Recognizing someone’s talent costs nothing.
Don’t underestimate the power of a simple, sincere compliment.
In this chaotic world where everyone is working so very hard, a quick “you know, you’re really good at your job” can go a long way.
“Envision the ideal end to any project before you begin. Even the best gigs don’t last forever. Nor should they.”
-Samin Nosrat
#Quotes
The year is wrapping up.
After a string of successful releases, my latest work is gracefully winding itself down.
Wrapping things up always needs to include:
- celebrating the wins
- learning from the challenges
- documenting the outcomes and value delivered
I cannot stress how easy it is for very smart, very successful people to forget this:
Your product’s greatest asset will always be the team behind it.
The second greatest asset? Your community of users.
“The brick walls are there for a reason. They’re not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.”
-Randy Pausch
#Quotes
“It’s amazing the degree to which children treat their own lives as normal.”
-Douglas Adams
#Quotes
During planning sessions, we sometimes talk about all the problems we are presently - deliberately - choosing NOT to solve.
This generally fosters alignment - but it can also shake loose faulty assumptions and open up new avenues for potential research and experimentation in future sprints.
In product management (like everything else), miscommunications can derail forward momentum.
And stops and starts can be painful.
When it happens:
- Don’t take it personally.
- Clarify your goals.
- Confirm any and all assumptions.
Most importantly: revisit the outcomes your clients really need.
This podcast about how Will Guidara made his restaurant best in the world using “unreasonable hospitality” is worth a listen.
One of the best bits - how instead of dreading the unexpected arrival of the food critic, he and his team gamified the process by practicing for it nightly.
“For natural ability without training is blind: and training without natural ability is defective, and practice without both natural ability and training is imperfect.”
-Plutarch
#Quotes
This was nothing like Tokyo
“This was nothing like Tokyo, where the past, all that remained of it, was nurtured with a nervous care. History there had become a quantity, a rare thing, parceled out by government and preserved by law and corporate funding. Here it seemed the very fabric of things, as if the city were a single growth of stone and brick, uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire.”
-William Gibson (Mona Lisa Overdrive)
#Quotes
BlueSky’s Starter Packs are pretty nifty as far as features go.
They’re immediately useful for users to bootstrap communities, which makes them unique and differentiating.
This raises engagement and participation - core goals for the product.
In retrospect, they’re also fairly obvious. :-)
Kevin Kelly writes:
“Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.”
I couldn’t agree more.
The best single sentence (so far) from “Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari :
”As Marshall McLuhan might have put it, the pigeon was the message.”
Time is your clients’ most valuable currency.
And it’s yours too.
My first insight into AI’s genuine utility came when I asked ChatGPT to tell me how an unfamiliar Python library worked, as if I were a young child.
Even if its answer had been wrong - like an ill-advised coworker - it gave enough insight to remove my block and keep moving forward.
(But it wasn’t.)
“Nobody will open a book and wish it contains more types of letters or be disappointed because it is, again, just another variation of the same alphabet.”
-Sönke Ahrens
#Quotes
“Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority.”
-Francis Bacon
#Quotes
Instead of asking “what went well / what needs improving” during your next retrospective, try giving everyone the chance to talk about how they were challenged, what they learned, and how they personally grew during a sprint (or project, or…)
Changing the framing can make all the difference.
I find myself talking a lot more about how products adapt to unexpected changes in their operating environment.
The world is messy but our products don’t need to be fragile.
Resilience is quickly becoming a basic expectation in an increasingly chaotic time.