March 24, 2024

How to Escape the Brown Compromise Trap

We are all painters

The brown compromise is an analogy from the painting world. The story goes like this: if you ask a family of five folks living in the same house which colour they prefer, you may end up with a dataset like this one: green, yellow, blue, violet, and I don’t care (yes, this is not a colour!). You may also end up in a family (like mine) where one of the users (me!) is colour-blind and has a very different perception of the world than the other four family members.

June 16, 2023

Happiness: a Dance of Openness and Closure

Navigating the Rhythms of the Mind

An elephant at sunset by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unspash

Photo by Aarón Blanco Tejedor on Unspash

Our mind operates with two main paradigms. Open or closed.

Openness is the feeling we experience when connecting directly with our experience. It can be while being in the flow state, as identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi where we lose our sense of time and solicit our brain effortlessly. We have multiple expressions for these states.

June 8, 2023

Yesterday I was fired 🔥

What better moment to reflect on life, life choices and happiness than a day after you were laid off?

Ultimately, the reasons do not matter much and will not be exposed here.

A one to zero transition:

I realized today that quitting your job (without another one planned) or being fired is a 1-to-0 transition. In physics, this is called a non-linear transition. It describes rapidly evolving phenomena like phase transitions and the exponential growth of tiny lifeforms. We don’t practice (mentally) this 0-to-1 transition! It is, in fact, the exact opposite of a prevalent mental model of the product & business world. Pether Thiel popularized the 0-to-1 mental model in a well-known book of the same name.

June 23, 2021

📖 Nudge: Why Product Managers Should Become Proficient Choice Architects

Designing a great choice architecture should be one of your core responsibilities as a product manager.

February 22, 2021

Don’t Ask For More Resources: Do More With What You Have!

Instead of asking for more, focus on helping your team succeed. Ensure you align your goals with the team’s current capacity: this is the…

January 22, 2021

The Dark Side of Authority

Boost your success and team growth by … not deciding!

September 20, 2020

Trifecta: How to maximize a product teams impact

Introduction & Definition

In this blog post, we’ll explore the concept of “trifecta” (also called triad in some organizations) that I have seen used successfully in the past both at start-up and even at large scale organizations (ex: Shopify).

Let’s start with a definition. The trifecta represents a subset of a product team whose goals are to capture systematically:

value: for the business
usability: for the user
feasibility: technological, ethical, legal, etc.

Valuable & Usable & Feasible are the trifecta goal!

I will use the term craft in this article and would also like to define it: a craft is one or more people inside the product-team with their hierarchy, rituals and specialties. Example of craft includes engineering (sometimes back-end, front-end, mobile), UX (designer, researcher, content specialist, etc.), Product (product manager, product owner, product lead, etc.), data-science (data-scientist, etc.), commercial, legal, etc. Each organization is different and has a different structure to execute its mission. In this article, I will refer to “craft” as the various specialties & hierarchies that exist within the organization.

May 1, 2020

Don't give us MVPs we want minimally enjoyable products!

Minimally Viable Products are a myth or, if you prefer a mental model. Always wrong but sometimes useful.

Original Image: Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable by Henrik Kniberg

Very much like Prometheus and the fire or Icarus and the sun they are powerful analogies and ideas that shape our view of the world. A tribute to their power is that, thousands of years after their creation, we still relate to them even if their initial context is long gone.

January 18, 2020

How to Run a Why, Who, What, How Alignment Session

A simple set of questions to remove ambiguity, build team alignment and prioritize

January 17, 2020

The Abuse of Tech Debt

There is nothing unique about tech debt: just change. A tech debt classification and initial root-cause analysis.