I enjoyed David Pereira’s breakdown of The Three Phases of Product Managers—and not just because he got me with his jazz reference. The third phase:

A Product Manager acting as a Jazz Player will set the context, and team members will build upon it. They relentlessly search for opportunities to create something innovative and outstanding. This scenario is more or less like the following:

• Context: Product Managers bring the proper context to the team. Goal, audience, value proposition, objectives, and strategy. The team can help sharpen the context, and that sets the playing field.
• Uncovering Opportunities: Everyone in the team has the same voice. They bring potential opportunities and evaluate whether it’s worth investing in them.
• Learning: Curiosity is what drives them. As in Jazz, the team isn’t afraid to try solutions as fast as possible. They improvise and don’t fear embarrassment, but they’re scared of not learning fast enough.

I also agree with David that the most difficult part about growing into a product leader is the shift from “Conductor” to “Jazz Player” (in the model he shares in the post). And among those attributes, context is the hardest, and remains something I am constantly trying to get better at.

Synthesizing information and providing the necessary context to our teams about projects or decisions take longer upfront, so many leaders skip that part because they have so many other things vying for their attention. But the problem is that if you don’t do that work upfront you’re only going to have to do it later—and in a more time-consuming way. The team will have questions, there will be lots of back-and-forth, and they will likely also be frustrated by the lack of clarity in their work. So don’t skip that part. Don’t just say “here’s what we’re doing”, say “here’s what we’re doing, here’s why we’re doing it, and here’s the data that supports why we’re doing it.”

Ben Balter puts it this way in his excellent article Leaders Show Their Work:

As the ones with that missing context, leaders sometimes naively or inadvertently assume that all that’s required for a change to take effect is to communicate the thing that’s changed, but humans are not servers. Unlike deploying a change to a codebase, a diff isn’t sufficient to truly realize what’s intended. Engaged humans rightfully seek to understand how and why the change came to be and often want to double check their leaders’ work to fully understand how it impacts their own.

• Surreal Animal Mashups by Ingo Lindmeier. This one lives up to the title.
• Interesting research on Time Savings When Working from Home and what we’re spending that extra time on. It’s mostly for more work! “The average daily time savings when working from home is 72 minutes in our sample. […] Workers allocate 40 percent of their time savings to their jobs and about 11 percent to caregiving activities.”
• See also: Why 2023 Could Finally Be the Year of the 4-Day Workweek. “Among the reporting countries in the 4 Day Week study, revenues rose an average of 8.14% and increased a whopping 37.55% in comparison with the same period the previous year.”
• But then also see: Job searching and interviewing is a nightmare — and only getting worse. “It’s important to remember that if a company’s hiring process feels off, working there might feel off, too.”
• I’m never relinquishing my closet of DVDs. I can definitely relate—it’s why I still buy vinyl and CDs. “Unless you have a physical disc in hand, you really don’t have control over what happens to it.”
• Wonders of Street View. Weird things picked up by Google Street View. Easy to get way too lost in these.
• I’ve been spending more time on Mastodon now that Ivory is available for iOS. It’s a wonderful app and it’s really fun over there. Come join us!

In his article Engineering Maturity Model Mike Fisher shares how he thinks about the importance of different team capabilities when building software organizations. Despite how some maturity models—such as the Capability Maturity Model (CMM)—have been misused in the past, Mike encourages us to look past the process and focus on the principles. Here’s the important part:

[The layers] aren’t stages in that you’re never really finished with any of them but you do need to have the ones at the base stronger and more developed than the ones further up or else you are certain to run into problems. […]

While I do think of this kind of like a maturity model, they are not stages that one achieves and moves on from. These are areas that one must keep returning to and keep investing in, always from the bottom up. Getting over your skis and investing too much in the top, which is very tempting for startups, is fraught. Too many product development teams without continued investment in the infrastructure or deployment pipeline can slow everyone down, proving Brooks’s Law. The important task for Engineering leaders is to determine when and how much investment gets made into each of these layers.

To put it another way, if the base of your infrastructure and deployment pipeline is shaky, an increased focus on product development is eventually going to bring the whole house down. Click through to the article to see Mike’s full model.

Sometimes the internet seems to think about the same things at the same time. Last week we were all in on meetings (see here, here, here, and here), and this week we’re all talking about distractions. Here are three excellent articles about this topic that all came across my feeds this week.

First, there is a new interview with the father of deep work, Cal Newport (NYT gift article link). He talks about context switching and “slow productivity”—and it’s really good:

I’m trying to develop this notion of productivity that’s based on, at the large time scales, the production of things you’re proud of and that have high impact, but on the small time scale, there’s periods where you’re doing very little. […] So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.

Matt Reynolds has a catchy title in Wired: Easily Distracted? You Need to Think Like a Medieval Monk. It’s a fun exploration of how medieval monks were, as he calls them, “the original LinkedIn power users” who kept trying to one-up each other with how distraction-free they were living:

These kinds of stories reminded monks just how hard it was to stay focused. They weren’t expected to be concentration machines. They too would come up short every now and then. “Acknowledging that upfront is a kind of compassion,” says Kreiner. “Monks are really good at being compassionate to each other, and to how hard it was to really follow through on stuff.” Freeing ourselves from distraction is really difficult. We don’t have to feel awful about not always matching up to our lofty goals.

And finally, in a short read Mandy Brown talks about the importance of Between-time:

We live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.

If I had to find a thread through all these pieces, it would be this:

• Not every moment needs to be filled with work that produces output. Cal Newport calls this working at a natural pace: “one with more variability in intensity than the always-on pace to which we’ve become accustomed.”
• Everyone gets distracted. Have some grace for yourself, and others. And try to distinguish between “distractions” (filling time with stuff) and “between-time”—those real breaks that we all need but get so little of.

This is a wonderful essay by Vivianne Castillo that encourages designers to hold fast to the belief that things could be better for users—and for themselves. From The one thing missing from UX today? Hope:

Today, it’s clear that many designers are feeling overwhelmed, disillusioned, and even unsafe within their organizations—and design leaders are recognizing that conversations around burnout and stress aren’t quite cutting it. I’ve found a deep sense of comfort in the words of American activist, grassroots organizer, and abolitionist Mariame Kaba: “Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion…Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” 

Kaba’s quote is a reminder that the answer to feeling hopeless isn’t toxic positivity or forced optimism. The answer is to make our engagement with hope a discipline because of what’s at stake if we don’t: namely that designers will begin to believe that a better future is not possible within our lifetime.

She goes on to provide examples of how to uphold a comittment to hope in creative, human-centered ways, specifically as it relates to values of belonging, integrity, and power.

Every few days I post some links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on this blog. Use it to fill your reading queue with interesting stuff.

• The Most Ridiculous and Weird Tech Gadgets From the Last 25 Years. “The Hushme was a ‘voice mask’ intended to let you make phone calls without bothering anyone.”
• Between-time by Mandy Brown. “We live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other activities—the scrolling, swiping, tapping of managing a never-ending stream of notifications, of things coming at us that need doing. All that stuff means moments of absolutely nothing—of a gap, of an interval, of a beautiful absence—are themselves absent, missing, abolished.”
• Movie Trailers Keep Tweaking Well-Known Songs. The Tactic Is Working. (NYT gift article link) “As a composer, Rosen is at the forefront of the trailerization movement: He’s in demand for his ability to rework existing songs to maximize their impact in trailers for films and TV shows.”
• All Human Systems are Enormous Trash Fires. “Once you recognize that all human systems are enormous trash fires, you stop trying to figure out how to switch to a system that isn’t an enormous trash fire, since they don’t exist. […] Eventually you even start to appreciate the beauty of it. How impressive it is that we manage to get anything done at all, given how completely trash everything is, and how on fire it is all the time.”
• This is a beautifully-written piece about standup comedy but also about so much more. I don’t want to spoil it, except to say it starts like this: “Perhaps due to lockdown and the interruptions to normal service, but more likely due to autumnal intimations and a long dormant weakness for sentimentality, I now cherish the belief that the only flavour for which a grown-up should cultivate a taste is the bittersweet.”
• KC Green reflects on creating the “This is Fine” meme. “When a work gets as big as this has, is it still yours?”
• Eightify: AI Youtube Summary with GPT. A Chrome plugin that promises: “Instant AI summaries for Youtube videos using GPT. Summarize video into 8 key ideas.”
• Can Doom Run It? An Adding Machine in Doom. “I demonstrate that it is possible to run any bounded computation in Doom, minus constraints on level size.”

Every few days I post some links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on this blog. Use it to fill your reading queue with interesting stuff!

• The Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 Winners are out.
• Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival? “On an aggregate level, consumers are simply not buying music. They prefer to stream it for pennies rather than purchase it for dollars.”
• How Do Big Tech Giants Make Their Billions? I know infographics are so 2000s, but this comparison data is super interesting.
• This week’s useful app → Readow provides book recommendations powered by AI.
• This week’s WTF Link → The lights have been on at a Massachusetts school for over a year because no one can turn them off. “The lighting system was installed at Minnechaug Regional High School when it was built over a decade ago and was intended to save money and energy. But ever since the software that runs it failed on Aug. 24, 2021, the lights in the Springfield suburbs school have been on continuously, costing taxpayers a small fortune.”
• This week’s Gen X link → Remembering horse_ebooks in the age of GPT3. “it’s this fear of the uncanny which i think drove the negative response to the discovery that horse_ebooks was actually no longer a bot at all. more than the disgust at feeling like you’d been played in service of a viral marketing campaign, the deeper sense that a future is coming where it won’t be possible to reliably tell the difference between bot activity and human activity lay underneath that negative reaction. and ten years later – that future is here.”