“It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal.”
-Douglas Adams
#Quotes
During planning sessions, we sometimes talk about all the problems we are presently - deliberately - choosing NOT to solve.
This generally fosters alignment - but it can also shake loose faulty assumptions and open up new avenues for potential research and experimentation in future sprints.
In product management (like everything else), miscommunications can derail forward momentum.
And stops and starts can be painful.
When it happens:
- Don’t take it personally.
- Clarify your goals.
- Confirm any and all assumptions.
Most importantly: revisit the outcomes your clients really need.
This podcast about how Will Guidara made his restaurant best in the world using “unreasonable hospitality” is worth a listen.
One of the best bits - how instead of dreading the unexpected arrival of the food critic, he and his team gamified the process by practicing for it nightly.
“For natural ability without training is blind: and training without natural ability is defective, and practice without both natural ability and training is imperfect.”
-Plutarch
#Quotes
This was nothing like Tokyo
“This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
-William Gibson (Mona Lisa Overdrive)
#Quotes
BlueSky’s Starter Packs are pretty nifty as far as features go.
They’re immediately useful for users to bootstrap communities, which makes them unique and differentiating.
This raises engagement and participation - core goals for the product.
In retrospect, they’re also fairly obvious. :-)
Kevin Kelly writes:
“Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.”
I couldn’t agree more.
The best single sentence (so far) from “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari :
”As Marshall McLuhan might have put it, the pigeon was the message.”
Time is your clients’ most valuable currency.
And it’s yours too.
My first insight into AI’s genuine utility came when I asked ChatGPT to tell me how an unfamiliar Python library worked, as if I were a young child.
Even if its answer had been wrong - like an ill-advised coworker - it gave enough insight to remove my block and keep moving forward.
(But it wasn’t.)
“Nobody will open a book and wish it contains more types of letters or be disappointed because it is, again, just another variation of the same alphabet.”
-Sönke Ahrens
#Quotes
“Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.”
-Francis Bacon
#Quotes
Instead of asking “what went well / what needs improving” during your next retrospective, try giving everyone the chance to talk about how they were challenged, what they learned, and how they personally grew during a sprint (or project, or…)
Changing the framing can make all the difference.
I find myself talking a lot more about how products adapt to unexpected changes in their operating environment.
The world is messy but our products don’t need to be fragile.
Resilience is quickly becoming a basic expectation in an increasingly chaotic time.
“You must be harsher on yourself and on others: failure to communicate is the fault not of the dull-witted audience but of the unstrategic communicator.”
-Robert Greene
I am reminded (yet again!) that I always need to be clarifying, repeating, and doing what can feel like over-explaining in the moment.
It really, really does save time, reduce friction, and end up building trust.
“The future is like weather: a thousand thunderheads on the horizon, a haze of weird thunder-sleet in our eyes, and we never know where the lightning is going to strike. The best we can do is prepare for each possible hit by testing the possibilities.”
-Warren Ellis
#Quotes
I’ve worked in an industry that prides itself on dramatic upheaval and reinvention my entire life.
Spending the time early-career to learn vi editing commands has proven to be one of the most durable investments I’ve ever made in my education.
“When asked how he would order his thoughts if he had one hour to save the world, Einstein sagely responded that he would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and save the world in five minutes.”
-Jim Mattis
#Quotes
“The future is unwritten.”
-Joe Strummer
#Quotes