People in every system, systems in every person. // Writing since 2013
Someone once asked me whether you can join a dysfunctional company and still have a good career. They assumed dysfunction is rare—something you'd see in advance and choose to join or avoid. But my experience is that most companies are dysfunctional in some significant and non-immediately
Well here we are. Another year has gone by. Each year, it goes by quicker and quicker. Each year, it grabs a hold of me and whispers, “you’re on a one-directional ride, buddy!” I’m now a quarter of the way through — no, scratch
We’ve been asking the wrong questions in every retrospective and assigning the wrong endings to every story for the past century. ‘What did we learn?’ assumes a lesson exists to be learned, and that a certainty about the world can be extracted. What if there isn’t?
Here’s a 🌶️ spicy take: I think practice at human/LLM interactions can lead to better human/human interactions. Over the last few months I've watched colleagues spend considerable time crafting and sharing LLM prompts for different projects—complete with context, examples, and success
In " Identifying Signals of Expertise ", I ended up cutting almost 2000 words to keep things succinct and focused. But that stuff was useful! If you're looking to upskill your interviewing skills further and dive deeper into identifying signals of expertise, read on; I've included
One of the most useful questions I've used for evaluating expertise during a hiring interview is: Tell me about a time when you did something you thought was right, and later it turned out to be a mistake. That kicks off a series of additional questions and followups:
I spent two weeks testing if AI tools could handle real marketing work and replace me. Working with 8 years of data, I found they're great at tedious tasks and terrible at finding meaningful insights in messy data. Bottom line: they're powerful assistants but poor agents.
What marketing teams and agencies can learn from healthcare's use of risk-based contracting, how that drives outcomes and innovation, and on creating a contracting model where everyone wins if the business grows, no one gets paid just for showing up.
Is being able to read a historical anomaly? Thoughts on tacit knowledge as intellectual dark matter, changes to information-seeking behavior, Star Wars, and why post-literacy is probably going to happen and what that means.
In ten years of public reading and writing, last year was an outlier. I wrote almost nothing public last year, and read the least since I starting tracking it in 2017. I'm chalking this up to work, fatherhood, and training. Work: I wrote a lot this year and
What a year it’s been! Eight months since the year ended and I’m just now catching up on my reflections. I’m closer to ‘books read in 2024’ than I am to 2023. It took a while to write this because last year
Have you ever wondered what the heck goes into building and running software? There's a lot of distinct "work" that goes into it: building UIs, writing algorithms, managing data, maintaining quality, operating the software, and addressing technical debt. This post will unpack what those things mean.
Document-first approaches solve for the “why” and answer business questions. Demo-first approaches solve for the “how” and focus on the specifics of execution. You should selectively deploy one or the other method of building depending on the core constraints of the project.
In February 2023, I recorded a podcast with Kayla Cytron-Thaler at Canny.io about the role of product management, building products from scratch, and more. This is the video, audio, and cleaned up transcript. In particular, the transcript is a bit different from the recording – I'm taking
I've tracking books that I've read since 2013 or so, and writing about it since 2020 ( 2020 , 2021 ). This year, I read 30 books, graphic novels, and related publications. Top Picks & Honorable Mentions NonFiction It's hard to pick a "best of"