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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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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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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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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.…
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Use ChatGPT to remove Malware from a WordPress blog
I had been neglecting this blog for a long time, and in my neglect, the WordPress version got way out of date, SSL certificates expired, and then it got hacked. It was FULL of Malware. By the time I realised, the site was full of spam content and links. A fresh install of WordPress on…
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AI-powered usability testing
I’ve been playing with “Vibe Coding” tools like Lovable and Cursor a bit lately to see how they can help Product Teams prototype, test and validate ideas quicker. Meanwhile back at the office we’re running a series of moderated usability tests on a new web product at the moment, which got me thinking: are there…
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Product Requirements Documents with ChatGPT
ChatGPT is quite good at creating PRDs. All good PMs have a good PRD template that they start with, but using ChatGPT to create a PRD for a new idea, feature or product accelerates the process 10x. Try this: go to ChatGPT (or Claude or whatever) and type in: I want to create a web…
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How to respect other people’s time with Slack
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…
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How to use the weekends to improve your productivity
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…