Problem First is a blog by Ben Chadfield about Product Management, Leadership, Technology, and Life.
I moved to the UK without a natural place to call home. I didn’t have a hometown to return to, or a family history that anchored me to a particular area. At first, we rented. That was intentional. We wanted to try different places before committing. But that process takes time. Years, really. You settle somewhere that works, life fills in around it, and exploration slows down. Eventually, we…
With AI and robotics posed to reshape industries, the very fabric of how we earn an income is at risk. As machines take on more of the workload, how do we ensure humanity thrives? Surrogate Productivity Allocation (SPA) is a proposed framework for how value is generated and distributed in a world where human contributions to productivity are increasingly unnecessary. The problem with the current…
You can lean away from life. Not push it too hard. This doesn’t make any difference and that’s the point. Sometimes though, you want to hit life hard. Get right in it. Shove it along, in one direction or another. You won’t know if you’ve ruined your life forever. Or if you’ve put everything in place for all your dreams to come true. What is a ruined life? And what are these dreams coming true? For…
This article was generated as a test of using crewAI agents to research and write articles on topics. The set topic for this article was “AI trends in cybersecurity.” The next big trend in AI in cybersecurity is the widespread adoption of Explainable AI (XAI), which refers to techniques used to explain the decisions made by AI systems, making them more transparent and trustworthy. The increasing…
I recently decided to update my website after neglecting it for over 8 years. I wanted to give it a refresh and make it more modern and appealing. After a quick search, I chose Eleventy as my SSG. I like new SSGs that give me something interesting to learn. I’ve been sticking with Javascript for a while, only using Python for machine learning projects. Eleventy fits that description perfectly.…
Last year’s Blog Secret Santa was fun, for the most part. The platform was totally hacked together in the fewest hours possible, using as much code from CS Workflow as possible. People could sign up with their Twitter accounts, at a certain time they would get matched with someone to write for, they could add their gift post, and it was delivered at Christmas. The platform worked well, even if it…
Update: Tweets no longer exist so links removed Last weekend I migrated my personal blog from Wordpress to Jekyll . I tweeted as I went to keep some sort of record of what I'd done and the decisions I'd made. I also hoped that anyone else wanting to do the same thing would find it helpful. It all started because GoDaddy reminded me that my hosting was about to expire. I'd been using Jekyll for the…
This post is part of a creative, generous effort in the content strategy community called Blog Secret Santa . Many thanks to Margot Bloomstein for the germ of the idea , and to Ben Chadfield for taking it to fruition, expanding it into a community of 50 content strategy bloggers. I am honored to have gotten Ben as my Blog Secret Santa outlet! – Currently anonymous guest blogger I always say that…
I suck at following my own advice. CS Workflow’s website is pretty bad, we’re not active on social media and the amount of content we’re producing is only slightly more than none (there’s good stuff in the pipeline). I seem to forget the basics when working on my own projects. For an example on top of the one’s already given, I forgot to add authorisation to Blog Secret Santa to stop people being…
I resigned from my job nearly two months ago. We had recently hired someone that could easily step up into the vacancy I was leaving, so I could handover and be out of there quickly. There were lots of reasons for resigning. The main one was that my wife needed more help raising our baby daughter. Spending all that time at work, while my wife was struggling alone just didn’t make sense. After a…
People don’t like it when someone is attacked, especially when the attack seems unjustified or there’s an underdog being attacked. This is a reasonably common human trait that still operates in the world of business. So, if you are up against a competitor with a prospective customer you should tread carefully. I’d recommend that your proposal talks about only about the way you’ll solve their…
I have to start by confessing that I don’t know what it is about Turbolinks that caused the issue I was having. I’m only edu-guessing that Turbolinks is the cause. So…I needed to know the text that the user had selected with their cursor. This would be used to create context for the comment they wanted to make on the text. I started by using a popular method I found on Stack Overflow . function…
I keep coming back to the same three pillars when developing marketing strategies. This is regardless of industry, company size, customer type, and channel. These pillars are awareness, engagement and innovation. There’s nothing complicated or ground-breaking here, just a simple structure I like to work with. Awareness Awareness covers all growth-focused activities, like attracting new customers…
Yesterday I released a very simple tool to help copywriters get better briefs. I had a couple of days dev time up my sleeve while other parts of the main CS Workflow project are getting worked on. What I ended up with was a simple signup for copywriters. This generates a token that, when part of a URL, associates the brief with the copywriter. The briefs are a tableless model and are only saved as…
Recently I posted about the results of my cold call experiment for Dibbist. Last week I closed down the online appointment service. I made that decision because I had made a lot of mistakes and wanted to do it right with CS Workflow . So what were these mistakes? Mistakes Not understanding assumptions Dibbist was designed to bring the technologies and best practices of web and mobile development…
Copywriters can now register their interest for CS Workflow . You can do that here: http://csworkflow.com . I’m building an application specially for copywriters to make the review and approval process as painless as possible. If you’re a copywriter or have managed content projects, you’ll know how hard it is to get good feedback from reviewers and compile all that feedback into changes. CS…
My first real product was launched last year. Dibbist is an online appointment system for small businesses. I’ve failed to attract any subscribers and I know all the reasons why. I’ll do an more in depth post about what I did wrong. This post is about my cold calling experiment for Dibbist. I have connections to an owner of a small BPO (business process outsourcing) company. BPOs are always…
From my previous post on my learning progress , you’ll know I was running through a few Ember tutorials. Through these I learnt a bit, but I wasn’t grasping Ember’s MVC concept with the single model example apps. I was starting to feel like an idiot. Fortunately, an off topic comment on Hacker News lead to me pointing out the tutorial limitations. A kind gentleman pointed me to the Ember tutorial…
About 10 days have past since we found out that we’re having a girl. We were waiting for over 3 months to find out. Waiting until the birth didn’t make sense. I still can’t imagine what it’s going to be like having this new person in our life. I’ve managed to avoid being around babies more almost my entire life. Vicky will make sure I’m not useless, and her family will be living in Melbourne by…
I’ve spent about 16 hours running through tutorials, reading and rebuilding Poopee . This post will cover what I’ve learnt so far and how. Poopee currently uses a MySQL database fronted by PHP that returns XML. The front-end is JQuery. My aim is to rebuild it with Mongo and Ember. MongoDB I’m comfortable with Mongo. I run through a basic interactive tutorial at Mongly . The main reason I wanted to…
At the end of last year I set myself the challenge of getting Capistrano to deploy updates for Dibbist . Two previous attempts had tripped up on the same Rake issues. It was something to do with my server setup and I didn’t want to start from scratch. You may have seen my tweet announcing that I’d been successful, so you’ll know I go it working. I did for Dibbist and even more recently repeated…
Sometimes you explain a principle in a simple way that makes it both memorable and easy to understand. Sometimes when when you make this explanation you cement the principle in a new, deep way for yourself. I did this the other day when defending using carefully crafted web copy to sell products instead of feature lists. I was attempting to show that selling a product based on the problem it…
This is my list of personal development goals for the next 12 months. I want them to be as far from new year’s resolutions as possible. I want my goals to be as smart as possible. Get comfortable with a javascript MV* framework I’ve played with Meteor and Backbone, but want to get beyond playing and get to the point where I can create a reasonably complex thick-client app. The aim will be to…
During my honeymoon in Malaysia I was reminded of the way I wanted businesses to act on social media. Brands should be reaching out to consumers to try to keep or steal their loyalty. While walking the streets in Penang, My wife and I had to constantly reject offers for taxi and rickshaw rides. This sounds annoying and any model replicating it would be spammy, but not if applied responsibly to…
Today a wide range of media jumped on the fact that the new terms seemed allow Instagram to sell your photos to advertisers and keep all the profits. Certain parts of the terms backed up this possibility and caused mass outrage. The key lesson I picked up is that when announcing legal changes to a service the company needs to go through the main changes and address their intent. With all the legal…