What Star Wars Can Teach Us About Web Projects

I was just six years old when the original Star Wars movie premiered. For like the next five or six years, my peers and I were “letting the Wookie win,” pretending to fly in formation on our X-wing bikes, and avoiding Stormtrooper patrols. (As for who I modeled myself after, it was Solo of course….couldn’t stand the Jedis in either the original or prequel series.)

When I look back at them, though, I find the movies to be a series of unfortunate dialog choices held together with special effects. Thank God for Harrison Ford and Alec Guinness for keeping the original series somewhat entertaining. The prequels were actually physically painful to endure, from the Gungans (”me so stupid!”) to the names of characters (really, how am I supposed to be scared of a guy named Count Dooku?) to more than I can possibly mention here.

(I guess you could say that the above paragraph is also a lesson in content development. It is possible to be too commercial, too salesy, too out there. It’s pretty bad when the generation that grows up loving what you created just sighs and rolls their eyes when you turn out dreck instead of the high quality stuff everyone is anticipating. Talk about ruining a beloved franchise with sappy content.)

Here are some other pseudo-random pearls o’ wisdom from Star Wars that relate to the world of web projects:

1. Bad feelings are usually right. If you think you’re about to be sucked up into the Death Star’s tractor beam, crushed in a trash compactor, or experience any other awful fate, please just listen to your feelings.  If you think the project you’re on is a money pit, a deadline treadmill, a waste of time, or just plain evil, then heed the feeling and do something to get out of the way of doom.
2. Size matters not. Time and again, we’ve helped the little upstart kick the snot out of the big guy. If the stories reinforce anything, it’s the power of the little guy (whether jedi master, or pilot of a snub fighter) taking on the big mamba jamba boys and winning.
3. But let the Wookie win! If you’re totally outclassed, no sense getting into a big fight for no reason. Let the wookie win, then find another way to exploit the situation. Brains may be better than brawn, but brawn will beat you down every time. Hint: go after something that wookies aren’t good at.

 

4. Do or do not. There is no try. I hate to hear the words, “I’ll give it a shot” or “I’ll try.” Listen, life is short. Just build the landing page, create the one-page tip sheet, start the adword campaign, and see what happens, okay? Stop meeting about it. Stop talking about it. Stop debating it for 90 days until you’ve been completely overrun by your competitors. Just do it. Or don’t do it.

 

5. Never send a lackey out to do something you can do better. Over and over again, we see the hapless stormtroopers mowed down by our heroes, or just plain fooled by Jedi mind tricks. That whole “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” thing would never have gotten past Vader, now would it? And you’d never see the Emperor running away from Han Solo, right? A lot of times, the good guys just prevail because they simply outclass, outthink, outwit, and outgun all the day-to-day minions they encounter.

 

6. You must unlearn what you have learned! Too many of you are out there right now, working your way through your web development processes: trying to weigh the value of PHP vs Rails, or whether you should use Visio or OmniGraffle for wireframes, or MySQL or SQLite for storage. UNLEARN. Talk to 3 users of your web application today. Do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next.  Ask them what ails them, what keeps them up at night. Build your products and services around these pains. Now go forth and wireframe and build SQL schemas.

 

7. Look not to the future and the far away! Yes, okay, so lots of Yoda wisdom here, but there is some power in being in the present. Yes, you have to plan for things down the road, but being present to the needs of your customers right now is a very powerful thing–in fact, you may discover some things that will happily keep you from doing things in the future that would otherwise be destructive.