Industry News

Every few days I post some links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on this blog. Use it to fill your reading queue with interesting stuff.

The Most Ridiculous and Weird Tech Gadgets From the Last 25 Years. “The Hushme was a ‘voice mask’ intended to let you make phone calls without bothering anyone.” Between-time by Mandy Brown. “We live in a world full of distractions but short on breaks. The time between activities is consumed by other...

These types of reports can be a bit vapid sometimes, but I am happy to say that The State of UX in 2023 by Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga is an extremely thoughtful, well-researched look at what’s going on in the design industry. They talk about the current economic and labor landscape, the type of skills required, how design tools are evolving, and much more. They also addresses the topic of “algorithm-driven thought leadership”, which is a topic that’s close to my heart:

When...

Every week I post a few links to things I enjoyed that don’t neatly fit into the topics I usually cover on the blog. Use it to fill your weekend queue with interesting stuff!

The Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2022 Winners are out. Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival? “On an aggregate level, consumers are simply not buying music. They prefer to stream it for pennies rather than purchase it for dollars.” How Do Big Tech Giants Make Their Billions? I know...

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s post Meetings for an effective engineering organization, I bring you more meeting content! In You can’t just cancel 76,500 hours of meetings Becky Kane makes some good points about the context of meetings within an async culture:

Reducing meetings is just one piece of creating an async-first culture.

She gives some examples of other pieces that are harder but even more important in having a lasting impact on engagement and productivity:...

It looks like we may have had another tremor or Google search ranking algorithm update kickoff yesterday, Wednesday, January 18th. We just had one this weekend after the December 2022 helpful content update and December 2022 link spam update finished on January 12th and now we have this, again.

It seems like the topic of meetings is on everyone’s minds again as we start the year. Will Larson has some good perspective from the engineering org viewpoint:

Some engineers develop a strong point of view that meetings are a waste of their time. There’s good reason for that perspective, as many meetings are quite bad, but it’s also a bit myopic: meetings can also be an exceptionally valuable part of a well-run organization. If you’re getting feedback that any given meeting isn’t...

When I arrived at Wildbit in 2016 as Postmark’s first product manager, my initial job was to work with the team to create a formal vision and strategy for the product. I wrote about that process in How we built a product vision and roadmap so I’m not going to spend much time on that.

The focus of this post is on how and why we redeveloped and implemented our Product Strategy after 6 years, and how we used it to create a prioritized product plan. I hope this will be helpful as a guide for...

I enjoyed this post by Yuhki Yamashita (CPO at Figma) about how design is always “Work in Progress,” and how to deal with that:

Our work never feels done because it isn’t. Our collaborators jump in and out of files, leaving feedback and iterating on designs while we’re creating them. Many of us can ship whenever, so it’s hard to know when new designs are actually ready. It’s the chaotic reality of modern product design and development.

He gives some really good recommendations...

This is an interesting interview with Richard Culatta, author of Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World. They discuss how to help kids bridge the gap between physical and digital spaces, how to model good technology behavior, and more. This is such a good point:

By focusing on screen time we miss the far more important concept that we should be teaching our kids; screen value. Some digital activities are just not a good use of a kid’s time (eg. playing a...