I’ve been working on something – and in the course of working on it, I realized that it was part of a bigger thing for me and the way I think about the Internet. I have goals for 2025: I want to expand our vegetable garden. I want to place in a mountain bike race. … Continue reading Introducing More Good Work Talk →
There’s a lot of content out there about metrics – OKRs, KPIs, AARRR, LTV, ARPU etc etc. There’s even some thoughts on this very blog about metrics (Metrics, Means and Maps, Cogitating on ROAS, It’s Good that Data is Man Made). When product folks talk about measuring our team’s success, we always talk about the … Continue reading Goals for Upleveling Your Product Team →
(if you’re just looking for a link to the QP template, here it is!) This post is the first in what I hope will be a recurring series where I share some of the tools that I use, and work with my team to develop, in our product practice. In this way I hope to … Continue reading Product Toolkit: Quick Proposal →
I’ve been in the workforce for a while now. During a meetup in London with the data team at Automattic, for my turn at a flash talk I gave a Brief Unabridged Resume, writing out my full professional timeline on post-it notes laid out on the wall of an AirBNB in Westminster. It took about … Continue reading Advice to My Younger Self: Always Ask →
I’ve had the good fortune of getting a lot of advice from folks who are farther along in their careers – either greater velocity, higher heights, more reps on the work, really a diverse crew of mentors and advisors. During one of these conversations I was given the advice, to shift my thinking when it … Continue reading Incentives: Invisible and Important →
Did you know I had a whole career in specialty coffee before I became part of the tech industry? It’s true – I trained hundreds of baristas, some of them competitors (barista competitions are a thing!), opened a number of cafes, developed a whole multi-course curriculum, I also kind of interestingly in retrospect did some … Continue reading Don’t Taste One Coffee →
“Oh, that project is behind because Platform Widgets doesn’t talk to us.” As humans, we do this thing, where we ascribe people-ness to things that aren’t people, and we talk about those things in ways that we would talk about other people. Pets are a great example of this – and wild animals too, but … Continue reading Teams Don’t Talk, People Do →
There are these three ideas that are coming together for me right now. We’ve talked about the importance of novel intersections before – how as you explore different areas, texts, content, relationships, you find places where they approach the same problem in different ways, or you find a similar perspective being represented in unexpected ways … Continue reading Trombone Oil & Picking Good…
When I first heard that the CEO of AirBNB, Brian Chesky, had eliminated the Product Management role, and transitioned that department whole cloth into Product Marketers, I was surprised – and skeptical. Surprised in part because, AirBNB is a company whose product folks have had a serious impact on me and my own product practice … Continue reading The Time Brian Chesky Scared Me So Bad I Bought A…
Immediately following grad school (I studied Philosophy at SUNY Binghamton), I spent a year in the City of Binghamton, working as an AmeriCorps community organizer. It was a tough job. I commuted that year exclusively by bicycle. The pay for an AmeriCorps organizer at that time was the median income of the community where we … Continue reading Forming, Norming, Storming, Performing →