28 May 2023

How technology changed the world

Noah Smith’s rumination on how technology has changed the world since he was young really resonated with me:

When I look back on the world I lived in when I was a kid in 1990, it absolutely stuns me how different things are now. The technological changes I’ve already lived through may not have changed what my kitchen looks like, but they have radically altered both my life and the society around me. Almost all of these changes came from information technology — computers, the internet, social media, and smartphones.

He goes through several examples, and comes to this conclusion:

Sometimes technology grows the economy, but more fundamentally, it always weirds the world. By that I mean that technology changes the nature of what humans do and how we live, so that people living decades ago would think our modern lives bizarre, even if we find them perfectly normal.

Like him, when I think about it all and compare it to life in 1990, “I can’t help but feel a little overwhelmed by how far we’ve come.” And yes, I miss some of the things Noah mentions in his post—I have fond memories of “getting lost” with my wife in European cities. But for the most part I am much more in line with Clive Thompson’s thinking in his book Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better:

Today we have something that works in the same way, but for everyday people: the Internet, which encourages public thinking and resolves multiples on a much larger scale and at a pace more dementedly rapid. It’s now the world’s most powerful engine for putting heads together. Failed networks kill ideas, but successful ones trigger them.

His book is a wonderful perspective on all that we’ve been living through.

26 May 2023

Product-led growth and micro-conversions

The first part Sara Ramaswamy’s Product-Led Growth and UX is just a summary (a good one!), but the “How UX Can Help” sections has some really great insights and ideas, like this one:

While macro conversions (high-level conversion tied to the primary purpose of the site) are often the first success indicators considered, it is, however, important to define and revisit micro conversions, which measure incremental improvements to the user experience. In product-led growth, products are competing at the micro-conversion level. Analyze the conversion user journey and create milestone micro conversions that capture progress toward primary macro conversions. Also identify secondary user actions on site that are correlated with macro conversions.

“Compete at the micro-conversion level” is a really good lens to keep in mind as we improve our products.

25 May 2023

On the dangers of vanity metrics

I saw two deeply personal posts this week, each related to the dangers of chasing after vanity metrics. First, Justin Andersun tells us about The Ski Lesson, and concludes with this:

We should not lose touch with the spirit of what we’re doing. A job’s essence is to serve the needs of others, and friendship is to support the people we love. Metrics become vanity when they lose touch with that spirit.

Second, fio dossetto writes this about being mindful of vanity metrics:

Vanity metrics are easy to pick and hard to let go of. They can subtly but significantly damage the system for a long time before you spot them, at which point you’ll need to take a hard look at your actions and decide how to course correct. Fast.

Both posts highly recommended!

24 May 2023

How to spend your life force as a product manager

I’ve been spending lots of time recently thinking about and working with my team on what I can only refer to as “how we should spend our life force.” If that sounds weird, hold on to your hats because I’m going to make it even weirder by (and I apologize in advance) throwing a 2×2 matrix into the mix. So. Come with me in this post as we discuss how our biggest strength as product managers can easily become our biggest weakness, and how we can protect our health and sanity in the midst of all the turmoil in our companies and the world at large.

First, without getting too deep into the metaphysical or get myself in trouble about things I don’t know enough about, I do think it’s import for each of us to make conscious decisions to spend our “life force” on things that make us generally feel fulfilled and bring us closer to the person we want to be. That can take many forms—a bike ride, a fun side project, a bad action show (The Night Desk is so ~~bad~~ good!), an interesting problem at work… those can all be good ways to spend our life force! Being on the internet too long, on the other hand, is rarely that:

This is true at a macro level in our daily lives, but also when we zoom into how we spend our time at work. PMs in particular have this annoying habit where we tend to gravitate towards the wicked problems—a trait that makes us good at what we do, but can also be self-defeating because when we spend too much of our time depleting our life force, burnout eventually finds us.

So 2×2 matrix incoming! I think of the way we spend our life force as PMs on two dimensions: the difficulty of the task, and our likelihood of influencing the task’s success.

(more…)

22 May 2023

A good definition of “product sense”

I think this is the best definition I’ve seen so far of that elusive term “product sense”:

I define great product sense as the ability to do two things without having extensive data (i.e. without running lengthy research upfront):

Generate many solid, highly profitable ideas for ways to make money

Intuit whether a product is likely to be successful with a high degree of confidence

The detail of having this sense without extensive data is important. Anyone can get to a great product via guess-and-check. The best product minds reliably take a more direct path.

22 May 2023

Meetings are a point of escalation, not the starting point of a conversation

Ben Balter has a solid post on remote and async work, in which he makes the point that meetings are a point of escalation, not the starting point of a conversation:

A few minutes of reading or a few comments on an issue or Google Doc can often replace waiting days for mutual availability and a dedicated 30-minute block of time. In this sense, you can think of meetings as a point of escalation based on complexity, not as the default starting point for a workstream, initiative, or conversation.

Also see his excellent list of benefits of working asynchronously. Also also see Sisi Wei’s excellent guide on asynchronous participation in brainstorming, including this really great idea:

After the meeting, redesign that shared doc to become a worksheet for people participating on their own time. […]

The document should now read like it was designed for asynchronous participation to begin with. Instructions you may have given verbally – even helpful tips you realized and delivered impromptu – should now be captured as written instructions in the document.

23 April 2023

Building a music mini-site with data from Last.fm, Discogs, and YouTube

It’s been a little quiet on the blog recently, and the reason for that is either perfectly valid or profoundly unnecessary, depending on your viewpoint. Even I am not entirely sure which one it is.

Over the past couple of weekends (and too many late weeknights) I have used all my spare time to build a mini-site for my obsession with music. It started as a small idea to just show the current track I’m listening to, and a list of recent physical albums I added to my collection. But then it snowballed into something much more. You can view the site at music.elezea.com, or by clicking on the link in the top navigation. If you want to know a bit more about how it works, read on!

It all started when I came across Andy Bell’s mini-site for his music collection. He uses a Notion database and Last.fm to show all the music he has in his collection, and what he’s listening to. Since I also still use Last.fm (yes, it’s still around!), and all my physical music is documented on Discogs, I wanted to build a small site that uses the Last.fm and Discogs APIs to show some of that information.

But once I got started and got stuck into all the information available via those APIs, I just couldn’t stop. I still have so much more I want to do, but I know it’s time to take a break. All in all this has been such a fun and rewarding thing to spend my time on. I know the site has pretty much zero value to the world at large. But I love checking it to get more information about something I’m listening to—and it helped me take quite a few steps forward in my technical skills. So I’m choosing to call it a win.

Below are some notes about what the site does, how it works, and also what the experience was like for me (as a non-developer trying to learn).

Now playing

Get the most recently played track from the Last.fm API, and check if the song is currently playing or not.
If it’s currently playing, show the current time and a message that what you’re seeing is what I’m listening to in real-time.
If it’s not currently playing, mention that and show the time it was played.
Pull in the cover art and other data about the song from Last.fm.
Do a lookup for the artist and if Last.fm has data about them, show the first two tags (genres), first 3 related artists, and their bio.
Do another lookup to a different API endpoint for the artist’s top albums, and display data about their two most popular albums.
Use the YouTube API to do a lookup for the song, and embed the most relevant result in the page so that you can listen to it right there.

Top albums and artists

Show the top albums I listened to in the last 7 days, including play counts.
Show the top artists I listened to in the last 7 days, including play counts.
Make a separate API call for each artist to get their genres and similar artists, if that data exists on Last.fm.
Make another API call to get each artist’s most popular albums.

Recent purchases

Pull the last 6 releases I added to my Discogs collection.
Also pull in data about the genre, label, and release date.
⏳ The Discogs API is really great, so I want to add a bunch more stuff here, but that’s also for the mythical v2 of this thing.

Random thoughts, complaints, and what’s next

The site is deployed with Netlify via a Github repo, and it just works. Netlify is so great.
I don’t care what you “real developers” say, the two biggest problems in programming are environmental variables and formatting dates. I am thankful for ChatGPT for helping me with the date formatting piece, and my colleague and friend Derek for helping to get the environmental variables to work.
Last.fm’s API clearly hasn’t been touched in years and the documentation isn’t great, so it’s been a bit of a mission to figure all that out. Postman has been a life-saver here to test the API calls and see what data comes back.
YouTube’s API has a limit of 100 search lookups per day, which feels ridiculously low. I hit that within an hour while I was building and testing it. Oops! On the upside: I am now much better at error handling. If the site hits that limit it will now show a message to that effect, and link to a direct search on YouTube for the song.
⏳ I’m using YouTube only because the Spotify API makes it incredibly difficult to get an auth token. Auth tokens expire after 1 hour, and refreshing that token every hour is currently beyond my limited skills. I might come back to this as well because the Spotify API has sooo much interesting data.
⏳ Another huge data source is the MusicBrainz API. I plan to spend some time wading through those docs as well to see what else I could add.
If you can think of any other cool things I might want to add to this, please reach out on Mastodon!

9 April 2023

4 effective product team structures

Ravi Mehta’s 4 Effective Product Team Structures is a helpful framework for leaders to figure out how to organize product teams:

Because of the nature of product work, there are two vectors that product teams need to be organized around: area of focus and level of accountability.

For area of focus, product teams can align their work with either business outcomes or feature development.

When considering the level of accountability part of the structure, product managers either act as fully responsible owners of the work or as facilitators of the work, where they share metrics responsibilities with cross-functional partners.

In the article he goes through the pros and cons of each of the 4 structures.

Now playing

Top albums and artists

Recent purchases

Random thoughts, complaints, and what’s next

More