Welcome! To learn more about Marsh or how social and technical systems can be deeply intertwined, in [Episode 2: What is Sociotechnical and who is writing it?](https://sociotechnical.org/archive/what-is-sociotechnical-and-who-is-writing-it/), or explore the [archive](https://sociotechnical.org/archive/).
What kind of a product manager are you? (If you're not a product manager, think about one you know.) What traits do you share with some PMs and not others? Product management is weird. For years I have wrestled with ways to explain it to other people—even to other PMs! What has helped me is to divide it into six flavors, each with its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Today I will explain how…
If you have ever heard, "Treat your platform as a product," or, "Think of your API as a product," then you might be in the business of creating software! A danger with these kinds of shortcut phrases is that they can become common enough that they begin to lose their definition. So consider for a moment, what do they really mean? At first, this may seem paradoxical. When someone says…
This post is part of a community effort to identify opportunities or challenges in the API landscape in 2024. This is my contribution, and you can find other articles and viewpoints on the APIFutures page . “Stripe or Twilio.” If you’re like most people, that represents what you’d likely think of when you hear the phrase “API product.” This makes perfect sense, as both of those companies are…
What does it mean to be sociotechnical? When something is described as “social,” it suggests an interaction between multiple people. When something is described as “technical,” it suggests a detailed and specialized world, often in engineering or science. What happens if you combine these two concepts? If you were to form “technosocial,” it would suggest the impact of technology on society, such…
Nowadays, a light switch is a common user interface that offers a simple control over a vast amount of power . But in 1891, when the White House was just 100 years old, the first electric lights were installed . President Benjamin Harrison and his wife, Caroline, were afraid of getting shocked, so they had their staff turn on and off the lights for them (a human proxy, if you will). A light…