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.

A very worthy read, indeed.

A guy was dangling off the rope at the end of this crane at The Republic in downtown Austin this morning. He then crawled back up and across. He doesn't seem visible in this image, but you can see a drone monitoring his whereabouts. @downtownaustin.org

Have you ever been a victim of product gaslighting? "Product gaslighting" is when you report a bug in a product, and support never acknowledges it's a bug and acts like you're crazy for expecting it work.

"One of the things we did [wrong] was that we made research transactional. We made it, 'I'm going to pay you money . . . so that I can extract information from you'." - @jmspool.bsky.social #prodmgmt #ux

Giving - your time, expertise, compassion, energy - is its own reward. It feels good. Too often, we assume people need an extra incentive or external reward. #prodmgmt

"Positioning" in the context of #prodmgmt and #marketing is ambiguous. Positioning refers to the process of deciding the differentiated value your product will realize and represent in the minds of prospects. It can also refer to messaging and other tactics you use to shape those perceptions.

The first question you should ask when someone asks you to create a product roadmap is what problem it would allegedly solve to have one. It may or may not be advisable to create one, depending on the answer and the situation. romanpichler.medium.com/when-you-sho... #prodmgmt

The behaviors, problems, and outcomes that impact your customers most usually don't happen inside your product. Listen to @jaredpeterson.bsky.social describe how #UX and #prodmgmt often neglect what happens outside the product. www.productcoalition.com/p/behavioura...

Peter F. Drucker is famous for having stated: "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself." If this assertion is true, then #prodmgmt and #marketing have a great deal of overlap.

"Teachers facilitate a learning experience, and students learn what they're ready to learn." - @producttalk.bsky.social #prodmgmt

Do you or your team have knowledge to share about product management and marketing? The next @pcaustin.bsky.social event is taking place Saturday, April 12th, 2025. Details and a link to propose a session are on the ProductCamp Austin website. www.productcampaustin.org #prodmgmt #prodmktg

Someone should quantify the economic productivity lost due to Slack being down.

While the move to Keras supporting multiple backends is, in theory, a good thing, the result has been a lot of broken code and use cases. No one seems to want to take responsibility and fix it. #ML #MLSky

This is a longer post, since most people are probably still unfamiliar with Shapley values, and I wanted to provide all the necessary background. www.xgblog.ai/p/xgboost-is... 2/2

Overheard on the #prodmgmt interwebs: "Customer feedback should guide product development decisions." No, product strategy should guide product development decisions, and customer feedback either informs the strategy or the implementation of the strategy.

A reminder of questions #prodmgmt should answer when someone requests a product roadmap: 1. What problem do they think it would solve to have one? 2. Is a roadmap the best solution to the problem? 3. If it is, what roadmap orientation (features, themes, problems) best solves the problem?

Come mingle with fellow downtown residents at our annual meeting! WHAT: DANA Annual Meeting + Urban Core Happy Hour WHEN: Sun, Feb 23 (4:30-6:30) WHERE: The Kitchen @ 600 Guadalupe (6G tower) RSVP: www.eventbrite.com/e/dana-2025-... Free for current DANA members; non-members $20.