My good friend Christina Wodtke has been writing a lot of great pieces on OKRs recently. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is a framework for determining and reaching goals that many companies including Google and Zynga now use as part of their product development. OKRs are a great way to marry product […]

Continue Reading: Good intro to OKRs

A fascinating tidbit about Apple’s culture from ex-Apple senior designer Mark Kawano in this interview with Fast.co Design. “It’s actually the engineering culture, and the way the organization is structured to appreciate and support design," Kawano said. "Everybody there is thinking about UX and design, not just the designers. And that’s what makes everything about […]

Continue Reading: On Apple’s design culture

A good reminder from Andrew Chen, who notes how bad many consumer metrics are conversion/percentage wise: Why consumer product metrics are all terrible. “Other than the exceptional cases, consumers are impatient and disinterested in your product. Even the ones who sign up to try it out, only a small % are willing to stick around […]

Continue Reading: Don’t be dismayed by noisy metrics

The folks at Invision did an interview with me on how we do design at HubSpot. Topics covered: what HubSpot software actually does, the tools we use to design, the critical elements of our workplace, and what the HubSpot offices look like. In talking with the Invision folks I found out that their interview series […]

Continue Reading: How we do design at HubSpot

If you haven’t yet read Mills Baker’s recent post Designer Duds: Losing our seat at the table, you should. Mills makes some excellent points, including this one that I regard as his thesis: “In order to avoid losing its place atop organizations, design must deliver results. Designers must also accept that if they don’t, they’re […]

Continue Reading: Design duds != business duds

Adrian Sanders, an alum of the startup accelerator program YCombinator, gives some advice on what is important when talking about your startup: “Do not tell me how your idea is going to work, show me that it is working. That is far more convincing. Every idea out there has been dreamed up (save money on […]

Continue Reading: Show growth

Recently I have found myself returning to this classic piece by Michael Goldhaber, published in April 1997!: The attention economy and the Net. In this piece Goldhaber lays out what has most certainly come true: that our attention is what is valuable in an information age. From the summary: “If the Web and the Net […]

Continue Reading: The attention economy has come true