Loud Language Modeling
Language signals human intelligence, but it's the mechanism carrying a substrate with vestiges of both bias and empathy. AI can't encode everything.
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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 2)
More product managers should get trained in the scientific method than rush to get an MBA. Here's what that actually looks like applied to a real PM problem.
The Scientific Approach to Product Management (Part 1)
The struggle between emotions and data for a product manager mirrors what happened during the Scientific Revolution. Building your curiosity chops is the first step.
Waiting at the Bus Stop
Patience used to be an autonomic virtue. In today's fast-paced digital world, it needs to be manufactured. A bus stop in Delhi taught me more about mindfulness than most books on the subject.
The Simplified Approach to Product Management
The raft of PM degrees and frameworks miss the mark — they don't help you build the EQ that's really required for the role. Here's what actually matters.
It Wasn't You Anyway
Closure is a basic human desire. Here's a framework for rationalizing a job loss — because whatever the reason they gave you, it wasn't you anyway.
But I Don't Even Really Work Here (Part 2)
Trauma is too much, too soon, or too fast. Losing a job — especially the way layoffs are conducted — meets that definition. Our brains react the same way they would to a tiger in the savannah.
But I Don't Even Really Work Here (Part 1)
Losing a job gets to the heart of your identity and rips apart your emotional investments in minutes. There's very little acknowledgement of the mental anguish that inevitably comes with it.
Life Lessons from Little League
Baseball is physical chess. In the little time I've spent as a volunteer coach, I've found the sport to be a goldmine of life lessons — for parents, coaches, and kids alike.
Show Me the Money
Almost every PM I've mentored is chasing titles or money without thinking about the tradeoffs. The approach is simple: consider what you're actually trading off between title, money, and knowledge.
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.