I came across a blog post Instrumental interfaces, engaged interfaces a while back that left an impression on me. Recently, this mental model has popped up in my brain more frequently, so I spent some time reflecting on it...
Time keeps rolling on. As of today I’ve hit the big “three-oh” and have officially eclipsed 30 years on this pale blue dot. It’s a day for celebration, reflection, and looking forward to what’s next...
The Mind of War is a biography of U.S. Air Force Colonel John Boyd, a legendary fighter pilot and military strategist. John was above all else, a curious, intellectually rigorous thinker and explorer...
It’s a common trope that estimates are annoying. Engineers don’t want to be on the hook for a “best guess” at how long a project will take, particularly when there is still uncertainty involved...
I've been spending a good bit of time in the Product Manager interview cycle lately, and with that comes new games to learn. One recurring game that keeps coming back is the "Product Sense" interview...
After 4 exciting years, I’m parting ways with Metabase. It’s been a fulfilling run, working with smart people to build the most delightful business intelligence tool out there while scaling the team from 25 → 100+ employees...
Today I turned 29 and this birthday has more of a “nothing” feeling than those before it. I don't quite have an answer for why that's the case. Maybe it's part of getting older. Maybe it's more stability in my day-to-day than in years past...
We often focus on the “right” way to do things, but just as important, is the “wrong” way to go about things. I’ve recently become much more aware of an anti-pattern that I keep running up against...
A Man Without a Country is a collection of essays from author Kurt Vonnegut. It’s a short and informal read, like chatting with a friend over a cup of coffee, a friend with uniquely lighthearted and thoughtful views...
I turned 28 years old a few weeks ago. It feels simply alright. I’m both as grateful as ever, and things are as hard as ever. I’ve written some version of this post each year, for the last 6 years...
There are a seemingly endless number of ways to make a living today. This optionality can paralyze young people, and rightfully so, as it all feels very permanent and important...
It’s that time of the year where I reflect on another trip around the sun. I’m turning 27 years old and unsurprisingly I don’t feel different than I did yesterday. But if I turn the clock back a year earlier, it does feel quite different now...
Reading
We've got decades and decades of career left. This gets much less intimidating when you have a sense of how and when to change the work we do. Peter Drecker's Managing Oneself provides provoking questions on precisely this...
Reading
The most recent gap I discovered in my PM skillset was around developing and articulating a strategy in different product areas. I was recommended Good Strategy Bad Strategy to help out. It didn't disappoint...
Product
Product management can be a frustratingly broad field. There are a seemingly endless number of mental "muscles" to train at any given time. From strategy to research to prioritization to execution...
Reflection
Happy new year! It’s time for another annual review in which I look back on how the last 365 days turned out for me. I'll follow a similar structure as last year's review with these two prompts...
Life
Reading and writing about awareness has always felt shallow to me. Personally, the only times in which I’ve truly appreciated awareness are when I find myself experiencing it firsthand...
Life
Another birthday has come and gone. On paper, things look similar to where I was last year. Mentally, things feel much different. There are things that gnaw at me of course, but I’m more content than I have been in a while...
Thinking
From my distant perspective into academia, it seems that theory is something of a holy grail in published papers. Presenting novel information is interesting. Being able to explain why that information looks the way it does is better...
Life
I’ve found that the one of the most important relationships for our happiness and productivity is that of our relationship with time. It can quickly turn into a sour one. I know it has for me in the past...
Data Science
I’ve been kicking around this notion of exploratory vs. explanatory data viz. Despite what most BI tools might have you think, not all data viz is created equal. The charts that we cobble together often have different goals...
Data Science
“Figma for X” might not be as common a startup trope as “Uber for X” but it’s definitely catching up over the last few years. My main beef with catchphrases like these are how often they get thrown around without any context...
Data Science
Maintaining dashboards and analytics is hard and only gets harder as you further delve into the world of self-serve analytics. This makes sense. More stuff being created means more stuff that can break or slip between the cracks...
Data Science
Self-serve analytics is a tough game to win at. Lots of companies aspire to “do self-serve” in order to reduce the load on their analytics and data science teams, but few succeed. This doesn’t mean that we’re hopeless...