The 30 day blog fitness challenge

At work, we recently started the 100 day burpee challenge. The rules are simple: on the first day, you do 1 burpee, on the second day, 2 burpees, on third day, 3 burpees, and so on up to day 100. If you miss a day, you have to make it up the next day: for example, if you miss day 50, you have to do 101 (50 + 51) burpees on day 51. The point of the challenge is to increase general fitness (burpees use the entire body), develop good habits, and learn the virtue of consistency.

Suffering through burpees near the end of a workout at the '10 Crossfit Games NorCal Qualifier

When Adam Nash found out about the burpee challenge, he laughed at me. I'm not sure if he was put off more by the word "burpee" or the sight of me jumping around like crazy next to my cubical. As a response, Adam, along with Mario Sundar, proposed a different challenge: a 30 day blog fitness challenge. The rules are, again, very simple: write one blog post, every day, for 30 days straight. If you miss a day, you have to make it up the next day. The purpose of this challenge is analogous: develop mental fitness (writing uses the entire brain), develop good habits, and learn the virtue of consistency.

It sounded nice until I realized that I'm supposed to keep pace with:

• Adam, a VP of Product, who already has a very active personal blog (1.7M hits!) and is a regular on the LinkedIn Blog 
• Mario, whose job title involves the phrase "Chief Blogger" and who isn't exactly a slouch on his personal blog 

And I'm supposed to do this all while writing code, winning hackdays and doing burpees? I've given it much deliberation, realized I've barely written 30 blog posts in the last 4 years, tallied up all 3 people that read my blog (hi mom!), checked my busy schedule, and made a decision.

Bring it on.

I'm unquestionably the dark horse in the race, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

1. The fact that almost no one reads my blog is a benefit: I can afford to write crap and no one will notice.
2. I have a very high pain tolerance. See burpee video above.
3. I fully intend on cheating. Meta-posts of this sort are just the beginning.

And so, dear reader(s), prepare yourselves for 29 more consecutive days of blog posts, featuring exciting topics ranging from Crossfit, to game mechanics, to open source software. Oh, and burpees.

This is where I work. Remix.

A few weeks ago, LinkedIn held a "Pimp Your Row" competition, where each row of cubicles was given money for decorations. Our IT team ended up winning with their incredible Tron-themed night club and the pictures from the competition made that my second most popular blog post ever (you'll never guess #1). Today, the IT took it up a notch again with "Tron Remix": 2 bars, DJ's, live drummer, dance party, and a whole lot more. I can officially say I got paid to party.

Lights, sound and beer pong.

Mirrors, projectors, and music.

Two bars, dancing and LinkedIn's own Steve Johnson on the drums.

Beer pong. The ping pong balls glow in the black lights.

One of the bars

Your job posting sucks.

Silicon valley is in a talent war. Tech companies are battling to hire the top prospects like never before, with Google alone planning to add more than 6,000 people in 2011. They are also dishing out money left and right to retain employees, with counter-offers ranging from $500k to $3.5 million, and even $100 million! And yet, despite the incredibly high priority of hiring, companies like Google still waste their time with job postings like this:

Click for larger image

Looks like a normal job posting, right? What's so bad about that, you ask? Everything. Just about the whole thing, start to finish, is a waste of time. And this post isn't to pick on Google: just about every company does it: Facebook, Twitter and my own company, LinkedIn, all use the same types of job postings. In this blog post, I'm going to tell you why they are all wrong.

So many words. So little meaning.

Let's start with the obvious: most of the content in these job postings is absolutely meaningless. Here are some choice phrases pulled straight from the job postings mentioned above:

Results-oriented.

Work well both as part of a group and independently.

Strong communication and documentation skills.

Detail oriented with excellent written and verbal communication skills.

Now ask yourself a question: has anyone EVER looked at one of the phrases above and thought to themselves, "Communication skills? Nah, guess I can't apply." These are all vacuous phrases that your brain skips over as you read the job posting. They have no impact on the candidate one way or the other.

Clones

One of the difficulties in this talent war is distinguishing your company from the competition. In case you haven't noticed, all job postings look alike. Even if you skip over the meaningless phrases mentioned above, every job posting is still just a blob of boring text that rattles off requirements. The job posting for a "Software Engineer" at one company is indistinguishable from another: "5+ years of experience, BS/MS/PhD in CS, excellent programming skills in Java..." Considering companies spend millions of dollars on branding, their job postings remain remarkably uniform.

The me monster

Finally, the biggest problem of all: most job postings are are totally, utterly selfish. They are the ultimate "me monster" at the party, totally focused on what the company wants, what the company's requirements are, we must have this, we need that, don't bother applying if you don't have those. The candidate's needs and desires are almost totally forgotten. The vast majority of job postings describe the how and the who, but totally leave out why you'd ever want to apply there in the first place.

If you're fighting tooth and nail to fill job openings, this is kind of a big deal. Your job posting might contain some info an active job candidate is looking for - and even that is questionable - but it is totally useless to passive candidates. And that's a problem, because the vast majority of people are passive candidates and, by definition, are not looking for a job, or for that matter, a job posting.

Who exactly are you targeting with your job posting?

The ideal job posting

To figure out what the ideal job posting is, you have to ask one question: what is the candidate actually looking for? Of course, you've known the answer to this all along: everyone wants the opportunity to work on cool products, with smart people, and in a great culture. So the perfect job posting would do two things:

1. Advertise the fact that your company is, in fact, hiring for specific positions. This should take no more than a few sentences: job title, location, very brief description.
2. Show off everything you can about your brand to convince the candidate that your company is where they'd want to work.

Instead of filling the page with filler text and meaningless details, give me a glimpse of the products you build; tell me about the team and why they are the best at what they do; highlight the technologies involved and the tough problems you solve. In short: show, don't tell.

Some examples

Sadly, I've seen very few decent job postings on the web. Somehow, just about every company has been suckered into using this antiquated text-based method - a left over from newspapers and bulletin boards - and we have yet to move this part of the hiring process into the 21st century. Here are the few decent examples I've been able to find that are at least intriguing and, even as a passive candidate, might have caught my interest. They are far from perfect, but hopefully, will get you thinking in the right direction (click for a larger image):

If you know of an awesome job posting, let me know in the comments!

Why game mechanics won't save your crappy product

The other day, I was chatting with a LinkedIn product manager about a new app he is working on and I posed a "hard" question: what incentive would users have to use the app initially and on an on-going basis? Before the product manager had a chance to answer, someone nearby chirped in: "you should put in some game mechanics!" Sigh. This is not the first time I've heard this. "Game mechanics" have been all the rage the last few years. Everywhere you look - from foursquare, to yelp to Xbox - you can find badges, leader boards and reward systems. And while it is sometimes effective, most implementations are either totally useless, or worse yet, counterproductive.

In fact, the very idea that cramming "game-like" elements into a product is enough to attract users is misguided; the proposal of using "game mechanics" as the primary way to drive and maintain user engagement is a short road to failure. I think these misconceptions come from a lack of understanding of two key concepts:

1. Gameplay psychology
2. The role of game mechanics

Gameplay psychology

The first reason that game mechanics probably won't work for you is that you don't understand game mechanics. Before you go off and add a leader-board or badging system to your next product, please take the time to go through Sebastian Deterding's superb presentation "Pawned. Gamification and its discontents". I'm embedding it within this blog post as the presentation beautifully covers the many mistakes and misconceptions about what gameplay is really all about:

One of the key takeaways from this presentation is that most people don't understand motivation. Think of the most common game mechanics you see in most products today: badges, scores, and progress bars. foursquare has it, so it must work, right? Wrong. These "external rewards" are rarely effective because gamers and humans in general are typically not motivated by external factors, but rather by intrinsic ones. In fact, studies have shown that external rewards and pressures can often act as de-motivators. If you're not convinced, it would be well worth your time to watch Dan Pink's talk on The Surprising Science of Motivation.

The role of game mechanics

If you fail to grasp the key principle of motivation, your game mechanics have no chance of being effective. But even if you do get the mechanics right, there is still no guarantee of success. To understand why, you need to understand that game mechanics are not your core product (unless you are building a game, of course) and have no value in and of themselves. All they can do is act as a "multiplier", encouraging some existing behavior by increasing the behavior's value in the eyes of the user. If that value was originally zero, game mechanics won't help.

To put it another way, if you have a crappy product to begin with, gameplay will not save it. It doesn't matter how many badges, progress bars, leaderboards, achievement scores, or collectibles you add, if the user doesn't see any value in your product, you will not be successful. Moreover, the more obvious the value proposition, the less you need to bother with game dynamics. All of this is best illustrated with a few examples:

cubeduel: great gameplay, 0 value

cubeduel: a great example of well executed game mechanics - you have to play some number of "duels" before you can see your own score - but absolutely no inherent value to the product itself. Lots of people tried it for a couple minutes, got bored, and never came back.



 

Pandora: crystal clear value, no games

Pandora: the exact opposite of cubeduel. From the first minute of using Pandora, its value proposition is obvious, and you're hooked. No game mechanics whatsoever are necessary to keep users engaged.

StackExchange: clear value, good game mechanics

StackExchange: the StackExchange sites are a great example of a strong core value multiplied by effective game mechanics. Most users end up on one of their community sites (StackOverflow is the most popular) by googling a question. The utility of the site becomes obvious immediately: quality answers written and vetted by a community of experts. If your particular question isn't there, you can sign up and ask. At this point, the first game mechanic is revealed: the reputation score. This score starts at zero and as it increases, various "privileges" become available: for example, you can't add comments, create new tags, downvote answers, or offer bounties until your score reaches certain thresholds. To get your score higher, other users need to upvote your questions and answers, which encourages you to actively participate in the site. When you do this, the next game mechanic becomes apparent: your profile. Your questions, answers, reputation score, and tags from any discussions you participated in are all publicly visible. Again, the value is obvious: professional reputation. If you do a good job of participating on the site, you look better in front of employers and colleagues. Strong value * effective game mechanics = 24 million unique visitors per month (and growing).

Stop playing games. Start building awesome products.

Kniffel: game mechanics != fun

Game mechanics can be a powerful tool, but like everything else in your toolbox, it's all about knowing when and how to use them. If you're working on some new product, start with the basics and make sure that you have the value proposition nailed down. Only when you have something sufficiently compelling by itself should you start thinking about adding any sort of game mechanics.