“When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”
Discord has been executing near perfectly and it looks like they’ve built-in most of the functionality of Discourse now. That’s an absolutely amazing complementary feature to the ephemerality of the chat stream.
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
A nice article about Box’s transformation and especially that chart contrasting burn v. growth is one of the most important things for any startup to keep in mind.
A lot to like in this article (“They avoid scrum and SAFe like the plague.”) but I’ll settle for adopting the core thrust of it and just retiring the entire concept of a PO and never have to debate “What is the difference between a PM and a PO?” ever again.
Since the one digital thing that Germany is really good at is copying, here is the UK’s 2025 roadmap for digital and data. Just copy-paste it and do everything that’s in there.
Running multiple strategic tracks will set you up to dominate at a large scale, but many organizations can’t run one let alone run multiple at the same time. The visualization and plays as described here by Itamar Gilad look a lot like Wardley mapping.
Product sense (and taste) are so important but so hard to pinpoint and teach to others. Lenny here unpacks what goes into it but even then there are very few shortcuts to getting it.
Nice to read a project we worked on a long time ago (web application concept and initial set of user stories to hand off to development) is still going strong. This project and others like it support my thinking that it’s possible to solve problems definitely in a product agency context.
Some ways to improve the quarterly prioritization tussle between engineering and business that focus on facilitating the conversation and reducing the number of things under immediate consideration.
We’ve worked remotely like this ten years ago with Hubbub and had to come up with a lot of these tactics and tricks just to be able to get work done. In the meantime, it seems the tools have come a long way (imagine the things we could have done if we had a tool like this back then!) but people’s thinking is still stuck in the past.
An entire article about speed vs. velocity vs. tempo that can be summarized as: “Orientation is the Schwerpunkt.” How much does your team invest into orienting themselves before they take on new work?
I was amazed at how closely this article about product development at Facebook tracks with how I approach it: “PMs are 100% accountable for the results of your team.”
The Pulp game editor is hugely impressive and at the same time making something like this is well within the potential of any small talented group of people who have a bit of time and vision.
Stripe runs on written long-form documents in a way that I haven’t seen before. So that means somebody can go deep, like all the way down, and then distill it back out to everybody else. So you don’t have to do all of that work yourself. It does require a lot of reading for sure, but the benefit is great clarity of thought on complex topics.
I’m glad reality is catching up with the design fiction proposals we came up back in the day, like here the combination of video conferencing and Snapchat face filters.
I started a new job and thought I’d try out OmniFocus for a change after using Things very intensively at the last job. Things felt a bit constricting and I thought I’d try out the alternative app for a change.
Agile is setup as a bit of a straw man in this piece about scaling product delivery, but it is true that following the existing methods too rigidly will not get you where you want to be. I’d rephrase it to say that mature teams need to be able to reflect and create their own systems as they go.
The more experience you have, the more implicit authority you will have. It can be tough to understand that when you propose a silly idea over lunch when you have 5 years of experience has a very different impact than when you have 15 years of experience — someone might actually listen to you and go make it!Really, this is a great thing, a sort of influential power you gain. It needs love, care and maintenance though — always work on getting better, learning from your mistakes and improving on your experience. There’s nothing more dangerous for an organization than a person with terrible ideas whom everyone admires professionally.
but I like working with PMs who went into it through channels other than the official ones, and are motivated out of their passion for building things and solving problems. Not because they feel it’s something they’re supposed to do, or because they think it’s prestigious, or because it is the default path from whatever elite school they went to.
What is weird is that organizations that purport to be against risk will often do their projects exactly in this very risky way. Within an institutional logic, it often seems like there is no alternative but that is up to a few people to change.
“So if, as a product leader/CEO, you think your team isn’t 1 working on things that truly matter, or 2 achieving results that justify the investment, it is first ON YOU to figure out which of the 4 strategy problems you have, and fix them.”
A crucial part of effective teams is introducing slack like in this case removing the entire concept of a hand-off (which causes misalignment at best).
“Ultimately the truly great product manager ensures that everyone in their organization feels connected to the business, and shares an equal level of urgency and commitment to the customer’s needs.”
A good definition of product judgement which is absolutely essential for project success. I’ve seen groups without this head off in the wrong direction too often to count and have usually had to jump in myself.
Not surprising that the entire concept of ‘ethical AI’ is another scam perpetuated by the MIT Media Lab. At this point I would assume any project coming out of that institution to be compromised unless proven otherwise.
Lekha is a former collaborator who now has this lovely site of her own. Her sense of systems and many skills have always made it a joy to work with her.
“In the new city of the supertalls, man is born free but everywhere is in salad chains. The people are being made skinny to fit the skinniness of the buildings to come.”
A concretized framework for making better product decisions by Laura Klein that comes down to: get together, write things down, review things, course correct when required.
I usually say that application development (mobile and otherwise) is a solved problem but once you go to any kind of scale, you run into all of these operational issues which keep things interesting.
Figma’s multiplayer support is fantastic and something similar should be a part of every creative application. Now they’ve also written a very understandable high-level overview of their implementation (with CRDTs).
I remember some very early conversations about the Basslet (now Lofelt) and its creative possibilities. Building their own design tools for this medium is a key move and I look forward to trying it out.
I’m very impressed by this design research blog by Maike Klip about the digitalization of Dutch government services and how to maintain a human connection.