"A picture is worth a thousand words" is the excuse designers get when the written requirements are an unstructured brain dump. When people write like this, they're passing the responsibility of critical thinking to the reader. Writing is a superpower that doesn't get enough credit.

Otzio.app now reads articles in a variety of voices and accents. Also, a cool easter egg for Montrealers: articles begin and end with a soundbite reminiscent of our iconic subway chime. #buildinpublic

Mediocrity trickles down and high-performers won't put up with it. medium.com/@claus.nissl...

"When a tool avoids having an opinion, it pushes that responsibility onto the organization. Decisions fragment. Interpretation becomes local. Alignment erodes." #productmanagement medium.com/analysts-cor...

"Features that had generated excitement in the demo becoming furniture in the product […] That’s not product-market fit. That’s product-market tolerance." wildfirelabs.substack.com/p/shipped-is...

Start all your writing with “Hey, dipshit!” so people know it wasn’t written by AI. Follow me for more writing tips.

I've listened to hundreds of articles and posts in less than 60 days thanks to Otzio.app. And dogfooding your own product means it keeps improving. Now its gotten a little better at extracting X (Twitter) and Medium articles. #buildinpublic

Experienced contributors ask boring questions for clarity, uncovering blind spots, and mitigating risk. Instead of moving fast and breaking things, try not breaking things so you can move fast. www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-ma...

The Boring Internet kinda sums up Otzio.app's origin story. RSS is boring, federated, and indestructible. No platform to justify its own existence, just a protocol that already works. www.terrygodier.com/the-boring-i...

Nobody’s stopping you from using harissa instead of tomato paste.

The Ferrari Luce reveals an interesting lesson in problem framing: the car you want to drive and the car you want to be seen driving are two entirely separate jobs to be done.

Sure, you can use AI to implement any ad-hoc feature a customer asks for. Hell, you might even think a customer fart is at least a Jira ticket. But do you have the discipline to remove the feature when that customer leaves?

AI makes it dangerously easy to reward yourself with progress while avoiding contact with reality. medium.com/@dankhan/whe...

People have asked me why otzio.app is a PWA instead of a mobile app. The answer is I’m prioritizing iteration speed over time-consuming review processes of two separate app stores that also want a 15%-30% cut. The hurdles towards validation are sometimes lower than you think. #buildinpublic

Management when I suggest exposing some KPIs to our customers as a forcing function to drive mutual outcomes.

Gas hitting $3.50/L will be the exact moment my childhood nostalgia meets my adult financial ruin. I ain’t giving you no tree fiddy, OPEC!

About a week ago I quietly started alpha testing Otzio, my articles-to-podcast app. Early feedback shaped a lot: easier setup, paywall workarounds, and article thumbnails + transcripts in modern podcast apps. Today it gets its own home: otzio.app Give it a try. #buildinpublic #reading #podcasts

Slow down, ask tough questions, and pause until the direction is clearer. "That is the behaviour that separates a senior PM from a competent ticket-runner, and it is almost never rewarded in real time." pmdepot.org/guides/is-th...

"When teams collapse the entire left side of the diamond into one fast loop, [alignment disappears]. Not intentionally. Just quietly. Nobody notices until the product is live and nothing is moving." insideproductorg.substack.com/p/why-your-t...

I’ve felt this a few times before: learning word processors in the late ’80s, POV-Ray in the ’90s, HTML/CSS in the 2000s. And now again with Claude Code. It's that same spark of unlocking a new frontier in computer-aided creation. It’s hard not to get hooked.

The Ollee Watch is a great example of one of my favorite ideas from systems thinking: acknowledge what exists, and build something that complements it. www.olleewatch.com

Every time a UX designer realizes they’re actually in the business of designing for interacting with information systems, an angel gets its wings.

In 2022, I was in the top 1% of Pocket readers. This was a feat made possible by the app's free text-to-speech (TTS) feature. Pocket was the perfect companion to my podcast player.

Every feature costs more than you think. Beyond implementation: discovery, shaping, marketing, support, maintenance, handoffs. Every feature, every time. Ship the Corolla. Iterate toward the Range Rover if your market asks for it. youtube.com/shorts/TOIdG...

Some of my kids' water bottles are so complicated to reassemble that if you're not careful, you'd solve the Lament Configuration and Cenobites would emerge from the walls with "such delights to show you."

To paraphrase the most oblivious excuse I’ve ever heard for not being allowed to talk to customers: “You can’t talk to them because renewals are coming up and they’re probably upset because we’ve been ignoring them all year!”

AI lets us indulge in our every impulse, without the checks of shared alignment and understanding. That's not speed. That's drift. www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-0f...

"That is how products become cluttered. Not because teams intentionally choose it, but because the threshold for adding something falls below the threshold for living with it." www.linkedin.com/pulse/every-...

Accessibility knowledge migrates strangely. Designers go from contrast and color into web standards. And suddenly devs realize they need to level up too. Sometimes it's reversed. Either way, uneven knowledge leads to tedious handoffs. That's what makes accessibility hard.

All the things we throw at the wall. All the second-guessing. All the bike shedding. All data requests. All of it because we're not letting Product talk to customers.

Closed captioning just got a really cool accessibility upgrade. www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOcf...

Death, taxes, and accepting cookies.

Committing to repo tools like GitHub as the ultimate source of truth for managing projects and documenting decisions is a compelling idea. youtu.be/WgV6M1LyfNY

Hands-free fixtures are the car touchscreens of public restrooms. Just unreliable compared to analog alternatives.

Scrum retros usually focus on a team’s internal mechanics. But what if there are real bottlenecks between teams and departments? Is a team-only retro enough to actually improve the system? 🤔

All these LinkedIn job alerts are turning into a who's-who of dysfunctional organizations.

Dad reflexes are 10% athleticism and 90% assuming your child has a complete disregard for self-preservation.

Each new feature or process is a tax that compounds. Here's a great dive into how complexity is created, famous failures, and some mitigation strategies. I especially like the "one in, one out" policy. It happens to be how I avoid household clutter. uxdesign.cc/how-complexi...

Sometimes my stance on the Google Fonts icon library is not unlike The Onion's stance on Megadeth's "Rust In Peace". theonion.com/humanity-sti...

Assume you're wrong, make the smallest bet possible, and let reality prove you're right. #productmanagement medium.com/@m2jr/realit...

Proper noun feature names are a communication tax on everyone. Marketing, sales, users, ICs, and support—everyone pays it. If it looks like a duck (etc.), call it a duck. Not a "Submersible Flat-Billed Avian Rodent™." You're adding negative value to everything. kubie.co/blog/fightin...

TIL about the Shared Mutable State anti-pattern and the Principle of Least Privilege. I’ve felt the UX friction these cause for years, but now I know them by name. Design education is too indexed on graphics, ignoring that we’re in also systems design, a field with its own rules that also impact UX.

Tools like Stripe have given us the ability to experiment with business models, and here’s a really good study from Lovable. www.elenaverna.com/p/we-stopped...

Windshield washer fluids, mouth wash, and household cleaners have no business looking like they're packed with delicious and refreshing electrolytes.

Kevin Muldoon knocks it out of the park with this article on how we went from extreme programming to Scrum, and the things we lost along the way. medium.com/agileinsider...

Feature improvements can be just as impactful as new sexy high-risk features. #productmanagement

Creativity lies in working around principled constraints, not in perpetuating popular anti-patterns. #designsystems

Lenny‘s interview with the co-founder of Slack and Flickr is so densely packed with product insights, from friction vs comprehension to LARPing work.

When I traded my code editor for Figma, I actually traded working code for excessive documentation. This is kind of the antithesis of Agile. So this post really, really resonates. www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

An AI note-taking app, but filtered through Werner Herzog’s unforgivingly bleak lens. “There is no positive outcome in the feature. Only a collective murder of time and spirit.”