The Illusion of Humans in the Loop
'Human in the loop' sounds like the best of both worlds. The research reveals three ways it quietly fails, and why Jensen's dial isn't really yours to set.
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The 'If You'd Bought' Illusion
Read more →“If you’d bought $1,000 of Apple stock at its IPO in 1980, you’d have $2.9 million today.” The math works out. The story doesn’t.
At $22 a share in December 1980, $1,000 gets you 45 shares. Five stock splits later, you’re sitting on 10,080 shares. At roughly $290 today, that’s $2.9 million. Remarkable! Also almost completely beside the point. Because at some point in the mid-90s, Apple’s stock fell around 80% from its highs and the company was weeks from bankruptcy. Most people sold. When a stock drops by 80%, the story you’ve been telling yourself about long-term wealth creation gets very quiet.
And if somehow you held through that, it’d be hard not to sell when it 4x’d, or when you needed the money for a house, or when the market crashed and everything looked terminal. The people who held Apple from 1980 to today either forgot they owned it, inherited it, or had a conviction that no one around them shared at the time.
The math of a legendary stock gain is always simpler than the psychology of holding it.
Feeling Lost as a Product Manager
Read more →A mid-career identity crisis isn’t uncommon. The demands of a daily routine make it hard to focus on matching your activities with your role. If you’re feeling lost as a Product Manager, one way to reset your axis is to think about your interactions. Here are three that matter — and the downsides of focusing on one more than the others.
Builder — The group that builds your product, e.g. your Engineering or Architecture team. If you’ve been an engineer in the past, chances are you may hang out more with builders. Spend too much time here and you’ll get jazzed about building a science project that nobody wants to sell or use.
Seller — The group that sells your product, e.g. your sales or partner organization. If you have a background in sales, you might get trapped in sales incentives that are misaligned with users or builders (anything to make quota!!).
User — Your customers — the group that actually uses your product. If you spend all your time with customers, you might get trapped trying to build something nobody wants to build or sell.
To reset your axis, think about your interactions and work on getting them back in equilibrium. Ideally you spend equal time interacting with all three groups.
If you’re not interacting much with any of these groups, then you’re spending most of your time with other “stakeholders.” That’s not Product Management — but as long as you don’t feel lost, it’s not a bad place to be.
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The Scientific Approach to Product Management (Part 1)
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But I Don't Even Really Work Here (Part 1)
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Show Me the Money
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Inattention Economics
Every social media feed has experts and frameworks for everything. Our attention spans are shrinking, and the biggest casualty is a teenager's ability to think about opportunity costs.