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Topic

Management

A collection of 5 issues

Pastations: Is it Time to Move Beyond Presentations?

In an influential essay, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, Tufte argues that (PowerPoint) presentations are unsuitable for serious problems. The essay is largely polemical, with Tufte freely mixing points about affordances of the medium with criticisms of bad presentations and lazy broadsides. Hilarious stuff first: 1. “All 3 reports have

Why do We Fail? And What to do About It?

I recently read Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. (You can read my review of the book here and my notes on the book here.) The book made me think harder about failure and how to prevent it. Here’s a result of that thinking. We fail because we don’t

Growth Funnels

You spend a ton of time building a product to solve a particular problem. You launch. Then, either the kinds of people whose problem you are solving never arrive or they arrive and then leave. You want to know why because if you know the reason, you can work to

Technical Leadership: Building Great Teams and Products

Companies bet on people. They bet that the people they have hired will figure out the problems and their solutions. To make the bet credible, the golden rule is to hire competent people. Other virtues matter, but competence generally matters the most in technical roles. Once you have made the

(Software) Product Development Cycle

1. Solicit Ideas Talk to customers, analyze usage data, talk to peers, managers, think, hold competitions, raffles,… For each idea: 2. Define the idea Write out the idea for clarity — at least 5–10 sentences. Do some due diligence to see what else is there. Learn and revise (including abandon)