I'm currently writing my first book about Product Intuition. Please follow me on Twitter to read an early draft.
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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.
develop a point of view, read the foundational texts
Every discipline and domain has foundational texts. These texts are oft cited and under read. They represent the dominant philosophy of the domain. For example in business: Innovator's Dilemma, Crossing the Chasm, and Strategy books by Michael Porter. Everyone cites their superficial perspectives. To be an expert in your domain you have to read the [...]
An In Progress Product Manager Onboarding Guide
Recently I've had the opportunity to work with a few talented Product Managers who are new to the discipline. So I decided to capture a few of my thoughts on onboarding in hopes that at it will be useful to others. It's still very much a work in progress, full of typos and incomplete thoughts, but [...]
defining your career
Your career is defined by your skills and how you’ve used them, not by any external measure of your progress. Continue reading: Julie Zhou VP of Product Design, Facebook How to Think About Your Career
Business lessons from a Baltimore childhood
Growing up in Baltimore, I got in a lot of fights – more than I’d like to admit, but probably fewer than my memory serves. One particular fight, at age twelve, stands out in my memory. In my neighborhood there was a pecking order. And I, a skinny kid with an undersized stature, needed to [...]
Game Theory: How a CES Announcement Provided PS3 Another Year of Profits
Way back in the 20th century, 1994 to be exact, a price war was raging between the Daily News and the New York Post for the price of New York’s Daily Tabloid Newspaper. The lessons of this exercise in game theory provides insight into the ongoing console wars between Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo. In addition, [...]
A closer look at the Freakonimics pay for grades study
A few weekends ago, I watched the movie version of Freakonomics (available on Netflix instant streaming here). Except for the film’s final section, “Freakonomics: The Movie” covers exactly the same topics as the first book in a more digestible format.The final section covers a test conducted at a Chicago Heights High School, exploring the question: [...]
The McDonaldization of Starbucks
‘We dropped our shorts to make more money. Hope you don’t mind.’ (this excerpt is a bit lengthy but I find the in the trenches Starbucks anecdote interesting, hopefully you find it worth it!) . . . Now, Starbucks was hiring hundreds of specialists from the outside, many from management positions at Burger King, McDonald’s, [...]
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