Things You Should Know: 25 Lessons I've Learned About Selecting Content Technology and Services
2020
Amazon
137
This book started as a blog post in 2017, but grew until it was just too big. It sat around in Google Docs for about a year. In 2019, when I joined Optimizely (then Episerver), we figured it might have some marketing value. I finished it, and Optimizely paid to have it designed by Sam.
The theme is things “a little bird told me,” hence the bird on the cover (I named him “Trevor”) and the speech bubble with encapsulates the title.
It was a little odd in that I had all 25 chapters in place as smaller (500-word-ish) blog posts. When I needed to expand it, I was in a position to just enlarge each of them. So I would just add anecdotes and expand upon points, but I never changed the structure much from when it was originally put together.
I wrote it using the same tech stack as the content modeling book – Markdown-to-HTML, CSS, and Prince for the PDF. I did an ebook for this, and was forcefully introduced to how weird and vague ebook formatting can be, and how wild creating a MOBI file can be for Kindles.
The book published in April 2020 (right in the middle of the COVID-19 quarantine). Optimizely used it in some of their 2020 marketing.
At the end of the book, I invited people to submit other lessons I could include in a future issue. Between this, and my own experience, I’ve identified a few others I would include.
- The idea of “curb appeal” and how some features that look amazing, might not provide lasting value, and vice-versa.
- How submitting to your integrator’s project methodology might be a good idea, especially during your build.
- How appeals to simplicity are a manifestation of Gall’s Law – simple systems will get more complex over time
- All about references – do they actually provide any insight into how a vendor or integrator will work out?
- How an RFP and functional spec are not the same thing. They have different purposes, and confusing them is dangerous.
- How “agile” is hard to do in an external services company, rather than a group of internal developers
- Industry expertise is probably not as helpful as you think it’s going to be
Some of these came from a discussion about the book during a Boye and Company call, about which Janus made a recording and wrote a blog post.
Several chapters from this book have been published by Optimizely.
Optimizely will even give you a free copy, if you register.