Cameesa - The Blog

A long long time ago (about 6 months ago) a good friend (Suneet Lad) asked me to write a post about ‘taking advice.’  He said “Kamil, I am sure that people offer you advice pretty often, how do you know which advice is right? and which is wrong?  how do you know which advice to take? and which to leave?”

Well, Suneet, here is that magic post that I have been meaning to write for a long time.

You are correct that we do receive a lot of advice from many people and usually it is all ‘good advice.’  Rarely, do we see anyone offering crap advice.  Receiving great advice makes our job more difficult but considering that we are actual users of the site, the first question we ask ourselves are  “does this advice make sense, and would it benefit me as a user?” Next, we ask ourselves, “what is an example of how this will help the community and solve an existing problem?”  will this make the user’s job easier?  how much benefit will this idea have to the business and/or to the site?

In addition, we ask ourselves: how long will it take to implement this?  how much value will it actually bring to the site?  These are the main question we ask ourselves.

If people offer us Crappy advice we pretty much know it right off the bat, but to tell you the truth I don’t think we have ever received bad advice for the site.

If the advice is business based and not a change to the website, and we are not sure whether it will be beneficial. then we perform some market research (broad answer) before we make any other changes.  So basically, we implement advice that will give us most quality for the least possible amount of time taken to implement.  As the 80/20 principle states that 20% of input will result in 80 % of output and results that you want.

As for the paper, or essay you had to write, you were getting advice from many people and you weren’t sure which advice to take because all of it was probably good.  You would have to ask yourself, how long will it take me to validate this information? do i agree with all of it, or is there a flaw? and if i decide to write about this advice how long will it take me and how much value will it actually provide to my paper?

I know my answers are very generic, but that’s how we do it.  Enjoy.