I recently mentioned how I like to draw it until it works when I’m ramping up on a new system. Clint Byrum says it so much better in his post System Diagrams are Performance Caches for Cognitive Load. First, this bit resonated with me because it’s exactly the situation I currently find myself in: Having joined just a few months ago, I was overwhelmed about 5 minutes into the meeting. The individual words and concepts all made sense. JSON parsing slow. Network transit treacherous. Changing things at the source hard. I got all of those components of the discussion, but through the whole thing I ..read more

Maybe it’s my age showing but I’m with Gruber on this one: I would argue, strenuously, that the phone is the natural AI device. It already has: always-on networking, cameras, a screen, microphones, and speakers. Everyone owns one and almost everyone takes theirs with them almost everywhere they go ..read more

Bit of a clickbaity title, but there’s some good advice for product managers in this article about making sure the organization understands that product is a profit center, not a cost center. This is the most important point: Directly tie product to revenue. One way to do this is revenue attribution. In most companies, revenue and revenue growth is tied to marketing or sales. Making the point that product provided the thing to sell and the features that draw in customers is difficult to make. Product, in this regard, looks passive, and marketing or sales are actively doing something. It is ea ..read more

I don’t agree with everything on this list of how to send progress updates, but these two points are especially important and worth remembering: Acknowledge changes explicitly. If you said a the last time and b this time, and b conflicts with a, you need to explain the inconsistency. People perceive acknowledged inconsistencies as cost of doing business, but unacknowledged inconsistencies as broken promises. I name this section “challenges and requests” in my updates, but the underlying principle is the same: Add a dedicated section for worries and failures. Be honest, have good plans, and ..read more

This isn’t entirely surprising but it’s a sad state of affairs, and it’s worth highlighting not just how, but also where LLMs are being trained: Hundreds of thousands of hours of work goes into providing enough feedback to turn an LLM into a useful chatbot, and that means the large AI companies outsource the work to parts of the global south, where anglophonic knowledge workers are cheap to hire. I know it’s too dismissive to call chatbots “fancy autocomplete” like many do, but we have to remember that this isn’t magic. The words the bots use come from somewhere. And in the case of “delve ..read more

Mandy Brown nails it, once again: One of the principles I come back to over and over is adrienne maree brown’s invitation to move at the speed of trust. That is, whenever attempting any effort with other people, prioritize building trust and respect for each other over and above any other goal. The trust forms the foundation from which the work can grow ..read more

If you’re a fan of the Murderbot series (and if you haven’t read it, get on it!) you will absolutely love this recent keynote speech by author Martha Wells at the annual Jack Williamson Lecture at Eastern New Mexico University. She describes how Murderbot came to be, what it’s really about, and where the story sits within sci-fi and our world in general: There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignorin ..read more

Michał Poczwardowski shares a good reminder about how to set expectations well in our teams: The biggest partner in crime for missed expectations is unclear communication, which means that the antidote is clear communication. Follow these steps to make sure that expectations are clear: Be realistic about the future. Overconfidence will build up expectations. If there are a lot of uncertainties, state clearly what is certain and what is uncertain. Point out what you don’t know. Give as much context as you can. If you leave too many unaddressed gaps, people will fill these gaps with their own ..read more

Thanks to April Dunford for this fantastic reminder about positioning (and life!): My favorite positioning quote is from Dolly Parton, who said, “Find out what you are and do it on purpose.” A great positioning exercise is a structured process that allows a team to get real clarity on exactly “what you are” so marketing and sales can “do it on purpose.” Come to her article for the Dolly Parton quote, stay for the Beyoncé positioning lesson ..read more

Here’s a quick thought about ramping up on something new as a product manager. If I don’t understand how something works in an organization, I do two things. I ask questions, and I draw boxes and arrows based on the answers. People sometimes make fun of me for this, but hear me when I say that nothing gets people aligned like a systems diagram they can disagree with. B2C, B2B, Platform, Internal… the industry/product type doesn’t matter. Draw the flow of information through your product, get people to disagree, adjust until they agree. That’s the moment when you become a PM that can actually b ..read more