Discover great authors from HEY World

Accessibility on the internet

Curb cuts are the canonical example of how building products with accessibility in mind ultimately makes life better for everyone. It's not just about making a special accommodation for people with permanent disabilities. There are also knock on effects for people with: • "temporary" disabilities (like being on crutches) • situational ...

The Chinese finger trap model of life

The more you want to get something out of life, the less likely you are to get it. Just like a Chinese finger trap. The harder you pull your fingers to get them out, the more stuck they get.

Who Goes Nazi (by Dr. Seuss)

Readwise Reader is an incredible app. It's coming out of private beta this week and if you read on the internet (if you're reading this, that probably means you) you should give it a try. It's made saving, managing, highlighting, and remixing everything I read for work and pleasure much easier and MUCH more fun. RSS, newsletters, PDFs,...

Magic is real, but it's not special

The most unrealistic part of fantasy stories is that there are people in them who think magic is amazing or special. Anyone who has: • graduated from school • taken out a loan • gotten married • had a kid • used a passport has done magic. What did you think you were doing when you imbued your sigil on a piece of parchment with special ...

Telling the truth like a standup comedian

Alan Watts was a translator of Eastern philosophy to Western audiences. There were many who did the same, but what took him to another level was that we talked philosophy like a standup comedian. He described deep truths the way a Jerry Seinfeld crafts jokes. Masterfully using tension. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxDNW...

Want to see a parasocial relationship in action?

Check out this video of a fan talking about catching Aaron Judge's 60th home run ball. At 0:53 a reporter asks "Do you have any expectations about catching the ball and receiving anything in return?" Michael, the fan gets visibly emotional and replies, "No." "Just wanted to give him back...it's a success story...so any way I could give...

Trust the audience

A post by Sheila O'Malley reminded me of a subtle lesson from my theater days: "It's for the audience to decide." Most people get into something (theater, product, engineering, history, philosophy, sports) because it moves them in some way and they want to bring that feeling to others. But you can't feel it for the audience/reader/list...

3/4 of a McBoatface

The Ulster County Board of Elections has 3/4 of a McBoatface on their hands. 1. Participatory poll or contest 2. Entry that is within the rules but not what the admins intended, yet captures the spirit of the contest 3. Entry goes viral 4. Admins accept and celebrate the winner Much attention is paid to the way in which internet mobs c...

i learned a new word today: sophistry

👆what most cross-functional planning meetings can feel like i love the way ideas collide on twitter. Ted Gioia wrote about sophistry in his newsletter and it clarified something in the impact/execution/optics framework that Shreyas Doshi talks about: it's not about moral judgements (impact = good, optics = bad) it's about what the PM v...

A great goal to have as a leader is to make yourself "dispensible"

There are so many problems to solve in any organization. It’s exciting to jump in, identify something that needs to solving, and fix it in your own unique way. But there’s a common trap (one I’ve fallen into several times): creating a Values Oasis. Will Larson gives an example of a Values Oasis: ““A few years ago, I heard an apocryphal...

Implementing Shape Up

This is a repost from May 2020. I've moved on from this job, but the lessons still ring true. Below is a summary (if you can call 2,600 words a "summary") of how my development team and I used some of the ideas from Basecamp's Shape Up to improve our process. If you'd like a summary of all the techniques in Shape Up, here's a good one ...

On understanding second order effects

Dunking on politicians is easy because everyone can agree that although they are given a lot of power, they almost never know what they're talking about. Putting aside truly malignant politicians, they can seem like Lenny from Of Mice and Men: powerful, meaning well, but ultimately ignorant of the ramifications of their power. The appr...

You do not need product management experience to be a product manager

It can seem like there's a catch-22 when trying to break into product. You feel like you won't get an opportunity to do product if you don't have any product experience and you can't get any product experience if you aren't given an opportunity to do product. But it only seems like a catch-22 if you make an incorrect assumption. The tr...

On Imposter Syndrome

This tweet from Visakanv resonated with me. However you do it, preventing imposter syndrome from being a significant factor in your thinking and doing is one of the most important things you can do for your friendships, career, and life in general. It was for me. This goes beyond the quaint realization that EVERYONE from the new kid in...

It always goes both ways

You can call it privilege. You can call it utopianism. You can call it self-regard. Whatever you call it, people have a blind spot that I see pop up over and over again. We tend to view our relationship with the world as a one-way street, when it actually goes in both directions. For whatever reason (egotism? present bias?), it's easy ...

Ted Lasso: The second season is actually good

If you haven't seen Ted Lasso yet, I envy you. You have a fantastic experience to look forward to. The premise is somewhat silly and simple (which makes sense because it's based on a series of commercials promoting Premier League Football in the United States). An American football coach becomes the coach for a British football (i.e. s...

Having it both ways

Uncontroversial statement: Steven Spielberg is a pretty good director. He is good at making movies, but his genius lies in two other things he does consistently well: 1. He hires John Williams to score every film. 2. In his films, he leans into themes that resonate with the zeitgeist of the time in some way. He can see something that’s...

Be the Customer's Advocate

As a product manager, I am constantly trying to explain what exactly a product manager does (sometimes I feel like saying a PM's job responsibility is explaining what exactly they do). But the main job of a PM, the sine qua non of their job responsibilities is to understand, and speak on behalf of, the customer. The customer isn't in t...

Infotainment

The first note I always got in my college playwrighting class was “where’s the conflict?” This makes sense for stories. Stories without conflict lack tension, they don't build to anything, there's no mystery. There's a word for stories with no conflict: "boring." Stories are useful for communication, so it's makes sense that news repor...

Starving on eating menus

Alan Watts was an American philosopher & popularizer of Buddhism and Taoism in the 1960s. I was really into him in my 20s and one thing he talked about that has stuck with me was this phrase: ““We’ve run into a cultural situation where we’ve confused the symbol with the physical reality; the money with the wealth; and the menu with the...