Ashutosh Nilkanth's Blog

We have so many choices these days, and so little time to make a choice. From the choice of the right breakfast cereal to the choice of the right health insurance, we are trapped in an endless spiral of everyday choices.

Last night, I watched a TEDGlobal talk by Sheena Iyengar, a Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, about her research on “choice”. Yes, choice, or choices – depending on how you interpret modern dilemmas. It’s a really insightful talk about the gullible nature of choices:

The [second] assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this. The more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice. So bring it on Walmart with 100,000 different products, Amazon with 27 million books and Match.com with — what is it? — 15 million date possibilities now. You will surely find the perfect match. Let’s test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe. Here, I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries, who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society. One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question, but from a simple gesture of hospitality. When the participants arrived for their interview I offered them a set of drinks, Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite — seven, to be exact.

During the very first session, which was run in Russia, one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard. “Oh, but it doesn’t matter. It’s all just soda. That’s just one choice.” (Murmuring) I was so struck by this comment that from then on I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas. And I asked them, “How many choices are these?” Again and again, they perceived these seven different sodas, not as seven choices, but as one choice: soda or no soda. When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas, now they perceived it as only three choices — juice, water and soda. Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans, not just to a particular flavor of soda, but to a particular brand. You know, research shows repeatedly that we can’t actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi.

…In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different.

While this phenomenon may be cultural, some of it also has to do with the notion of individualism in many societies. “We are what we choose”, remarked Jeff Bezos in his speech to the Class of 2010 at Princeton University. But thinking too hard can often lead to poor choices.

What if most, if not all, of the choices could be simplified with something simple — a default option.

A default option, provisioned through careful analysis, can have an immense impact on us, specially in the social and economic landscape. What if the default option for the delivery of your utility bills or bank statements is email instead of paper mail? What if the default option for the enrollent in a retirement plan is inclusive instead of exclusive? What if a school cafeteria displayed the healthiest foods at the front? What if a $1 donation is a pre-selected option in a magazine renewal form? The simplest way to get more organ donors is to make the system “opt-out” instead of “opt-in”. People use the default choice most of the time, since they believe it is default for a reason.

Changing the defaults can be a powerful incentive to changing behavior. Having said that, choosing a good default is equally important. A wrong default for an array of choices can be counter-productive. Facebook’s privacy settings are a good example of poor defaults.

In the book “Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness”, Prof. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler talk about the science of choices and defaults:

The human brain is amazing, but it evolved for specific purposes, such as avoiding predators and finding food. Those purposes do not include choosing good credit card plans, reducing harmful pollution, avoiding fatty foods, and planning for a decade or so from now. Fortunately, a few nudges can help a lot.

In present day and time, we often forget that when we have to make a choice and don’t make it, that is in itself a choice.

Here’s a meme that resounds quite often in the startup world:

Execution is more important than ideas.

Good ideas are only so good in the mind of the beholder, unless proven to be useful or effective through execution. Ideas matter. The execution of those ideas matters more. But, what is execution?

Execution may mean different things to different people. In it’s basic form, execution means:

a carrying into effect or to completion

I believe that execution fundamentally derives from two inter-related facets: achievement and focus.

Achievement comes from continually completing a thing, more than repeatedly starting many things. Initiation is important, but without completion it’s worthless. Having said that, it’s practically impossible for one person to start many things and complete all of them. So, basically, the secret to achievement is to start fewer tasks or projects, and focusing on completing them before starting anything new.

Focus, and more precisely – uni-focus, is related to achievement. It’s an equally important factor in execution.

Let’s look at an example of a toaster. It’s a common gadget in many households, available in many shapes and sizes. Its primary function is to toast bread.

The ‘Back to Basics Egg & Muffin Toaster’ does it all. It has a 4 slice toaster, 2 egg cooker, slots for toasting muffins & bagels and a host of device controls.

On the other hand, the ‘Transparent Toaster’ has a radical design. It’s a novel idea, but it only does one thing. It toasts bread. And it is transparent, so you can see it all happening, thus avoiding the dreaded burned toast. The sad part is that it’s only a concept design. It couldn’t be mass produced due to a lack of heated glass panel technology.

Then there’s the ‘Magimix Vision Toaster’, which is similar to the ‘Transparent Toaster’ concept, only that it is an actual product. It toasts any kind of bread. It has minimal controls, and it is a classic example of uni-focus execution. It does less, yet its streamlined design overshadows the lack of bloat. Most importantly, it’s a finished product with paying customers.

If you look at some of the most popular and widely used Web applications today like Google Search, Facebook, Twitter or even the Google Chrome Web browser, you’ll find a common theme. They are all uni-focused. Their primary function is based on a single point of operation. The Google Search box is where the world starts their search. The Twitter status update box is the epicentre of real-time micro-messaging. The Facebook status update box helps millions of users to express themselves. The Google Chrome Omnibox is another brilliant example of a uni-focused control where you can search and navigate from the same textbox. All of these applications do much more, but 80% of the users only use the primary function on a daily basis.

Execution is about finding the right balance between achievement (the ability to do less, but get more done) and focus (the ability to concentrate and streamline).

How would you classify writing software? Is it science (as in computer science), a form of art (as in code is poetry or prose) or an engineering discipline? Terence Parr, a professor of computer science at the University of San Francisco, recently wrote about why writing software is not like engineering. Terence concludes that writing software is more an art than an engineering discipline:

Writing software is most similar to writing fiction novels. Writing novels is also an act of creation in an unconstrained and ethereal medium with few well-established construction rules.

I find this notion to be a fallacy, because writing software can be looked as a form of art, but it is largely driven by engineering. Programming can be called a craft or an art-form, but the software itself is not. My biggest argument in this context is regarding automation. Engineering primarily promotes automation of tasks. Most software is written to automate manual or semi-manual processes and enforce computational validations. However, we cannot automate art. A painting won’t automatically self-render itself into a 3D landscape. Nor would the premise of a fiction novel evolve or extend on its own, like refactored source code or OOP libraries can allow for in software.

It has become quite clear in the software world that a big design up-front doesn’t work. Engineering can solve this problem through iterative design and development. Art, on the other hand, cannot be progressive by its very nature. The final result of art is static, albeit beautiful or enjoyable.

Recently I heard Neal Ford talk about Emergent Design during a brown bag session at work. Neal is an author, a speaker and a Software Architect at ThoughtWorks. In his talk, Neal questioned the nature of code? What is software code? I think it’s a subtle yet very important construct in the understanding of software engineering.

A conventional engineer’s output, be it mechanical, aeronautical or any other branch, is the design or the blueprint. The engineer provides the very basis of objects architecture and its inner-workings. But what is the output of a software engineer? Yes, our lot designs architectures too and we also document the inner-workings (as much as some of us hate to). But the primary output of a software engineer is — the code. Hence, software code is the core output of a type of engineering, not a type of art.

To further draw the “art of engineering”, I’ll leave you with an interesting anecdote to ponder on:

Warning! If you still enjoy playing PacMan, don’t read the next paragraphs—they will ruin it forever for you. Sometimes knowledge comes with a price.

Consider the PacMan console game. When it came out in the 1970s, it had less computational ability than a cheap cell phone of today. Yet, it had to solve a really difficult math problem: how do you get the ghosts to chase PacMan through the maze? That is to say: what is the shortest distance to a moving target through a maze? That’s a big problem, especially if you have very little memory or processor power to work with. So the developers of PacMan didn’t solve that problem, they used the anti-object approach and built the intelligence into the maze itself.

The maze in PacMan acts like an automata (like in Conway’s Game of Life). Each cell has simple rules associated with it, and the cells executed one at a time, starting at the upper left and proceeding to the lower right. Each cell remembers a value of “PacMan smell.” When PacMan sits on a cell, it has maximum PacMan smell. If he had just vacated the cell, it has maximum PacMan smell –1. The smell degrades for a few more turns, then disappears. The ghosts can then be dumb: they just sniff for PacMan smell, and any time they encounter it, they go to the cell that has a stronger smell.

The “obvious” solution to the problem builds intelligence into the ghosts. Yet, the much simpler solution builds the intelligence into the maze. That is the anti-object approach: flip the computational foreground and background. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that “traditional” modeling is always the correct solution. Perhaps a particular problem is more easily solved in another language entirely.

Excerpt from the The Productive Programmer by Neal Ford. Art titled ‘Pacman Apocalypse‘ by Lawrence Yang.

Recently I read about the yet unbuilt 2011 Ford Fiesta that attracted more than a thousand online pre-orders within the first 6 days of the launch of its reservation program. It made me wonder not only about the marketing hype associated with such campaigns, but also about the fact that pre-orders from such campaigns help dealers gauge interest in the vehicle and what accessories consumers find most appealing.

I found it interesting that the same thought can be applied in the context of technology startups. Pre-release expressions of interest can immensely help Lean Startups gauge interest in the (yet unbuilt) product and what features consumers may find most appealing. It can also help startups ascertain the actual scope, perspective demand and real-world audience of the product, all of which are very important factors for effective monetization. After all, the first goal of a startup is to find those first 50 paying customers.

A big part of the problem is that no one knows what will work with the consumers and what won’t. No amount of market research, case studies or investment will ever substitute a real-world trial. So you start with a bare bones product that requires minimum efforts to build & release for a “preview product”, and hence reduce the time to market.

Building this “preview product”, or a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) as Eric Ries likes to call it, is essentially based on minimizing total time through the Lean Startup feedback loop:

Bootstrapping, rapid prototyping, customer driven development, iterative improvement, eliminating waste (muda), unit testing and continuous deployment are all essential components for building a MVP. Much of this paradigm is also derived from the Toyota Production System.

For example, having a paid account availability notification in your application is a tiny yet nifty approach to a MVP. You build a smaller product, or rather, you build a single feature. You incrementally improve it based on early feedback from interested users. And during this lean startup loop, you measure the actual value of the product by inviting users to pre-order your lean product.

In the field of human-computer interaction, a Wizard of Oz experiment is a research experiment in which subjects interact with a computer system that subjects believe to be autonomous, but which is actually being operated or partially operated by an unseen human being. A related true story I read about an ad-hoc approach, similar to what an MVP can often employ, goes like this:

There was a guy who wanted to sell cars online. But it was a huge system to write from end-to-end, and moreover he didn’t know if it would work or not. So he made a simple website with basic content and forms etc., but he processed the entire back-end work by hand. There was no real automated backend, but the customers got the impression that the entire thing is pretty much automated. This experiment provided him the feedback he needed for expanding his business processes and automating only the essential components.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

Another year has nearly come to an end. A new decade is set to begin. It’s amazing how time just whisks away.

What’s also amazing is how much we can learn about ourself in time just by paying a little more attention to that sound in our head. After a year of pondering and progress, mistakes and accomplishments, I felt that I should share what I really learnt this year:

1. Just do it, and more importantly, do it fucking now! Create stuff that excites you. Do stuff that scares you. And, if you think you haven’t found your passion…

2. …Procrastinate. It ain’t that bad, as long as you have a desire to start somewhere. Most people never follow their dreams because they are shit scared to open their eyes. Start small, grow organically. The key is to start. Start!

3. Never argue with a fool. They will drag you down to their level, and then beat you with experience. Same goes for pseudo-intellects and pedants.

4. Health is wealth. I quit smoking for good this year. Took up swimming instead (after a halt of around 10 years). I’m nearing a kilometer of a swim daily, but what’s significant is that mentally and physically I feel rejuvenated.

5. Have positive people around you. I don’t think that people are inherently “bad”, but some people have a tendency to measuredly create naive obstacles to restrain you from doing what they couldn’t or can’t do. If you fail in your repeated efforts to make such people understand the reality, then at-least don’t react negatively yourself. One persons oasis is another persons reality.

6. Wife is always right. But that doesn’t stop me from doing what I want anyway, or so says the wifey.

7. If you are wrong, say sorry. If you are right, shut up.

8. Never do anything for money alone. Do it for a reason you believe in. Do it for your passion. Relatively, don’t be a miser but be frugal.

9. If something doesn’t excite you (makes you say HELL YEAH), then don’t do it. Family commitments are exempted.

10. The most important things in life are not things. An African saying suggests: “If you want to walk quick, walk alone. But if you want to walk far, walk together.”

11. Let bygones be bygones. The only way is forward, so move on. If others want to constantly whine on past grievances, then let them do so. Eventually, they’ll see the bigger picture.

12. The most effective productivity technique that works for me is to just have one goal in a day. If you happen to complete it, then have a second smaller goal, but never have more than one goal a day to start with and more than two goals to end with.

13. Make the World a better place. Again, this doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Don’t expect to change the World over-night. Reduce wastage. Help begins at home and neighbourhood. Start small with Kiva and World Vision. Giving is a good criterion of a person’s mental health. Generous people are rarely mentally-ill.

14. Not everybody agrees to the same things as you do. One must always respect other opinions (so please excuse my rant if you don’t really relate to much of it). Great things happen when people share their opinions, discuss them rationally keeping the larger goal in mind, and reach a simple solution. An interesting thing I took from one of my company meetings was that to make things happen (in an organization or with-in a group of people in general) you need 100% commitment but only 80% agreement.

15. Thank people.

Kudos to some really smart people like Paul Graham, Derek Sivers and many TED speakers who inspired me to prune and spruce my thoughts, and put it all to action in my everyday life.

May the New Year 2010 bring you happiness and good health. Merry Christmas.