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How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

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Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#141

Post by theshadowknows »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #130
briandear wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, those tactics really work. I don’t like them either, but I have done A/B tests and the intrusive model always results in people who are more “gullible” and thus more likely to buy whatever it is you are selling. The dismissive types — they wouldn’t have been a customer anyway. (Generally speaking..)

Hmm... yeah, you're right. They're filtering out customers like me. That means the intent of the site is not the site content, but the mailing list they can generate by dangling that content via a link, eh?

If they’re any good then it’s both. You should have a content team that works toward the goal of making great content for your audience, an analytics team that helps you figure out exactly who your audience is and what they like, and a CRM team that works to execute on that vision to maximize value for both the customer and the org.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#143

Post by Godel_unicode »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #130
briandear wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

However, those tactics really work. I don’t like them either, but I have done A/B tests and the intrusive model always results in people who are more “gullible” and thus more likely to buy whatever it is you are selling. The dismissive types — they wouldn’t have been a customer anyway. (Generally speaking..)

Hmm... yeah, you're right. They're filtering out customers like me. That means the intent of the site is not the site content, but the mailing list they can generate by dangling that content via a link, eh?

Why can't it be both? Odds are if the content is good, someone who cares created it. More than one thing can be true.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#144

Post by TeMPOraL »

theshadowknows wrote: post #141
paulmooreparks wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... yeah, you're right. They're filtering out customers like me. That means the intent of the site is not the site content, but the mailing list they can generate by dangling that content via a link, eh?

If they’re any good then it’s both. You should have a content team that works toward the goal of making great content for your audience, an analytics team that helps you figure out exactly who your audience is and what they like, and a CRM team that works to execute on that vision to maximize value for both the customer and the org.

Except when you separate out optimizing value for your audience from optimizing value for your org, the former becomes a cost centre, if not plain waste of money. At some point, someone is bound to ask, why waste money with a person passionate about the topic, when someone who doesn't care could write 2x - 10x the volume of content?

Or put in other way, there are very few orgs that are "good" in the sense you describe. There are so few of them, that myself - and many others - treat monetization steps as a negative signal. Personally, I put that as a heuristic for on-line content - the harder a site tries to make money off you, the less trustworthy and useful it is.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#145

Post by TeMPOraL »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #143
paulmooreparks wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm... yeah, you're right. They're filtering out customers like me. That means the intent of the site is not the site content, but the mailing list they can generate by dangling that content via a link, eh?

Why can't it be both? Odds are if the content is good, someone who cares created it. More than one thing can be true.

In my experience, those two are inversely correlated. The best content tends to be one that's not monetized in any way, and the more effort into monetization is visible, the more likely the content will be shallow, or bullshit.

Not a law of physics. Just a heuristic I picked up over the last two decades on the Internet.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#146

Post by jack9 »

blowski wrote: post #66

A useful set of tips, but when I first became a manager, my biggest problem was thinking there was some magic formula to get the best out of my team. I was looking for a YAML config script, but human beings don’t work that way. Now, with a bit more experience, I spend more time listening to people and working out how I can help them with their specific need. As a sidenote, I hate the euphemisms “release” and “let go”…

> Release: Let go of people who don’t align with your values.

I hate the "similar values" proposition, like that's something practical to align with the working members of teams. How about the same attitude and similar ability? Measuring that is not easy, but it's a heck of a lot easier than trying to measure "values".

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#147

Post by quantsNightmare »

partiallypro wrote: post #138
paulmooreparks wrote: post #122

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, t…

It's because analytics say this gets more lead captures, but they rarely measure if the leads are fake just to make the things go away. In the end they are just looking at "conversion" metrics and the cost it took to drive that traffic. Longer term effects are hard to measure, and ad agencies and internal ad teams are measured for this month, not the future.

I work at a place where I am a fly on the wall, listening to these ad teams, and let me tell you, they honestly believe this kind of bullshit honestly works and matters.

They hotly debate the virtues of deceptive dark patterns, and, man, are they assholes to boot. They also blow cash on retarded shit like juiceros, and bro-compare their juicero-type schlock and tchotchke collections unironically, and sometimes with transparent envy of one another. It's as bad as you might imagine.

After lunch, when they really get going, with their mind-blowingly vapid conversations, I have to blast my eardrums with tinnitus inducing audio, in order to quarantine my mind from their stunting world views.

When Douglas Adams imagined the Golgafrinchans, I have to believe that he was in the presence of the these sorts of people, when he dreamt up that little tidbit.

It is my ardent belief that the only way to divest society of such parasitic blooms of "humanity" really is to blast them into outer space, but in order to do so, we have to learn to be really careful about how we sanitize our telephones first.

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#148

Post by TeMPOraL »

drblast wrote: post #126
rxhernandez wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the reality is if the military were in the business of making a profit, retaining employees, or pleasing customers, it would fail miserably. Is that because of management issues or because of the intrinsic issues that come from being in the business of killing people to gain land, resources, power, or whatever?

They're linked. When you are managing people who can legally be put in jail or shot for not following orders, the dynamic is quite different. Especially in the case of Marines, if you have a very well defined objective that requires brute force to solve, that's the ideal situation for them and they'll do amazing things. Anything that's a gray area, not covered by rules, or that requires creativity or questioning auth…

> the idea that someone in authority can, in advance, create a set of rules that we can blindly follow to a successful outcome is insane for all but the most desperate situations.

I can think of two redeeming qualities for such sets of rules, if applied and understood correctly:

1. Eliminating indecision. If figuring out what to do is too difficult (or none of the options are better than others), you have a somewhat sane defaults to fall back to. Indecision has costs too.

2. Making things more predictable upstream. Authorities may make up some rules that may not be most effective when applied by the bottom line, but they normalize the entire bottom line, making it easier to manage. This is similar to what we do with frameworks in software - we trade efficiency and flexibility for consistency, in order to build an abstraction layer that's less complex to work with. Misapplied, this of course leads to tragic/comical examples, both in organizations and in software (e.g. Electron).

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#149

Post by titanomachy »

hanniabu wrote: post #139
marcus_holmes wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asians have massive respect for authority. This, in effect, mean that they won't ever say no to, or disagree with, their boss. I had to learn to ask open questions, because if they could say yes they would. They would still guess at what I wanted to hear and tell me that. I got told different things than other members of the management team, not because anyone was trying to deceive, but purely as a show of respect. M…

Curious why the servant leadership style didn't work for you and why you think that is because this is the approach I prefer as well but I'm young in my career.

Because he was in southeast asia where people expect authority?

Re: How to be a Manager – A step-by-step guide to leading a team

#150

Post by marticode »

paulmooreparks wrote: post #122

This has nothing to do with the topic at hand. Rather, it's a call to action to stop something I really, really hate about the web these days: popups over content, begging me to sign up for an email subscription. Whenever I'm reading a web page and one of these rude popups appears, I immediately close the browser tab and move on. If the authors are rude enough to interrupt me with an invitation to clutter my inbox, t…

I don't get this either. Especially when the box shows before I can read the article: why would I sign up it a site I haven't even started to read and find about?
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