Holiday greetings from "The Thompson Family"

Holiday cards are always fun to make. Our card from last year caught many by surprise: it appeared that the Gu and Cao family had adopted a new family name, "Thompson". That was not what we had intended at all!

What went wrong

We were super behind in creating the card last year. In fact, I didn't get to it until well past January 1 of 2017 (gasp)! In a haste to get things done, the blunder happened, inevitably. I unknowingly agreed to the new family name Walgreen's had decided for us (or for all of its customers who happened to have selected the design).  Not until when I was holding a giant stack of cards that bore our proudest family photo of the year did I notice the the tiny print sneaking under the cheerful "Cheers", and it spelled T-H-O-M-P-S-O-N. Oh, no!

I wasn't going to discard all the cards that I had just paid for so I had to fix it. After experimenting with a few variations, I settled on "The 'Thompson' Family" because I thought it was funny (haha!), and it took the least amount of effort to fix. Jotting down a pair of double quotes wasn't too painful to do.

What could've helped: Better interface, obviously

The name field of the template really should've been made more noticeable. It was so tiny compared to other words in the template. It was no surprise that it went completely undetected. In addition to making the field noticeable, the system should notify the user if he/she didn't make an attempt to edit the field because the default value is almost always wrong.

What else could've helped: a small batch size

This anecdote reminds me of a story from The Lean Startup book that illustrates the concept of a small batch size. A father and his kids were tasked to stuff envelopes with newsletters. The children did it the intuitive way: they folded all letters, put all letters into envelopes, sealed each envelope, and finally put the stamps on. The father did it the opposite by stuffing, sealing, and stamping one envelope at a time. In the end, the father finished his half of the newsletters first. Had I done it like the dad, I would've noticed the mistake right away, corrected it, and saved myself from having to correct each instance of the mistake later on.  

Lesson (re)learned

The small batch size principle applies to many other situations in our work and lives. While working incrementally, you can finish up quickly and examine what you've done right away. The pause provides an opportunity to reflect on worked and didn't work so you can adjust your approach immediately and continue on.