I enjoyed Bill Gates’s post The Age of AI has begun, right until he got to this bit:

When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home.

The idea that increased productivity gives people more time to do other things that are more useful and fulfilling is a thoroughly-debunked theory. First, there’s the question of what we even mean by “productivity”, especially in the context of the Productivity Paradox:

The productivity paradox (also the Solow computer paradox) is the peculiar observation made in business process analysis that, as more investment is made in information technology, worker productivity may go down instead of up.

But even if we can get to a point where we agree on how to define the word, we have known for a long time that the only thing that increased productivity does is create more work:

The usual first response to encountering the Productivity Paradox is disbelief: “If I have to write a few emails so that I don’t have to use a carrier pigeon, sign me up!”

But in a bureaucracy, the story of those few emails usually doesn’t end there. So, you send your few emails, and then you soon get email replies and comments. Now, you have to write more emails in reply to those emails, which are then sent up the hierarchy and to a chain of full-time reviewers, who each make a comment to show that they are useful.

So when we get more productive the time we “save” on one type of task just gets filled with a different, not necessarily more valuable task. But what about “at home”, you ask? Nope. We have also known for a very long time that instead of giving us more time for hobbies and hanging out, technology is killing leisure time:

The very tools that were supposed to liberate us have bound us to our work (and schools) in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Almost all of us have less leisure time than ever. We work harder, take fewer vacations for shorter periods of time, report more stress than almost any other demographic group and find the boundaries between work and play increasingly blurred. Computing and communications technologies are destroying the idea of privacy and leisure.

So anyway, Bill Gates wrote a pretty insightful take on AI, in my opinion. But the idea that generative AI will free up our time to do more valuable and fun things is not backed up by history at all. Or to put it slightly differently:

This is such a great post by Will Larson about onboarding executives into a new role. His recommendations for topics to cover in the first two weeks are especially good. Like this:

Where can the new executive find real data to inform themselves, rather than relying on existing narratives? The best executives will listen to you, but won’t fully believe anything until they’re able to find data to substantiate your perspective. That’s not because they don’t trust you, but because any seasoned executive has been burned by trusting someone who fervently believed something that ultimately wasn’t true.”

And this:

Who do they need to spend time with to understand the current state and the company’s implicit power structure? Especially the longest tenured employees who uniquely hold parts of the business in their heads, and individuals who have significant influence over the executive team that wouldn’t be obvious from the reporting hierarchy.

Turns out there’s a Donella Meadows quote for everything:

Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.

In What we’ve learned from our users about designing for accessibility Andrew Gosine describes how their team lived out one of Slack’s primary design principles, which is to design with users, not just for them:

In another proposed update, we tried to get clever about where we placed a user’s focus when they opened a thread. If there was an unread message, we’d drop them into that first message in the thread. If there were no unread messages, we’d move focus to the message input. We believed this would increase efficiency for screen-reader users. Our feedback group reacted strongly to this. We’d unintentionally deteriorated the reliability of knowing exactly where you would be when you open a thread, and, as a result, we broke the way-finding our users relied on in Slack. Thanks to our group, we reverted that change.

This is a great read with lots of examples from the project.

The Beauty of Earth From Orbit.

Google and Microsoft’s chatbots are already citing one another in a misinformation shitshow. This is fine. “If you ask Microsoft’s Bing chatbot if Google’s Bard chatbot has been shut down, it says yes, citing a news article that discusses a tweet in which a user asked Bard when it would be shut down and Bard said it already had, itself citing a comment from Hacker News in which someone joked about this happening, and someone else used ChatGPT to write fake news coverage about the event.”

One hundred drones now used across IKEA retail for stock inventory. “One hundred busy drones are now at work during non-operational hours to improve stock accuracy and secure availability of products for online or physical retailing. This solution supports a more ergonomic workplace for IKEA co-workers as they no longer need to manually confirm each pallet.”

Is Blockbuster video about to make a comeback? I didn’t realize how many chances Blockbuster had to not die. “In 1997, Warner Bros approached Blockbuster with an exclusive DVD rental deal that would have split revenue 60-40 in favour of the studio. Blockbuster rejected it, and the studio retaliated by dropping its DVD retail prices to undermine the rental industry. And then in 2000, Blockbuster made two even more fatal decisions. First, Blockbuster turned down the opportunity to purchase the then-fledgling Netflix. Second, it chose instead to partner with Enron. Within a year, Enron filed for bankruptcy. Within five years, Netflix was shipping out a million DVDs every day. Suddenly, Blockbuster was yesterday’s news.”

Is there a drop in software engineer job openings, globally? “The US, Canada and UK are currently seeing some of the lowest numbers of developer job listings since Feb 2020.”

Swimming outside the lanes. Tracy Durnell talks about leaving her day job and going out on her own. “People complain that no one wants to work anymore. And it’s true to an extent: no one wants to work in a job where they are underpaid, unfairly treated, unappreciated, and constrained. I like my work, but so far dislike jobs.”

Shiny Happy People, Being Chased By Monsters. Are we in the midst of a vibe shift back to the days of whimsy? “FreakyLinks may have been on my mind lately because I think we’re in another moment of cultural shift from seriousness to whimsy; if you don’t believe me, ask yourself why Everything Everywhere All At Once so thoroughly kicked the ass of that movie about the mean conductor lady at the Oscars. We’re at a similar moment to where we were in the early 2000s — where people are shrieking ‘I want to be happy!’ and ‘I’m tired of thinking! Give me some baggy orange leather pants instead!’”

Songs are what we carry, even when we have nothing else. On the B-Sides I talk about the latest U2 album a little bit. “It’s the sound of a band that has been together for close to 50 years starting to wind things down the only way they know how: they sing the songs they carry, even when they don’t have a whole lot left.”

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Blake Thorne on The LaunchNotes Podcast. I think I’m a little rusty with the speaking thing, but I did have a lot of fun here. We covered a bunch of topics, including how people got into product management before Inspired was published, how to enable autonomy and ownership in product teams, the value of writing and publishing what you learn, and also somehow… my favorite kettle. Give it a listen if you’re into that sort of thing!

Shift left on go-to-market to build better products is a great post by Frank Tisellano on why product managers have to consider Go to Market efforts while they are still deep in the understanding/planning phase of a project:

Great PMs recognize that building a good product is table stakes and that the way to truly differentiate themselves is by taking a strategic approach to how customers or users find and adopt their products.

In other words, great PMs shift left on go to market, considering and developing their distribution strategy while they’re still prioritizing problems to solve, long before a PRD is written, let alone a line of code.

He goes on to give some practical tips—and examples—on how to make GTM a bigger part of the PM process.

David Poblador writes about The Pitfalls of Hyper-Growth: How Companies Can Do More with Less. Startups tend to operate more with a scarcity mindset at the onset, but as they grow…

As businesses grow, they often rely on flawed indicators of success that do not necessarily correlate with sustainability. One of the most common measures of success is headcount growth. Unfortunately, hiring lots of new employees can create inefficiencies, harm company culture, and reduce productivity. When hiring becomes the only tool to get the job done, it can detract from the most important things, like focusing on priorities and managing the company’s lifecycle.

David’s post led me to a fascinating interview with Jesper Kouthoofd, who is the founder of music-tech company Teenage Engineering. In the interview he talks about why they specifically avoid running after hyper-growth:

We only want to make great products and when you don’t focus only on making money and have reached a certain level, everything becomes about quality. Right now, there is a certain cultural fascination with fast growth, IPOs and so on, but I want to go slow, really slow and think long-term. It takes time to do good things. You see, this cultural phenomenon of speed and growth at all costs is displayed in every startup, they all look the same, it’s like fast food: it looks good, its taste is consistent but then you feel horrible afterwards.

This is obviously not desirable or true for all companies, but it’s worth noticing that there is more than one way to run a business.