Author: mikalfm

There are 24 hours in a day 168 hours in a week Surely a few of them can be used to create something awesome. Why not resolve to create one each week? And over the course of a year—leave the world with 52 awesome things. What is awesome? Something that creates durable value not just [...]

More than a century later Taylorism continues to shape how we think of work. Over the past few years I've become sensitive to a common workplace characteristic: an intellectually dishonest work environment. Now the word intellectual itself comes with its own set of baggage. Associating with pompous verbosity. But intellectual honesty is personal, it means [...]

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before, you have signed up to deliver the improbable, your project is tracking better than you expected and against improbably odds you might even pull it off – if only you can figure out what to do next. This is a blog post about stories and the noesis [...]

As Greek philosopher Heraclitus opined, "you can never step into the same river twice." This post is an ode to time—the true source from which learning derives. As a product manager, a significant portion of my role is fostering decisions. This comes in many forms but my personal maxim is to minimize the number of [...]

When doing think. When thinking do. A career swings between two extremes, leveraging strengths and mitigating weaknesses. A tactic I’ve found helpful through each swing of the pendulum is immersion—an approach for building on strengths and mitigating weaknesses. You might adopt this tactic in the midst of or leading up to a moment that requires [...]

On the Plausibility of Vampires and Facebook

For those learning the Product Management discipline, Inspired is one of the best books you can start with. However, don't take the book literally, Marty Cagan offers some extremely hazardous guidance in advocating for high-fidelity prototypes as the only means of shipping software: In my mind, there’s only one form of spec that can deliver [...]