Strategy & Ideas

For an upcoming project at TOPP, we’re talking about setting up an optional scope contract [PDF] — where we specify the time, cost and quality, but leave the actual scope of work open.  This approach has many advantages, which I’ll just quote from Beck & Cleal’s document: Customers can change their ...

I get way too much spam in my inbox, even just counting things I’ve signed up for myself.  Most of it I delete, but today’s email from CoTweet stood out, and is worth mentioning. A while back I signed up for CoTweet, just to check it out — nutshell: CoTweet lets you collaboratively monitor and… Cont...

I had a great crowdsourcing experience yesterday. Here at TOPP Labs, we’re doing a 6-month check-in on our annual employee reviews.  What that means for me is a 30-minute interview with each of the folks on my team (about 20 in total), where we look back on the past six months to see how we’re… Cont...

Over at TOPP, we’ve been talking recently about the “spectrum of engagement” — in other words, providing a variety of ways that people can engage with a website, ranging from quick & easy (e.g., thumbs-up-ing something) to slow and involved (e.g., writing a blog post or signing up for an account).  ...

This week, TOPP moved into additional, (maybe) temporary office space, to alleviate some of the crowding at our office in the West Village.  We were looking for a place that was convenient, comfortable, and most of all, available immediately (backstory is that we’ve been basically sitting on top of ...