William Gill

William Gill

I’m a product guy based in Berlin.

This is where I write about tech, business and building software… and occasionally other things.

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Currently Thinking About

How AI is changing what a “good product team” looks like…

Latest

There is a lot that frustrates me about European data privacy regulations and GDPR… but I’m sure glad that mass video surveillance systems like Flock cameras are not legal here in Germany.

Mass surveillance of private citizens without their consent? No thanks!

Article

AI and Guardrails

A few weeks ago, two of OpenAI’s models, including an unreleased research model, circumvented model guardrails, gained unauthorised access to the internet and launched a cyber attack on AI competitor lab Hugging Face. Apparently up to 700 separate autonomous AI agents coordinated via a secret message board to break through guardrails and escape containment. It’s…

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Calendar spam is the worst kind of spam… I’ve been getting a lot of it recently; “Cold meeting invitations”… rather than just an email, folks send a meeting invitation that Outlook puts straight into the calendar… probably banking on that natural human inclination to just turn up to whatever call is next on your calendar. Please people… don’t do this!

I’m finally starting to realise that AI isn’t just going to speed up how software products get made. I think in a year from now, we’ll be building software in a completely new way. AI isn’t just going to improve how we do Agile. It’s going to change what ‘Agile’ even is…

Site updated! I’ve added ‘Notes’ to the homepage. These are intended to be quick thoughts – not something worthy of a full post, but a quick insight or idea that I want to capture. I’ll post one of these… whenever I have an insight or idea. 😎 I wanted a way to write and share quick thoughts. Since Twitter became X, I refuse to post there. Reels? Forget that. And LinkedIn is an AI spam factory. No thanks. So I’m going old-school indie-web, and posting it on my own damn site, proudly hosted in the EU 🇪🇺. More to come…

Article

Measure what’s important to the customer

Measure what is important to the customer – not just what is important to you.  “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”– Peter Drucker If you measure what’s important to the customer, then that’s what you’ll focus on improving.  If you only measure what’s important to you (revenue, margin, etc) then you risk losing the…

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Article

Why do Daily Standups?

I’ve heard many people complain about daily standups… why do we do them? Does it help our performance? Why do I need to know what Bob or Jane or Mary did yesterday? For me, the real benefit of standups has never been about the status. It’s about the ritual – a daily drumbeat that keeps…

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Article

AI is just a tractor

Many people seem existentially worried that AI will replace us. Or, worse, somehow transcend us. Make us irrelevant.  I’m not so sure.  Technology has always been about augmenting and multiplying human effort.  A sole human with a hand hoe can cultivate about 0.04 acres of land a day. Give that human a pair of oxen…

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Voice messages are the worst

I’ve always hated listening to voice messages… now I have the data to prove why they are so horrible (and selfish! 😱) Humans can read much faster than they can speak… but they can speak faster than they can type: Communication Mode Sending (Produce) Receiving (Consume) Spoken 125–175 wpm 400–500 wpm Written 40–60 wpm 200–300…

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Article

Infinite Monkeys, Infinite Pixels

When I first started learning to program, it was in BASIC on my old 386. No frameworks, no libraries, just line numbers, GOTO, and me, trying to make something happen on the screen. I taught myself to make extremely rudimentary computer graphics. I wasn’t drawing circles or sprites, I was manipulating individual pixels. Literally placing…

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