Four short links: 24 October 2017
If You Build It, Bias not Behavior, Cognitive Biases, and Future of SaaS Businesses
- Your First Ten Customers (Stripe) — If you build it, they will do absolutely nothing..
- Using Sensors to Show that Men and Women are Treated Differently At Work (HBR) — We collected email communication and meeting schedule data for 500 employees in one office, across all five levels of seniority, over the course of four months. We then gave 100 of these individuals sociometric badges, which allowed us to track in-person behavior. These badges, which look like large ID badges and are worn by all employees, record communication patterns using sensors that measure movement, proximity to other badges, and speech (volume and tone of voice, but not content). They can tell us who talks with whom, where people communicate, and who dominates conversations. […] Our analysis suggests that the difference in promotion rates between men and women in this company was due not to their behavior but to how they were treated. This indicates that arguments about changing women’s behavior—to “lean-in,” for example—might miss the bigger picture: gender inequality is due to bias, not differences in behavior.
- Cognitive Biases in Programming — the planning fallacy remains, for me, the defining characteristic of programmers. When you stumble blinking back into the light and realize you’ve spent 18 hours trying to make bug-free a process that saves you five minutes every two months, you have programmerbrain.
- Rising Table Stakes in SaaS (Tom Tonguz) — software has eaten the world, the low-hanging fruit has been picked, and your competition is smarter/faster/cheaper versions of yourself and not bloated dinosaur client-server incumbents. What’s next? (No, really, tell me what’s next. I’m @gnat on Twitter.)
