My friend Allan sent me an article about the city of Brasília, and how its architecture affected the recent insurrection (Ryan wrote the best overview about what happened that I’ve seen). I have long been fascinated with Brasília, every since I researched it for a product management article called Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery:

A “shiny citadel” from far away, as The Guardian once wrote, up close Brasília has “degraded into a violent, crime-ridden sprawl of cacophonous traffic jams. The real Brazil has spilled into its utopian vision.”

This problem echoes across today’s web landscape as well, where the needs of ordinary users spill constantly into designers’ utopian vision.

So I read In Brasília, Modernist Architecture Met Political Violence with great interest:

Brasília’s so-called Monumental Axis, or Eixo Monumental, isn’t a walkable touristic path dotted by free museums. Instead, it is an otherworldly landscape of red earth, open grass and enormous roadways, an anti-pedestrian landscape best viewed from the air. So vast are its voids that the sheer scale of the space may have helped temper the energies of the crowds.

The city’s design had specific consequences for the political unrest:

More than 60 years later, Brasília’s real-world shortcomings are well known: Its population far outgrew what its designers imagined, with most residents living in satellite developments that sprawl far from Costa’s planned central district. Many politicians commute via plane, making the city more a symbolic site than a place where one finds gatherings of politicians. President Lula was not in Brasília at the time of the riot, nor were legislators of Brazil’s National Congress, which is in recess: The protesters attacked mostly empty buildings.

This is a really interesting look at how urban design affects the behavior of citizens.

Good post by Vadim Kravcenko on Things they didn’t teach you about Software Engineering:

Although it may sound surprising, the primary focus of a software engineer’s job is not writing code but rather creating value through the use of software that was written. […] Elegant code, best practices, smart solutions, design patterns — these are done for the sake of your fellow software engineers who will work on the codebase after you rather than helping you fulfill the purpose of bringing value.

And speaking of meetings:

It’s all interconnected, and the meetings are where the information is shared. As a software engineer, you are responsible for some part of this information sharing, so it would be irresponsible to hinder it. You might not like it, but the information must be shared for the system to remain efficient.

Here is a good articulation of why I wasn’t as enthusiastic about the Shopify meeting cancelation thing as most everyone else. Something felt… off? Here’s the Raw Signal team in When meetings are outlawed, only outlaws will hold meetings:

But the long-term fix for bad meetings isn’t no meetings, it’s competence. If you run a bad meeting, you need to fix the meeting or cancel it. But if you run a company full of bad meetings that need annual reboots, you need to fix your management team. Because while collaboration, alignment, decision making, and unit cohesion can all happen outside of meetings, well-run meetings are a very useful and effective place to accomplish those things. Taking that tool out of your management toolbox might be prudent if you don’t trust your managers to use it without hurting themselves or others. But it would be better if they were competent.

Also this:

Running an effective meeting means being opinionated about what it is and isn’t for, and fierce about not wasting the time of your invitees.

→ Context: Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke Tells Employees To Just Say No to Meetings.

Via Chris Coyier I found this great post by Karl Sutt on How to communicate effectively as a developer. I especially appreciate him pointing out the importance of communicating clearly in short-form writing like Slack messages. His example of “low-resolution” vs. “high-resolution” writing in that context is a useful reminder for all of us:

In both cases, the example on the left is what I call “low-resolution writing”. There is very little context, too much reliance on pronouns and unclear references. The writing is not emphatic—the reader has to spend extra energy to work out what is being said. The examples on the right, on the other hand, try to make the reader do less work, even though it is more effort for the writer. The writer clearly has thought about how the message will be read.

This idea is similar to what Erin Meyer refers to as “high-context” vs. “low-context” communication in her (excellent) book The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business. She explains in this HBR article:

I compare cultures along the Communicating scale by measuring the degree to which they are high- or low-context, a metric developed by the American anthropologist Edward Hall. In low-context cultures, good communication is precise, simple, explicit, and clear. Messages are understood at face value. Repetition is appreciated for purposes of clarification, as is putting messages in writing. In high-context cultures, communication is sophisticated, nuanced, and layered. Messages are often implied but not plainly stated. Less is put in writing, more is left open to interpretation, and understanding may depend on reading between the lines.

Choosing the right communication style for the right context is an important skill for everyone, but especially product (and other) leaders. If we assume too much context is known, people will misinterpret what we mean with our words.

In Official myths Mandy Brown talks about how we are trying to solve the legitimate challenges of remote work by blindly (and incorrectly) assuming that the solution is going back to the office:

In many a remote-critical piece I’ve read, there’s a kind of mythical office that remote culture is being compared to, a place where everyone is welcomed, where collaboration and support is easy-going and automatic, where everyone is always whiteboarding or talking in the hallways. It’s kind of astonishing to see how much this presumed office utopia has become implicit, given we have literal decades of satire about offices as locales of poorly lit, soul-sucking, isolated work, where you are more likely to be abused by your boss than sponsored by them.

She goes on to explain the importance of supporting junior staff, and how office environments are often not ideal environments for that.

Matt LeMay’s post on how to build safety into team communication might not immediately seem that relevant to product management, but Why is Psychological Safety at Odds With the way we Work? is an excellent reminder for all of us:

Now let’s talk about the product managers who are willing to take on the individual risk that comes with creating psychological safety for their teams. These product leaders often don’t have the opportunity to step into those big “visionary” roles – not because they lack vision, but because they are so busy doing the emotional labor of cleaning up after the other product leaders who are making those big, lofty promises. These are the product leaders who earn the trust and respect of their teams by helping leadership understand the real-world trade-offs that go into actually delivering products, even when leadership doesn’t want to hear about it. And here’s the thing: over time, they actually train company leadership to be better! They sharpen their organization’s focus by saying, “You can have this OR you can have that. Which is more important given our goals and constraints?” These product leaders deliver so much value to the companies they work for, and the truth is, they don’t always get rewarded for it.

Over the years I have become more and more convinced that team safety is the most important job a product manager has.

In Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility Carie Fisher makes a compelling argument for making accessibility a priority in tech companies. Her conclusion really resonated with me:

Maybe I’m naive, but I’d like to think we’ve come to a point in our society where we want our work lives to have meaning. And that we don’t want to just hear about the positive change that is happening, but want to be part of the change. Digital accessibility is a place where this can happen! Not only does understanding and writing purpose-driven code help people with disabilities in the short-run, I believe strongly that is key to solving the overarching diversity issue in tech in the long-run. Developers who reach Stage 4: Understanding, and who prioritize accessible code because they understand it’s fundamentally about people, will also be the ones who help create and cultivate an inclusive environment where people from more diverse backgrounds are also prioritized and accepted in the tech world.

She mainly mentions developers in this article, but I’d argue that it is very much also the responsibility of product managers to make sure accessibility is always in the discussion on projects. We need to make sure that if extra time is needed for accessibility, we build that into the planning.

Further reading

For some practical advice on how to make emails more accessible, see Accessibility vs. Inclusion: What it Takes to Create More Inclusive Email Marketing Experiences and Email Accessibility: Looks aren’t everything.

For an example of how not to approach this topic, see Should websites be accessible to everyone? Domino’s says no.

Brad Frost argues that design tools are holding us back because “they require a specific toolchain in order to function”. Instead, what we need is closer collaboration:

Tooling can help, sure, but it’s not a silver bullet. To truly address the realities of the medium for which you’re designing, designers and developers should collaborate as equals to solve problems together. That means more talking and real-time collaboration and less time spent throwing static artifacts and Zeplin links at each other.