Like most professionals, I have been dealing with goals for most of my career. Early on, I was mostly impacted by annual goals. Later, when I got into management, everything started to revolve around quarterly goals.
But those details don’t really matter — the important thing is that almost all of the goals I’ve encountered have been logically dubious, unhelpful, and hurt employee motivation far more than they’ve helped it.
To be blunt, I’m now going to tell you why that was the case, and how to fix it.
Big news! The new and improved, public version of Resolution is live and ready to use. It's still missingsome stuff (more on that in a sec) but the major improvements are up and running. Those include:
Account creation
Model publishing to a public URL
An onboarding engine / help center / contact widget
A scratchpad where you can build an (unsaved) model without logging in
way better ESC/Enter handling (this was making me crazy)
better error messages
tons of weird, edge case bug fixes
prefixes for units (so you can append "inches" or whatever to the end of "length")
Just general handsomeness and reliability
What's Missing / Immediately Next
Hilariously, our biggest remaining tech holdup isn't tech at all -- it's me getting a bunch of stupid tax and corporate information established with Uncle Sam so I can set up Stripe properly. Actually switching over to real payments shouldn't take long after that, so ideally it'll only be a couple of days. BUT, for now, you can make an account and save/share up to two models as is, and build as much crazy stuff in disposable-Scratchpad-mode as you'd like.
Use this little doo-dad in Resolution to send your thoughts and questions.
I'm not going to actually blitz people with this thing until payments are running (you know, because money), but I'm more than happy to have you kick the tires if you've found this on your own, or already knew about it. Make sure to check out the Examples page not only for video walkthroughs, but included links to models you can really use and copy into your account.
So be sure to check out what's new, share what you build, and let me know what you think!
Given that we’re approaching the initial launch of Resolution, there’s a lot to be excited about. Every feature, every capability, the simple fact that it exists, etc. etc., and so forth.
But the thing I’m the giddiest about might surprise you. Pricing!
(Note: Things are starting to get real, which means that after this post, I am going to shift the content here from meandering techno-navel gazing to much more of a release-notes-kinda vibe. Navel-gazing will continue unabated in the newsletter, so sign up if you're into that.)
What’s Been Happening?
It feels like a million years ago, but in reality, the Resolution Kickstarter project just ended in early October, after 30 days. Even though we didn't end up with an influx of money from the campaign, we found some volunteers to do UX testing on and spent a few weeks trying to figure out what was needed to make Resolution 1.0 commercially successful.
If you're unaware, I recently launched a Kickstarter campaign in an attempt to raise $50,000 for my still-nascent (but very cool) software thing/application/company, Resolution.
It did not succeed. And yet... perhaps the REAL fifty thousand dollars were the friends we made along the way?
People often ask me for a very simple, very short, "instagram for dogs" like explanation of what Resolution is. This is a hard question to answer -- and I've worked in product marketing for over a decade -- just as it would be hard to answer the same question about a spreadsheet or PowerPoint or SalesForce or any number of things.
But, when I have to explain it, conceptually, with that level of non-detail, I usually go with something like "it'sa spreadsheet that doesn't use formulas". This is not entirely accurate, but it's not entirely inaccurate either. There are many things you can do in a spreadsheet that you can't do in Resolution; some of those you'll be able to do eventually, and some of them you'll never be able to do until control of the product is violently wrestled from my hands by private equity suits in some kind of quasi-legal corporate battle.
However, even at launch, Resolution DOES do a bunch of fundamental, common things you'd normally do in a spreadsheet, and it absolutely does them without formulas and (bonus!) without cells.
