A student said to Master Ichu, ‘Please write for me something of great wisdom.’

Master Ichu picked up his brush and wrote one word: ‘Attention.’

The student said, ‘Is that all?’

The master wrote, ‘Attention. Attention.’

The student became irritable. ‘That doesn’t seem profound or subtle to me.’

In response, Master Ichu wrote simply, ‘Attention. Attention. Attention.’

In frustration, the student demanded, ‘What does this word attention mean?’

Master Ichu replied, ‘Attention means attention.’ [1]

Paying attention is hard. We’re distracted, we think too much, we are too self-absorbed. Technology has made focusing even harder, but we have always craved distraction, whether it’s a smartphone game or a nervous habit like tapping the table. It’s easier not to be here, wherever “here” is.

I make digital products for a living, and the exact opposite of distraction—Attention, attention, attention—is The Thing™️. To make a wild claim, I might even argue that there’s nothing else.

Is It Enough to “Just” Pay Attention?

Yes. Simply paying attention is enough.

This is as true for digital products as it is for raising children.

I have two young kids — a girl and a boy. At home, my kids soak up attention (like they’re supposed to; it’s great). Bath time, eating, diapers. “Watch me, Dad!” My children and their needs highlight a crucial fact: Paying attention is the most important thing I can do as a father.

If I pay attention, my family feels loved, and my daughter doesn’t fall and hit her head (she’s small). If I pay attention, my son learns how to build that Lego set (he’s a little bigger).

Now you’re saying, “Well, Phil. You’re talking about more than just attention. You’re talking about actually doing something.” You’re right. I’d say that paying attention means 1) That you care, and 2) That you will do something about what you see. No person in their right mind would let a kid fall, if they notice it in time. No product manager worth their salt would see a product failure and let it slip by unmentioned. But it’s still “just” paying attention. The action, like stopping a kid from falling, comes automatically when you’re paying attention properly. So there :)

I fail to pay attention all the time. When I’m tired at home, I don’t have the energy to take my kids to the park. I fall asleep when reading to my son. My daughter grabs one of our cats and gets scratched. Not good.

If I don’t pay attention, the world around me gets worse. If I do pay attention, the world around me gets better. All of this goes to illustrate: It’s enough to just pay attention.

The Monks of Reikado and the Eternal Flame

Now that we know attention is good, let’s see how to apply it.

I think there’s no better example of attention than Japan’s eternal flame at Reikado Hall on Miyajima, an island off the coast of Hiroshima. Here are some pictures I took on a recent visit:

The eternal flame lives inside, and the monks have been keeping it smoldering day and night for around 1200 years [3]. As you can see, the hall can be quite smoky:

The walls are covered with a thick layer of soot, and if you like the smell of woodsmoke, then this might be your favorite place on Earth. It’s good luck to drink a bit of hot water from the cauldron. The water does not taste smoky, but since the air is so pungent, the smoke transfers to the experience of drinking the water. It feels good.

I remember the times I’ve lit a grill or a fireplace, and keeping the flame going for two or three hours is hard. Maintaining a flame for 1200 years requires a shocking level of attention. It’s a matter of opinion, but I’m not sure that anything we’ve done recently, including inventing the smartphone or sending humans to space, really compares. The eternal flame is a quiet achievement, but one that requires many generations working in unison towards a common goal, without faltering, ever. And it’s still going. The achievement is a living one, still in flux, still requiring the same attention it always has.

The achievement of the Reikado monks and their eternal flame puts attention in perspective. “Just” paying attention, over time and in service of a goal, is one of the most difficult and most important achievements humankind has to offer. This achievement applies to mothers and fathers molding the next generation, to craftsmen forming a perfect object, and to little old people like you and me, building digital products.

Tending the Flame

Creating a digital product, or making anything, is about tending the flame. Paying attention every day until it’s done. And then continuing to pay attention to the bugs, maintenance, and enhancements that inevitably come after.

Like with kids, attention makes the world better. And like the eternal flame, attention must be consistent over time. Attention, consistently applied. That’s it.

If Reikado monks can tend the flame, so can we. Sure, making digital products is hard, but it isn’t magic. It’s “just” paying attention, along with all the hard work that implies.

One day I told my friend, Sean Coates, that I wanted to build a teeny-tiny weather app from servers to pixels. I wanted to create a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) with only enough bare-bones functionality to make it work well.

In traditional Sean fashion, he replied:

So you just want to build a little bridge.

After months of building a web app from scratch in my spare time, I’m still smarting from that zinger, and learning from it. You need to have most of the same skills, whether you want to build a little bridge or a big one. And there are the same catastrophic consequences at stake for each.

I recently launched Weather Badge, but building it taught me just how hard it is to build even a little bridge.

Simplicity Makes the Internet Human

My earliest idea for Weather Badge came from my belief that there’s simply too much information out there. Specifically, I found myself stressed out by weather apps with way more information than I needed.

Good design picks out precisely what you need from the vast Internet and presents it to you in a human way. So I thought: What if the complexities of weather could be reduced to a single, beautiful weather badge?

Here’s what a Google weather search looks like, circa 2018:

Instead, what if your morning weather query looked like this:

Just what you need. Nothing more. And in human language. That’s the idea anyway.

Simplicity Requires Being Opinionated

It was pretty darn hard to simplify the Weather Badge interface that much. Dieter Rams’ “Less, but better” manta is hard to put into practice because “better” means different things to different people.

If you’re looking for wind data, numerical stats, or far-future forecasting, then the Weather Badge interface might not work for you. If you want a simple, visual weather app that favors words over numbers, then Weather Badge might be your jam.

All this goes to say: Simplicity requires being opinionated. The only interface that works for everyone in every scenario is a data dump loaded with functionality that ends up being overly complex.

To run through the difficulty of simplicity on a micro level, I designed the weather badges myself, and even representing a straightforward weather state like rain took some doing. Here’s my process for the Rain Badge, showing different prototypes along the way:

And the final product:

Fog was even harder. How do you represent a nebulous weather state in a way that doesn’t look like a cloud? I opted for an abstracted scene that showed a famous foggy spot where I used to live in San Francisco:

And I had a great time designing the Wind Badge, taking cues from a Tibetan prayer flag:

Simplicity is hard. It required many iterations, and bit of inspiration, to figure out what product design “opinion” worked best for me on this project.

Compromise Is Part of the Process

If you’ve played around with Weather Badge and clicked on that little 9-dot icon at the bottom, you’ll notice that it expands to show more weather data:

Isn’t this against my original idea that simpler is better?

Before I launched Weather Badge, I used it everyday. And I found that while I usually only needed the super simple weather info at the top, I sometimes needed a few more bits and pieces. So I added:

• 24-hour forecast
• 5-day forecast with numerical lows, highs, and precipitation type/chance
• Extended weekly forecast
• Severe weather warnings (not shown in the screenshot above)

Without the 24-hour forecast, I didn’t know when to ride my bike to work (I got rained on). Without the 5-day forecast, I couldn’t plan family outings. And without weather warnings, I would have ridden my bike during “slippery winter road conditions” that weren’t surfaced in the original interface.

If you do a little more clicking around, you might also find the 3-dot icon in the top-right that reveals a sidebar:

This came from deeper thinking as I sat with the app and realized that I was missing a few crucial pieces:

• What about non-US users? → I added a Fahrenheit / Celsius toggle
• What about Dark Sky API attribution? → I mention it at the bottom of the sidebar
• What if someone was confused by one of the badges? → I include a description for each badge

Both for legal reasons and to accommodate all users, the app needed more information than could be included in the original simple UI. I compromised by hiding the extended weather forecast and sidebar, which is potentially bad practice. To save users from having to click through hidden menus, it would be better to show everything all the time. I kept the additional info hidden because of why I created Weather Badge in the first place.

Let Your Original “Why” Shape the Product

I created Weather Badge because other weather apps’ information overload stressed me out. Showing the additional data and functionality all the time destroyed the relaxing simplicity of the interface for me.

So I compromised: I included some additional weather info (still less than Google and others), but I hid it away to preserve that feeling of beauty and relaxation I get when I look at a single weather badge that explains the day’s weather in human language.

It’s a compromise that won’t work for everyone, but it stays true to the reason why I built the app, and it continues to shape my opinion behind the product.

Make Your Mark

Whether you hire a team or head out solo into the digital hinterlands, creating even a little bridge/MVP requires a lot of time and willingness to learn, or a lot of money to pay others to use their precious time and decades of experience in your stead.

For Weather Badge, I had to dig deeply into everything from Sketch → UX Design → DNS → NGINX → Git → Heroku → PHP → Laravel → JS → SASS → CSS/HTML and more just to get the first pixels on the screen, let alone iterate on those pixels. But that’s a story for another time.

I hope the weather’s good by you. It’s cold in Brooklyn, but the fire’s warm 🌈

Trouble in Project Management Land

I was hanging out at a barbecue with a fellow digital native over the weekend, and he said his tech company had been experiencing explosive growth. 30 to 85 people in the past year. Sales skyrocketing. Devs all over the US, punching out code. The C-suite making good decisions that pushed them over the hump and into the green hills of profitability.

The only department that had been causing trouble was Project Management (in this story, referred to as PM). As a Product Manager myself who has done significant project management in the past, my ears perked up and I carefully — oh, so carefully — asked my next really thoughtful question: “Why?”

The Culture Behind the Why

He started with the list of apparent problems in Project Management at his company:

• Turnover — 2.5x turnover in the last year
• No leadership — the head of the department was removed and not replaced
• Negative culture — he mentioned at least one PM who was a “bad egg”
• Lack of domain-specific knowledge — new PMs didn’t know the lingo or concepts surrounding their core business

As I listened, none of these reasons answered the question for me. They are all symptoms, not causes. Let me show you an honest reading of each of these from a PM’s point of view:

• Turnover → PMs are not respected.
• No leadership → No standards for success, no guidance.
• Negative culture → Pretty obvious why the culture is negative considering the above two points.
• Lack of domain-specific knowledge → A fault in hiring, on-boarding, and the above-mentioned lack of guidance and leadership. PMs are largely facilitators, but they need to know foundational concepts to get a handle on what they’re facilitating.

It became obvious to me that there’s a culture behind the why that was leading their PMs to fail. The nature of that culture was not fully apparent to me until the guy said:

I don’t know why it’s so hard. Project Managers are just ticket jockeys [between the client and devs].

The term “ticket jockey” expresses a fundamental lack of respect for the job and suggests a company-wide misunderstanding of what a good PM can and should do.

Good Project Managers Deliver “Good Projects”

Despite my emotional reaction to the term “ticket jockey,” I am hard-pressed to immediately respond with specifics to why PMs are not ticket jockeys.

A list of deliverables by department at a tech company makes the situation a bit more obvious:

• Dev delivers Code
• Design delivers Product Design
• C-suite delivers Vision
• Sales delivers Clients
• Project Management delivers Good Projects

You might replace “Good Projects” with the more specific “Well-executed, well-perceived, and profitable projects,” but even this deliverable is a bit vague when you dig into it. PMs generally do not get their hands on the code to ensure execution; they don’t contribute directly to lots of processes that make the project well-perceived like design; and they usually don’t close sales or make final resourcing decisions, limiting how much they can affect profit margins.

So why are PMs not ticket jockeys? What do they do?

The Core Purpose of a Project Manager

Because of its vague borders, the PM role is different at every tech company, but Frederick Brooks, Jr. sums up the PM’s core purpose well in his book, The Mythical Man-Month:

The investment of a modest amount of skilled effort in a Plans and Controls function is very rewarding. It makes far more difference in project accomplishment than if these people worked directly on building the product programs. For the Plans and Controls group is the watchdog who renders the imperceptible delays visible and who points up the critical elements. It is the early warning system against losing a year, one day at a time.

Without a good PM, it’s quite easy to lose “a year, one day at a time” on a big project. A good PM makes everything clear that would have otherwise been “imperceptible.”

How precisely to provide that clarity is a topic for many more tactical articles, but let it be known that it’s possible (see Ryan Singer’s Managing Product Development by Integrating Around Concerns for a peek into a method that really works).

The Technical Project Manager

I have a personal bias towards appreciating “technical” PMs who understand code and the technologies surrounding it at some level. Because we create digital products, having some technical knowledge increases your ability to swim natively in those waters.

You don’t have to be able to code everything yourself. Rather, technical PMs facilitate intelligent conversations about digital products at all levels: clients, devs/designers, the C-suite, and users. You don’t need to know code, but it adds value and expands the types of projects you can confidently tackle.

How to Value Project Management

PMs feel appreciated throughout the company and by their own department when they have clear:

• Roles and responsibilities
• Definitions of success
• Paths to learning more

The tactics for each of the strategies above will not be the same for all companies, but by valuing PMs you will ensure that you create beautiful products on time, on budget, and with full appreciation of your product across the board from dev to client and ultimately to the user, which is why we do what we do.

If I see the guy who called PMs “ticket jockeys” at another barbecue, I’ll politely let him know.

I sat down to a traditional Japanese tea service in Ritsurin Koen, and I received:

1. One chestnut-filled sweet little wider than a quarter.
2. Less than an inch of green tea.

No refills. No second helpings. No nosy “How are you doing?” service. I ordered, it was delivered without comment, and I sat back to enjoy it. If the daimyo of Sanuki enjoyed the same tea service almost four hundred years ago, then I could too. The view wasn’t half bad:

To prolong the experience, I sipped my tea slowly and nibbled at the corners of that chestnut until both were gone.

And I was more than happy. Much happier than if I had been given a dozen sweets or a series of green teas served endlessly. I appreciated every bite, every sip, and the unobtrusive quiet that did not need to proclaim how good everything was. It was just good.

Making Digital Products Valuable

“We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation(1)

Because I make digital products, I’m all-too aware of how easy digital goods are to consume. To download an app for free and forget about it. To play a show on Netflix, pause it, and never start it again. To read a hundred tweets, none of which you will ever reconsider.

Digital goods without perceived cost often end up lacking perceived value. Scarcity puts the meaning back in a digital world that could otherwise become a copy of a copy of a copy.

There are many ways to create value, but let’s consider two complimentary methods to make digital products unique and, by extension, valuable: product-side scarcity and user-side scarcity.

Product-Side Scarcity: Pokémon Go

The makers of Pokémon Go could have given you every Pokémon ever created from the start. And they could have given you an almost infinite number of copies of each at just about zero cost. But those Pokémon would have had little value because they didn’t cost you anything.

“Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner(2)

The core mechanism of Pokémon Go is that each Poké Ball or cuddly creature costs something. A walk down the street. A drive downtown. Or a relatively steep financial commitment (compared to the baseline of free).

Uniqueness in the game is related to cost, measured in terms of time or money. Very often the more unique a (digital) good is, the more it costs. And the converse is also true—the more it costs, the more unique it is because you’re less likely to pay the price. This creates a feedback loop that produces value.

Success Means Being Both Scarce and Widely Available

While this isn’t true of all successful apps, success with the “freemium” model can involve bridging an apparent contradiction: the need to be both scarce and free. The app must be scarce in that it costs significant amounts of either money or attention (that is turned, through the magic of advertising, into money).

But the app must also be free in the sense that customers can try it without cost, improve their day-to-day, and then face the sting of the app being suddenly gone from their lives. If losing dollars stings less than losing the app, then the hope is that people will pay to keep using it.

The freemium model allows games like Pokémon Go to become overnight sensations. 14 days after its initial release, it had been downloaded 30 million times with $35 million in revenue(3). The digital goods within the game are scarce, and thus they have value—enough value for players to pay actual dollars despite the fact that the game is free.

User-Side Scarcity: Very Goods

Very Goods is a small community of taste-makers whose collections influence the world of designy goods. It competes with the likes of Amazon(4), despite its stated goal of keeping its membership small.

As opposed to Pokémon’s product-side scarcity, Very Goods creates user-side scarcity by limiting the number of users. The result is a thriving community of just over 1,000 members that produces content for over 18,000 monthly viewers and climbing.

In most cases, scarcity is required to produce valuable—and dare I say beautiful—digital goods in a world that is all too often without either quality.

Scarcity Creates Beauty

With global competition and unsurpassed availability, digital products can find themselves in a race to the bottom: “OK, I guess I’ll buy it” lowest prices, “I want it now” fastest delivery, and all of it encapsulated in a “More is always better” philosophy that can end up diluting the value and beauty of our digital goods as well as our experience of the world around us.

I am not proposing that we raise prices, limit distribution, and cut production across the board. Instead, I am just saying that we—as both consumers and creators of digital goods—might do well to consider the tea service in Ritsurin Koen: one small tea, and one small sweet. That might just be all we need.