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. …

Learning to navigate an uncertain world — Chris Butler will be hosting the “The Product Mindset” at the Product-Led Festival, October 19–21, 2021. Chris will be diving into how the product mindset is more than product sense or taste, it’s embracing the way the world works and what that means for the certainty (or uncertainty) of what…

If a voice platform like Alexa or Google Home Hub doesn’t prioritize communal computing, how should skill developers build for everyone in the home and office? In this recent article with Opus Research, I give advice for skill developers to make their skills more communal and the case for platforms…

What if Netflix was a military contractor? What if mercenaries had to deal with all of the systems that gig workers are required to comply with? How does detection of patterns (and randomness) impact military planning as machine learning and compute starts to become commodified? Should you keep a d20…