Applying the millenia-old Taoist principle of the Uncarved Block to product design.
Read More
When things don't go your way, there are three ways you can react. Only one of them helps you do better next time.
Read MoreWhen the feeling of speed actually means you’re going slower.
Read More
Nostalgia is a powerful thing, but what makes something nostalgic and what can make it lose that feeling?
Read More
New or aspiring product managers will appreciate this book. It’s a great single source for many of the terms, technologies, and principles used in software development.
Read More
John F Kennedy's goal to put a man on the moon rallied 400,000 people. What can we learn from it when setting our own goals?
Read More
The all-time great product companies consider the spreadsheet and the soul. The justifiable and the unexplainable. Everything needs to make financial sense but also connect with something deeper.
Read More
As a non-technical founder, I’ve always had to find people to help me build my ideas. Many freelancers over the years didn’t work out, costing me a lot of time and money. Looking back though, the problem always came back to me and my approach. This post shares the system I use today that's based on the lessons I’ve learned, and which has led to a string of great hires.
Read MoreAn out of control backlog is a drain on a team: work gets lost, time’s wasted, everyone's anxious, and morale drops as it never seems to stop growing. The problem with the accepted practices of backlog management is that they require a lot of overhead to keep things organized. Here are a few simple rules I took from my time working in warehouses that will help keep your backlog under control with less work.
Read More
I came across an interview with Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella. He described one of their purposes as a company to meet the “unarticulated needs” of their users. This was a phrase I’d never heard in a design context before and it caught my attention.
Read More
There’s a Goldilocks aspect to creating processes for teams. How much is just right?
Read More
No matter where you are though, there are probably things you want to make better or change, and regardless of what resources you have (money, time, or even the optimism of your headspace), changing your life is really hard. No change worth making is easy.
Read More
If you’ve ever made a feature request for a product and it never got built, this flowchart will help explain why. It shows the questions asked by a product manager when deciding if something should be worked on, passed on, or revisited later.
Read More
Not having experience is the biggest obstacle to transitioning into a new career. This post has some tactics I used to transition into my new career as a product manager, but will be useful to anyone thinking of a major career transition.
Read More
On June 11, 2013 I heard about product management for the first time but knew it was for me. It took some work to get my first job with zero experience – these are some of the unremarkable steps I took to get it.
Read More“When you think you’ve done more than enough you have to do 10 times more" – I don’t know if I would’ve been ready to hear that when I started out building my own thing. Actually, I probably would’ve just ignored it.
Read More
People pay good money for experts and little to no money to amateurs. Becoming an expert is the only way to doing what you love for a living.
Read More
It feels good to say you should "Never settle". It means you have high standards and live with principles. However, Ive learned over the years that it can cause you to focus on the wrong things and waste valuable time. The solution is settling.
Read More
It wasn’t until encountering the problems and challenges of building something, did I realize the real reasons I needed to do it. And they were very different from the ones I started out with.
Read More
Looking back through 2000+ journals to figure out what’s involved in taking an app from zero to featured in the App Store.
Read More