Product Thoughts

CVS certainly isn’t alone in this but my experience attempting to unsubscribe from one of their emails over the weekend made me frustrated enough to want to vent here. This “Oh no! Our unsubscribe button must be broken” is so transparently shady to me. I love that I’m welcome to call Customer Care. Call someone?! To unsubscribe from an email?! No thanks! I’m left with no recourse other than smashing that Gmail Spam button and just wait for the next newsletter that I can’t unsubscribe from to sho

Lenny Rachitsky has, over the past 5+ years built what I consider to be the best community and content around "Product" writ large - covering various aspects of the craft of product management, strategies for product growth and finally, and often most interesting to me, valuable perspectives on the psychology of being a product manager/product leader. It all started with a great subscription newsletter and a subscriber-only Slack community. The subscription only costs $150 per year and if being

Last week Jason Kottke shared this awesome <10 minute video on how tattoos work (hint: it’s all thanks to your immune system 🫡 ) While I do have a passing interest in tattoo art (here's a fun piece from The Atlantic that explores The Words People Write on their Skin), the reason this video made such an impression on me is the stunning animation and storytelling in service of learning. I did a little digging and the creator, Kurzsgasadt, has other great looking videos covering Why We Need to R

Stompers is a social step-counting app I've been enjoying for about a month now. The concept is simple, quirky, and ultimately has been effective at getting me to do something valuable we all need to do more of - move. The app has a distinctive, decidedly lo-fi cartoony comic book visual style. Like many step counters before it, Stompers does a good job of reflecting the amount you move every day. However, this is not intended to be a single-player game. Stompers is fun because you do it with y

I used to LOVE blogging. I blogged regularly from 2000 to 2010 across a few different sites - for awhile about internet and pop culture, then about design and tech called and eventually moved over to Medium (those posts have been imported here) I never did it to build a giant audience or to make any money. It was just super fun to write about random stuff with my friends and share it with what was likely an audience of each other, maybe our moms and a few other bloggers. It didn't matter. I lov

(originally posted on Medium) If Oprah can have a list of her favorite things, why can’t we all? Over the holidays, as I was drinking wine and lamenting the dumpster fire of a year 2016 was, I thought it would be good to try and think about the products and experiences that stood out to me for being uniquely delightful in hopes that they may bring some happiness or inspiration to others as we head into 2017. Hopefully something in here brings you joy, inspires you to create something new and

(originally posted on Medium) I hadn’t logged onto Facebook since December 2014. Back then, I decided the effort — and data, oh that sweet sweet data — I was putting into the service wasn’t coming close to being matched by the value I was getting out of it. This was in stark contrast to the two products I used the most — Twitter and Instagram — where that balance was much more rewarding. Facebook also became a place where being yourself, and sharing/standing by what you believe in, would oft

(originally posted on Medium) I’d started gathering notes on my experience with the Watch on the weekend it was released (a little over a month ago) but quickly realized that the device fit into such a new place in my life that hot takes wouldn’t cut it. Below is the result of me capturing thoughts over the course of about a month and then going back and doing a little revising as some of my hottest takes ended up melting away as I got used to this new device in my life. I wanted to capture th