I can clearly remember the day I first watched a video playing on a laptop computer with a color screen. It was back in 1995, on my brand new Windows 95 laptop. When I first turned it on it started playing the video above – a cheesy 70′s song covered by Jimmy Cliff. That catchy … Read More →
Category Archives: Tech
Long Live the Radio
I spent three of the best years of my life working at a radio station. This cemented my love of the medium and made me a fan for life. Although video is the undeclared king of the internet era, radio has the ability to entertain, educate and inform in situations and locations where video is … Read More →
Leaving a Working Void
After three years at my job I decided to move on; my position will not be filled for a while. Some people may have a weird feeling about not having another person take their place: after all, if they don’t replace you, you probably haven’t done much. I, however, think it’s the ultimate badge of … Read More →
Writing Rig
The book business is undergoing a revolution – not only in the way books are produced (electronically) and published (by the authors themselves), but also in the way books are written in the first place. I’d like to describe the “writing rig” I’m using to write my book, a method that could have only been … Read More →
What do Product Managers Wish for?
What do product managers wish for? They wish they could decide what their product should be like without the burden of customer requests, usage data, management dictums, and engineering pushbacks. They wish they could decide what’s best for the customer and get it implemented with no qualms. They wish they could just do it. It’s … Read More →
The Lonely People of 2012
“All the lonely people Where do they all come from? All the lonely people Where do they all belong?” - The Beatles, Eleanor Rigby Eleanor Rigby spent her lonely days at a church back in 1966. In 2012 she would hang out at a coffee shop, staring at her laptop, pretending to be busy. … Read More →
Good Robot, Bad Robot
Automatic pool cleaners, known as robots, are out of sight for most people. Even pool owners don’t care much about them – as long as they work. A recent experience with a broken one thought me an important lesson in product innovation and marketing. Although it happened in a niche market, this interesting case applies … Read More →
Hire the Future, Not the Past
A recent study found that recruiters spend 6 seconds scanning a resume before making their initial decision. The study is biased and superficial, but if true, it must means that most of the reader’s attention goes to recognizable elements, like brand names. Big mistake. … Read More →
Domain Expertise – a Must?
A common hiring mistake is to insist on finding someone who has significant domain experience. While such a hire – if one can be found at all – has its merits, the drawbacks often outweigh the advantages. The common belief, to paraphrase an old meme, is “no one was ever fired for hiring a candidate with domain expertise”. Hiring managers think they play it safe by ignoring “foreign” candidates whose career path did not cross their specific domain. To their defense I can say that it is, indeed, easier to vet candidates who have domain-specific keywords on their resume. It just feels right. But is taking the easy route the right way to go? … Read More →
Fear of Letting Go
Companies find all kind of excuses to not ship software products. The main reason is typically fear that the product is not ready for prime time. Guess what – if you don’t expose it to real users it never will be. So what stands in our way? Fear. Fear for our company, for our job, for our future. Nobody wants to be associated with a flop. … Read More →