cutlefish.substack.com
Product Initiative Reviews
It is ironic that some high % of teams do retrospectives for their team. (process, output, blockers, etc.), but not retrospectives for their work.
127 links collected from substack.com between 2020 and 2025
- Sorting: Oldest links first
- Domain: substack.com
2020
- cutlefish.substack.com
Blank Slates, Seedlings, Freight Trains, and Gardening
The basic idea is to use common (but salient) objects, activities, and ideas to spark a conversation.
- cutlefish.substack.com
"Vision" and Prescriptive Roadmaps
Knowing what to build and "telling the future" is a sign of confidence. Features Are Real.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Persistent Models vs. Point-In-Time Goals
Without persistent models, teams are always chasing their tails. Quarterly OKRs should not feel like a "big deal". But they are exactly that when either 1) teams have to dream up their OKRs from complete scratch without a persistent model to guide them, or 2) OKRs are a cascaded down and teams lack context.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Healthy Forcing Functions (and Paying Attention)
I love the idea that we use forcing functions to snap us out of automatic action. To have a conversation. To consider information.
- cutlefish.substack.com
TBM 31/53: Scaling Change Experiments
Continuous improvement internally is a lot like improving a product externally. It is tempting, but dangerous, to skip steps.
- cutlefish.substack.com
But Why Is It Working?
Much harder is understanding how very different organizational cultures can produce equally positive outcomes for customers, team-members, and "the business".
- notboring.substack.com
Stripe: The Internet's Most Undervalued Company
Stripe is not going public any time soon. It is at the very beginning of a decades-long journey during which it will compound the internet’s growth, and compound with it to become one of the world’s most valuable companies. If Stripe is successful, it will transform the economy, and I’ll be here telling everyone to appreciate it even more.
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Annual Planning Dance
...you could ditch annual planning all-together and do something more continuous, but whenever I say that’s possible no one believes me (except for the people doing it)
- alexw.substack.com
Hire people who give a shit.
Over time interviewing, I’ve found that I mainly screen for one key thing: giving a shit.
2021
- alexw.substack.com
Information Compression
When Person A has to communicate a complex idea to Person B, she invariably is going to leave out a lot of the details and say something accidentally too simple. This process of translating the mental image of a complex system to something human-readable (usually words or pictures) is information compression, and what Person B then understands from that message ("the compression") is the decompressed image.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Stop Hiring Things to Do Too Many Jobs
The problem with something that does lots of jobs is that it is very easy to send the wrong message. Say someone joins your company. Do they pick up on all the nuance?
- annehelen.substack.com
LARPing your job
You can LARP your job in person (holding lots of meetings, staying late and getting there early as a show of ‘presentism’) and digitally (sending lots of emails, spending a lot of time on Slack, or whatever group chat platform your organization uses).
- cutlefish.substack.com
What the **** Does That Even Mean?
Here’s a fun activity you can do with your team. What words do we use that seem to cause confusion?
- cutlefish.substack.com
Quicksand vs. Challenge
I’ve come to believe that a lot of what people see as "skills" on the part of well-known product companies, is actually freedom and space. The work is difficult, but the good (or at least rewarding) kind of difficult. At a core level, the organization has confidence that the teams will contribute meaningfully, and the surrounding architecture, strategy, and org structure support that.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Vanity Metric vs. Meaningful Metric Activity
What would your compelling, human-centric North Star Metric name look like? What do you WISH it could be? Start there...
- cutlefish.substack.com
Why Limiting WIP, Starting Together, Being Less Busy, and Working Together is SO HARD
People will nod like crazy when they hear about the ills of high WIP or running individual projects...and go right back to it.
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Integrator Burden
These individuals know that organizations are not an idealized Venn diagram of "aligned incentives" glued together by meritocracy. They sense the cracks and the edges and want to help and support, and know if they don’t, no one will.
- trungphan.substack.com
ConstitutionDAO: A meme history
While ConstitutionDAO did not win the bid, the effort captivated the internet. It showed the promise of DAOs and Web3 but — most importantly for SatPost — it birthed some truly glorious memes.
- askgib.substack.com
Can you provide insight into how you work with product discovery?
I work with dozens of product teams around the world. In helping them to build a discovery capability — the ability to develop consumer insight— I provide this checklist
- stefanobaccianella.substack.com
The decade of remote working
There is no such thing as hybrid, your options are office-first or remote-first.
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Messifesto
When looking at why things are working (or not working) in organizations, we all have our explanation biases – leadership, organizational design, incentives, management, skills and experience, empowerment, complex adaptive systems, systems thinking, "mindset", safety and resilience, diffusion of innovations, psychological safety, strategy, and more.
2022
- evgeny.substack.com
Clubhouse is dying
Why did this happen? Let’s take a look at the basics of Clubhouse as a business, not as a cultural phenomenon.
- aftenposten.substack.com
What does a tech lead do, anyway?
I’m going to share with you what my regular work-week looks like as tech-lead of Aftenposten
- productish.substack.com
How to create good product outcomes
Here are the top three lessons I’ve learned: 1. Avoid broad outcomes 2. One outcome per team 3. Keep metrics simple
- trungphan.substack.com
Amazon's $31B ad business, explained
The success of its ad business is a 180-degree turn for Amazon. In 2009, Bezos famously said "ads are the price you pay for an unremarkable product or service".
- cutlefish.substack.com
What Didn’t End Up in Jira
None of the tools in their company captured what actually happened, and who was involved (except for that tiny bit at the end, and their calendars).
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Basics
I’m not a process freak, but I do believe teams should have their house in order. You can get by with very little process overhead. If you figure out a minimally viable version of these eight things, you will be further along than most product teams in the world. Pulling this stuff together may seem boring, but the boring bits can be so important.
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Problem With Problems
No problem exists on an island. Every problem is a nested solution to a higher level problem. Every problem is a collection of nested problems.
- amivora.substack.com
It’s not prioritization until it hurts
Prioritization means cutting things that are valuable so I can double down on even bigger goals. If I’m not disappointed by a few items on my "cut" list, like a product I’m excited about but don’t have time to work on or an interesting discussion I can’t join, I’m not cutting hard enough.
- dwarkesh.substack.com
The mystery of the miracle year
It has something to do with them being young, concentrating intensely on the right problems, and remaining open to fresh perspectives.
- gadallon.substack.com
Bus and Spoke
I would encourage more airlines to start thinking about how to incorporate multi-modal transportation in a more seamless way. All these examples raise the question of whether 2022 can be the year where transportation can become more efficient.
- askgib.substack.com
What specifics in a daily routine separate a good Product Manager from a great Product Manager?
Most product leaders spend their time doing the necessary evils of their job and get sucked into too many meetings. Here are the areas where I encourage product leaders to spend more (and less) time
- aftenposten.substack.com
Hackathons are a sign of a workflow that doesn't encourage innovation
If you needed a hackathon in order to demonstrate a product idea, then that usually means in my experience that your weekly workflow doesn’t allow for room for suggesting new ideas.
- cutlefish.substack.com
"You're Making This Too Complicated"
If you are a mess explorer, consider whether it helps you to expose all of the mess in public. Are you overwhelming people? Is it helping your cause?
- nigellee.substack.com
Rent out your subscription (Netflix, Spotify, etc) through web3
What if your subscription was an NFT in the blockchain? Think about some of the interesting things you can do with NFTs
- cutlefish.substack.com
Scaled Feature Factories
I call the pattern: We’re Trying to Do Product, But We’re Handed an Incredibly Overwhelming List of Prescriptive Projects Disguised as Problem Statements With Overly-Ambitious Business Impact Forecasts
- cutlefish.substack.com
Asking for Feedback and Pushback
As a product leader you can’t expect everyone to give you "actionable feedback". And you can’t expect everyone to give you feedback in the same way.
- amivora.substack.com
Recognizing the tradeoff between a tangible benefit and an intangible cost
For every feature we build, I try to think not only about how it feels for the people who use it, but also how it feels for the people who don’t. Does it add more cognitive load? Could they stumble upon the feature and be confused? Will they see the feature every day and never use it, and over time, start to feel like the whole app is "not meant for them"?
- amivora.substack.com
Soliciting hard feedback
Imagine how much faster we could grow if we had those insights in real-time and could take quick action to respond. Here are a few tactics that have helped me get hard but useful feedback.
- runthebusiness.substack.com
Product Paths
Good product management is all about choosing the "right" product paths, but "right" is only obvious in hindsight.
- runthebusiness.substack.com
The Business Model Makes (or Breaks) the Business
What if Twitter had set itself up as as creator business and made the consumer user base secondary? What if the real users were the 1% creators (journalists, entertainers, thinkers, writers)?
- on.substack.com
The problem isn’t that Elon Musk owns Twitter – it’s that you don’t
When you publish your thoughts on Twitter, you are doing labor for that company. Yes, you get followers, but you can’t take them with you.
- askgib.substack.com
What systems are most effective for giving feedback to employees?
The most exciting thing about Netflix’s culture and feedback systems is the methods themselves depended on experimentation and ongoing feedback. We started with a traditional annual review system, tried more frequent reviews, and eventually eliminated the formal, written review systems in favor of a culture that advocated and helped coach employees to embrace candor and to give and receive feedback more effectively.
- thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com
ChatGPT Is the World’s Best Chatbot
A compilation of the most interesting findings and implications people have dug out of ChatGPT (with my added commentary, of course)
- thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com
How to Get the Most Out of ChatGPT
I believe there’s a lot to gain from ChatGPT so I want to dedicate a post to its virtues and merits: This one will help you learn which are the best applications for ChatGPT—without entering gray territory—and how to get the most out of it.
- cutlefish.substack.com
The NPS Effect
The NPS Effect explains why less-than-optimal things can persist in business for a long time—even when a good % of the team wouldn’t recommend those things to a friend.
2023
- runthebusiness.substack.com
Synthesizing Learnings
Many product teams do research, but don’t take the critical steps of synthesizing and disseminating learnings. They either fail to convert information into knowledge, or that knowledge stays trapped within the pod and doesn’t help educate the broader product / engineering / design org.
- thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com
5 Practical Applications Where ChatGPT Shines
Instead of assuming ChatGPT is great for anything related to text, writing, or language, we should approach the problem of its applicability with that top-down perspective: Let’s understand the characteristics that best define the chatbot, and from there draw a line to those tasks where those traits aren’t bugs but features.
- aftenposten.substack.com
Making Aftenposten the most resilient digital paper in the Nordics
I’ve been pondering on one big problem: if something catastrophic were to happen to all the papers in Schibsted, how can we ensure that Aftenposten is the first to restore service to readers?
- derw.substack.com
Whatever happened to Elm, anyway?
There simply isn’t such a compelling use case for a language that relies on being type-safe when TypeScript can do that for you 90% of the way. Adopting a niche language comes with a bunch of downsides on top of that, like a smaller potential hiring pool
- mikefisher.substack.com
Product Debt
Paying down product debt is an essential process for maintaining high availability and engineering efficiency. One of my favorite sayings on this topic is that "availability is the most important feature." In any decent size company, there is no feature your product teams will launch in a year that will yield more revenue than just keeping the app or site running.
- thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com
Prompt Engineering Is Probably More Important Than You Think
In contrast to human-to-human communication, interacting with computers is unnatural. Computers are aliens to us. That’s why consciously learning prompt engineering is key—it won’t come to us as naturally as we’d like. People who don’t know this try to force the computer to adapt to what they know (human communication) and that’s precisely why they fail to get the results they want.
- gadallon.substack.com
Surge Pricing is Surging: It’s an Unfair Game
The implication: first, choose your fairness wisely. Choose the groups you want to be fair toward: gender, race, age, and income. And understand that there are trade-offs.
- runthebusiness.substack.com
Teaching Users Your Product...
I was treating "teaching users your product" as 1 big job, and in reality there are potentially 3 sub-jobs hiding behind it. When you teach your product, you actually teach 3 different dimensions: the interface, the domain, and the benefit.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Fog and Debt Debt
This dynamic is why letting things slip and waiting until bad things happen, or focusing only on lagging indicators, is dangerous. Waiting seems rational. "Why fix something before it is an issue? We've got work to do!" The problem is that, almost by definition, when that goes wrong, you'll probably have to deal with the "fog" of many layered factors and an impaired ability to diagnose and address problems.
- amivora.substack.com
10 tips for moderating a panel or fireside chat to get a fresh conversation
Panels and fireside chats have become my favorite kind of public speaking — they require so little prep! — and moderating can be even more fun than being a panelist. Throughout my career, I’ve learned so much by asking amazing people to talk about what they’re passionate about.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Goal Cascades vs. High-Conviction Models
To tell the difference between a harmful cascade and an effective tree/graph, ask if it is a high-conviction model. If people shrug—wondering if their actionable goals will impact sustainable, long-term growth—you probably have a low conviction model and a harmful cascade.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Why Are You Doing This? (Wrong Answers Only)
So much can be learned from this very basic question: What are you working on right now, and why is it the most important thing you could be working on?
- cutlefish.substack.com
Level, Depth, Time, and Frame
When I think about strategy, goals, plans, roadmaps, etc. I think about them across four dimensions: Level, Depth (or Specificity), Time, Frame
- mikefisher.substack.com
Teamwork – Working together makes all the difference
The way we build modern software products is in teams. While I’m sure there are people that have all the requisite skills such as product vision, management, user experience, analytics, and software development to build something all by themselves, it’s almost guaranteed that a better product could be built by leveraging people with stronger skills in those areas.
- buildingromes.substack.com
Staff Engineer & TPM: A conversation about tech's two most unique IC roles
Staff Engineers are primarily technical leads operating on a longer time horizon. This involves strategic work but also setting standards, simplifying complex solutions, adding clarity and mentorship.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Effort vs. Value Curves
In general, when I see teams stressing out about prioritizing individual features (or prioritization frameworks), I always recommend that they step back and paint a picture of the high-level curve they are dealing with. That is often far more telling than the effort/impact-specific tactical bets.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Why Aren't They Saying Anything?
Are you waiting for people to provide feedback in surveys or to speak their managers?If so, is that going to be enough? Go through the reasons above and make sure that you’re providing channels and help where needed.
- mikefisher.substack.com
Failure
One strategy to familiarize team members with failure is to conduct a Failure Workshop. Think of it as a tabletop exercise on failure in a safe environment. The workshop's objective is to "stay in the failure" while fostering a supportive space for peer interaction.
- ghiculescu.substack.com
11 years of hosting a SaaS
Use managed services for as long as possible. We did ourselves a big disservice by leaving Heroku after only a few months. We should have stayed on it for years - there was so much time wasted managing servers that could have been done for us during critical early days.
- cutlefish.substack.com
What Slows Us Down
If speed is so important, why do most companies go so slow? I have concluded that it boils down to one (or all) of these problems.
- craftingtechteams.substack.com
Why do your developers want to leave?
We hate working on old, complex software we don’t understand. It turns out— we hate it so much that we’re prepared to throw in the towel and roll the dice at a shot with another company. Granted, relationships with peers and managers play a significant role in this, that can’t be denied and it is not refuted or strongly correlated by the paper.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Productivity (The Clash)
If your company is currently mired in discussions about productivity, realize that this is a proxy discussion for something else. Like many things, it is about power, narrative, and worldviews. It is probably about a clash—paradigm, professional, cultural, or otherwise.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Maintenance, KTLO, and BAU
Software is much more like a garden than a mechanical entity like a car. We plant the initial seeds (start designing and building), water and nurture it (make updates and enhance features), and periodically have to prune (refactor) and weed (remove bugs and vulnerabilities). A product requires constant attention to grow and adapt to its environment (user needs, technological changes, and market trends). It's an ongoing process of growth, adaptation, and care.
- mikefisher.substack.com
History
Whether you are a new team member, a senior leader, or a government official, knowing the history of the organization and the people is critical to integrating and leading. Take the time to learn where the organization has come from if you’re the new person and if you’re the person that’s been around a while, teach the new folks that are joining.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Why Didn't They Say No?
I was working with a leader recently, and they asked me why a team might knowingly commit to work they couldn’t feasibly get done. Why didn’t they say no?
- mikefisher.substack.com
Right Person, Right Role, Right Time
As organizations transition from startup to scale-up, and eventually to established enterprises, the leadership mantle may need to shift to individuals whose personality traits are congruent with the altered operational dynamics.
- kristenberman.substack.com
Fitbit Google Migration Flow: The Economics (vs. Behavioral Economics) of Product Design
When you design a product with the traditional economics worldview, you aim to understand and cater to a user's fixed preferences. But in the behavioral economics realm, the belief is that preferences are created at the time of decision-making—thus products have an influence on shaping them.
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Predictability Trap
You only have so many levers to deliver more predictably. You can reduce batch size, minimize work in progress, collaborate more closely, work in shorter time boxes, focus more, start together/work together/finish together, limit the reactive tasks you get pulled into, and limit multitasking and context switching.
- johanhedevg.substack.com
5 supplements everyone should take
Supplements! A god damn jungle. Grab your machetes and let’s go!
- fernandovillalba.substack.com
It's not microservice or monolith; it's cognitive load you need to understand first
Before you pick any type of architecture, what you need to ask yourself is how much cognitive load capacity your organization has available to meet the demands of the product you want to deliver and then adjust accordingly.
2024
- mikefisher.substack.com
Hope
The power of hope coupled with empowerment within organizations is not to be underestimated. It forms the bedrock of a conducive work environment, spurring individuals and teams towards achieving remarkable milestones. By nurturing hope and empowerment, organizations are not just building a positive work culture, but are actively investing in a future replete with possibilities and success.
- aboutpm.substack.com
Advancing into a Product-Led Organizational Model
Organizational transformation is a marathon, not a sprint. Persistence is key to recognizing the uniqueness of each organization. While there's no one-size-fits-all guide, a structured and thoughtful approach significantly enhances the likelihood of success.
- aboutpm.substack.com
Obvious and subtle indicators that you work in a feature factory
I will highlight both obvious and subtle signs that you work in a feature factory and describe 16 indicators I've noticed in Product Management over the last 15 years. These can be divided into three major categories: a dysfunctional process, a shattered culture characterized by unclear roles and responsibilities leading to dysfunctional collaboration, a lack of strategy and vision (or at least both badly defined)
- mikefisher.substack.com
Psychological Safety
Within the phenomenon of psychological safety are observable traits such as taking turns while speaking, being aware of other’s feelings, and clear norms. Google researchers eventually determined that a number of factors were involved in making some teams more successful than others but psychological safety was the most important.
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Biggest Untapped Opportunity
Skilled pragmatists are too smart to wade into conflicts or political maneuvering. They work within the system. They are under-challenged and bored at work but are resourceful enough to scratch those itches in other ways. They aren't lazy—doing the bare minimum and stopping—but they also don't go "above and beyond" because they are inherently skeptical that it is worth it.
- tidyfirst.substack.com
Mastering Programming
From years [decades] of watching master programmers, I have observed certain common patterns in their workflows. From years [decades] of coaching skilled journeyman programmers, I have observed the absence of those patterns. I have seen what a difference introducing the patterns can make. Here are ways effective programmers get the most out of their precious 3e9 seconds on the planet.
- thealgorithmicbridge.substack.com
Google Gemini Anti-Whiteness Disaster Is a Cautionary Tale About... Gaming?
I don’t think they expected it to depict Vikings as Indian and British kings as Black. That’s not what diversity means. That’s a result of specification gaming.
- cutlefish.substack.com
How Capable Leaders Navigate Uncertainty and Ambiguity
What do leaders who are skilled at navigating complexity know how to do? What do they do differently? What would you observe if a leader had these skills?
- cutlefish.substack.com
"Bad" Strategy. Why?
I often speak to people who lament the fact that their company strategy doesn’t match the "good strategy" descriptions discussed in books, talks, research, and popular examples. “With so much information out there, why don’t we have a real strategy?”
- amivora.substack.com
The goal of a “strategy” is to change our own team’s behavior
Creating a strategy doesn’t directly change anything for our customers. Customers don’t care about our strategies — they care about their experience with the product in their hands. So for a strategy to be useful, it actually has to change our behavior as a team to create better customer outcomes.
- timotegeimer.substack.com
Message to all product folks
If the product management trendiest books are so powerful, it's because they are inspiring, they make us hope and dream. But it's also important to remember that these books are not meant to reflect reality, let alone a scientific analysis of what makes tech companies successful worldwide.
- daliahavens.substack.com
Engineering teams need to be 'INSPIRED'
You’ll be surprised how much fun the job gets when you are given a problem to solve vs a bunch of features to build.
- cutlefish.substack.com
How to Learn and Practice Product Management in a Feature Factory
Here's how to safely learn/practice product even if your org feels like an irreformable feature factory.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Three Product Teams
This post will explore three popular models for product teams: Sprint, Story, and Backlog-Centric, Team and Mission-Centric, Engineer-Centric (with Rockstar PMs)
- cutlefish.substack.com
The Black Box
Your team is burnt out. They are not getting anything done. Work is "low quality". You can see and feel those things. But what you are seeing is an output of something—the downstream effects of other things happening.
- cutlefish.substack.com
2-6-4-1
Here's a fun way to structure a quarter. It's a nice change of pace and helps a team go through the "full cycle" of learning, building, measuring, learning, etc. 2w research and discovery, 6w get something out to customers, 4w iterate, 1w tie up loose ends
- runthebusiness.substack.com
Falling into a Feature Factory
When both groups are operating from their higher brain functions, delightful experiences can be created. But when one or both parties falls into a mode of just reacting from their “reptilian brain”, things start to go sideways.
- runthebusiness.substack.com
Staying Synced on Strategy
But what makes one strategy better or worse than another in terms of keeping oriented? The answer is coherence.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Trust Lets You Observe Reality
The Cutler Variation of Goodhart's Law: In environments with high psychological safety, trust, and an appreciation for complex sociotechnical systems, when a measure becomes a target, it can remain a good measure because missing the target is treated as a valuable signal for continuous improvement rather than failure.
- datascienceleadership.substack.com
The 4Ps Framework: How I Structure 1:1s for Maximum Impact
How do you ensure these meetings are more than just another item on your to-do list? Enter the 4Ps framework: Preparedness, Personal, Performance, and Peers.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Why Reflexive Thinkers Need to Take More Breaks
Emotional labor, epistemic relativism, perspective-taking, navigating cognitive dissonance, and reflexivity are not "free." It's work, and it is draining. It is draining to navigate environments where (most people) are confidently sure of themselves or at least work hard to portray that.
- amivora.substack.com
The 4 components of product quality: performance, bugs, completeness, and consistency
Every time I’ve focused on these, my product has intuitively gotten better. And it gives the whole team a sense for how we can work together to improve quality, in a way that's deeply felt by customers.
- zaidesanton.substack.com
5 reasons why your best developers will quit - and how can you postpone it
What does an unmotivated developer feel? Unappreciated (and/or underpaid). Lonely. Bored. Stuck. Apathetic. When a developer quits, it’s almost always because they feel one (or more) of those 5 things.
- elizlaraki.substack.com
Google Maps UX: The India Conundrum
The team reworked turn-by-turn street directions to include navigational landmarks to help orient people, signal turns, confirm direction, and error correct. The team worked through several iterations before finally landing on a solution that emphasized landmarks, but also subtly included road names
- cutlefish.substack.com
Zombie Practices and Processes
Processes like OKRs fall apart not because people don't understand them but because they lack meaningful feedback, have unclear goals, are buried under conflicting incentives, or have learned to distrust the system. Zombie processes arise when we don't address these factors.
- mikefisher.substack.com
Writing
Writing is important to me because it’s integral to how I think, how I lead, and how I contribute to my community. And I believe it can be the same for you. Whether it’s to clarify your thoughts, to share your knowledge, or to document your journey, writing is a practice worth developing.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Ultra Founder Mode
Founder Mode is a joke. It’s for the weak. You want the truth? Founder Mode is pure delusion—a comfortable lie for those too scared to go all in. You want to level up? This is Ultra Founder Mode, where the intensity never drops, the pressure never lets up, and excuses are obliterated.
- thetechenabler.substack.com
My guidelines for AI-assisted coding
Generally, the guidance is: don’t forget good software engineering practices just because an AI is involved.
2025
- fffej.substack.com
The AI Opportunity for Software Engineers
Every major advance that made coding easier—high-level languages, frameworks, cloud computing all led to more software, not less. AI will follow the same pattern: by lowering the barrier to entry, it will flood the world with more software, more systems, and more complexity. And that means we need more engineers, not fewer.
- oneknightinproduct.substack.com
4 Different Ways To Transform a Product Organisation
Every company out there has evolved a working culture over time that is the sum total of the pre-existing biases of every employee, and especially of the leadership team. Status quo bias is an obvious contender here. Fear comes into play.
- elizlaraki.substack.com
The pixels that made YouTube
By branding the player, YouTube wasn’t claiming ownership over the video content. But it was creating a signature look and feel around each video that was unmistakably YouTube.
- tidyfirst.substack.com
Social AI Adoption: Lessons from Hybrid Corn
The most effective driver of AI adoption isn't better models or improved accuracy—it's success stories from peers and respected figures in professional networks. Rather than push AI, encourage communities that will push AI.
- wolkwords.substack.com
Något har dött
GÖR DEN GREJEN DÅ. Med papper, sax och lim. Skulptera. Bygg. Slipa. Inte fan vet jag men skapa den på riktigt. Ta sen en bild på den och återkom. Då ska jag ge dig en like. Jag tror till och med att jag kommer le.
- hagakure.substack.com
One Year In
The product itself still has a long way to go, but the system that can build a great product is largely there—and it’s continuously getting better. The product is, after all, a lagging indicator of the quality of the socio-technical system that produces it.
- hagakure.substack.com
Your Org Chart Isn’t Ready for AI
Traditional product teams often follow a linear flow: PM defines, designer mocks, engineers build. But that model breaks down when you're building AI-native products. We’re not designing screens for users to click—we’re building systems that interpret intent and act on it. That changes everything. To get it right, everyone needs to be involved early: product, design, frontend, backend, data. Discovery and delivery collapse into the same loop. Feedback is faster. Outcomes are less predictable. The system learns from use, so you need tight, collaborative cycles to learn with it.
- thoughtfuleng.substack.com
AI is going to hack Jira
What will happen when we blindly apply Big Agile + premature AI tooling to core health services and patient data? Financial services? Social media and the spread of misinformation? Government infrastructure? Military infrastructure? It’s 2025 and software engineering is the backbone of pretty much everything. But for all its prevalence and influence, most people don’t have the technical literacy to even grasp the basics.
- mikefisher.substack.com
Thayer Method
So maybe the answer isn’t fewer meetings. It’s better ones. Meetings where everyone comes prepared. Where we solve problems together. Where ideas are tested, refined, and built in real time. In short: meetings that look less like a lecture, and more like a room full of smart people, standing at the whiteboard, figuring things out together.
- cutlefish.substack.com
A Cagan Critique
My key critique is that the article follows a classic rhetorical move. It begins with the language of empathy and belief, such as "I want to believe" and "it pains me," but it ends with a moral judgment. What starts as a reflection on the challenges of building empowered teams becomes a statement about individual character, framed as a lack of ambition.
- cutlefish.substack.com
Empowered For Delivery, But...
To get things done, breaking through silos is rewarded. "We are one team here! Pull in who you need, cut across silos, take initiative!" But when it comes to feedback, concerns, "pulling the andon cord", or questioning the current strategy, front-line team members are expected to route everything up the official chain. Boundary-spanning is great for delivery, but not for dissent.
- dpereira.substack.com
Unlocking the Power of Intrinsic Motivation
The good thing about intrinsic motivation is that you can design the workplace for that. With simple actions, you can get outstanding results.
- chunksofchange.substack.com
Vad innebär det att resa 2025?
Jag tror att resa är bra, att det utmanar och frigör. På olika sätt för olika människor. Vissa kan bo på Bali i ett år och inte lära sig någon om landet de flyttat till eller människorna där. Andra åker på en charterresa med helpension och livet förändras helt. Men samtidigt tänker jag att just nu, i denna tid i världshistorien måste vi omvärdera allt. Om vi väntar med att resa annorlunda så kommer vi inte ha en planet kvar
- cutlefish.substack.com
What To Do More (And Less) Of
What do we actually see when teams are more product-centric? I’d like to share a post version of the talk below. None of these behaviors are all-or-nothing. There will always be situations where you do more of some and less of others. The point is to use them as prompts for reflection and conversation.
- tidyfirst.substack.com
Canon TDD
1. Write a list of the test scenarios you want to cover. 2. Turn exactly one item on the list into an actual, concrete, runnable test. 3. Change the code to make the test (& all previous tests) pass (adding items to the list as you discover them)- 4. Optionally refactor to improve the implementation design 5. Until the list is empty, go back to #2
- kristenberman.substack.com
Slack AI: What product teams can learn from one banner
Turning a feature on doesn’t guarantee people will use it. Adoption depends on motivation, action, and recovery when things don’t go perfectly. This one banner illustrates three lessons product teams can apply right away.
- elsevanderberg.substack.com
For god's sake, "vibe checks" is not an eval strategy
So how are you systematically checking that the output your product spits out is good? Smart product/AI leaders have been shouting for months about how AI product managers need to get good at building evals (Lenny Rachitsky, Aakash Gupta, Teresa Torres, Hamel Hussain & Shreya Shankar, to name a few). So I’m shocked to see how many AI product builders have not thought this through, and leave it at a random vibe-check every now and then.
- cutlefish.substack.com
You’re Not Misaligned. You’re Thinking Differently.
Concrete thinkers zero in on tangible details. They take things at face value, prefer clear steps, ask “how” and “what,” and anchor on specifics like flight times, budgets, or examples. Abstract thinkers reach for concepts and patterns. They ask “why,” connect ideas across domains, and zoom out to purpose, meaning, and future possibilities.
- moregoodays.substack.com
Why Every City Should Have a Hospitality Department
We talk endlessly about economic incentives and housing stock and walkability scores and innovation hubs, but almost no one is talking about the moment a human shows up with a suitcase and a dog and realizes they don’t know where to buy a plunger or who might go for a coffee with them.
- emmafrans.substack.com
Är sociala medier verkligen tjack?
I stället för att enbart prata om begränsningar i skärmtid tycker jag att vi borde prata mer om hur vi skapar en tillvaro där barn, ungdomar och vuxna kan och vill göra annat. Hur bygger vi platser, aktiviteter och sociala rum som konkurrerar ut skärmen på egna meriter?
- betterthanrandom.substack.com
If you are useful, it doesn’t mean you are valued
It took me a few years to truly grasp the difference. If you’re valued, you’ll likely see a clear path for advancement and development, you might get more strategic roles and involvement in key decisions. If you are just useful, your role might feel more stagnant.
- mikefisher.substack.com
Unintended Consequences
A “feature” is never just a button or a feed; it’s a nudge in a complex human ecosystem. When we optimize for convenience or connection, we often trigger second-order effects that are difficult to unwind.