Seth Godin makes an important observation: “Organizations that do nothing but measure the numbers rarely create breakthroughs.” I think he’s right. While it is critical to measure KPIs (key performance indicators) and that measurement is how you become successful, it’s not enough to keep you successful over the long term. If all you do is […]

Continue Reading: Beware the local maximum of creativity

Thought of the day from Robert Stephens, founder of the Geek Squad (which Best Buy acquired in 2002): “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.”

Continue Reading: On Advertising

John Lasseter of Pixar, in a recent interview in Fast Company: “Everything I do and everything Pixar does is based on a simple rule: Quality is the best business plan, period. I love this quote for several reasons. First, it makes perfect sense in light of what people like about Pixar. They tell well-crafted, sophisticated […]

Continue Reading: Quality is the best business plan

A nice set of leadership rules by senior VP of Product at Google Jonathan Rosenberg. The ones that resonated most for me: “be a broken record”, “every word matters”, “tell stories”, strategies and tactics”, and “interview well”. In particular, telling stories is underutilized by almost every product team I’ve encountered.

Continue Reading: Rosenberg’s Leadership Rules

A must read for any product person working on a new product, Paul Graham’s Do Things that Don’t Scale will become a classic in startup literature. This is one of many good parts: “Airbnb now seems like an unstoppable juggernaut, but early on it was so fragile that about 30 days of going out and […]

Continue Reading: Paul Graham’s Do things that don’t scale

Harry Brignull, curator of Dark Patterns, shares notes of his excellent talk The Slippery Slope. There’s a lot to like in here. What surprised me what Brignull’s observation that dark patterns are often done for a good reason. In one example a person was hired to simply say “hello” to people waiting in line so […]

Continue Reading: Great talk on dark patterns

Nice piece in HBR by Karen McGrane: The Rise of the Mobile-Only User, pointing out that mobile use isn’t just a secondary use case or a killing-five-minutes use case. Money quote: “Mobile-only users aren’t some strange new breed of customer, signaling their desire for different messages, content, and services through their choice of screen size […]

Continue Reading: Mobile-only users?

Great piece by Ken Norton of Google Ventures on feature importance isn’t just linear, but is often order-of-magnitude different: Babe Ruth and Feature Lists. Ken provides a clear example of how the most important feature may be way, way more important than the second or third one. Also, though, one thing bothered me a bit […]

Continue Reading: How important is that feature?

The way to have product team members trust each other and get along is to have them sketch together.

Continue Reading: The importance of sketching in product design

If you’re a product designer this is one of the most important topics you have to deal with. Braden Kowitz of Google Ventures Design, in his recent post Why you should move that button 3px to the left: “Designers notice the gap between functional and delightful, and that’s why we obsess over the little details. […]

Continue Reading: Justifying fit and finish