DANA recently provided feedback on the city's proposed updates to the Downtown Density Bonus Program (DDBP). We urge city officials to consider our recommendations, and we reiterate our call for restructuring the program to address its fundamental flaws. www.downtownaustin.org/dana-letter-...

"When a team says a problem is urgent, ask what work customers are abandoning today because of it. Real urgency shows up in behavior, not adjectives." - @trikro.bsky.social #prodmgmt

A simple framework for advocacy: 1. Say what you ideally believe and want. 2. Suggest improvements over the status quo given current political realities. 3. Define the conditions under which what you ideally believe and want would be politically realistic. 4. Make those conditions a reality.

I signed up against item 39 on the agenda for the upcoming #atxcouncil meeting. Soft parking caps applied selectively near transit might result in greater sprawl development and work against the very goals (transit-supportive density) they are intended to achieve.

Join us at our 2026 Annual Meeting at the Hanover Brazos rooftop on Sun, 3/1 from 6-7:30p! Enjoy BBQ and sunset views while discussing the future of downtown with special guest @zoforaustin.bsky.social and local advocates. Free for members/their guests & $10 for others. RSVP: luma.com/pxra3qio

Successful startups often don't play in the same field as the competition. They reframe the landscape as something different. open.substack.com/pub/patternb... by @m2jr.bsky.social #prodmgmt #startups

Beyond surveys and role-based personas: A single true story about a real user's or prospect's experience is arguably worth more than a dozen survey responses. articles.centercentre.com/its-time-we-... by @jmspool.bsky.social

Data scientists and engineers sometimes just want to view Jupyter notebooks without editing or executing them. Check out this simple but handy ipynb viewer by Jakub Jirutka. ipynb.js.org #AI #ML

Reminds me of why spreadsheets are often better solutions than specialized apps. medium.com/design-bootc... by Joe McLean #prodmgmt

"[T]he teams that thrive are the ones who use disruption as an opportunity to build the solutions they’ve been thinking about anyway." www.mindtheproduct.com/our-biggest-... by Asher Atlas #prodmgmt

"Validation" continues to lead #prodmgmt astray. Good piece from Todd Gagne despite his use of the term. open.substack.com/pub/wildfire...

"If cities deregulate off-street parking and charge the right price for curb parking, market forces will improve transportation, land use, the environment, and urban life." - Donald Shoup, quoting himself in reply to an accusation that he favored parking maximums.

"Despite their ambivalence on whether to require or restrict parking, planners always regulate it. This behavior recalls a Soviet maxim: 'What is not required must be prohibited.'" - Donald Shoup

Strategy is a set of hypotheses. Build adaptive strategy into your process. kromatic.com/blog/adaptiv... by @trikro.bsky.social and Susie Braam #prodmgmt

Seems like contradictory advice. #prodmgmt

"The solution is simple: breathe life into the vision. Take it off the slides and embed it into everyday product work." www.mindtheproduct.com/vision-isnt-... by @martarolak.bsky.social #prodmgmt

In many AI scenarios, traditional and deep learning are still the best methods for the job. towardsdatascience.com/the-three-ag...

Business goals are inward focused, and defining them has limited value. The real magic is in defining and measuring customer outcomes, and then showing how improving customer outcomes will lead to better business outcomes. articles.centercentre.com/why-ux-outco...

When someone asks for a report, don't ask, "What do you want in the report?" Instead, ask what decisions it will help them make. "Nobody wakes up in the morning and says today's going to be a great day, I'm going to produce 15 reports." - @jmspool.bsky.social

Today's #AI and #ML models rely on memorization and "local generalization". Massive scaling has led to smarter models. But getting models to adapt to novel situations, where there is little or no data, will require more than just memorizing more data. deeplearningwithpython.io/chapters/cha...

To honorable City Council, Commissioners, & Staff: DANA opposes height limits and other exclusionary zoning downtown, and we specifically oppose the base height limit proposed in the C20-2025-010 Central Business District (CBD) amendments. 🧵

The task of coming up with a long-term vision can feel daunting. However, if you break it into bite-sized pieces or visionettes, it makes it doable. Here’s how you do it: https://articles.centercentre.com/building-an-experience-vision-from-a-journey-map/

Wilson scoring is a simple way to score the popularity of items (such as comments on a Reddit post) based on up-votes and down-votes. As far back as 2009, Evan Miller pointed out the flaws in other methods (e.g. average rating). www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-s... H/T @kennyd.bsky.social

Join in for September's volunteer Shoal Creek clean-up session! WHEN: Saturday, Sep 13 (8:45-9a) WHERE: outside The Independent (301 West Ave) The monthly collaboration continues with APD, DAA, & the Downtown Austin Community Court. www.downtownaustin.org/september-20...

"But strategy suffocates when everything gets reduced to a list. Lists coordinate. Loops adapt. You need both." - @paulisthrivving.xyz medium.com/thrivve-part... #prodmgmt

Words-based methods can sometimes find relevance where semantic-based retrieval and modeling fails. I've developed ensemble models to address these limitations. www.alphaxiv.org/pdf/2508.21038 #ML #MLSky #AI

One of the most frustrating situations in civic advocacy is when potential allies think the cause has merit but is not "politically viable". Yet the reason it's not viable is that they, themselves, haven't publicly voiced their support.

Also, strategy is largely about aligning current and future decisions with deliberate choices you've already made. #prodmgmt

Come out to DANA's End of Summer Urban Core Happy Hour this Sun, Aug 24 at The Stay Put (73 Rainey St.) from 4-7pm! Our guest speaker will be Davon Barbour, CEO of @DowntownATXInfo! Entry comes with 2 free drink tickets & appetizers. More info and RSVP here: www.eventbrite.com/e/dana-end-o...

Increasingly, I've noticed vibe coders and product people suggesting that prompts and LLMs can replace specialized machine learning models for making predictions. We only have to look at how LLMs work to recognize the flaw in this belief. #AI #ML 🧵

"Google seems to be working on bringing NotebookLM to Gemini, combining two of its most powerful AI apps. The option to import notebooks will reportedly appear in the same menu where you currently add images, files, or Google Drive documents to Gemini." www.androidpolice.com/googles-best...

Without much fanfare, @divyasreepat.bsky.social and her team have released Keras 3.11. It includes support for Grain, a declarative data processing solution similar to TensorFlow datasets, yet not dependent on TensorFlow or any particular backend. github.com/google/grain #MachineLearning #ML #AI

Great to see @lauraries.bsky.social on Substack, and I'm looking forward to reading her new book on defining an "enemy" to build and position a brand. riespositioning.substack.com #positioning #prodmgmt #prodmktg #strategy

"A very thin line separates the 'good' kind of personalization from the creepy kind." thedecisionlab.com/insights/tec... by Preeti Kotamarthi #ML #MachineLearning

No matter how good the play-calling, no matter how good the quarterback, no matter how good the running backs, a football team won't be successful if team members don't do the fundamentals of blocking and tackling.

Instead of story points, use Roman Estimation to "right-size" work. mdalmijn.com/p/roman-esti... by Maarten Dalmijn #prodmgmt #agile

Aside from the artificial distinction between vision and strategy, this Roman Pichler piece rightly describes some common mistakes in attempting to define a product vision. romanpichler.medium.com/5-product-vi... #prodmgmt

"Does this feature make users more human, or less?" #AI and machine learning are transforming user experiences in ways you may not be aware of - and that can be a good thing. medium.com/@mrunalsurya...

Almost 15 years after @ashmaurya.bsky.social introduced the lean canvas, it remains one of the most important artifacts a product team can produce. Ash's explanation of it contains many important lessons for #prodmgmt. www.leanfoundry.com/articles/wha...

Jenny Wanger on analyzing competitors' strategies instead of features: jennywanger.com/articles/you... The level of detail obscures what matters most, though. We mostly need to know what word a competitor owns in the minds of prospects, so we can find a different one to own. #prodmgmt #positioning

Beyond the prompt: in the future, AI agents will participate in meetings with humans in real time, without explicit prompting. Imagine an agent raising its hand during a Zoom meeting and voicing an opinion or offering an idea. #AIX

In #agile, user stories stand for stories of users solving problems and achieving goals using our product. Structure prospect interviews similarly: elicit stories about users' actual experiences. These stories need not involve our product. #prodmgmt

Black box AI attempts to improve users' experiences without users knowing or caring that AI is involved. White box AI makes itself obvious to users. One promise of white box AI lies in establishing a healthy 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘱 with the user (H/T Jake McKee), beyond mere completion of individual tasks.

Servant leadership and #prodmgmt: www.ronkepm.com/post/the-qui...

I've noticed steady improvements in AI generating code. I must say, though, that I like it when it includes one mysterious error that forces me to understand the code so I can fix it.

Whether your team uses RICE or not for prioritizing is rather inconsequential. Having a sound and well-understood product strategy to guide priorities and decisions is what really matters. #prodmgmt

Do Austin's density bonus programs need "calibration"? Or are they fundamentally broken? www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/density-is... by @puzycki.bsky.social #atxcouncil

Density bonus programs are fundamentally broken. The city should explore alternatives and not just modify or "calibrate" them. www.ryanpuzycki.com/p/density-is... by @puzycki.bsky.social

Peter Drucker famously said, "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself." Marketing is much more than an "outbound" activity, and #prodmgmt is closely related to marketing.

Most calendar technology still seems to rely on the notion of a single "organizer" and does not embrace much in the way of collaboration.