Leaders Lead – Insights – Medium

Over three years, I was promoted from Producer to SVP of Product. I learned a lot about leadership during these “trial by fire” years.

My “Leaders Lead” talk features Sesame Street characters from my early career

“Leaders Lead” was a rallying cry for teams I worked on as we took on leadership challenges like acquisitions, layoffs, and product launches. I said it often during the three years I advanced from Producer at Electronic Arts, to VP of Product at Creative Wonders, to SVP of Product at both The Learning Company and Mattel.

Distributed Teams — Why Now? – John O’Duinn – Medium

Why are more people talking about distributed teams? Why now?

Over the last few years, I’ve been giving a series of presentations on the business, social and environmental benefits of distributed teams. One question I hear over and over is “Why now?”.

Here are the three biggest reasons I’ve seen so far:

1. Money: Software startups used to raise money for a data-center and a physical office building and staff payrolls. Only then could people start working on The Next Big Thing. Regardless of what your product will be, creating your data-center takes time to setup and has risks — a data-center that is incorrectly sized for future anticipated traffic or with operational problems could kill your company. You could also kill your company by choosing to setup a physical office in the wrong location (limiting hiring) or choosing an office that is too small (disrupting hiring until you relocated or setup a second office location) or too big (needlessly increasing your burn rate even when your cash flow is tight). Since Amazon Web Services became mainstream, it eliminated the lead time for building a data-center. Of course, you still pay money for AWS, but it reduces the financial risk by instantly scaling up/down as your customer demand grows/shrinks — and some clever engineering can significantly reduce your AWS bills. Now that the cost & lead time for a data-center is off the worry list for most companies, the cost & lead time for a physical office is the expensive outlier that people are starting to question as they look for funding.

He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He’s Worried About An Information Apocalypse.

In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled “Infocalypse.”

How to Run Inclusive Meetings

How to Run Inclusive Meetings

22 Feb 2018

Peer review and feedback season is well upon us, and one of the most

frustrating pieces of feedback I’ve received (and regrettably given) is

“you should talk more in meetings.”

$PERSON should speak up more. They alway have good, thoughtful input,

and I think that $PERSON would be more impactful if they contributed

more in meetings.

I got something along these lines when I was starting out as a

How To Build and Run A Geographically Distributed Engineering Team

At Initialized Capital, our share of investments outside the Bay Area has ticked up to about one-quarter of our most recent fund as the cost-of-operating and improved communication tools have made it easier and less expensive to collaborate remotely.

Fred Stevens-Smith and Russell Smith co-founded Rainforest QA, a platform that quickly assigns and collects quality assurance tests for web and mobile products to tens of thousands of testers all over the world.

Are You “Default Ship” or “Default Delay”?

A couple years ago I ran across a blog post by Paul Jackson where he mentioned in passing the idea of a tension between “default ship” cultures in relation to corporations versus startups. For some reason, those two ends of a spectrum have stuck with me ever since, and after struggling with some culture change in my day-to-day job recently, I thought that it was an interesting subject that deserved a little more attention and dissection. Because, even though Paul positioned it as a startup v. corporate culture issue, my feeling is that it goes much deeper than that and is a topic that every Product Manager should be aware of and have their eyes out for — you never know when the “default delay” police will come knocking on your product’s door…

Infinite Scroll: The Web’s Slot Machine – Startup Grind – Medium

A few years ago, everyone was clicking. Today, we’re all scrolling. Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Medium — it seems everyone is getting on the infinite scroll bus. What is it about this magical design pattern that has so many consumer web companies using it?

Not too long ago, users were forced to reload pages to progress from one piece of content to the next. Web designers were advised against creating websites with information appearing “below the fold,” the portion of the page. This means underneath what is displayed on the screen.

What is Ambient Computing? – Narain Jashanmal – Medium

Photo by Sebastien Gabriel on Unsplash

Perhaps it’s easiest to start by saying what it isn’t. It’s not simply another name for the Internet of Things (IOT) — though there are aspects of IOT that embody Ambient Computing.

Nor is it a revolution. Rather, it is guided evolution — making conscious choices about the direction in which we want to see computing go. The definition of computing that we’re working with here being a broad one that encompasses hardware, software, user experience and human machine interaction.

Stitching Prototypes – EightShapes – Medium

Demoing a User’s Journey Spanning Many In-Flight Products

I once worked with a Head of Design responsible for all the native apps for a large bank during their formative period leading to a design system. In my career, I’ve never met someone who could demo his team’s emerging work better than he could.

He was the quintessential “Minuteman” able to demo any project on a minute’s notice.

Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You

The ancient Stoic philosophers like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus regularly conducted an exercise known as a premeditatio malorum, which translates to a “premeditation of evils.”1

The goal of this exercise was to envision the negative things that could happen in life. For example, the Stoics would imagine what it would be like to lose their job and become homeless or to suffer an injury and become paralyzed or to have their reputation ruined and lose their status in society.

The big secret of small improvements

Photo by James Wainscoat

A small improvement on its own is insignificant, but together they make a huge impact.

Every other Monday, we stop everything we’re doing and devote our day to make our product just a bit better. All startups have more work to do than available resources and having focus is the most important thing. However, this often leads to neglecting the small details of their product.

Why Decentralization Matters – Chris Dixon – Medium

The first two eras of the internet

During the first era of the internet — from the 1980s through the early 2000s — internet services were built on open protocols that were controlled by the internet community. This meant that people or organizations could grow their internet presence knowing the rules of the game wouldn’t change later on. Huge web properties were started during this era including Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. In the process, the importance of centralized platforms like AOL greatly diminished.

What I wish I knew when I became CTO – SketchDeck developer blog – Medium

Over the last four years I’ve been the CTO at SketchDeck and now, as I leave and hand the reins onto the team, I wanted to reflect on the experience and what I wish I’d known at the start.

It’s been a wild and wonderful experience. Founding a startup is an upside-down version of traditional employment: initially you’ve no idea if the company will take off nor if it’ll ever turn into a full-time job, then as it grows you keep on being thrust into new and different jobs. It’s reasonably common to end up doing jobs you’ve never done before. You can accumulate responsibility faster than you can learn how to harness it.

The data-driven corporation – Hacker Noon

A self-service data insights platform for employees and other components of the ‘data-driven culture’

picture: pixabay

Modern companies are typically overloaded with large volumes of heterogeneous data, from multiple sources.

They make significant investments on technologies and architectures such as data marts, data warehouses, data lakes and operational data stores with sophisticated Business Intelligence, Analytics and Predictive systems on top.

Nevertheless, data & technology does not ensure better decisions unless an additional component is added to the mix: the data-driven culture.

Progressing from tech to leadership

I’ve been a technical person all my life. I started doing vulnerability research in the late 1990s – and even today, when I’m not fiddling with CNC-machined robots or making furniture, I’m probably clobbering together a fuzzer or writing a book about browser protocols and APIs. In other words, I’m a geek at heart.

My career is a different story. Over the past two decades and a change, I went from writing CGI scripts and setting up WAN routers for a chain of shopping malls, to doing pentests for institutional customers, to designing a series of network monitoring platforms and handling incident response for a big telco, to building and running the product security org for one of the largest companies in the world. It’s been an interesting ride – and now that I’m on the hook for the well-being of about 100 folks across more than a dozen subteams around the world, I’ve been thinking a bit about the lessons learned along the way.

The two laws of building products – The Startup – Medium

1. If you can’t sell it, don’t build it
2. If you can’t build it, don’t sell it

The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business, says MIT’s Bill Aulet, is a paying customer. But that’s not a sufficient requirement for a good business; instead, to use IDEO’s Tim Brown as a guide, we need to apply a ‘design thinking’ approach, finding the sweet spot of what is desirable to customers, technically feasible and commercially viable. Then we need to sell it, keep selling it and sell it some more.

Directly Responsible Individuals

The context behind the Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) is found in a lesson learned from Steve Jobs. Steve had a habit of making sure someone was responsible for each item on any meeting agenda, so everybody knew who is responsible.

“Any effective meeting at Apple will have an action list,” says a former employee. “Next to each action item will be the DRI.” A common phrase heard around Apple when someone is trying to learn the right contact on a project: “Who’s the DRI on that?”

(more…)

Your company’s Slack is probably sexist

Slack is the bane and the lifeblood of my workplace communication.

Here at Quartz, the workplace messaging app is ubiquitous. Our newsroom uses Slack, which recently raised a quarter-billion dollars, to connect to our bureaus around the world and to colleagues one desk over, with news discussions, procedural questions, banter, gossip, and cute dog photos.

As a new reporter at Quartz, it took me a few weeks to adjust. I got used to the always-on aspects of the system, which pings my phone any time I get a message. I eventually stopped making eye contact when teammates messaged me, and learned the myriad meanings of the dancing pineapple emoji. I liked that Slack allowed me access to senior staffers, and colleagues in other cities and countries.

This is fine: how to balance vision & management. – Ellen’s Blog

This post originally given as a talk at the Product Leader Summit.

Before I was trying to make it 100x easier to write software, I was the first employee (and VP of product) at a travel startup named Lola. While I was there, we went from a project in an incubator to a Series B company with 50 people. The first six months were actually fine, and the next eighteen months it felt like I lived in this meme:

Decentralized Internet on Blockchain – Hacker Noon

How blockchain can mobilize a community to provide Internet for each other and create a new sharing economy

Community powered Internet, coordinated by Andrena’s blockchain

My goal and dream for the past few years has been to replace Internet Service Providers (ISPs) through the power of the community. So I set out a personal and professional journey to start OISP, which stands for the Open Internet Socialization Project.

Beyond the Bitcoin Bubble

layer innocent nothing argue pottery winner cotton menu task slim merge maid

The sequence of words is meaningless: a random array strung together by an algorithm let loose in an English dictionary. What makes them valuable is that they’ve been generated exclusively for me, by a software tool called MetaMask. In the lingo of cryptography, they’re known as my seed phrase. They might read like an incoherent stream of consciousness, but these words can be transformed into a key that unlocks a digital bank account, or even an online identity. It just takes a few more steps.

China, Unhampered by Rules, Races Ahead in Gene-Editing Trials

HANGZHOU, China—In a hospital west of Shanghai, Wu Shixiu since March has been trying to treat cancer patients using a promising new gene-editing tool.

U.S. scientists helped devise the tool, known as Crispr-Cas9, which has captured global attention since a 2012 report said it can be used to edit DNA. Doctors haven’t been allowed to use it in human trials in America. That isn’t the case for Dr. Wu and others in China.

Why We’re Underestimating American Collapse – Eudaimonia and Co

The Strange New Pathologies of the World’s First Rich Failed State

You might say, having read some of my recent essays, “Umair! Don’t worry! Everything will be fine! It’s not that bad!” I would look at you politely, and then say gently, “To tell you the truth, I don’t think we’re taking collapse nearly seriously enough.”

Why? When we take a hard look at US collapse, we see a number of social pathologies on the rise. Not just any kind. Not even troubling, worrying, and dangerous ones. But strange and bizarre ones. Unique ones. Singular and gruesomely weird ones I’ve never really seen before, and outside of a dystopia written by Dickens and Orwell, nor have you, and neither has history. They suggest that whatever “numbers” we use to represent decline — shrinking real incomes, inequality, and so on —we are in fact grossly underestimating what pundits call the “human toll”, but which sensible human beings like you and I should simply think of as the overwhelming despair, rage, and anxiety of living in a collapsing society.

Share your Manager README

As a manager, on-boarding is both tough and really important whether you’re joining a team or they’re joining yours. My very short list for on-boarding in either direction is:

1. Share expectations
2. Build trust

That’s it. Everything else comes later. Know what you need to do next? If you know what’s expected of you, you can start moving forward. Have questions? You need some level of trust to ask them.

Why Calendars are More Effective Than To Do Lists

Photo Credit: marcoverch Flickr via Compfight cc

If there’s one pattern I’ve come across in dozens of articles, books I’ve read, and the 100’s of people that I’ve interviewed, it’s that the most prolific, productive and successful ones don’t depend on to-do lists, they depend on a calendar. It’s a lesson I’ve learned over and over again in my own work. The likelihood of me getting anything done goes up significantly when I put something on the calendar.

Go Deeper, Not Wider

I keep imagining a tradition I’d like to invent. After you’re established in your career, and you have some neat stuff in your house, you take a whole year in which you don’t start anything new or acquire any new possessions you don’t need.

No new hobbies, equipment, games, or books are allowed during this year. Instead, you have to find the value in what you already own or what you’ve already started.

Imagining a Better Online – Internet Law and Ethics 101 – Medium

Is it possible the internet will be a garbage fire hellscape forever? And if so, what then?

Credit: Lightcome/iStock via Getty Images Plus

“Everything is about to change. The world is going to crack wide open.”

Those are the final words from a character on Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s series about the dawn of Silicon Valley and the digital age. It’s the late 1980s, and the character (we won’t spoil who it is) had just leaped to their death rather than face prison time for computer crimes, leaving behind a suicide note, a profound voiceover from beyond the grave explaining their motive and, in doing so, predicting The Internet As We Know It:

Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What’s the Right Number? – Knowledge@Wharton

When it comes to athletics, sports teams have a specific number of team players: A basketball team needs five, baseball nine, and soccer 11. But when it comes to the workplace, where teamwork is increasingly widespread throughout complex and expanding organizations, there is no hard-and-fast rule to determine the optimal number to have on each team.

How to Start Thinking Like a Data Scientist

Slowly but steadily, data are forcing their way into every nook and cranny of every industry, company, and job. Managers who aren’t data savvy, who can’t conduct basic analyses, interpret more complex ones, and interact with data scientists are already at a disadvantage. Companies without a large and growing cadre of data-savvy managers are similarly disadvantaged.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be a data scientist or a Bayesian statistician to tease useful insights from data. This post explores an exercise I’ve used for 20 years to help those with an open mind (and a pencil, paper, and calculator) get started. One post won’t make you data savvy, but it will help you become data literate, open your eyes to the millions of small data opportunities, and enable you work a bit more effectively with data scientists, analytics, and all things quantitative.

Big Data’s Biggest Challenge? Convincing People NOT to Trust Their Judgment

Here’s a simple rule for the second machine age we’re in now: as the amount of data goes up, the importance of human judgment should go down.

The previous statement reads like heresy, doesn’t it? Management education today is largely about educating for judgment—developing future leaders’ pattern-matching abilities, usually via exposure to a lot of case studies and other examples, so that they’ll be able to confidently navigate the business landscape. And whether or not we’re in b-school, we’re told to trust our guts and instincts, and that (especially after we gain experience) we can make accurate assessments in a blink.

An Introduction to Data-Driven Decisions for Managers Who Don’t Like Math

Not a week goes by without us publishing something here at HBR about the value of data in business. Big data, small data, internal, external, experimental, observational — everywhere we look, information is being captured, quantified, and used to make business decisions.

Not everyone needs to become a quant. But it is worth brushing up on the basics of quantitative analysis, so as to understand and improve the use of data in your business. We’ve created a reading list of the best HBR articles on the subject to get you started.

Jean Hsu on people-centric management – Inside Intercom

When it comes to the importance of good people management, one data point speaks loudly above the rest. That is, people leave managers not companies.

Yet the transition from individual contributor to first-time manager is never easy, and there’s no perfect playbook. Engineering leadership coach Jean Hsu is on a mission to bridge that gap.

Following stints at Google, Pulse and most recently Medium, Jean works with technical leads through workshops and 1:1 coaching to help them get the most from their team beyond the immediate product cycle or feature release. She’s frequently writing about leadership on her blog, and just recently announced a new project with fellow engineering leader Edmond Lau, which you can learn more about here.

When your manager isn’t supporting you, build a Voltron

When your manager isn’t supporting you, build a Voltron

In my years of coaching managers and individual contributors, I’ve routinely heard the following complaints about their bosses:

• “My manager isn’t giving me any feedback.”
• “My manager won’t help me define my team’s goals.”
• “My manager can’t/won’t tell me where this company is heading.”
• “My manager won’t tell me how I can get to the next level.”
• “I have no idea what my manager does all day.”

It can feel tremendously frustrating to expect a particular kind of support of your manager, and have them fail to deliver it, or even acknowledge it. In my own career, I’ve had plenty of manager bad-fits: folks who were good executors but not good at managing people, folks who gave me little-to-no constructive feedback (more on this phenomenon), folks who prioritized supporting their peers over supporting their team.

Building a design-driven culture