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Anxiety in product development

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Re: Anxiety in product development

#131

Post by gramontblanc »

asdfman123 wrote: post #108
gramontblanc wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the same effect holds true if a team is made up of mostly confident/brash people, or if safety-to-project-yourself can be trained and elevated independent of any other aspect of social environment. Maybe improv classes or subsidizing employees to exhibit art or publicly perform music?

False dichotomy. You can be confident, brash, and rude to each other all day long, as long as everyone is in on it and everyone is socially intelligent enough to know each other's boundaries. The problem is when people tell themselves "that's just how I am" and don't have a high enough EQ to notice that they're coming across as jerks. Everyone is different and everyone requires a personal touch. It's important for pe…

Didn't mean to assert a dichotomy, more wondering whether the size of the effect of importance of emotional safety for expressive freedom varies with some kind of external measure of confidence

Re: Anxiety in product development

#132

Post by hinkley »

wpietri wrote: post #130
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tight feedback loops that include everyone from the customer through to developers have been the key to success on every successful product I’ve been a part of. It’s been difficult for me to reconcile these feedback loops and whole-team involvement with the current online push for asynchronous workflows. In my experience, the developers who want to isolate themselves at home or in their office, pull tickets out of a…

100% agreed. This is my big fear about the shift to remote work: it can deeply exacerbate organizational pathology. For what it's worth, I've worked with a couple teams that were remote and great at this, so it's not impossible. One was a small startup. The developers had worked together in person for years and were really well bonded. Once they added in some remote pairing, it was fantastic. The other was a Mozilla…

Screen sharing is a big deal when doing validation as well as usability studies. Random movement of the mouse and the tone of voice can tell you a lot about how the user is handling the new functionality.

Maybe one of the silver linings of this mess will be that people are more familiar with screen sharing software after this.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#133

Post by koheripbal »

cmehdy wrote: post #101
koheripbal wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that emotional compartmentalization is a critical skill. A couple years ago, I faced a very tough time in my life. My business was collapsing, my family's finances were in jeopardy, and there was a serious health issue going on. The emotional stress was incapacitating. I couldn't sleep, let alone focus enough to fix my problems. It was the downward spiral nightmare scenario. If I didn't have dependents (wife +…

It's pretty useful for most day-to-day things, but (1) who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances - see TBIs and other long-lasting traumas, and (2) there are medical illnesses where you can be mostly robbed of your ideas - which by this mantra leaves you powerless to change your world. I'm not saying that to take away anything from the well-being brought by this interesting personal prayer, beca…

> who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances

I believe the point of the last sentence is exactly that your experiences in the external world can change you. But the difference is that you should decide how it changes you. You should decide how you can bring smarter nuance to you principles to avoid the exhausting emotional drama in the world, and you should decide how to alter your ideas/strategy (the sword) to better shape your life to meet your life's goals and serve the people you love.

This is the ideal - it is often not a reflection of our very human reality. ...but it is, through years of practice, something that can be closely attained. The prayer is the acceptance that we are flawed emotional humans - and it is just a simple tactic to remember to aspire to being in control of our emotional state - rather than letting it control us.

We can identify our self-worth according to who we are inside (our principles, thing love we have, and the goals we have), rather than passively allow the world to beat us what it finds useful.

Mental illness falls outside the scope of this prayer. If someone has mental illness, then this (or any) prayer isn't going to solve their problems and they should seek professional help.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#134

Post by codr7 »

cutemonster wrote: post #122
codr7 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And as a result, the system is a total success so far. Without any kind of specifications or design meetings beyond a 5 minute chat here and there.

Can I ask whose idea was it that you work in the restaurant? I love that and such people (who do like you do) I'd like to work with It was your idea? What did they say, they were surprised?

It was their idea, and I was a bit surprised, but it felt like the right thing to do and for once I was my own boss.

The guy who's running the restaurant together with his wife is/was an engineer, he hasn't done any coding but he knows enough to be aware of the specification problem.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#135

Post by alexheikel »

Do whatever you can to move forward. Every time you start getting anxiety, stop. If you can do it harder, while taking care of you, do it harder. If you are doing your best, but still thinks its slow, don't try to force the situation. Sometimes negative results lead to better results. Just keep trying.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#136

Post by [deleted] »

cmehdy wrote: post #127
pathseeker wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances Yes, but that's focusing on the very unlikely external circumstances and defeating the point. 99.99% of the daily stuff that seems important actually is not and it's healthier to live a model assuming it's not important rather than worrying that everything could be that devastating brain tumor or IED taking out your bus.

In the US alone, for TBI alone, there were almost 3 million TBI-related emergency department visits in 2014[0]. One in 4,000 babies born in the US have hypothyroidism[1]. At the lower bound, there is 0.25% of the US population subject to schizophrenia[2]. If we go and look at things like Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), 2.7% of US adults have had it in the past year, 32% of which had serious impairments associated…

[deleted]

Re: Anxiety in product development

#137

Post by jpm_sd »

A professor at MIT once told me "Fear is the only motivator."

Fear of poverty. Fear of shame. Fear of loss.

Maslow's hierarchy suggests there might be a few others, but fear is a big one.

Re: Anxiety in product development

#138

Post by dennisy »

koheripbal wrote: post #72
neutronicus wrote: post #18

I think the serenity prayer, sans unnecessary theological content, is relevant here. Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the ones I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. For a lot of software products, there is no winning in the long run. You've got good product-market fit and customer loyalty, but your code base is a huge mess and the hard technical problems are so…

I find that emotional compartmentalization is a critical skill. A couple years ago, I faced a very tough time in my life. My business was collapsing, my family's finances were in jeopardy, and there was a serious health issue going on. The emotional stress was incapacitating. I couldn't sleep, let alone focus enough to fix my problems. It was the downward spiral nightmare scenario. If I didn't have dependents (wife +…

Great mantra, very Stoic!

Re: Anxiety in product development

#140

Post by jka »

cmehdy wrote: post #127
pathseeker wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>who you are can absolutely be changed by external circumstances Yes, but that's focusing on the very unlikely external circumstances and defeating the point. 99.99% of the daily stuff that seems important actually is not and it's healthier to live a model assuming it's not important rather than worrying that everything could be that devastating brain tumor or IED taking out your bus.

In the US alone, for TBI alone, there were almost 3 million TBI-related emergency department visits in 2014[0]. One in 4,000 babies born in the US have hypothyroidism[1]. At the lower bound, there is 0.25% of the US population subject to schizophrenia[2]. If we go and look at things like Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), 2.7% of US adults have had it in the past year, 32% of which had serious impairments associated…

I believe you and hear you. Not all events are under our control, and not everyone is able to lead a pain-free life. The general audience here may have some skewed (and perhaps limited) experiences.

Those of us fortunate to have good health and the ability to improve our circumstances should be glad for those opportunities, not take them for granted, and try to extend them to others.

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