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Printing lottery tickets
Here’s something that’s difficult to be honest about: Positive outcomes can’t be entirely designed or engineered. Sometimes they need exploration, discovery, and curiosity. These projects probably won’t have clear payoffs or immediate expected value; in fact, most of the time, they won’t. But with each project and insight, you’re also opening up new possible futures…
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Acceptance mindset
Growth mindset is eating the world; taken to its extreme, it proposes complete freedom and responsibility. If you don’t change, then it’s your fault. That extreme is a trap just as sticky as a fixed mindset. There are some things that you’re probably not going to be able to change. You’re better off accepting and…
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Contentions: Spaghetti at the wall
There are many projects that start off with an inclination. It starts with, “We think this would be a great thing to build.” The problem is, there isn’t a clear product management process to prove that it fits a person’s need (check out this piece my team and I worked with Katie Cerar on). Rather,…
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While you can afford to be bad at it…
Practice it while the stakes are low. Practice it when you don’t need to. Practice it poorly, clumsily, in a messy way, until you learn how to practice it better. You’ll thank yourself.
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Unblocking creativity with motivation and incentives
When I write every day at my blog, I only write things I’d write for free, which means it’s for fun. When I tried to write every day at Medium, I was writing each article as an instrument to make money. Even though the end result might sound the same—I’m writing every day—the experience is…
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Making a movie
Let’s say you’re working a full-time job and, over the past year, have been inspired by something you learned about your family or your friends, or something that you experienced. You decide you want to make a movie. How would you approach it? Would you brave against the odds of the traditional film system, and…
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Intro to Creative Doing, at Ness Labs
Anne-Laure Le Cunff invited me to discuss Creative Doing with her community, Ness Labs. It was a really fun session: If you want to watch other sessions, check out: Creative Doing, on Infinite Loops Creative Doing, at Sharpen Your Edge Creative Doing, at Ideas Into Action Creative Doing, at Minds and Mics Creative Doing, at…
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Priority vs. energy
At his blog, Will Larson writes (emphasis added): Rigid adherence to any prioritization model, even one that’s conceptually correct like mine that prioritized the company and team first, will often lead to the right list of priorities but a team that’s got too little energy to make forward progress. It’s not only reasonable to violate…
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“Why don’t we also…?”
The extra step sounds simple enough. It’s two words. It’s high leverage. People think it’ll bring a ton more value to the process. And it will! Except, of course, if you can’t make that step happen. “Get published.” “Pitch publications.” “Meet influencers.” Even if there’s an opportunity to work together, things stall. At best, collaborations…
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6 types of posts for corporate engineering blogs
The majority of experienced developers who responded to this thread applied for a job or joined a company after learning more about it at a corporate engineering blog. u/improbablywronghere wrote, “Finding a blog post from a company is like you an interviewer at some company finding a public GitHub repo from a candidate.” Writing a…