If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.
– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic, perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance.
– A great Longreads recommendation, Hillary Clinton vs. Herself by Rebecca Traister
Straight up bigotry
I wonder how it’s lost on so many people that creepy predators can walk into any bathroom they so choose, regardless of what they’re wearing or with which gender they identify.
I wonder why a political party that champions small government and personal privacy thinks where someone tinkles is of utmost importance and necessitates government intervention.
I wonder how many people segregate their bathrooms at home because boys and girls shouldn’t share cooties.
I wonder why I’ve never noticed that I’m a wittle girl and the State needs to protect me from the world. Thanks for the heads up!
I wonder how many Stanford graduates are still haunted by the shower songs of their neighbors since many student living arrangements had non-gendered, shared bathrooms.
I wonder how many times I’ve sneaked into the men’s restroom when the women’s was being napped in (the only explanation I can believe).
I wonder how so many people value social constructs over humanity, dignity, and love.
It’s easy to get sucked into adding more and more features, scaling our products and business inline with what people tell us they want, or what we think they want. This can be a recipe for disaster, leading to bloated, frustrating products and a diminished user experience. As designers, managers or founders, much of what we do is influenced by our customers, critics and fellow team members. To build, maintain and scale the best products and services, we need to identify and focus on what’s important. We don’t do that by saying ‘yes’ to everything, we do that by making informed, considered decisions, and by saying ‘no’.
– Andrew Couldwell, in The importance of saying ‘no’ in digital and product design
As engineers who had never done this before, talking to people didn’t seem like real work. Real work was coding. But in reality, 20 hours of great interviews probably would’ve saved us an accrued 18 months of building useless stuff.
– from Finding Product Market Fit by Peter Reinhardt, CEO at Segment
what do you call the % of users that performed an event during the week following the user’s sign up date?
– from a great write-up by my colleague and friend, Matt Mazur. This question led me down quite the rabbit hole.
If you’re making a case that is persuasive to others, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve made the case previously.
If you’re making a case that isn’t persuasive to others, it doesn’t matter whether or not you’ve made the case previously.
Product Management: Whys and Hows
Hello world. I don’t usually write real blog posts. But, I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about goal setting, alignment, and product management lately, and ended up drafting the following rant on how I approach aligning day to day work with a big, overarching goal.
Apologies that the original audience wasn’t intended to be you, so not everything is artfully dissected and explained. Just a little something I’m pondering and thought could inspire some thinking on setting goals and ensuring that they a) make sense and b) inform day to day decision-making and prioritization.
Our first instinct as product people is to go talk to our users, and then turn those inputs into product requirements. But should we always listen to our users? Andrew argues that there are two completely different approaches to involving users in finding opportunities, depending on whether your product idea fits in to existing user behaviour vs new user behaviour. Existing behaviour is things like Uber taking on taxis, Net a Porter moving fashion shopping online, etc whereas new user behaviour is things like the first iPod, iPhone and Twitter – totally new ideas and behaviours.
– Martin Eriksson paraphrasing Andrew Harder in Finding Product Opportunities with User Research
Stupid Matters 