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Ashley Rolfmore

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Sometimes you just gotta make some noise

Oh bloody hell not this again You might be lucky enough (and I do mean lucky) to hear some feedback like this: "well, X is awful, we can't use it at all" They may not say this, but it's what they are communicating. And

That's Numberwang

When numbers become meaningless 5? 9? 2450? Have you ever had to debug an issue without sufficient logs or visibility? Or tried to get a decent case study out of a customer? I've done both and trust me, they can be extremely difficult. Turns out, these are actually

You just drew your pistols and didn't even notice

I used to think a lot about product management, partly because it's one of the many hats an organisation has ended up labelling me with, and partly because it's that intersection of technology, behaviour and capitalism - linking the micro back to the macro and vice versa.

AI is just another gerbil in the sack

What happens when a user tells you a system number is wrong? And what happens next? Turns out, a lot - wrong numbers are a very common reason people lose trust in systems - notably when they have to rely on them. But it wasn't the wrong number that lost

Your tech native brain is (probably) blocking you from making great software

When I was a child, a long time ago, I used to play this game. Factory: The Industrial Devolution from https://www.macintoshrepository.org/4385-factory-the-industrial-devolution The goal was to successfully assemble a number of goods in a few minutes. Ingredients or parts would come out the

Ode to the organisational gaffer tape

Every organisation has people whose job title or duties doesn't describe what they actually do. They're not a failure of org design. I've been that person more times than I can count. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that being asked

Stop trying to engineer your way out of listening to people

I spend a lot of time negotiating this in the software world: Probably don't want this road And if you're wondering why this happens, it's normally because: people aren't talking to people people aren't listening So lots of designers and

UX Design in Data & AI Products: How to "Show Your Working"

So, I've explored why APIs need a user experience designed for them . I'm now moving to another area, which is slightly more visible but still pretty damn complex: presenting data. Broadly, I will take you through: Why people don't trust your data/numbers yet,

Actual flight advice

Why You Should Ignore Airline Advice Columns As previously written about, I fly too much. This is on average about 40 flights every 12 months. 2025 it's going to end up at 53. I do this because I live on a lovely small island but do also love

Systems, Choices, and the Space Between

I spend a reasonable amount of time talking about systems interacting and how that can influence behaviour in groups (ie organisations). For example, at a certain density of crowd, people en masse behave more like a liquid than like individual beings. This can lead to safety risks. I however want

Play your own version of Traitors at home

So I was a little surprised to see this TV series get to the heights it has, and in addition a UK celebrity version has done extremely well this week. From the various pieces, I understand that most of the celebrity players just really really wanted to play it rather

Business is political - a systems thinking approach

⚠️ This is a sensitive topic and I have tried to bridge the sensitivity of it with some gentle humour to make some of it more understandable to a wide audience. You are welcome to contact me directly if you feel that I have been inappropriate. In addition, nothing

Taxonomies, Ontologies and Knowledge Graphs: a primer

I’ve lived in this world long enough that some of these ideas just feel obvious to me, but I’ve learned they often aren’t. In most workplaces I’ve been in, fluency in how these ideas connect between data, code and software - is surprisingly

In defence of Microsoft Teams

Now, I suspect out of everything I write, this is potentially the most controversial opinion I have. Microsoft Teams is actually brilliant. Right. Let's try to explain this... The dark old ages I first started office jobs in environments where you'd have a VoIP phone and

Fluency, Frameworks and "Eff It"

Design is Dead? Agile is Dead? Linkedin is full of posts that: espouse ways of working or models of working say things like "a product manager must use these frameworks to be successful" state "X is dead" and if you're lucky, why (agile, continuous