• Have been thinking a lot about "modability" as an attribute I love in the software I use (Roam being the main one). Think I prefer "Tinkerable" though.
• That said this article isn't really about modabble or tinkerable software, but systems & protocols. It's closed to the View Source Affordance.

• "With any experienced team of engineers and designers, PM'ing is not a full-time job"
• "since the necessity for a PM depends on the product, the team, and the needs of the business, the traditional notion of a 1-to-1 relationship between teams and PMs should be reconsidered."
• "Ideal time to hire a PM ... founders can no longer be involved in all the important product decisions" "But the founders should still act as de-facto heads of products".

• Solution Space
  • Surface
  • Interaction structure and flow
  • Conceptual Model
  • Product & Service strategy
• Problem Space
  • User Needs
  • Domain
  • Observed Behaviour
• Reality
  • The real world

• Saw a few people recommend this so decided to listen, but was disappointed. Penelope seems smart, and It's kind-of interesting, but way too gushingly positive to take seriously - it's basically a press release/ job posting for why you should work at Stripe.
• Stripe is a Sinatra monolith - prob largest ruby repo in existence
• Dropbox paper and Google docs used internally
• Also using Jira 😱

• We emphasize maximizing output, not outcome and impact.
• Your company only earns or saves money when the software you build gets used.
• can almost guarantee you don’t have metrics that’ll tell you how many times your last feature got used – whether it’s really generating value. But, you do know if your last project finished on time.
• You can deliver what you said you would every sprint, and it may not matter if the work doesn’t result in the outcomes your organization predicted.
• “Ed’s priority is to satisfy me through continuous delivery of parts of my kitchen. But, if the software is your product, not the service of building it, then your highest priority had better be outcomes like more people trying, using,and continuing to use your product. Because those are the things that earn or save your company money.”
• “I need to see what I’m making as a real product, not just an assignment that needs to impress an instructor.”

• Become 10-30-50 to escape the career treadmill
• Delegate with transparency
• Bias for building is a double-edged sword
• Focusing illusion leads you astray
• Gifted Debaters win the battle, lose the war

• Make signup easy
• Make navigation easy
• Make it customizable
• Stick to simple UI design

• Need to read more about Allen, but from this piece I feel like he's my product idol.
• "Sex is a driving force for human nature"
• "Product management is art, not commerce" - agree.
• "I’ve been able to imbue my perspective of the world"
• "Grand design" vs design thinking. Grand design - "the new product emerges fully-formed in the mind’s eye before it is commercialized".
• "A good product requires a certain degree of ‘dictatorship"
• "The primary goal for technology should be helping humankind increase efficiency."
• "There is a limit to how much a single app or tool can hold. To avoid an over-bloated app, he recently announced that WeChat is expanding to revolve around different standalone apps." <- very interesting considering WeChat is the canonical super app.
• "Quality, not openness, is the greatest good that a platform can deliver" <- hard disagree with his point here. I dislike the "quality" as determined by an algorithm approach - would prefer to see everything and do curation myself.

• Strategy: The reason for the product, application or the site, why we create it, who are we doing this for, why people are willing to use it, why they need it
• Scope: Functional and content requirements. What are the features, and content contained in the application or product.
• Structure: How user interact with the product, how system behave when user interact, how it’s organized, prioritized, and how much of it. Two components:
  • Interaction Design
  • Information Architecture - arrangement of content elements, how they are organized.
• Skeleton - The visual form on the screen, presentation and arrangement of all elements. 3 components:
  • Interface design
  • Navigation design
  • Information design
• Surface - sum total of all the work and decisions we have made. Visual Design(Sensory Design) - concerned about the visual appearance of content, controls, which gives a clue of what user can do, and how to interact with them.

but the main argument is that productivity and collaboration have always been handled as two separate workflows:

We started with individual files that we sent back and forth via email
Then Dropbox came along and enabled collaboration within documents, but communication about these docs remained a separate channel
Slack wants to become the central communication channel for all productivity apps

Some great examples of how fire fighting in startups tends to work. Regularly find myself referencing this.