William Gill

Slack can be great for improving workplace communication, but it can also be a collosal distraction for everyone. Tens or hundreds of channels and DMs, and an expectation of near immediate replies…  With so much communication going on, how can anyone get any work done? After giving this a lot of thought, one simple fact…

I don’t normally think much of lists of productivity tips, but I quite liked this list from Quartz: Ten things to do on weekends to make your Monday more productive. The article starts with the oft-quoted statistic that productivity declines rapidly after more than 55 hours per week: So if you’re not working all through the…

Access to high quality resources for product management is better than ever before. There are so many excellent people writing about product management that it’s easier than ever to find the knowledge that you need. So why are there still so few product teams actually working in the ways described in all of these resources…

At FATMAP we celebrated Christmas last week by getting the whole company together for two days here in our Berlin HQ. We started with a one-day Hackathon. We started with idea proposals, and teams quickly formed around the most interesting and creative ideas. There was only one rule for a hack day proposal: you had…

When Reid Hoffman talks about building a startup, he says it’s like jumping off a cliff, and assembling a plane on the way down. It’s a reference to the fact that when you start building a startup, you set a clock ticking. If you can find product-market fit and a viable business before the clock runs…

From The Verge: Twitter has made follower counts appear less prominent on its iOS app by making the font size smaller in a new redesign effort, according to a Twitter spokesperson. The change comes after CEO Jack Dorsey repeatedly said that he wants to rethink how the company could prioritize “meaningful” conversations over numbers like…

When we look around and see the absolute domination of companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook, it’s easy to assume that the technology boom is over, and that these companies took all the profits. But a16z’s Benedict Evans has a different take: he argues that tech is only just getting started. He calls it…

I just finished reading The Circle, the dystopian view of a world when the next Facebook completely abolishes privacy once and for all. The scariest thing about the book is how real – how possible – it all seems. The world is a few decisions away from being set on that path. I read today…

Marty Cagan was in Berlin recently and did a talk about why teams are not truly empowered, and what teams might do about that. He shared his “True Test of Empowered Teams”: 1. The team is staffed with competent people with the necessary range of skills. 2. The team is assigned problems to solve, and…

I have always believed that the best place to start when designing a new feature or product flow is with a pen and a piece of paper. I think if you go to quickly to screen/UI design, it’s harder to take a step back to focus on the actual user problem. Instead, you immediately start…