- Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson. Upon heading back to the UK, a good friend gave me this wonderful book that draws from mould, ant, and city examples to show how complexity and sophistication can emerge from simple individual behaviours. I’m still trying to figure out when and how such systems are the most powerful, and the book has definitely brought me somewhat closer to the answer. “If cities can generate emergent intelligence, a macrobehaviour spawned by a million micromotives, what higher-level form is currently taking shape among the routers and fiber-optic lines of the internet?”
- Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications by Damien Cave, Emma Bubola and Choe Sang-Hun for The New York Times. With a few exceptions, fertility rates across the world have dropped — to numbers as low as 0.92 (South Korea). Every crisis is ripe with opportunity: Which systems and technologies can we use as the population pyramids flip? (And: The alternative, an endlessly rising global population, is surely worse?)
- Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace. A book for anyone who wants to build a working environment that fosters creativity and problem-solving. “You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.”
- A Nervous Splendor by Anthony Gottlieb for The New Yorker. Ludwig Wittgenstein and his siblings (despite coming from one of Austria’s richest families) had a turbulent and not necessarily joyful life — for three of his brothers it ended early in suicide. The family leaned heavily towards neuroticism, but had an exceptional love and talent for music. Not to mention Ludwig’s outstanding contributions to philosophy, which even in their day were recognized as pure genius.
- Session-Based Recommender Systems by Cloudera. Session-based recommendation algorithms give recommendations depending on a user’s interactions in a single session. This means it doesn’t require a history of that user’s preferences or even a profile. In this article, a NLP approach (word2vec) is taken out of the linguistic sphere to create a model.
- 44 Signs You Are Becoming a “Real” PM/PO by John Cutler at Cutlefish. Sometimes it can be difficult to explain what a product manager / product owner does (or where the difference between the two lies). However, Cutler manages to pinpoint what it feels like to be a PM/PO. “You’ll fancy yourself as technical but be humbled daily. You’ll fancy yourself as UX-savvy but be humbled daily. You’ll fancy yourself as business-savvy but be humbled daily”
- The Mediocrity Trap by John Cutler at Cutlefish. Ten thoughts on mediocre work, which is the constant Damocles sword above a product manager’s head. It’s too easy to explain away poor outcomes with the influence of external factors — “Rationalized mediocre work is even worse than accidentally mediocre work.”
- Choosing Your North Star Metric by Lenny Rachitsky for a16z’s Future. An interesting look at which North Star Metrics are used by prominent tech companies. Roughly half of the sample focuses on revenue (AA, GMV), which is slightly higher than I would have assumed. For anyone still in the pre-product-market-fit stage, getting people to stick (i.s. retention) is the primary objective.
- Fitbits, Bundled Payments, and Rollercoasters by Nikhil Krishnan at Out of Pocket. Especially interesting is looking at how Fitbit managed to enroll 455K+ people in less than 4 months by using their existing user base and a clear recruitment process.
- Analytics is a Mess by Benn Stancil. One of the most dangerous things about data-supported decision making is the idea that the findings are inherently objective. “Our jobs, especially those centered around reporting and BI, are to search for the capital-T truth, and represent it as accurately as possible. The problem is, this is all a lie.”
June Reading List
June 19, 2021