Bart Gajderowicz delivered a great talk at Machine Intelligence Toronto about how people go through stages in accomplishing a goal [1]. The talk was about homelessness and AI approaches to public policy. I instantly saw a connection to all sorts of tensions that people endure when they set out on a goal. To distill the […]
Ben Thompson calls culture the accumulation of decisions. Assume that it’s true. How do decisions at a tech startup come into being in the first place? A startup can be instantiated with the business plan. And if you take a Beinhocker (2006, The Origin of Wealth) approach to it, you may believe that there’s a […]
A great mind in public policy told me, just this last September, that people are really bad at judging the rate of technological change and when it’ll affect them. It’s like standing on a railway. You can see the train out there. Some people assume that the train is going to hit them very soon. […]
Some work is very clearly product work. It’s work on things where the success and failure is dependent on the users of the thing. Your users pay you. Their satisfaction matters above all else. Optimizing for the satisfaction of end users is a distinct activity. Hypotheses have to be assessed and then tested – because it’s […]
Why does it seem like all the unimportant, easy stuff gets done first? Look up The Urgency Bias. Employing simplified games and real-life consequential choices, we provide evidence for “urgency bias”, showing that people prefer working on urgent (vs. important) tasks that have shorter (vs. longer) completion window however involving smaller (vs. bigger) outcomes, even […]
In general, information retrieval from analytics systems becomes harder with the degree of customization (It gets harder to find things over time). That customization is frequently an expression of the values of a culture over time. The inertia of the technical debt caused by early customization is greater than the inertia of a data driven […]
A data driven culture isn’t necessarily devoid of creativity or imagination. Just the opposite. They’ll have to be especially patient around brand formation. Brands A brand exists in the mind of a person. It usually costs a lot of money for a brand to be impressed upon the cortex of a person. There are certain […]
Assume that you’re a founder of a tech startup. Assume that you’ve achieved product-market-solution fit. You’ve nailed it. Time to scale. Many founders are great at sales. But not all founders are great at marketing. And that’s a bit of a problem because of three letters: CAC. The Customer Acquisition Cost CAC is the ratio […]
Consider the chart below: There are two series – the total number of cumulative customers (top curve) and the number of new customers added each month (bottom curve). The top curve is shaped like an ‘s’ and the bottom one is shaped like a bell. Each month that goes by, the rate of new customer […]
A digital product will go unloved for years. Somebody new comes into the organization and is tasked with the redesign. Two years and a lot of money, tears, and bruises later, a totally changed product is launched. People hate it. Sometimes the creative force behind the redesign, expecting an avalanche of applause and a Lion, […]