Tech Literacy for Lean Founders

Vassar College Venture Co-op, November 2012

Jonathan Berger, Pivotal Labs

Hi!

I'm @jonathanpberger

• My background is in
  • philosophy and then
  • design and now
  • development

Why do I have this

ridiculous mustache?

http://mobro.co/jonathanpberger

What do I do?

• • I'm an entrepreneur with a fashion startup called http://marketpublique.com
• • I'm a designer and developer who builds products every day at http://pivotallabs.com
• • I occasionally speak and blog and post all that at http://jonathanpberger.com

Who are you?

(Show of hands)

Whose primary role is as a

Doer?

Bizdev, Marketing, Analysis

Whose primary role is as a

Maker?

Design, Development

Who's currently

working on their own company?

Who's planning on

launching this year?

Who's on a team

without a technical cofounder?

The Plan

• 1: Why "Literacy" is a useful way to discuss becoming technical
• 2: Why Coding literacy helps Non-Technical Founders
• 3: How to become literate

Part 1:

Why "Literacy"?

Why "Coding as Literacy"?

It's a good way to talk about coding, which is often treated as a binary.

If you work in a technical medium,

TECHNOLOGY IS POWERFUL

BUT

Learning hard technical skills is

SCARY

Remember

Literacy != Fluency

Getting technical doesn't have to be a

full-time commitment

You just need enough to

read the writing on the wall

Part 2:

How does Code Literacy Help Founders?

The Anna Karenina Principle

Happy families are all alike;

every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

The Reverse Anna Karenina Law of Startups

Failed startups are all alike;

every successful startup is successful in its own way.

Common Causes Startup Failure:

(failing to nail these questions)

• • Who has a problem? (Customers)
• • What's the solution? (Product)
• • How do I build it? (Team)
• • Why will they pay me? (Business Model)
• • Where can I find runway? (Funding)

Common Causes of Startup Death

• • Who has a problem? (Customers)
• • What's the solution? (Product)
• • How do I build it? (Team)
• • Why will they pay me? (Business Model)
• • Where can I find runway? (Funding)

The Iron Triangle

• • Scope
• • Schedule
• • Cost

(Pick two.)

Agile methodologies were

built to address Iron Triangle risk.

My Thesis:

Code Literacy helps Non-Technical Founders mitigate Scope risk.

Areas of risk for

Non-Technical Founders

Risk from Honest Mistakes

• • Engineers <3 over-engineering,
• • Paying others for what founders could do themselves,
• • Misunderstanding technical cost (trying to do too much),
• • Misunderstanding technical complexity (trying something that's too hard),
• • Misunderstanding what's interesting (me-too ism).

Almost all this risk can be mitigated by

(technical) context

(more on that in a minute)

Risk from Dishonest Mistakes

• • Founders left without access to their code.
• • Getting the run-around from devs.

Risk from Dishonest Mistakes

• • Founders left without access to their code. Understand version control.
• • Getting the run-around from devs. Understand basic principles.

Part 3:

Becoming literate

I started as

a self-taught designer

I worked on Spot.Us and

found Agile and fell in love.

I started

Picking up on what I heard around me

For me, this looked like

CSS, HTML, Erb => TDD, Cucumber => Bash, Bundler, Rake => Git => Rspec, Capybara, Jasmine => Javascript, JQuery, the DOM => more Ruby, ORMs, REST, HTTP.

Basic Techniques

In order of

value / cost

Understand

Github

(Git is another story altogether.)

Learn to Build Static Sites

• • Learn basic HTML,
• • Learn basic CSS.

Intermediate Techniques

Learn

Markdown

And use it for everything.

TDD and Story Writing

using Cucumber. Write stories at the right size.

(See my post Writing Well-Formed Stories for more.)

TDD and Story Writing using

Cucumber / Gherkin

Given I am a logged in user

When I click "add to cart"

Then the item should added to in my cart

And my Total Price should go up

Build

Dynamic sites

• • jQuery
• • Sinatra

Learn

Git

(Version control). Control your code. Even better, contribute small fixes (mostly copy and CSS).

Advanced Techniques

In-browser Mockups

be more precise in asking for what you want using basic CSS, HTML, and a templating framework (e.g., Erb or Haml)

JQuery and the DOM

contribute interactions. Simple stuff is really pretty easy.

Meta-learnings

Rules I Learned

About Learning Technical Things

• • Learn what the web is built of (internet architecture),
• • Immersion/osmosis is a powerful teaching tool,
• • To learn, it's critically important to do things and get feedback, not just read about them.

Tastes I cultivated

About Learning Technical Things

• • Tools are important (but don't obsess over them),
• • Develop the sense of when to ask for help and when to tough it out,
• • Develop the sense of smell of knowing when you should go along with Magic, and when you have to learn how it works under the hood.

What Next?

Learn Something! Learn a little HTML! And CSS! Get your hands dirty!

Courses

• http://CodeYear.com
• http://codecademy.com/
• http://codeschool.com/
• http://lynda.com
• http://Railstutorial.org

Resources

• http://stackoverflow.com
• http://forrst.com

Thanks!

Find me at http://jonathanpberger.com, jonathanpberger@gmail.com, @jonathanpberger on twitter, github, forrst, flickr, etc. etc. etc.

Donate to my mustache at

http://mobro.co/jonathanpberger

Find this deck in HTML (with links)

http://jonathanpberger.com/talks

Bonus Level!

Wherein I try to show examples if there's time.

Popular Web Languages

• PHP (wordpress, drupal)
• .net
• Ruby (Rails, Sinatra)
• Python (Django)
• Javascript (Node)

Test Driven Development

• Red
• Green
• Refactor

Pair Programming + The Pivotal Way

http://bit.ly/conceptsofpivotaltracker

Making is good for projects

• • Small details are important, especially to the user. They fall by the wayside.
• • There's a whole class of things for which it takes more time to explain it than to do.
• • This is tech literacy's sweet spot for designers and PO's and leads to a dramatic increase in think-make-check speed.

Making is good for teams

• • Lend a helping hand to development work at the edges,
• • Avoid resource bottlenecks,
• • Build respect and camraderie, reduce "us-vs.-them"

Making is good for individuals

• • Building things feels awesome
• • "Instead of telling someone else how to paint, you get to hold the brush."

Where can literacy help?

• • Designer, PO: Better tactical design choices and execution, more team bandwidth,
• • Principal: better strategic design choices, more realistic estimates, better analytical tools.
• • Developer: uhhh...

Where can literacy hurt?

• • Design, PM, Principal: time / opportunity cost, overstepping bounds, loss of innocence
• • Developer: tunnel vision can skew priorities

In general, more literacy is better

(no matter what the role)

but...

never forget

Sometimes design is an ineffable value-add and code needs to take the backseat.

Preserve the ability / reserve the right to stay innocent and come up with crazy ideas that the Technically Literate deem impossible.

Quotes

"the rewards are more than you can imagine" - Giff Constable, neo.com

"fuck validation; be RUTHLESS"

"code wins arguments"

Nothing is better than naivete. - Pamela Castillo, marketpublique.com