I love Tracy Durnell’s blog—it’s been in my RSS reader for a long time. In Building community out of strangers she makes a case for personal sites to be more… personal.

I like hearing about the trials and triumphs of other normal people’s lives, seeing what goals they pursue and what they care about enough to write about. I gather book recommendations from others’ reviews, sample others’ taste in music, and delight in the daily wonders of others’ worlds: the cat luxuriating in a strip of sunshine, the stream in the dappled light of an open forest, the neat-looking conjunction of lines on the wall they passed on their morning walk. While social media emphasizes the show-off stuff—the vacation in Puerto Vallarta, the full kitchen remodel, the night out on the town—on blogs it still seems that people are sharing more than signalling. These small pleasures seem to be offered in a spirit of generosity—this is too beautiful not to share.

I love that perspective—and this is exactly why I follow so many personal blogs. And yet I’ve always been a little scared to go there on this site. I’m supposed to be a professional! This is work!

Well, I think that 20 years into doing this tech thing for a living it’s time to start sharing a bit more about all my interests, not just the product stuff. So I guess this is your fair warning that you might start to see more of that here!

PS. Tracy also updated her blog roll (remember those!?) and I am definitely going to add one here as well.

My work at Jeli so far has given me a new lens on “incidents”—both in the software world and beyond—that I didn’t have before. These “failures” are everywhere around us. But are they really failures? Or are they ways for us to learn more about the systems we work within, and how to improve them? I think it’s the latter, and My $500M Mars Rover Mistake by Chris Lewicki is another story that showcases that…

The core lesson I’ve drawn from my rover ordeal is best expressed in these words: Let your scars serve you; they are an invaluable learning experience and investment in your capability and resilience.

I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear that we now have brain scan research that shows that Zoom fatigue is a real thing:

The brain and heart readings suggested that videoconferencing led to significantly greater signs of fatigue, sadness, drowsiness, and negative feelings, as well as less attention and engagement, than a face-to-face lecture. The questionnaires also showed the volunteers felt significantly more tired, drowsy, and fed up and less lively, happy, and active from videoconferencing than face-to-face sessions.

Just so we don’t make the wrong conclusions based on this… the research does not mean that remote work is bad for you. It does mean that we need more communication to be asynchronous, and rely less on synchronous, office-analogous methods of communication when we work remotely.

In his characteristic spicy way Marty Cagan says that if you want to replace product managers that’s fine—but be careful:

If you’re a CEO or GM, you might be thinking that instead of trying to recruit and develop strong, true product managers, maybe you’ll just do like Apple and skip the product managers, and you’ll just take responsibility for value and viability yourself?

If so, it’s critical to understand that the Apple product model depends on exceptionally strong product leaders. Many of Apple’s product leaders have 10–25 years of experience building world-class products at Apple.

In Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business, Bobby Pinero (CEO of Equals) makes some interesting points about what they’ve learned about freemium pricing models. This point about how user friction is not always a bad thing stood out to me:

In all of our pursuit of getting people into the product, the thing we forgot is that the goal of onboarding is not for people to complete onboarding. It’s not to just get people into the product. The goal of onboarding is for people to get their first moments of value from your product. To get “activated.” And removing friction is actually detached from this goal.

Just like everything in product, this all depends. Every business is different. But it’s nice to see things from another perspective

I like this perspective from Ed Sim on recognizing that you can’t always build yourself into product-market fit…

There is no easy answer for a lack of customer traction, but my one suggestion before you commit to the idea that you are one feature away from success, is to go back to the basics and first ask if this is the right user or customer. If you believe you have that nailed, try multiple messages and keep learning from every interaction. You may have the right product today but for the wrong user. Or you simply may just have a cool technology in search of a problem to solve in which case you should start completely over. 

I don’t like the “10x” terminology in tech, but The 10x Exercise for Entrepreneurs is not that. It’s about a thought exercise for entrepreneurs as they start to reach product-market fit:

What does our employee org chart look like with ten times the scale? What will our customer mix look like at ten times the revenue? What types of funding sources and capital stack will I need to fund the growth of the business to achieve this scale? What types of partnerships, infrastructure, and geographic locations will be necessary to 10X the business?

I wholeheartedly endorse the RawSignal team’s take on performance reviews:

A great performance review is not an evaluation conversation, it’s an alignment conversation. It shouldn’t be a conversation about which things happened, it should be a conversation about which things matter. It’s an opportunity for you and your person to get onto the same page about where you’re seeing the work differently, because that is informative in terms of how the next year is going to feel.