» Comprehensive introductory training on large language models (LLMs)
» Nonverbal communication can make assistive robots more effective
» Practical suggestions to foster greater alignment between product and go-to-market teams
» Strategy is a coherent set of choices about what we’re going to do to achieve our vision
» Negotiating estimates ultimately leads to disappointment — it will still take as long as it was going to
» The necessary conditions for any behaviour to be enacted include capability, opportunity, and motivation
» Written well, personal user manuals can build psychological safety
» However, they can also be abused to excuse certain counter-productive behaviours
» Rather than focusing on engineering team productivity, examine the causes of their low / negative value work
» When asked for development estimates, ask why they need the information and what they’ll do with the answer
» Different development tasks need varying amounts of user story detail
» Treat your developers with the same thoughtfulness as your users
» Empowered teams can only succeed if the leadership team is on board
» Leaders can’t scale or have all the answers; empowered teams stand a better chance
» Leadership needs to be open and transparent when issuing a “must-do” edict to an empowered team
» Product leadership is continually striving for coherence of approach and clarity of purpose
» Motivation comes from making progress in meaningful work
» A mission-focused team tackling poorly understood problems may appear unproductive to outsiders
» It is everyone’s responsibility to act upon negative behaviour / thinking, but without assigning blame
» Even in the most controversial negotiations, the other party is just like you and aims to walk away happy
» To reduce coordination cost, partition the work by time or space
» Behavioural design considers customers’ levels of mental energy, cognitive biases, and their existing patterns
» Successful organisations reinforce psychological safety in different ways
» Adding more people to a team makes communication a more significant overhead
» When delivering difficult news at work, you are not there to seek sympathy
» Tie business impact to deprioritised work to highlight the problem to your CEO without sounding whiny
» An organisation’s emotional culture governs which emotions people express and suppress at work
» Many organisation equate “fixing” to basically “patching holes in the slowly sinking boat”
» Desire paths spring up as users’ needs and goals change
» The effort paradox: the effort of forming a new path versus the desire to take the path of least resistance
» In digital products we use analytical tools to help us observe desire paths
» When a new desire path emerges, question your old assumptions — user behaviour is changing
Years ago, someone once told me that “perception is reality” when it comes to reputation at work. Of all the lessons I’ve learned in my career, this has been by far one of the hardest.
