Keep A Bug List
According to d.school founder David Kelley, legendary Stanford professor Bob McKim used to give his students a famous assignment: “keep a bug list.” Mind you, this was decades before software development came to prominence, before the term meant what it does today.
What McKim meant when he instructed students to keep a bug list was something very simple: keep a running list of the things that bother you - the things that “bug” you. (One can’t help but see a connection to Seinfeld’s primary source of new material.) He knew that these lists would be a rich source of potential opportunity areas for students focused on creating innovative new products. And indeed, many of the early design program’s innovations can be attributed to students working from such a list.
I haven't been able to track down an original reference for McKim's assignment (yet!), but it came to mind during a recent conversation with a fantastic entrepreneur: Laura D’Asaro, co-founder of Chirps, a really cool company with a really cool mission (they received some measure of fame from their success on Shark Tank).
Laura is a serial entrepreneur I had the pleasure of teaching while she was a student at Stanford GSB. Her track record includes saving a local park as a teenager, breaking a world record for cancer research, and you know, starting a Cricket-powder snacking company (you see what I did with the title and the McKim reference there? It gets better…). She’s also got several promising businesses in the hopper, and so I was eager to turn the tables and get to ask her some questions.
She shared some of her favorite tricks to generate new ideas. “The biggest thing is, I’m hyper-aware of problems. Anytime I find myself feeling annoyed, I write down the problem and think about what I might to do solve it.” She gave the example of an observation she made when she was a Bay Area newbie: pumpkins rot pretty quickly around here during the scary-season. Annoyed at this, she’s already planning on “buying 100 pumpkins next Halloween and trying a bunch of things out to see what will prevent rot. I don’t know if it’s a combination of salts, or chemicals, or what, but I’m going to try to figure it out!”
There were MANY points of inspiration in our conversation (well worth a listen here), but I wanted to call special attention to the well-established tactic of keeping a bug list. Write down the things that annoy you. Whatever happens next — whether you simply “let go,” or use them as ideation fodder, or end up launching an entirely new business — it’s a simple habit that will fuel your creative practice.
Related: Seinfeld asks, “What Stinks?”
Related: P&P Podcast: Laura D’Asaro
Related: Look Out for Problems
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.