Randy, as he often does, sent me some articles recently…this time related to the speculated arrival of an Apple tablet computing device.

We have some big plans for Cheezburger in the coming year, and there’s a lesson to be learned from these articles, in particular one from Daring Fireball:

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design…but there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

The epigraph I used to start this piece — the bit about Steve Jobs demanding that a tablet be useful for more than just reading on the can — indicates that Apple will release nothing without such an answer. I agree that such an answer is essential.

This jibes a point that I’ve been highlighting lately: we can develop software faster than we can figure out what we want to build.

These days, with the evolution of web technologies, the problem isn’t exactly figuring out how to do something, but what exactly to do.  What is the thing that we’re going to build?  Answering that question clearly is the “essential” element to which Gruber refers.  It’s the clear answer to that which leads to success.

In fact, that’s what Gruber goes onto explain…not why someone would want it, but rather what exactly it is going to be in relation to other products.

When I think about Cheezburger, and the plans we have for the year ahead, that’s our biggest challenge in web development these days—what is it that we’re building and why would someone want it—everything else flows from there.

Today I’m at Web 2.0 Expo NYC participating in the Lean Startup Workshop by Eric Ries.  Eric is an articulate voice for those of us in the web development world who have been innovating to find new ways to build web sites effectively and efficiently.

I really appreciate the work he’s been doing to get the message out.  We were talking before his presentation and he told me that he hasn’t been home since October 1st!

Literally, I’m typing this as he’s taking questions from the audience.  Here’s a few key highlights from the talk:

• Most companies fail because they build something that nobody wanted, not because they built something of low quality.
• The key to building what people want is “The Pivot”: changing direction while staying grounded in learning from experience.
• The unit of progress for waterfall development is advancing the plan, i.e. moving from requirements to spec to development and so on.  In Agile, the unit of progress is workable code.  In “Lean Startups”, the unit of progress is validated learning about customers and what will cause them to give money to your business.
• In his model, there are two cross-functional teams: a problem team (to learn about customers, their wants, needs and aptitude for acceptance) and a solution team (to create things for customers).
• The key to any lean transformation is learning to distinguish the waste from the value.
• “Customer development”—that is, learning about customers—it’s not about just doing what the customer says.  It’s about learning if the customer will accept your vision of the product.  [A-kin to what Marc Andressen calls product/market fit.]
• Typically, behind every technical problem there is a human problem.  Fix the human problem if you want the technical problems fixed.  [This is another way of saying, "software is just a reflection of the people and processes who create it".]
• When something isn’t working, it’s a signal that tells you something about your system.

That’s just a summary which doesn’t probably do Eric’s ideas any justice, so forgive me.  However, you can read more about Eric’s ideas at http://startuplessonslearned.com.

A lesson about business that Seth Godin learned by riding a bicycle: your best opportunity to improve your cycling performance is while riding uphill.  In other words, your speed has limits when you’re riding downhill, so extra effort doesn’t make that much of a difference.  But, when riding uphill your extra effort really counts.

Let me show you how this lesson applies to web development.  To do so, let’s ride our bicycle up and down the Hill of Traffic.  What you see below is a chart representing traffic on a web site over a period of time.  On side A, you see that traffic is going up, and on side B it is going down.

When your website or company is on Side A, then it’s Good Times.  Traffic is growing and everybody his happy.  On the other hand, Side B is Bad Times.  Traffic is falling and everybody is worried.

During the Good Times, there isn’t a lot of consequence when you slip a schedule, or ship a bug.  No worries…it’s Good Times, right?  But, during the Bad Times, the boss wants you to rush stuff out the door faster stop the falling trend, and is willing to take calculated risks on quality.  Big worries because if this doesn’t turn the tide…well, it’s Bad Times.

The lesson is that when you’re going up the Hill of Traffic, Side A, that’s when you’re extra effort counts.  During the Good Times, that’s when you have the opportunity to focus the things that make a development team great–test automation, solid operations and infrastructure, and planning, design, estimation, scheduling and delivery.

When you’re going down the Hill of Traffic, Side B–and inevitably you will, for a week, or a month, or a quarter–you won’t have time to focus on the things that make a team great.  All you will be able to do is run like mad and hope that you’re best efforts turn things around.

To me, this is relevant because Cheezburger is Good Times right now, and everybody is having fun.  But, that isn’t going to last forever, so now is the time that we’re going to re-double our efforts at being an awesome team.

This week I wrote about launching and swarming.  It wasn’t by accident that I wrote about both these topics this week–it was deliberate.

In Launching: The Only Thing That Matters, I made the point that your startup couldn’t realize the value they were creating without putting the product in front of customers.  In other words, if you don’t start the race, you can’t win.

Want to Get More Done? Here’s How: Do Less! illustrated how by focusing on one project at at time a team can deliver results more quickly while providing the business greater flexibility and eliminating waste.

Why did I write about them together?  What do they have in common?

The answer is if launching as soon as possible is a key to success, then the “swarm” method of project development is an essential ingredient.  The startups that swarm will launch more quickly and, therefore, have an advantage over those that don’t.  Startups are hard, so every bit of advantage is priceless.

I spoke recently as part of the StartPad Countdown Lecture Series on The Lazy-Messy-Backwards Way of Starting Up.  

After having been a part of several startups, we’ve done things a little differently at I Can Has Cheezburger?  The talk discusses our approach to technology and the business, how careful allocation of resources are the most important thing for a startup, and how acting counter-intuitively can lead to success.

TechFlash covered the event [click here], and their post includes a nice comment exchange.  

You can find the video and slides here.