- Leading cross-functional teams – by Ken Norton
The "How to get respect from…" sections are worth reading.
(categories: management product productmanagement priorities goals ) - 12 things product managers should do in their first 30 days at a new company | Google Ventures
Jumping off a cliff is not listed (see teaser image).
(categories: productmanagement business product work priorities )
All posts by ajohnson
Links: 8-28-2015
- HOWTO: Get tenure
On life and values and work and career.
(categories: life values work career )
Links: 7-16-2015
- sbdc » Time, and the managing there of
Quote: "I thought it was noteworthy that in Max’s conversation he commented that in some professions there is a time when work is actually done. When you finish X that’s all there is for the day. When I worked as a professional graphic designer in the 90’s that was often the case – I’d have done everything I could and next steps were waiting on something from someone else so I could call it a day. But now, with the web, and social sites, and constant email there is never an end. There is always a flow of new things to do, so unless you consciously decide that you are going to put it down and do something else for X hours a day, you won’t. And before you know it you’ll be dead and will have wasted your life chasing likes on Facebook. Fuck that".
(categories: life culture time priorities budgeting ) - Office, messaging and verbs — Benedict Evans
Lots of great stuff in here, excerpt: "Just as today we make web app copies of software models conceived for the floppy disk, so the first PCs were often used to type up memos that were then printed out and sent though internal mail. It took time for email to replace internal mail and even longer for people to stop emailing Word files as attachments. Equally, we went from typing expense forms (with carbon copies) to entering them into a Word doc version of the form, to a dedicated Windows app that looked just like the form, to a web page that looked just like the form – and then, suddenly, someone worked out that maybe you should just take a photo of the receipt. It takes time, but sooner or later we stop replicating the old methods with the new tools and find new methods to fit the new tools. Hence, channeling Marshall McLuhan, new tools start out being made to fit the existing workflows, but over time the workflows change to fit the tools."
(categories: productivity software collaboration work workflow tools ) - The Web We Have to Save — Matter — Medium
Quote: "The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking."
(categories: blogging culture internet web ) - Futures of text | Whoops by Jonathan Libov
Excerpted excerpt: "Text is the most socially useful communication technology. It works well in 1:1, 1:N, and M:N modes. It can be indexed and searched efficiently, even by hand. It can be translated. It can be produced and consumed at variable speeds. It is asynchronous. It can be compared, diffed, clustered, corrected, summarized and filtered algorithmically. It permits multiparty editing. It permits branching conversations, lurking, annotation, quoting, reviewing, summarizing, structured responses, exegesis, even fan fic. The breadth, scale and depth of ways people use text is unmatched by anything."
(categories: chat text sms design messaging ui bots ) - "General Orders for Sentries" as perhaps the finest operations document of all time – SEBASTIAN MARSHALL
Interesting ops stuff.
(categories: operations process military )
Links: 7-13-2015
- The Earthquake That Will Devastate Seattle – The New Yorker
Awesome!
(categories: portland science ) - Race Results For Fueled By Fine Wine – Half Marathon Results – Sunday, July 12, 2015
Did my first half marathon, I have a lot of work to do.
(categories: running exercise motivation )
Links: 7-10-2015
- Three takeaways for web developers after two weeks of painfully slow internet — Medium
Had never seen Chrome –> Developer Tools –> Device Mode –> Network speed.
(categories: performance web mobile http chrome ) - (Science) Fiction and Design — Hackerpreneur magazine — Medium
INSPIRING and AWESOME. So many great visualizations there, I loved the combination of the idea of a narrative near the bottom that’s then been marked up with green / yellow / red highlights but the whole thing is great.
(categories: design space ideas process )
Links: 7-9-2015
- Organizational Debt is like Technical debt – but worse | Steve Blank
Spot on, have been through this.
(categories: hiring culture hr people management startup ) - (8) Timeline Photos – Polar Explorer Eric Larsen
Quote: "Today I’m honoring Renan Ozturk, climber, artist, and filmmaker. Renan has been held at knifepoint in the deserts of Chad, sustained a traumatic head injury while backcountry skiing in the Tetons, and suffered through hallucinations on Himalayan big walls. Through it all, the cameras have been rolling. With his latest and most ambitious project, Meru, Ozturk- a feature-length documentary following Ozturk, Jimmy Chin, and Conrad Anker’s much heralded 2011 return to and first ascent of the Shark’s Fin on Meru in the Indian Himalaya. The climb itself required living on the wall for 12 days in temperatures that hovered around minus 20ºF. Ozturk was still recovering from cranial and spinal fractures sustained in a near-lethal skiing accident in Wyoming’s Tetons almost six months earlier. Ozturk topped off 2012 with the first successful completion of the Tooth Traverse, a five-mile-long enchainment of peaks in Alaska’s Ruth Gorge, and traveling to Nepal’s Khumbu region to work on a time-lapse photography and art project with Sherpa Cinema." So yeah… I think I sat in a bunch of meetings today.
(categories: life adventure courage culture goals ) - People Don’t Want Something Truly New, They Want the Familiar Done Differently. – Nir and Far
(categories: design product-design innovation sushi )
Links: 6-22-2015
- kilimchoi/engineering-blogs · GitHub
Great list of engineering blogs.
(categories: blogs engineering programming software ) - The Keys to Employee Retention
Lots of good ideas on employee engagement and pointers to deeper stuff.
(categories: career management employee-engagement motivation business ) - A dad’s legacy: Warriors’ Kerr guided by father’s example – San Jose Mercury News
Wow, great story and a helluva childhood. Quote: "Oh, I had a horrible temper," Kerr said. "If I didn’t get a hit, or missed a shot, I’d throw these huge tantrums. But my dad would never grab me right away. He was patient. He’d wait until I calmed down to talk to me. My dad taught me a lot about emotions, controlling my temper and being even-keeled." Amongst other things it sounds like.
(categories: basketball steve-kerr management parenting patience education motivation emotional-intelligence eq ) - Charleston and public policy: Why gun control is doomed | The Economist
Quote: "In short, questions over guns are becoming *questions of identity*. When Mr Obama or the mayor of Charleston says that gun control would be a logical response to Wednesday’s killings, the message triggers a tribal response. The America that believes that guns make the country more dangerous—urban, educated, Democratic America—is proposing to disarm the America that is sure (indeed increasingly sure) that safety lies in keeping firearms close by. As a result, nobody is about to disarm anyone." Emphasis mine, reminds me of an article I read awhile back (can’t find it now) which pointed out that for conservatives, it’s not about climate change, it’s about a deeper belief system that’s being challenged by climate change. Anyway.
(categories: politics guns identity government )
Links: 6-5-2015
- Walrus Cam – Round Island – Oceans – explore
Awesome, need more walrus in my life.
(categories: animals webcam fun ) - You Can’t Sacrifice Partition Tolerance | codahale.com
tl:dr is a great summary: "Of the CAP theorem’s Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance, Partition Tolerance is mandatory in distributed systems. You cannot not choose it. Instead of CAP, you should think about your availability in terms of yield (percent of requests answered successfully) and harvest (percent of required data actually included in the responses) and which of these two your system will sacrifice when failures happen."
(categories: consistency database distributed nosql )
Links: 6-4-2015
- Using logs to build a solid data infrastructure (or: why dual writes are a bad idea) | Confluent
Great blog post, first I’ve heard of "change data capture" (have to read to the bottom).
(categories: architecture kafka logs wal change-data-capture consistency )
Links: 6-2-2015
- #1 Dad | Lucky Peach
Good stuff.
(categories: family life kids career priorities work )