Product orgs, reality, and vibes
A PM’s power is proportional to how close they are to the money.
Work
Product, career, and the messy systems behind how software gets made.
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Monkeys & Typewriters
An AI luddite stops worrying and learns to have fun making weird stuff with robots.
How good PMs work in 2022
In the world of technology, product management has always been about features. The race to add the most features and get them to market quickly has been the name of the game. But as we move into the future, this mindset is no longer going…
Embracing ‘Read-Only’ Mode During Covid
My friend Sally Kerrigan wrote this last year, about accepting that a pandemic is not the best time to be creative, and deciding to intentionally enter a “read-only” mode: It seems like writing should be the easy thing to do as a…
‘Geriatric Millennials’
There’s a lot to unpack in this post by Erica Dhawan, and it took me a minute to decide which parts to excerpt. This passage, though, captures both her thesis and most of what’s wrong with it: For organizations that are divided across…
The Full Coinbase
A step-by-step guide to making any workplace crisis about you.
The ‘Rework’ Podcast Goes Dark
Sorry, one more Basecamp link: Jason Fried and DHH (and other 37signals/Basecamp folks, allegedly) wrote a book called Rework about “the better way to work and run your business,” which has a spinoff podcast covering a mix of Basecamp…
What really happened at Basecamp
In response to the Basecamp partners’ “full Coinbase” heel turn that I wrote about yesterday, Casey Newton spoke with Jason Fried, DHH, and numerous employees and reported on what’s been going on behind the scenes: The controversy that…
Back to Basic at Basecamp
The company that wrote “It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work” responds to craziness at work
How To Blog
Getting back into blogging means choosing workable tools, publishing imperfect ideas, and sharing what interests me without building a brand.
Annus Horribilis-ish
Looking back on 2020.
On “authority”
Some thoughts about a long-standing cliche about product leadership.
People over work product
It may seem like the work is more important than people, but it’s just a side effect of bringing together a team.
Hello world.
Restarting my blog means letting go of perfectionism and making room to share unfinished ideas and things I like.
Something New
22 February 2011 was my first day on the Typekit team. 23 February 2018 will be my last one. After seven years, I’m moving on from Adobe to do something new.
“Middle-form” Blogging
Marco Arment and Andy Baio and Jason Snell and Gina Trapani have all written about returning to “middle-form” blogging—blogging that’s longer than a tweet but shorter and more casual, like it was back in the day. Sentences, not…
“Creative People Say No”
Technologist Kevin Ashton (via M.G. Siegler) on the power of saying no to things, excerpted from his book How To Fly A Horse: Time is the raw material of creation. Wipe away the magic and myth of creating and all that remains is work: the…
Improving load times with JS event capturing
Really nice explanation/tutorial from Sam Stephenson of one of the techniques used to make the new Basecamp so damned fast. I'll admit I've been reading about "bubbling" vs "capturing" events for years but never really understood the…
Oink is Shutting Down
Gee, that was fast. Guess not enough people were using Oink to oink oinks. In my talk about naming things in January (video), I spent like half an hour trashing critiquing Oink's product naming (hence the "oink oink" joke). Though it's…
PayPal: Feel the Love
Watts Martin: The key to understanding Paypal is this: Their policies in dealing with their customers are all crafted with the assumption that their customers are out to screw them. It’s not that they don’t want to do business with you,…
Process Kills Passion
James Turner writes for O’Reilly Radar about the “best practices” plague afflicting software developers. So far (thank goodness) I haven’t had to play the code coverage game, a nice side effect of working on small teams for smaller…
Bloggers Shocked(!) to Realize Blogging is Hard
Not everyone featured in this Crain's Chicago Business article expected to launch the next Stuff White People Like or Julie/Julia Project. But all of them expected to get at least something out of the time they put into their blogs that…
“Should I Work For Free?”
Find out with this handy flow chart. And beware the "exposure" of a "good portfolio piece".
Joshua Topolsky: “Dear Michael Arrington…”
Topolsky is the editor of Engadget, a blog Arrington thinks has some kind of vendetta against his own blog TechCrunch, despite the fact that they're both owned by (and part of the same business unit of) AOL. Arrington did a good (where by…
Netflix: Culture of Fear
Sounds like a lovely place to work: A total fear of failure permeates the ranks. Netflix basically gives you a warning on your first mistake, and then fires you after your second mistake. This is why the annual turnover rate is well over…
Paul Graham: “How Not To Die”
Sometimes I really hate reading Paul Graham, even though in the context of Silicon Valley startupland I don't doubt that this essay of his is absolutely right: Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased that…
The No-Cry Software Development Methodology
Trendy software engineering management is a lot like trendy parenting, and both are harmful: It strikes me as silliness to think that one can create a universal methodology for something as complex as potty training an individual toddler,…
The Wrong Questions
Venkatesh Rao on questions that seem important but aren't, like "Who is our customer?" or "How can I lose weight?": They are terrible because they are useless. Asking them doesn’t help you answer them. They won’t help you create a…
Amy Hoy vs. ‘Engineerism’
I'm not usually a fan of Amy's, but she is crushing it with her new blog. It's worth noting (since it's related to the linked post) that Le Corbusier's theories of what housing should be are why we have housing projects like Chicago's own…