Web agency Postlight wrote about their engineering culture, and what a breath of fresh air it is to read this list in the midst of the current “hustle til you drop” culture:

The positivity of our internal communication fosters a team that is warm and easy to engage with for our clients. Our clients are shocked by how easy it is to communicate with our engineers. No knee-jerk reactions. Just a friendly, two-way, conversation with professionals.

Or, as we phrase it in our Wildbit values, “As a team, we support each other to do the work of our lives.”

It’s a bit of an uneven piece, but Peter Krmpotic’s What’s the Secret to Becoming a Great Product Manager? makes some good points about ego vs. customer focus:

The ultimate goal for product managers and product leaders is to instinctively focus on the customer and not their own egos. This is hard since it is natural to be self-centered and unnatural to be customer-centric.

In Scott Belsky’s recently published book “The Messy Middle”, he highlights how we are hardwired to prefer short-term rewards, because delayed gratification causes anxiety and discomfort. Thus, I think the main career-long objective for product managers is to reprogram themselves over time from being self-centric to customer-centric, to get the urge of acting on their own ideas out of their system. Or as Belsky puts it, “to hack their reward system”.

Very interesting article by Anab Jain arguing for More than Human-Centered Design. We need to move beyond ourselves and consider the things around us:

Interdependence is a powerful concept for me: different participants—human and non-human—are emotionally, economically, ecologically or morally interdependent on each other. And this reliance is acknowledged. I think this perspective is something that would be very meaningful for many of us to consider—whether we’re interaction, service, or UX designers, entrepreneurs, researchers or people who put things out in the world for others “to use”.

Have a look at the article for further thoughts and some practical examples.

This is a good summary of the “healthy pressure” we strive towards on our team as well:

While working without the pressure of explicit deadlines can feel liberating, it also increases the chance of distraction. Deadlines help us stay focused, aligned and driven – and can be used to keep project scope in check.

There are some great product tips in Scott Belsky’s How to Shape Remarkable Products in the Messy Middle of Building Startups, but this part about onboarding particularly stood out for me:

You can’t expect new customers to endure explanation. You can’t even expect customers to patiently watch as you show them how to use your product. Your best chance at engaging them is to do it for them — at least at first. Only after your customers feel successful will they engage deeply enough to tap the full potential of your offering.

One of the hardest things to figure out with onboarding is the right balance of selecting defaults (“doing it for them”) and having users learn by doing things themselves.

For example, within Postmark’s onboarding a continuing debate is whether or not we should auto-create a user’s first “server” for them, or help them understand the concept better by making them do it themselves. Finding the appropriate amount of friction to introduce is an ongoing and important challenge for any product’s onboarding.

Liz Pelly’s Streambait Pop is a fascinating look at the “Spotify sound” and other changes in pop music brought about by streaming:

The Spotify sound has a few different variations, but essentially it’s a formula. “It has this soft, emo-y, cutesy thing to it,” Matt says. “These days it’s often really minimal and based around just a few simple elements in verses. Often a snap in the verses. And then the choruses sometimes employ vocal samples. It’s usually kind of emo in lyrical nature.” Then there’s also a more electronic, DJ-oriented variation, which is “based around a drop … It’s usually a chilled-out verse with a kind of coo-y vocal. And then it builds up and there’s a drop built around a melody that’s played with a vocal sample.”

The really interesting part to me is how it’s a sound that’s essentially designed to make you forget about it, so that you just keep streaming endlessly:

The chill-hits Spotify sound is a product of playlist logic requiring that one song flows seamlessly into the next, a formula that guarantees a greater number of passive streams. It’s music without much risk—it won’t make you change your mind. At times, these whispery, smaller sounds even recall aspects of ASMR, with its performed intimacy and soothing voices. When everyone wants your attention, it makes sense to find reprieve in stuff that requires very little of it, or that might massage your brain a bit.

After I read this article I went through my Spotify playlists and counted how many of them had the word “chill” in it. Let’s just say I’m too embarrassed to tell you…

But moving on, I think this “inoffensiveness” in music is one of the reasons I’ve started to listen to so many more genres over the past few years. I now like music that feels like it just doesn’t quite sit right. Any artist or band that combines a little discomfort with a lot of skill has my attention. Just one recent example that comes to mind is Double Negative by Low. I still don’t really know what it is. But I know it’s something really special.