact a common term for building upon someone else's already existing project (example: https://help.github.com/articl..., and the fired developer did make a public apology (https://news.ycombinator.com/i.... That seems like it's a valid statement. So the anger here should then be focused on the "big dongle" comment, which is not unlike a comment that Adria herself made on her public twitter account (https://twitter.com/adriaricha..., while actually at PyCon. So, Adria herself made a presumably sexual joke during the conference, in a public forum. Now if you look at the responses on twitter, you can see some people saying this comment is okay because of the relationship and context, that is, she said it as a "joke" to a friend of hers. The issue here, then, is that she person she called out on twitter also made a "joke" to a friend of theirs, only at the conference, not on twitter. Both are public, and you could argue that twitter might even be MORE public. Maybe the "forking a repo" comment was in a sexual manner, maybe it wasn't, that's now in "he said she said" territory. She says yes. He says no. We do not know for sure.

Now, was the comment against the PyCon Code of Conduct (https://us.pycon.org/2013/abou... You could probably argue both ways here, but yes, it probably was. If Adria was offended, and it seems she was, she of course has the right to bring it up to the conference organizers. She did choose to use #pycon, making everything public, rather than @pycon, making it a narrower conversation. She did choose to put that out in the public, and sure she could have done it differently. That's not the issue though. She didn't like something, she brought it to the attention of organizers and asked for it to be resolved, action was taken. It's fine for her to do that, whether people like it or not.

Did these developer create a harmful, hostile, harassing, or sexualized atmosphere? It doesn't seem so. Did they make it uncomfortable? It would seen so. It doesn't sound as if they were inciting anything or going out of their way to be rude or disrespectful. Perhaps if they were addressed they would have apologized and realized they were wrong. Perhaps not. We don't know. But was anyone in imminent danger? Unlikely.

Now on Adria's own blog, she writes that she felt she had to take action or else a little girl she had seen would never learn to code (http://butyoureagirl.com/14015.... Now that's a bit of rhetoric, as it's unlikely that due to this person's comments, this young girl would not have learned to code. I understand what's implied though, all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men (and women) to do nothing. She felt she needed to say something to make the developer community more conducive, appealing, fair, and safe for women. Fine. She can do that and she should. And then she refers to them as "ass clowns." I might take offense in that. Maybe that's what she intended, probably not, but it would be well within my rights to be offended by a statement like that. It IS name calling. It DOES use what some people may consider profanity. And if someone wanted to make the argument, I suppose that someone could argue that it's a gay slur (it's certainly been argued before:https://news.ycombinator.com/i....

People claim that she got this developer fired. Again, you can argue here. Yes, it would seem that his firing was directly related to her actions. Had she not take this public action, this developer may not have been fired. So yes, she is a cause of the loss of his job. However, the decision to fire the developer was made by the company. They had a choice, and it seems that Adria did not attempt to get him fired.

Should Adria have been fired because of this? This is probably an even bigger argument. Whatever you believe about her calling these people out. She did have a right to do so. She shouldn't be fired for talking up about something that made her uncomfortable. However, SendGrid's response does make a point. She is in developer relations. Not male developer relations. Not female developer relations. Developer relations. Yes, this story will likely make it more difficult to act in her role. Some people make want to work with her more. Some people may want to work with her less. It IS divisive. And her position at SendGrid, unfortunately, is scarred by this. It is likely that she would not be able to mange her role effectively. Not because of what she does, but because of what others do who relate to her. This whole situation would likely have more of an impact on Adria's role, than it would on the PlayHaven developers role. So yes, her firing is probably valid, even if unfortunate.

I'm also seeing people now talking about race being an issue here. Perhaps I'm ignorant in this matter, but I have no idea what race or ethnicity Adria is. And personally, the fact that anyone would act in malice towards anyone else in regards to race/ethnicity/gender/orientation is so absurd to me, that I almost cannot even fathom that something like that exists. I don't know how anyone would go about choosing what race/ethnicity to be racist against towards her. But then again, I am a white male in the United States, so that could just be me being bling on that part.

This is long and I don't really expect everyone to read it. My point is this. There are valid points on both sides. To pick on and staunchly defend it while being blind to the other is not fair, and will only result in more divisiveness. This specific instance is a perfect example of how something might be accepted by some and appalled by another. Regardless of what side you're on, it's unlikely that either wanted this blowout.