Check out this video of a fan talking about catching Aaron Judge's 60th home run ball. At 0:53 a reporter asks "Do you have any expectations about catching the ball and receiving anything in return?" Michael, the fan gets visibly emotional and replies, "No." "Just wanted to give him back...it's a success story...so any way I could give...

A post by Sheila O'Malley reminded me of a subtle lesson from my theater days: "It's for the audience to decide." Most people get into something (theater, product, engineering, history, philosophy, sports) because it moves them in some way and they want to bring that feeling to others. But you can't feel it for the audience/reader/list...

The Ulster County Board of Elections has 3/4 of a McBoatface on their hands. 1. Participatory poll or contest 2. Entry that is within the rules but not what the admins intended, yet captures the spirit of the contest 3. Entry goes viral 4. Admins accept and celebrate the winner Much attention is paid to the way in which internet mobs c...

👆what most cross-functional planning meetings can feel like i love the way ideas collide on twitter. Ted Gioia wrote about sophistry in his newsletter and it clarified something in the impact/execution/optics framework that Shreyas Doshi talks about: it's not about moral judgements (impact = good, optics = bad) it's about what the PM v...

There are so many problems to solve in any organization. It’s exciting to jump in, identify something that needs to solving, and fix it in your own unique way. But there’s a common trap (one I’ve fallen into several times): creating a Values Oasis. Will Larson gives an example of a Values Oasis: ““A few years ago, I heard an apocryphal...

This is a repost from May 2020. I've moved on from this job, but the lessons still ring true. Below is a summary (if you can call 2,600 words a "summary") of how my development team and I used some of the ideas from Basecamp's Shape Up to improve our process. If you'd like a summary of all the techniques in Shape Up, here's a good one ...

Dunking on politicians is easy because everyone can agree that although they are given a lot of power, they almost never know what they're talking about. Putting aside truly malignant politicians, they can seem like Lenny from Of Mice and Men: powerful, meaning well, but ultimately ignorant of the ramifications of their power. The appr...

It can seem like there's a catch-22 when trying to break into product. You feel like you won't get an opportunity to do product if you don't have any product experience and you can't get any product experience if you aren't given an opportunity to do product. But it only seems like a catch-22 if you make an incorrect assumption. The tr...

This tweet from Visakanv resonated with me. However you do it, preventing imposter syndrome from being a significant factor in your thinking and doing is one of the most important things you can do for your friendships, career, and life in general. It was for me. This goes beyond the quaint realization that EVERYONE from the new kid in...

You can call it privilege. You can call it utopianism. You can call it self-regard. Whatever you call it, people have a blind spot that I see pop up over and over again. We tend to view our relationship with the world as a one-way street, when it actually goes in both directions. For whatever reason (egotism? present bias?), it's easy ...

If you haven't seen Ted Lasso yet, I envy you. You have a fantastic experience to look forward to. The premise is somewhat silly and simple (which makes sense because it's based on a series of commercials promoting Premier League Football in the United States). An American football coach becomes the coach for a British football (i.e. s...

Uncontroversial statement: Steven Spielberg is a pretty good director. He is good at making movies, but his genius lies in two other things he does consistently well: 1. He hires John Williams to score every film. 2. In his films, he leans into themes that resonate with the zeitgeist of the time in some way. He can see something that’s...

As a product manager, I am constantly trying to explain what exactly a product manager does (sometimes I feel like saying a PM's job responsibility is explaining what exactly they do). But the main job of a PM, the sine qua non of their job responsibilities is to understand, and speak on behalf of, the customer. The customer isn't in t...

The first note I always got in my college playwrighting class was “where’s the conflict?” This makes sense for stories. Stories without conflict lack tension, they don't build to anything, there's no mystery. There's a word for stories with no conflict: "boring." Stories are useful for communication, so it's makes sense that news repor...

Alan Watts was an American philosopher & popularizer of Buddhism and Taoism in the 1960s. I was really into him in my 20s and one thing he talked about that has stuck with me was this phrase: ““We’ve run into a cultural situation where we’ve confused the symbol with the physical reality; the money with the wealth; and the menu with the...