A Validation Story “That’s one of the best ideas I’ve ever heard.” My cofounders and I heard different variations of that phrase all the time when telling people about what we were building. Our pitch was met with almost exclusively encouraging, validating responses. We had built a small alpha test app to gather data to support the pitch and had 25 or so active users from our friends and family…
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The Mandalorian is obligated to reunite the baby with its own kind. Galactica is out to find Earth. Every house member in Westeros wants to control the iron throne. You might be sensing a theme. Many of my favorite TV shows follow a similar structure. Whether they’ve chosen it intentionally or not, the main characters have a mission. But, they also have to solve a lot of other problems in each…
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Silent Craig My default reaction when politics comes up in conversation is to be uncomfortable. Even if the person I'm talking to agrees with me, it doesn’t change my reaction much. I'm only at ease with the few people I regularly talk to about politics that mostly come with a curious and open mind. This doesn’t make for a lot of pleasant back and forth in any election year, much less this one. I…
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I’m a coder at heart. Writing code hasn’t been my primary job for years now, but I always come back to it for hobby and passion projects. At its best, coding feels like giving myself super powers. But, building things with code gets complex fast. New tools are released all the time to simplify the process of building software. Still, the net amount of complexity needed to build and maintain…
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Before I read Principles: Life and Work, I knew next to nothing about Ray Dalio or Bridgewater Capital. A few key recommendations in the past couple of years finally nudged the book to the top of my stack. The timing to wrestle with the contents of his book couldn’t have been more relevant to me especially over the last four months. I finished reading it the first time a few days before the US…
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I wish we lived in a world where this didn’t need to be said. But, the facts on the ground make it necessary to be clear: I believe black lives matter, and they deserve the same right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness many of us take for granted. I’m making a commitment to put thought and intention into what I can do so that hopefully my infant son doesn’t have to think about whether…
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My “system” is the label I use for the tools, documents, and habits that I rely on to help me live closer to the life I want to be living. Ohhhh, the system. I've built this system over time to clearly understand and live up to what I am committed to. I use it as a framework for my day to day, as well as to help me know when I should not commit to something new or when to clearly renegotiate…
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When I think of core values, I think about the clearly articulated ideas that explain how people live their life, and what they aspire to. These are mine. They have evolved over time and I expect that to continue, just hopefully not too much. Every day is a great day. We only get so many days, and it’s tempting to live for some imagined future when things will be great. I can’t control…
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I've wanted to refresh this website for quite some time. The last time I rebuilt and redesigned it was in 2013. The look and feel had gone a bit stale, and my lack of keeping up with updates to the static site generator I was using made it near impossible for me to post to the site without hours of tinkering. Lots of post ideas came and went. I could have posted to medium or linkedin or…
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I had a great time going on the Better Product Podcast. I got to talk with two people I have a lot of respect and admiration for about things that I really love doing and advocating for in digital product development. Anna and Christian are great interviewers, and their segment after my appearance is really helpful too. The entire Innovatemap team are pros and have been my teachers and partners…
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In almost all fields, most people are searching for "the answer." The silver bullet, the cracked code. Product development is no different. “Scientific management" arrived on the scene before 1900. Taylor’s methods lit a match under the modern pursuit of the "right approach" to making things. A pursuit that has exploded over the last 15 years. Those of us working in software enabled products are…
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One of those most ingenious features of modern, rule of law governments is how power is separated and provides a system of checks and balances. It's a fundamental assumption that different branches have to remain balanced over time to keep a state functioning well without authoritarianism. Carrying that concept into product development could be incredibly valuable for companies as they try to make…
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Recently as Slack has continued its rise as a primary tool for people to communicate, there's been a bit of a backlash against some of the behaviors that result. One person sent their dear John letter, 37Signals' Jason Fried shared his strong opinion on the subject, and Ars Technica also released a more comprehensive piece on Slack centered workplaces from a more observational point of view. All…
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Everybody's first pedal for like 20 years It's no secret that there's an ongoing, accelerating proliferation of tools for makers of software, especially if you write code. New and evolving programming languages, frameworks, libraries, databases, PaaS offerings, and more show up seemingly every day. Some of us are energized by this explosion and chase the bleeding edge. Some ignore it as much as…
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If you've been paying attention to some of my recent writing you may have noted a more downbeat and reflective tone. The open secret behind a lot of this reflection is that the business I co-founded has stopped operating and is shutting down. Naturally, this was a really big disappointment for all of us. Rationally, I know I will almost certainly have worse days in my life, but the way I felt the…
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I've had the occasion to be doing a lot of reflection on the past year and a half recently, on helping start a business, on running a development team, on being the primary person in charge of managing a product - all things I had never really done completely on my own before. I've tried to focus on mainly on crystallizing what I've learned from those experiences, but the question "what do you…
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Among the first things taught to students studying physics are Newton's three laws of motion, the first of which (paraphrased) is that an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. Many people struggle with being a starter and not a finisher on any number of projects, and can't keep things in motion. Countless github profiles are just like mine on the public…
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We've been using slack at Haven since before I made the first commit to our code repository, and it is a revelation. It deserves every glowing bit of coverage it has received. Given the opportunity, I would invest in them, even at their headline grabbing valuation. The way they've stood on the shoulders of IRC and even HipChat to bring group chat from the super technical crowd to the rest of…
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