Are you dying to help customers? — The best gift a great product can give to its customers is surviving long enough to continue serving them. There is never enough time and always far too many great ideas when building a product. Good teams are able to use heuristics or basic reasoning to weed out unworthy features…

Use informal celebrations to keep your team focused. — Teams don’t always work on the right thing at the right time. If feature X would benefit customers but the team is working on Z, they are working on the wrong thing. I call this “team drift.” (I use this term instead of “scope creep” which implies helplessness — teams…

Change always happens mid-stream but where does it start? The low point for me as a teen drummer arrived early on when I prematurely joined a band. One night on stage I started horribly wrong. The band leader quickly realized the situation was unrecoverable and simply turned around and yelled…

Within your team, there is an epic struggle for mindshare between the two big players in your Product’s world; engineers and users. And they see the world very differently. Achieving mutual respect is important. One bellwether for knowing who’s winning the struggle is how data is being displayed. …

Groundbreaking inventions are super boring. — I was lying on my back watching the sky over the abandoned factories of Rochester, NY. A friend and I had decided to spend a week brainstorming ideas that would transform the world and make us rich. No client work, only brainstorming — full time… for a week. It was…

The broken promise of listicles — Ever notice the ubiquity of list-driven how-to articles? So-called listicles? I have and they’re wrong. Every last one of them. When I was young and starting my first business John C. Maxwell rocked my world with his savvy wisdom. He and Steven Covey helped ignite this whole sub-lit firestorm with…

Blind spots are the cause of every project train wreck. — The project was careening towards a cliff. The technical debt was accumulating, the money was running out and the client was making larger and more distracting changes. At the same time the research and background was inscrutable. The specifications were detailed and vouched for. Expectations were set and reenforced with…

The sprawling camp that delayed a transcontinental pipeline for months drew people from around the country to stand up to the government. — DECEMBER 19, 2016 — Near Bismarck, ND: “Water is Life” is the breaking chant of Oceti Sakowin Camp near the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota. It’s part of the daily water ceremony at the Cannonball River. It’s said during protest. It’s an appropriate response of agreement. It can be…

If there were such a thing as a business horror movie it’d probably start calm and cheery as 2014 did for me and my small business. There was money, great clients and everyone was getting along. Conversations tended to focus on our personal lives and the wonderful projects we were…