Broadcasting the thoughts and musings of Mikal Lewis
“When you use big words people don’t understand, it makes them feel dumb, and they don’t like that.” While this time it was explicit, I've faced the thrust of the feedback throughout my career. Stop using big words. I never did, and here is why.
Nearly a decade ago I attended Edward Tufte’s Presenting Data and Information. I recently came across my notes for the talk, and decided to publish online as some of the takeaways, particularly the introduction of a "Story Canvas" had a significant impact on my information communication style in the decade sense. The key principle of [...]
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 [...]
I'm currently writing my first book about Product Intuition. Please follow me on Twitter to read an early draft.
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
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 [...]
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