Have you found that you don’t tackle the key disagreements during workshops? Do they end up in the “parking lot” but never get talked about again? You aren’t focusing on discourse or allowing it to happen enough. …

How might we employ animistic design and LLMs to make a more helpful smart home? — Large language models (LLMs) are now able to simulate human writing and conversation. They can generate text, images, and many other modalities with increasing capability. Could this technology be paired with the smart home to finally build context-aware communal computing devices? We could potentially fix many of the problems with…

Or how can you use animistic design to build better devices for the home? — On March 12, 2022 at SXSW a group of meatbags (aka people) got together to pretend to be devices in the home. From the description on the SXSW website: How Does The Roomba REALLY Feel About Dog Shit?! Or how does the Amazon Ring video doorbell worry about being a…

What happens when you listen to music on Spotify or watch shows on Netflix on your communal devices in the home? How much should the recommendations adapt to everyone in the room? In this article I talk about: Attempts from research in solving the group recommendation problem. How companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Amazon handle group recommendations today — or don’t. A path forward for group recommendation services through shared norms in the home or device — rather than a focus on a person.

As we put more and more of ourselves online we will struggle to use identities that make sense to us. This is because companies aren’t building for the way we use identities in real life relationships as applied to the metaverse. In this article you will find: Discussion of what identity really means today online. Why anonymity and pseudo-anonymous identities are important. Key principles to build identity platforms into your products and services.

Learning about learning from the USMC, applied to product teams — Product people play an amorphous, uncertain, and constantly renegotiated role on product teams. To do well in that role requires experience. …

Many mistakenly believe strategic thinking is about the future — How often have you made a decision thinking it was about the future? Roadmaps are essentially a list of things we will do in the future. It is always just a few months (or years) away that strategic goals come to fruition. Some perfect future where everything is the way…

OKRs are just dreams without grounded key results — You may be struggling with objectives and key results (OKRs) when getting started. The main reason is that you need to reframe the way that leaders provide direction to those on their teams. It is going from very specific work output to the customer outcomes they want. After setting great…

As organizations move from a single product to multiple products, product managers, and product teams, they find the processes of the past simply do not scale. Each product team seems to be following their own processes. …