Posts

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Sizing

I am realizing more and more how hard sizing is in the fashion industry.

I bought some clothes online and most of it turned to be not my size. Sadly sizes are not the same across brands nor countries,.

There is an entire sizing team at Zalando trying to figure it out what size to recommend to you.

In the second hand business it is even harder, as not all the clothes have the label still on. Also second hand doesn’t benefit from the repetition that companies like Zalando benefit from.

I recently was in a meetup and met someone working for a start-up that just does sizing recommendation across brands. She told me it is the top reason for returns (I actually don’t know how it looks for Zalando as I know nothing about the consumer facing part).

Sizing is hard.

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Amazon’s Nigerian Prince

I saw the following job from Amazon Berlin.

The first line “Work hard. Have fun. Make history”. The first thing that came to mind was the Nigerian prince scams. Amazon probably has this line to filter those that won’t fit their culture of frugality and hard work.

I also think it works well in the European context, where people care a lot about what Peter Thiel calls “work life life life balance”.

I don’t know if it is intentional, but it is definitely good for managing expectations, and kinda bold.

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Product Monday: The meetings music

Managing by influence is not easy. One way to ease your job is to be likable. It is an art more than science.

One small trick I learned from a fellow product manager was that he always played music at the beginning and end of team meetings. It was a nice gesture creating a friendly atmosphere. This was his track.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=yX1XSOzDPik

I don’t do it all the time, but if you do, be careful if you have overly serious attendees. They won’t like it and might have opposite effect.

What would be your track?

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Random Thoughts

I am exhausted these days. Part of it is the weather, part of it the days are getting short, and part is because I didn’t spend a single day at home in long time. I am an extrovert so this normally isn’t a problem, but this has now been the case for few months. I need a break.

One good thing I learned recently about good writing is to not use exaggeration words like “too” or “very”. The first sentence in this post was originally “I am too tired these days”, but instead I replaced “too tired” with “exhausted”. I have been doing this for some time and it makes the sentences sound better. One great short read about improving your writing is Scott Adam’s “The Day You Became A Better Writer“. I read it every few months.

I started taking Vitamin D. I didn’t know I have severe deficiency until I did a blood test. I didn’t have the symptoms people are talking about like being tired. I do have lack of focus, but I am blaming this on my smartphone addiction and not Vitamin D. Let’s see if this would have any effects on focus.

I am currently juggling between four books. Venture Deals, The Manager’s Path, The Black Swan, and The book of Why.

Venture Deals is good but heavy. Not the type of book you read/listen to in bed. If you want to benefit from it you have to read it slowly and take notes with the most important parts you want to summarize. It is also one of these books that will have beneficial parts at each stage of building a company. Not all of it is relevant at the beginning but some parts are more important at some stages than others.

The Manager’s Path has been recommended at work by multiple people. My manager even made it a must read for the leads in our department. I took a copy from one of the leads and currently trying to read it. It is becoming more important as I have a new product colleague joining and I will be responsible for bringing her up to speed.

I already talked earlier about The Black Swan and The Book of Why. They both are opposite of each other. The Black Swan claims you can’t understand causality and life is more random than we think it is. The Book of Why claims the opposite, that there is now a language for understanding causality. I am half way through the former, and just started with the latter.

Tomorrow is another Product Monday post. It will be a short one. I have few long form drafts but I won’t be able to finish any of them until tomorrow.

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Black Friday

Yesterday was my first time being in the situation room of Black Friday. Having most of my product experience in the travel industry, Black Friday is not a big day for travel companies. In fashion, it is different.

It is interesting to see the amount of preparation that goes into it. Consumers go shop, while developers make sure their services and apps can stand the load.

On the big day, everyone is glued to a screen looking at dashboards, and monitoring the chat. Going inside the room you feel the intensity.

At some point it felt like a rocket launch, multiple locations, dashboards and too many screens. It was only missing the commentary of rocket launches.

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Accessible Zalando

When I joined Zalando last year, Henning[1] (my manager) told me there is one problem: the only accessible bathroom was on the ground floor.

The sad truth is this is the German accessibility standard for public buildings. At least a single wheelchair accessible bathroom and it has to be on the ground floor. This is the case in government buildings, museums, and our Rocket Internet office.

It was fine until other problems arose. The floor doors were heavy, making them impossible for me to open. The bathroom was outside of the security area, requiring someone from the security personnel to open the doors for me every time I wanted to use the bathroom. And the situation in other buildings wasn’t that different.

Henning asked me to write a document describing the problems with different offices. I was skeptical but wrote it on a “won’t lose anything” basis. It was one page. The core argument was that someone who is generally slower shouldn’t be required to take the longest time to reach essential facilities like the bathroom.

Somehow the one pager escalated inside the company and I found corporate real estate contacting me saying they got a mandate to solve those problems. After many discussions they changed one of the doors in the Rocket building to an automatic one, and initiated a big project to retrofit and adapt current buildings to be accessible.

This Monday we moved into a new office in the Zalando campus. The building wasn’t designed with accessibility in mind before my one pager. It got retrofitted to have automatic doors on each floor, and a wheelchair accessible bathroom on every second floor.

I do believe in the good of humanity but I believe more in desires and incentives. There is no financial benefit to make workplaces wheelchair accessible. It costs a lot of money, and the return on investment is not justifiable[2].

I am still puzzled by what the company did. They didn’t have to, but they did it because they believed it was the right thing. It makes me grateful for being in this place with those people, and for making a change for the good of all.

When there is a will, there is a way.

[1] https://twitter.com/try_except_

[2] http://mostafanageeb.com/2018/10/12/the-most-tolerant-loses/

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Silent Evidence

These days I am thinking about silent evidence. The idea that what we see is biased by what we didn’t see. For every species of creatures, there are more extinct that we know nothing about. For every successful person, there are more that failed but we never hear of them.

I will write more about it later, but for now this is what I am thinking about.

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Smart compose

I am recently relying more on smart compose when writing my emails inside Gmail. You get a suggestion for the rest of the sentence and if you hit tab it just gets written.

I wonder if Google will open it up making it available to 3rd parties. This will lead to explosion in writers. I wonder what if it ingests my blog posts and figures out my writing style, then suggests me sentences as I am composing posts. This will be interesting.