Project Prioritization in a Software Startup

Business

Oh so many articles on this! So many methodologies. What more can be said? Oh be wise…

Not for the faint of heart, prioritizing the efforts of your development team is THE KEY for nailing market timing and profitability in general. Add on to that the costs of designers, product managers, and the folks doing research weeks or even months before the first line of code is written! To say nothing of the alignment between departments needing certain changes and the ramp-up time necessary to get everyone on board and in sync! You know the drill. I’ll stop here and drop the one piece of advice I really have. Nope. I’ve got three:

Software is built by people, prioritized by people, and it’s sent out to people in an effort to provide some value for them. As much as we want to systematize and automate, the bottom line is that we need solutions that work for people. And this is particularly true in young companies that can’t afford the overhead of complex processes.

1. The prioritization you do has to work for your people: your employees, your management, and your customers. If it isn’t working, then you need to change it. Full stop.

I reject the notion that high-level projects can be scoped and prioritized against each other and then sequenced and thrown on a gantt chart. Haha! No they totally can. But remember the engineer’s triangle ensures no plan survives contact with the enemy (in this case reality). In addition to prioritizing your projects at a high level, you need to prioritize each project’s deliverables.

2. Prioritize project deliverables separately from the projects themselves. You must understand that a “should-have” on project #1 is not more important than a “must-have” on project #2.

It is like 3D chess, weighing the benefits of unrelated functionality from different quadrants of your product. And oh, so easy to suck at. Even once you’ve determined the perfect course of action, and everyone’s bought into it, you can still lose by allowing people to forget what was decided!

3. Prioritization must be evangelized or it will be forgotten. It is easy to think of new ideas and our ability to conceive new work will always outpace our ability to achieve it. Make sure everyone stays on the same page, especially when changes are needed.

For a quick review of the top prioritization methods, see Folding Burritos. This is way I say “good luck” and walk out of the room.

The Club Lulu, courtesy of Yelp and Neil T.

Translating Office Perks for Remote Employees

Business

In a prior job I moved away from the corporate office and experienced first-hand the transition from in-office employee to remote employee. I have previously worked in a remote-first company so telecommuting wasn’t a new concept for me, but this transition was an experience that unearthed some unexpected feelings. I saved a Slack conversation where I began to work out my feelings around providing free lunch to remote employees to replace an in-office catered lunch. With permission from my conversant (marked as the ubiquitous “HR”), I want to share an excerpt with you as a window into the complexities of how perks are delivered and valued.

Me [10:40 AM]
So this $40/mo for remote workers to have lunch on the company as a replacement for in-office, catered lunches… can you tell me how you feel about it from a personal and financial viewpoint? I’m not sure how I want to feel about it yet and I’m reaching out to you for another point of view.

HR [10:41 AM]
That’s a tricky question. I have my personal opinion about it at the same time I’m trying to support the desire for our remote employees to have the same perks as in-office employees. From an administrative perspective, it’s time consuming to find delivery services and match those services with employee locations. And without more assistance, it’s basically not able to even happen unless the employees themselves do it.
When this idea originated, the intent was to only provide lunch from one location (Jimmy John’s). When the previous admin was here, it was suggested to use DoorDash for more variety and that’s when it got out of control. I understand that Jimmy John’s gets boring after a few times. I understand the desire for variety. I also understand that offering variety is 3-4x more money than what we spend per person for in-office lunches.
After some discussion, we decided on a monthly expense reimbursement of $40 for remote employees to receive the same perks but you can choose what you want.
That’s a long answer without even giving my opinion. What’s your opinion?

Ben [11:00 AM]
Oooh, I still want your opinion!

HR [11:37 AM]
When it was initially proposed, I was opposed from an administrative perspective. The idea of an admin having to research options near the employee and coordinating options with what the employees wanted to eat each week sounded like a very daunting task. But when we put a box around it, that Jimmy John’s would be the go-to each week, I was on board. That fell apart with the addition of DoorDash and Uber Eats.
I believe that all employees deserve the same perks. The way this remote employee perk is structured puts burden on the employee to arrange their meal. Is it still a perk if it takes leg-work on the employee’s part? I think the answer depends on the employee.
I get concerned about in-office employees, that work from home on Friday, getting wind of the monthly reimbursement for remote employees. Does that send the message that if you aren’t at HQ then you’ll get lunch money instead? Also, our current *monthly* average cost per employee to provide lunch is about $12-17/employee. The reimbursement amount of $40 was my idea to meet in the middle for administrative time saved and employee perk provided (knowing the meals will cost more with delivery)
My opinion is that this is a squishy way to extend this perk to remote employees. I think we can test it out and revise if needed. 

Ben [11:45 AM]
Thanks. I appreciate you sharing that with me.
I feel embarrassed having so much effort put into something as little as lunch. Does it make me feel connected? Yes, it’s nice. My wife appreciates it more than I do though (which should probably add, not detract from the overall value).
Work-sponsored lunch (aside from occasional team lunches) is a new concept for me and I can’t help but think that we’re in a special time when the market is strong, companies are competing for workforce and our company is growing. One day these things will go away and we, as a region, as an industry, will have to reconsider perks. I hope that employee appreciation never goes away though. In this regard most of the companies I’ve worked for have been “enlightened” and the current array of perks represents an evolution of service providers, not how much companies care.
I feel embarrassed that the Uber Eats backfired because I encouraged that as well. I didn’t realize that it made things harder. I’m sorry about that. On this front I recommit to never complain about what the company does for me because I know that it represents extra time and money over the average in-office employee.
Intellectual puzzle: Does $1=$1 when you’re paying salaries, insurance and perks for employees in different regions with different costs of living? I’d love to hear more thoughts on this from people with experience. I could lean both ways.

HR [11:55 AM]
I don’t see your feedback or suggestions as complaints at all. Perks never fit all employees 100%. I welcome your feedback and suggestions 110%. Not all will be implemented but if nothing is said, how will we evolve in offering the best we can?

Ben [11:57 AM]
Asking the remote employees to take care of themselves does ameliorate the administrative overhead and that seems to be a smart solution. It does take away the spontaneity and variety that makes in-office lunches great. I won’t get the same value out of that as someone in the office does. And it costs more than $4 a lunch, so it’s less efficient too. But it gets me fed and it’s nice and it’s a perk and there is a lot of thought going into it.
The Scrooge in me says, “Don’t worry about it. I moved away from company lunches when I moved out of state!” And I would be fine if nothing was done here for -”I wouldn’t even resent anything that happens for other remote employees.
If I had been hired to BE a remote employee, I wouldn’t feel that way though ^^
So I recognize that my opinion and feelings here doesn’t solve the problem for everyone!
If I sniff out that there’s a problem or concerns around remote employees being treated over-fairly, I’d run away from the perks because I’d hate to be a part of anything divisive within the company.
That’s why I wanted to hear your thoughts because I knew you’d be honest. So thank you for sharing.

HR [12:05 PM]
Intellectual puzzle – I don’t believe $1=$1 for remote employees but I also don’t believe it’s equal for in-state employees. Further discussion in person will probably be better on this one.
I appreciate your perspective on out of state employee perks. I think we agree that long-term success of perks will need periodic review. Thanks for the discussion!

Ben [12:06 PM]
Thank you.

HR [12:06 PM]
:fist_bump:

Ben [12:06 PM]
I still don’t know if I’ll expense the $40/month though.

Managing employees is hard because employees are people with different needs and opinions. What I appreciated most within this particular aspect was how caring my in-office counterparts were in their efforts. That mattered 100x more than a sandwich—even if it was a Jimmy John’s Club Lulu!

Image credit: Yelp and Neil T.

When Do You Have Product/Market Fit?

Business, ,

I’ve been asked twice in the last week, “how do you know when you have market fit?” Despite the amount of information readily available online and in books on this subject, it’s very much an appropriate question for entrepreneurs and product marketing leaders to ask themselves and their teams. Ever elusive, you need it most when you don’t have it, and having it doesn’t guarantee your success.

The Short Answer

You already know if you have product/market fit.

A Little Background

Although “product/market fit” was coined a dozen years ago by Marc Andreesen but the concept is as old as commerce. In the Lean Product Playbook, Dan Olsen said it “means that your product meets real customer needs and does so in a way that is better than the alternatives.” Advice I heard early on in my career, “find a need and fill it,” which traces back to Ruth Stafford Peale, offers stark simplicity. This phrase charged me with a lasting enthusiasm for improvement that I still carry with me today. 

Aspiring entrepreneurs know that in our mature, digitally-accelerated, international marketplace, finding a novel need is rare. So many great minds and companies have already scoured the world to uncover and exploit existing needs. The explorer may then turn towards the intersections of larger moving forces that churn up fresh needs as they move to solve larger, orthogonal needs. The investigator may look for problems, as issues that people have today but have yet to draw the firm conclusion: the lack of resolution is in fact a need! Clayton Christensen’s “Jobs to Be Done” theory offers another approach to identifying needs. Reframed as a job, the question becomes “what job are they hiring for?” So then, understanding the job—the intention behind consumer actions—is richer ground still.

The Long Answer

The question remains: “what does market fit look like?” Outside of theory, the answer hoped for is innately personal with peculiar timing. Perhaps better asked, “how do we know when we’ve found it?” Or, more naively, “what exactly are we looking for?” My immediate response when last asked this question was to rub my thumb and first two fingers together in the money gesture. Tongue-in-cheek, but yes, money fuels the business! And customers aren’t going to part ways with their money unless you’re offering something they think they like. But to truly answer this question, you do need to get specific to the business and the market. This is a good place to apply leading and lagging indicators.

Applied correctly to your overall set of key performance indicators (KPIs), the concepts of leading and lagging help you to understand what can be known before (leading) and after (lagging) specific events or changes to your efforts are applied to your market. For example, a leading indicator could be organic website traffic, while a lagging indicator is your NPS score—something you don’t get until after you land the customer and they have experience with your offering. If you’re looking at lagging indicators as a way to forecast your market fit, prepare to be disappointed with out-of-date metrics!

To answer market fit objectively you’ll need to explore leading indicators of product/market fitness for your offering, and then refine that down to as few as possible that reflect your efforts and have a strong tie to your revenue metrics (e.g. CAC, conversion rate, deal size and revenue). Examples of leading indicators could be traffic, referrals, faster-than-average deal lengths, positive customer reviews, or high response rates in customer discovery efforts. As you progress you can improve your confidence in each indicator with studied analysis. And remember the old axiom: correlation isn’t always causation! Over time you can plug in your lagging indicators as sales cycles, seasonality and repeatability bear out.

To answer market subjectively requires a more ethnographic approach. Continuous, tight feedback loops with prospective customers, market influencers and your customer advisory board is key to not only scoping your MVP but delivering competitive and innovate value year-after-year. Establish personas for your users, purchase decision makers and if B2B/B2E, other stakeholders within your customer’s organizations. Your ability to understand their needs—their job to be done—accurately and quickly, and how your offering fills those needs, will be a microcosm of your company’s overall success.

In Summary

Combine your best performance indicators with methodical customer discovery to weave a framework upon which to test your assumptions, make your bets and mitigate risk. Think scientific method here: questioning, hypothesizing, predicting, testing, and analysis. In that flow, when do you know that your hypothesis is correct? From the beginning! The process refines your understanding and reduces your doubt.

A long-time Lord of the Star Trek Wars, it’s interesting to contrast the differences between the responses of the same question to different characters. Don’t let your business model be based on Anakin!

Proud of GoReact’s Successes!

Business, Education, Technology

I’m super proud of what we’ve done at GoReact! When I met Ken almost five years ago, I quickly fell in love with his aspiration to use video to help students improve their performance. Ken has a real gift for planning and executing with high standards for the brand, the product, the sales process and the whole customer experience. We’ve put a lot of hard work into those goals, and we’ve grown that scrappy little team into a talented, fun, and hardworking company that delivers amazing value in the EdTech market!

Kudos to the whole GoReact team for making such an amazing product and for creating such a great place to work! And thank you to our customers who put their faith in GoReact every semester as they set out to teach tomorrow’s speakers, teachers, interpreters, nurses and so much more!

GoReact Recognized on the Utah 100 List Second Year Running

Zero States Don’t Understate

Design

Zero states are the messages that our apps tell us when we haven’t made anything yet, our lists are done, our notifications are all read, or when our searches have no results. As app designers, we often focus on giving the user what they needed so we don’t talk much about what happens when there is nothing to give. And nothing isn’t a bad place to be.

BambooHR does a great job telling you that zero is good

Don’t get hung up on showing nothing to your users. Some apps should always give something (think searching on Amazon on Google), others should be more responsible and stop showing things (endless social media and YouTube videos) but most of the time users want to know that they’ve ACCOMPLISHED getting to nothing! This can be super important part of their workflow.

So the next time you’re designing an interface that can have “one or more” somethings show up, take a step back and consider what you’d like to communicate to your users if there aren’t any to show. It could be a good time to relax and let your hair down with something funny, congratulate your users, ask them to create, or point them to another aspect of the app that needs their attention. You should never leave someone wondering, “huh, so I guess there aren’t any then?”

Need some inspiration? Check out what dribble has here.

Be Your Brand

Business

I saw this email in my inbox yesterday and I immediately flagged it because it hit a certain nail right on the head for me. This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, and watching from my company and from other companies. As you look past direct marketing efforts—and I wouldn’t recommend that this be done lightly because direct marketing and sales is SOOO MUCH easier to track and account for. And what can be tracked can be improved and that’s a great space to be in. But as companies look past that, they look for more comprehensive approaches that support indirect sales, word of mouth, influencers and just groundswell for your sales efforts. And then we start talking about brand and there’s a million ways that we see brands. Not all of them are successful. Not all are even noticed or appreciated. And if you don’t apply regular and intentional pressure then you will still have a brand, but it will be obscure, absent-minded, flighty and limited to the exposure that just happens and that’s not the impression you want.

So back to this email. It’s from Atlassian, makers of the supremely popular project management software Jira. And here they are sending me an email about incident management. Now I honestly didn’t know they had any product offering in that space, and that’s the genius here because they know that I do think about incident management and that’s a particularly nasty area that IT and Development groups need to have great controls and procedures in place for. It’s like Atlassian knows who I am! (And they do, because I’m fitting a profile they’re targeting for, but that’s not the point!) The point here is that they’ve just shared something with me that I appreciate. That maybe I need. And there’s a load of people like me out there that got this email and said to themselves, “Huh. Atlassian. OK, nice! I appreciate that!” Now I forwarded this on to the right guy in the company and I never clicked on the button in the email. Which means that they couldn’t track what they just did: they build trust. Now further, I forwarded the email onto my executive team as an example of this kind of marketing and now all of them are thinking good things about Atlassian.

How do you measure that? You don’t.

I’m thinking about basketball camps that Nike sponsors. I’m thinking about JR Smith’s new “Supreme” calf tattoo. I’m thinking about what Beats did for the Olympic athletes as they took their brand to the masses. There is a way to attribute the spend, but it’s not easy and it’s sketchy but it’s real. By providing value to people outside of your direct sales and marketing efforts—by providing exposure away from your buying channels you’re letting your brand breathe. And here’s the nail for me today:

If your your company has a mission to accomplish outside of just revenue, then you need to talk about it with your customers and prospects outside of your sales channels.

When you’re ready, get out and get talking about what your company is doing for people. Show them what you want to do and introduce them to people that are making amazing things happen with your product or service. You won’t be able to measure it, and you’ll need a discipline around it, but don’t think for a minute that if done correctly, it isn’t going to make a big difference.

Process Always Breaks Down

Business

We had an interesting epiphany yesterday.

Despite our continuing efforts to include key factors for prioritization, we found ourselves being pushed to work on things that were not prioritized. And it wasn’t about prioritization.

One of my team members has implemented a very clever prioritization method using Airtable that captures the problem, potential solutions, related meta and then key factors for prioritization including customer pain, frequency, reach and development effort to resolve. Being a bit of a spreadsheet nerd myself, I’m pleased that we’ve found a way to do this in a way that is collaborative, transparent and effective. It’s been an aspiration of mine to have something like this working to ensure that design and development are focusing on the things that matter most for the company.

So why work on something else if it’s not in the system?

The epiphany is that no matter how good your system is, even if it includes company rank, emotions, weather and actual dollar amounts for cost and benefit, humans don’t actually like systems! I mean, I’m a human and I love systems. I love this prioritization system we have because it means that I don’t have to worry that day-to-day we’re missing our target. It means that we have a recorded history of good choices and a plan for future good choices. It’s flexible and sharable. But it’s done by algorithms and not by gut. Humans like their guts. In the end, when all else fails, and even when all else is good, humans want to trust their gut over systems. That’s why process always breaks down: human guts.

(Here’s what I’m not going to talk about: why we should build and rely on processes, models, principles and systems that reflect our aspirations and needs.)

So go out there and build the best systems, for prioritization, delivery, operations, tracking and more! But remember why you’re building it. You’re building it to help humans be more precise, accurate and have better memories. You’re building it to insulate from frustration, impatience, overconfidence, and flights of fancy. But you built it for humans! If your system is too rigid for the dynamic of humans, then they’ll know and they’ll suspect it, fear it and ultimately lose trust it in. And untrusted systems fail. They fail harder with every fracture of mistrust. So be transparent, iterate to improve, but account for human nature too.

—–

I was going to end there, but I think some examples might help you understand some specific human factors that conflict with systems. Consider these, and perhaps your system can account for them. If you can’t, adjust your system.

  1. Does it really matter if a developer skips the top story in the backlog in favor of another story two down that really gets her excited?
  2. If the CEO marches down to your desk to tell you about a bad experience he just saw on the site, and he’s rational, is the correct response really just “that’s great, but it’s 30th in line?”
  3. Do you really wait to implement an internal tool for your Support team when they’re  getting bombarded with a demoralizing issue day after day, in favor of another tool or fix that outranks it?
  4. Do you always tackle the “big rocks” at the top of the list at the cost of one or two collectively larger, themed pile of “little rocks” lower down?
  5. Do you hold off on a new project because the original estimate caused a lower priority, despite a developer being so excited about it that he’s spending his own personal time to further the code?

8 Easy Pressure Cooker Recipes

Uncategorized

We’ve had a pressure cooker in the home for years and I’m always surprised to hear someone say that they just got a pressure cooker but they don’t know how to use it. Don’t know how to use it?? Turn it on! OK I know it’s not that easy but it is a go-to tool in my kitchen several times every week. Like crockpot recipes? Do you like tender meat? Take some time to explore these recipes and then Google some more and I think you’ll find that dinner prep time just got way shorter! Seriously, our Instant Pot changed the way we cook (faster and easier).

#1 RICE!

If there’s a theme to this post, and a theme to cooking with pressure cookers in general, it’s E-A-S-Y. I won’t burden you with a recipe here. At my house it’s 4 cups of rice and 5 cups of water, lid, push the RICE button. If you’re feeling fancy then throw in some chicken bullion. Done. We do this several times a week. It’s why we have two Instant Pots. 🙂

#2 Salsa Chicken

You’ll see some variations on chicken dishes in this list, but what makes this one come in at number two is that it’s a favorite for our kids. Maybe it’s the brown sugar? We usually serve the salsa chicken over rice and then have a veggie or salad on the side.

#3 Pot Roast

As I learned to cook, the pot roast gave me some apprehension. It’s the classic mom’s-been-cooking-something-amazing mountaintop that I was never sure I wanted to climb. Well forget all that. We’re just talking about an easy way to eat tender, fall-apart meat with some potatoes, carrots, onions and the like. Soooo many ways to do this one!

#4 Cafe Rio Pulled Pork

There are a lot of copy-cat recipes for pulled pork, but we learn towards yummy and easy. The basic idea here is tender and sweet. This works well over rice, but is best with the full-fledged, rice-and-beans, tortilla-bottomed super salad! With the pressure cooker you will spend more time on the creamy tomatillo dressing than the pork. We’ve also done put this on open-faced ciabatta rolls, broiled with a slice of provolone cheese.

#5 Teriyaki Chicken

Another chicken recipe. Another one that’s good over rice or with a stir-fry as part of an Asian-style meal, but we’ve also put it in tacos! Teriyaki chicken has a mild, sweet, and savory flavor that works well in concert with other foods.

#6 Shredded Chicken

OK so you’re getting the idea that you can basically do a lot of different chicken recipes! We use this one, or something like it, for sandwiches, salads, over rice and in tacos. What you’re looking for in good shredded chicken is soft, flavorful meat that can be added to something else that will give the dish the kick and flair you want.

#7 Ribs

The pinnacle of my cooking journey will be excellent ribs. I’ve smoked, baked, and pressure cooked them. I think I did all three on one batch! I really enjoy trying a new recipe and having to eat them myself in the end because “they weren’t good enough” for the rest of the family. I’m a team player!

#8 Taco Soup

A family favorite in my house, we have a few versions of taco soup: soupy for bread bowls, thick for a hearty chili. Cheese, sour cream and Fritos are great mix-ins with breads and harvest veggies on the side.

Why are you still here? Go buy yourself a pressure cooker already!


Noise Cancelling Microphone Rodeo

Business, Reviews, Technology

I’ve been telecommuting for nine months now. There have been a number of changes as I’ve physically separated from the great folks in my company’s office. But the hardest change has been trading out face-to-face conversations for video conferencing. Although it’s never been easier to schedule and join video calls with our existing browsers, phones, built-in cameras and teleconferencing equipment, it’s still no match for being there. There is so much to communicate and perceive that can only be done with the full fidelity of unimpeded senses: micro expressions, vocal timbre, outside-the-camera-frame body language, posture and gestures, knowing looks and eye contact or lack of eye contact, physical presence, proximity and touch and conversation timing and cadence. Even with the best systems so much of this is just lost! In addition, artificial constructs impede natural communication with so many meetings starting with technical difficulties, bad connections, video and sound checks, issues around muting (or not muting) background noises and then there’s latency! It really does requires intentional effort to make sure that remote meeting participants can hear and be heard during a fast-paced conversations, debates and brainstorming. Ugh. Now there are ways to mitigate these problems and I’ll focus on just two. After all, this is an equipment rodeo and I need room to talk about that!

Video Conference Manners

I’ll start with this because with just a few things you can dramatically increase the quality of video conferences. Good protocol applies to whoever is conducting the meeting, whether in the conference room with others, or remote. 

For starters, not every participant can always see all of the other participants. So take a moment at the beginning of a video conference to make sure you all know everyone on the call. Acknowledge and do introductions just like you would if you were in person. Video conferences can feel impersonal if not anonymous so do what you can to keep it personal. 

Second, take a beat every so often to make sure that remote participants understand what is being said and have an opportunity to pipe in. You may not be seeing the normal nonverbal communication that would clue you into their confusion or need to interject. Generally people are a little too polite on calls and we should give even the meekest a seat at the table, virtual as it may be.

Know who’s on the call, give them time to speak and remember that it all sounds much worse on the other end of the wire.

Lastly, think about audio throughout the call. Are there multiple conversations happening? How many microphones are there? Is anyone not able to speak for lack of being heard? Technology has come a long way, but the audio fidelity in video conferences is nowhere near what it is in real life! The human ears are remarkably adept at filtering noise and recognizing sounds. With just your own head’s stereo-on-a-swivel your audio quality will always be better than those on the other end of the wire. Conference microphones are designed to pick up sound efficiently and make everyone sound close, so if you can’t imagine what a room full of people sounds like coming through a single tinny speaker, take time to join a busy meeting and experience it yourself. It will change the way you feel about over-talking, side conversations and natural pauses in the conversation.

Noise-cancelling Microphones

Even with good meeting protocol, having a bad mic can be a meeting killer. Background noise can betray your location or peel back the illusion that your home can be an effective office. Much is said about noise cancelling headphones but it can be difficult to find a noise-cancelling microphone! Don’t assume that your laptop or your webcam’s mic will do a good job. Most mics have one job: pick up sound indiscriminately—they don’t know that a lawnmower or a crying baby is unintentional sound. Thus began my search, when I realized that people could really hear noises from outside my home office. I did take some time to look at sound attenuation solutions for my office, but ultimately you really can’t/won’t change your walls or your door and sound definitely comes through those. So for me the solution had to come from the microphone.

Having some experience with audio engineering and the physics of sound, I was pretty excited about finding a mic solution that could cancel out unwanted noise. And I found some pretty good ones that did not disappoint. They all use “beam forming technology” which uses an array of microphones to identify the loudest sound and cancel out the sounds coming in on the other mics. If you want to see this in action, check out how the Amazon Echo uses this in a noise room and will light up the direction it hears you from. 

There was a point in my research when I had the epiphany that this problem has already been solved for people who take their calls on-the-go and don’t want the background noise of cars, wind or other people. You know, those people who wear bluetooth earpieces all day and you don’t know if they’re talking to you or someone on a call? I realized that to maximize noise cancellation and also get the benefit of proximity effect, I needed limit my search to microphone headsets. All of the headsets that I found with active noise cancellation were also bluetooth. I’m a tough buyer so I had a few key criteria, mostly around what it shouldn’t be, like looking like a headset from Apollo 11.

  • Excellent noise cancellation
  • Doesn’t require a lot of desk space
  • Doesn’t look like I’m doing anything “weird” to get good call quality
  • Doesn’t break the bank

So here they are, in order of my preference. If you’d like to see more, consider something from one of these lists. All of three are good. I feel like I was picking from the best available.

Plantronics Voyager 5200

My overall favorite. Although initially I didn’t like the design because it seemed bulky, my wife and daughter thought that it was the best looking and head-on, the profile is pretty small. What won me over was that in the testing this mic did the best job out cancelling out unwanted noise. The packaging was really nice, maybe too nice with its pull tab and magnetically-closing flap. The earpiece’s build is solid, but flexible and comfortable to wear for long periods. My favorite part is the ear tip that sits loosely in your ear rather than being shoved inside it. $80 on Amazon.

Sennheiser Presence

I really like Sennheiser. I have their e835 microphone and studio headphones and I can’t say enough good about this brand. So I really wanted this bluetooth headset to win. But it didn’t. The noise cancellation was good, but not as good as the Plantronics. I liked that it was small and it has this clever open/closed switch to turn it on and off. It was pretty light too and could actually just hang from being pressed inside my ear but it also came with an over-the-ear hanger as well. The packaging was simple and understated, which I also liked. $92 on Amazon.

Jabra Steel

This one was a surprise for me. I didn’t think much of it when I ordered it—it seemed too simple but the rugged design and manly-man packaging made me feel like wearing this would make my life better! I gave it a shot but overall the audio quality and noise cancellation weren’t as good as the others. If I kept this, I would only wear it when working in my shop or if I was digging a hole or something. It seemed pretty indestructible and I wouldn’t worry about carrying it in my pocket or dropping it. $60 on Amazon.

Testing Method

As I was most concerned about the mic quality, I tested each one with semi-scripted scenarios that included different kinds of background noise so I could compare them side-by-side as much as possible. I also evaluated ease-of-use, fit, price and packaging. I had some success with attempting to record all of them at once, but I ultimately gave up on that approach in favor of time. The recordings are available here for reference if you’re interested.

Mic Rodeo RecordingsDownload