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 [...]
Author: mikalfm
Product Intuition – The Book (Summer 2020)
I'm currently writing my first book about Product Intuition. Please follow me on Twitter to read an early draft.
Write your story… Narrative writing as a problem solving technique
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 [...]
Time is information
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 [...]
Immersive Learning.
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 [...]
My Product Philosophy (aka How I Reason)
On the Plausibility of Vampires and Facebook
The Managing for Growth Toolkit
I strongly recommend Paul Graham’s Growth in its entirety. It highlights the phase every startup goes through whether inside a larger organization or an independent entity: The only essential thing is growth. As it turns out, the tactics for what got us here are not the tactics to get us there. Pre-Launch We’re competing against [...]
Your codebase is the best prototype
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 [...]
Why we write (a work in progress)
We write to think We write because you don't know what you know We write because it's the only way to onboard others on your thoughts Temporal knowledge vs durable knowledge
First rule of Competitive Intelligence
If you want to predict a competitors future moves, look at their leadership team's previous moves. This is summarized in a simple maxim I learned from Ben Gilad at the Academy for Competitive Intelligence: Leaders repeat the strategies and tactics that get them promoted until those strategies and tactics get them fired.
