Broadcasting the thoughts and musings of Mikal Lewis
“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”[1] I believe this to be true—and yet, if I were judged by what I do every day and not what I do once in a while, I’d be found wanting. Up until the past few years of my life, my [...]
Product management is about street-smarts, not booksmarts. Concept in brief. Product Management is an apprentice craft. It's learned in the real world, not in a textbook. It's not gained by hubris; it's pursued through praxis, applied theory, aka shipping products. Concept in action. There are three types of investments you can make to develop product [...]
When it's mixtape season hustle is the strategy. You give away a superior product purposefully to build awareness of your brand and connections with your customers.
The Summer I Learned the Hustler’s Yes. How I became a house party DJ in one summer with one turntable. This is a tribute to Florida A&M, the castle on the hill, and the one summer my love for hip hop became more than a hobby, and to the friends who pushed me there. Warning—if [...]
Product Intuition is the skill of cultivating luck to finding and developing “non-consensus and right” products and product strategies. And I'm writing a book about it.
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 [...]
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