Listen, I held out as long as I could with this whole fidget spinner thing. Sure yeah “It’s only $3, Dad!” but I just couldn’t get myself to do it. And then my 7-year old used the age-old trick used by 7-year olds for centuries: she went over my head and convinced my wife to buy one for her a couple of weeks ago.

Of course, the joke’s on her, because the fad is basically over. Why so soon? In The Rise of the Fidget Spinner and the Fall of the Well-Managed Fad Charles Duhigg takes a fascinating look at why fads… well, aren’t what they used to be. It all comes down to how they used to be managed carefully by marketing & sales departments, as is still the case with Beanie Babies:

In reality, though, all these middlemen were often crucial to ensuring that the pie was baked at all. As Osborne learned when she started selling Beanie Babies, middlemen like Joyce are often the ones who turn a fad into a sustainable business that creates jobs. You might think a company’s main function is to make stuff. But that’s usually wrong. Making stuff is often the easiest part of what a company does. It’s everything else — marketing and defending intellectual property, coming up with distribution strategies and knowing when to stop manufacturing Peanut the Elephant — that’s the hard part. That’s what middlemen do.

Anyway, consider this your PSA that we appear to have finally seen the last of those ghastly things.

I think most of us know Ben Horowitz’s classic Good/Bad Product Manager post. At Wildbit we have a whole section of similar Good/Bad posts to help define our take on various roles — but until recently, the Product Manager slot was empty. I started working on our take on the Good/Bad Product Manager debate a while ago, and we finally published it last week.

I realized that the most important lesson I learned about product so far at Wildbit is the importance of a happy and effective team, and how much of a Product Manager’s time should be spent on that:

No amount of workshops, sticky notes, or JTBD theory will help you create consistently awesome products that customers love if you don’t work with a team that is fulfilled and motivated.

That might be a slightly controversial idea, and it might not work for every organization. But it certainly works for us. So here it is, our perspective on what it takes to be a good product manager.

Kate Wagner explores How speakers went from statement furniture to unseen tech:

In today’s wireless age, most want their sound system to be out of sight and out of mind. “If interior designers had their way,” says Scott Orth, director of electroacoustics at Sound United, “there would be no speakers at all.” Orth adds that “the trend among average consumers has been to go smaller for the last thirty years.”

But there was a time when speakers were as essential a piece of furniture as the sofa: The peak of home hi-fi offered handcrafted teak consoles and towering pairs of floor speakers. Today, small, easily hidden speaker systems are the mainstays of home listening. But how did we get from full cabinetry to speakers not much bigger than a tin can?

When we moved into our house we made a conscious decision not to make the TV the centerpiece of our living room. Instead, everything is laid out around this (the TV is banished to the basement):

I didn’t think much of it at the time, it was just something we wanted to try out. But the results have been positive: we watch less TV, and listen to (and argue about!) music more. I think when TVs started pushing sound systems out of the way in living rooms, we lost more than just a beautiful piece of design. We also lost an important connection point within families.

Jia Tolentino’s takedown of the gig economy for The New Yorker is so good. From The Gig Economy Celebrates Working Yourself to Death:

At the root of this is the American obsession with self-reliance, which makes it more acceptable to applaud an individual for working himself to death than to argue that an individual working himself to death is evidence of a flawed economic system. The contrast between the gig economy’s rhetoric (everyone is always connecting, having fun, and killing it!) and the conditions that allow it to exist (a lack of dependable employment that pays a living wage) makes this kink in our thinking especially clear.

I’ve been knee deep in hard sci-fi stories like Red Mars and Babylon’s Ashes over the past few months, so I have a special affinity for stories about space colonization at the moment. David H. Grinspoon’s The logistics and ethics of colonizing the red planet is a really interesting take on the ethics of colonizing a new planet:

Today on Earth we are grappling with the fact that you cannot “conquer” a planet, even if — especially if — it is your home and your life support system. If we go to Mars with the idea that we can charge ahead and subdue a new world, our efforts are doomed. We should rather study how we might learn to help cultivate a Martian Biosphere that is balanced and self-sustaining, as is the Earth’s.

The Economist has an in-depth and very interesting feature about people1 who forego regular employment to live with their parents and play video games instead. The kicker that Escape to another world closes with is quite something…

A life spent buried in video games, scraping by on meagre pay from irregular work or dependent on others, might seem empty and sad. Whether it is emptier and sadder than one spent buried in finance, accumulating points during long hours at the office while neglecting other aspects of life, is a matter of perspective. But what does seem clear is that the choices we make in life are shaped by the options available to us. A society that dislikes the idea of young men gaming their days away should perhaps invest in more dynamic difficulty adjustment in real life. And a society which regards such adjustments as fundamentally unfair should be more tolerant of those who choose to spend their time in an alternate reality, enjoying the distractions and the succour it provides to those who feel that the outside world is more rigged than the game.

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1. Well, young men… ↩

Spoilers abound so proceed with caution, but Rogue One: an ‘Engineering Ethics’ Story is so very good:

What Galen Erso does is not simply watch a system be built and then whistleblow; he actively shaped the design from its earliest stages considering its ultimate societal impacts. These early design decisions are proactive rather than reactive, which is part of the broader engineering ethics lesson of Rogue One.

The exploration of how Galen didn’t just walk away but took an active role in the destruction of the Death Star is interesting and highly relevant to what I consider an “ethical awakening” in our use of technology. It’s one thing to #DeleteUber — and those campaigns can certainly be effective, in that case to the tune of 500,000 accounts. It’s quite another to “infiltrate” your company and basically sabotage its technology because you believe it’s ethically dubious. The really complicated question is who gets to decide whether or not a company’s “ultimate societal impact” is good or bad. And, of course, who watches the watchers…

A few months ago I wrote a post about how we build a product vision and roadmap for Postmark. It’s now almost 6 months later, and I just published a big post on the Postmark blog about how things are going. From roadmap to shipping: effective product management for remote teams is about how we moved from vision to execution, and how we dealt with the many challenges that remote teams bring to the equation. For example, on communication:

As a remote team we have to walk a fine line between working in private and working in public. We see this as a basic sine wave, where balance is extremely important. Work in private too much and you become silo’d and isolated. Work in public too much and it gets distracting for the rest of the team (and you never get time to focus). So we ran with the sine wave metaphor to create a diagram that outlines our ideal approach to private/public working and how we gather feedback.

You can view the post to see this diagram as well as a bunch of other topics:

• How we made the transition from an exciting grand vision to the daily grind of working on projects and features to make that vision a reality.
• What tools we decided to use on a day-to-day basis to keep everything running smoothly — and how our use of these tools evolved over time.
• The challenges and opportunities of being a (mostly) remote team, and how we try to make sure we communicate enough without overdoing it.
• Some remaining challenges we haven’t quite figured out yet.

Joe Tullio has some good tips for remote teams in Distributed UX teams: Early lessons learned. This part, in particular, is something I think many teams ignore because it can feel like busywork:

At Google, we have an internal “snippets” tool for posting regular updates on our work, typically at a weekly cadence. Snippets serve to share the latest mock versions, research reports, study plans, hiring updates, and anything else that feels noteworthy.

To be fair, snippets are a diligence task; I’ve been on teams where these updates were neglected for months at a time. However, my far-flung teammates have been instrumental in encouraging the rest of us to share updates, as they benefit greatly from seeing them. We’ve come up with several ways of reminding ourselves to do them, through calendar appointments, shared compilations, and as a last resort, the tried-and-true email nag.

I’ve written about a similar approach we follow in Useful daily standup meetings for remote teams, and I stand by it. The benefits far outweighs the “cost” of spending a few minutes thinking about your day and updating your team about what you’re working on.

Des Traynor shines a light on the unglamorous side of the PM role in Q&A: What does a product manager do?

If you look at how actual product managers work in any company there’s a lot more nitty gritty work. There’s a lot of spreadsheets, wireframes. Google Docs, emails, and oh-so-many Slack channels. And they all exist to research, collaborate, dictate, and document consensus on a direction the product is going. But I think if the role was titled “Direction and Consensus Manager” you might not get as many applicants.