John Cutler: A Map from Goals, Around Assumptions, Through Tasks, Towards Results. One of the central roles of a product manager is to drive shared understanding. With shared understanding, a team is more effective, resilient, and creative. Alignment without shared understanding is temporary and short-lived. (more)

a belief you pretend is a fact (nature of truth)

Arnold Kling, trying again to avoid Message Vs Messenger confusions, thinks we should generally assume that people we disagree with actually have Shared Goal-s with us, just different assumptions that affect our respective Design decisions. (more)

Teresa Torres: What Product Assumptions Are You Making? ...more often than not, I see that development teams are not even aware that these hypotheses exist, instead building their products as if they were fact. The problem with this approach is that rarely does a team get all, if any, of these hypotheses right from the get-go. If they don’t first test them (more)

John Cutler: TBM 46/52: (F)acts, (A)ssumptions, (B)eliefs (more)

We all seem to be playing multiple games (Games Theory) at all times, assuming all human activity are games, and we're always involved in multiple sets of human activity. (more)

Heroku's Adam Wiggins on making computers better. Adam Wiggins co-founded Heroku, the pioneering PaaS company, and is the founder of Muse App. He's also had a hand in interesting projects like Ink and Switch and has written extensively on the philosophy of computing at Making Computers Better. (more)

Erik Hoel: Goodbye academia, hello Substack. TL;DR I’m introducing paid subscriptions. This allows TIP to be funded and continue. (more)

Mike Solana: Substack's Easter Miracle. Wednesday, Substack announced the beta release of Substack Notes, a Twitter-like scrolling feed for short-form content, which immediately attracted the unbridled wrath of Twitter’s Lord Commander Elon Musk. By Thursday morning, it was no longer possible to embed tweets on Substack, and by Friday it was total war. (more)

Did Substack Just Change the Game for Indie Newsletter Publishers? ...as a Substack skeptic, this had basically broken my brain, because all of a sudden, I found myself saying nice things about Substack on Twitter and Mastodon. (re substack notes) (more)

John Cutler: TBM 214: From Assumption to Next Step. I used to do a lot of assumption mapping and elicitation exercises. One of the significant challenges was what to do with all of the discomfort and anxiety-inducing assumptions (more)

GeePaw Hill: An Intro to Spikes. I use spikes, periods of code-changing activity that end with no pushes, all the time, at small scale and large, as a way to develop my path. It’s a vital technique. (cf spike solution) (more)

Maria Farrell: Your platform is not an ecosystem. Another day, another exhortation to join an “ecosystem” that’s anything but. I could pick a hundred examples, but one that recently caught my eye was an ad placed in the Financial Times by the Singapore stock exchange, SGX Group, promising “multiple growth avenues, one trusted ecosystem”. SGX wants companies to list on its exchange rather than, say, the Hong Kong (more)

Evan Armstrong: Steve Jobs' Legacy for Builders. Steve Jobs was objectively cruel....Steve Jobs was objectively brilliant.... Talent and terror. Cruelty and compassion. Genius and narcissism. To accept Jobs (and by extension every person who changed the world) you have to accept this duality.... Still, when Make Something Wonderful was published on Tuesday, April 11th, I found myself accidentally slipping into fandom (more)

Simon Owens: Substack Notes could be the Twitter killer we've been waiting for. Ever since he acquired Twitter last year, Elon Musk has shown himself to be a capricious owner. (Musk Buys Twitter) (more)

Introducing Substack Notes. “We believe that what you read matters,” we said, and we meant it. So we set about building a system that fosters deep connections and quality over shallow engagement and dopamine hacks (more)

Simon Owens: Twitter has never understood the Creator Economy. From the very moment Elon Musk announced he was buying Twitter, we’ve been bombarded with predictions about how he would change the product, but it wasn’t until after the deal closed last week that his plans for the platform began to take shape. And what’s his first priority right out of the gate? Charging power users somewhere between $96 and $240 a year to keep their blue verification check marks. (more)

Nathan Baschez: A New Kind of Startup is Coming. Normally when engineers talk about Conway’s Law, they’re thinking about how managers should organize their employees to yield better systems design. But the law goes the other way, too: The systems we work with determine the organizations we get. (more)

To Prioritize Projects is often a pointless exercise of Project Management. (more)

from The Everything Store: “At a management offsite in the late 1990s, a team of well-intentioned junior executives stood up before the company’s top brass and gave a presentation on a problem indigenous to all large organizations: the difficulty of coordinating far-flung divisions. The junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross-group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up. (more)