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Corporate Survival Strategy: Winning with Mediocrity
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11 min read
“I’m not here to be number one in the market. I’m here to make money.” It used to bother me working with clients who were unwilling to commit to winning. They thought they wanted to be the best in their class, but not really. They were unwilling to make the hard choices and sacrifices required…
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What is a product?
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9 min read
We ended the last essay with ‘The next time someone asks you what you do, or what digital products are, tell them you build digital tools to help make people’s lives better. Because if a product isn’t offering value and making someone’s life better, is it even a product?’ Let’s dig into this a bit…
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What is it you do exactly?
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6 min read
Working in the digital product space, especially in an agency setting, requires you to concoct several descriptions of your job & industry to keep on-hand for conversations with family and friends. Depending on their technical sophistication, how you describe your work will vary greatly. I’ve noticed that anything computer-related get labelled as “IT” by most…
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Writing An MVP Product Sentence
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3 min read
When starting a new project, Robert Caro distills the essence of his new book into as little as a single paragraph. “I can’t start writing a book until I’ve thought it through and can see it whole in my mind…I boil the book down to three paragraphs, or two, or one.” This paragraph acts as…
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My notes on Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik
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14 min read
Even though this book was published about 10 years ago, Web Analytics 2.0 by Avinash Kaushik is still rich with information and provides a great overview of applying analytics analytically (lol). It doesn’t focus on using a specific tool, but more on the principles of effective digital data analysis which I find much more valuable.…
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Metaphors for Better Time Management
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3 min read
I started reading Metaphors We Live By this week, continuing to make metaphors top of mind for me. My interest was re-piqued on the topic after finishing The Knowledge-Creating Company, where they discuss Metaphor and Analogy as the most effective ways to externalize tacit knowledge. The prevalence of metaphor to think and understand concepts has…
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2019 Reading List
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2 min read
In the spirit of a depth-year, my intent for 2019 will be a much more focused, non-ne reading list. In 2018 I read almost 80 books, almost all of them for the first time. I am still grappling with the need for the new and being intentional about reading. In 2018 I bought ~130 books leaving…
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A matter of words
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2 min read
While learning about business writing, the idea of clarity is constantly reinforced. Strip sentences of all flourishes to clarify ideas and their meaning. I find that writing in this manner produces prose that ends up feeling sterile and uninteresting. While the ideas are certainly valuable and easy to understand, there is something missing when you…
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The Launch and Learn Mindset
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3 min read
Originally written and posted on the Versett blog. One of the first things you do when you launch a new product is to celebrate the big day. But let me share an unpopular opinion—maybe it’s not the right time to be celebrating. Launching a product is a testament to the hard work the entire team…
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Writing Better
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3 min read
What does it mean to write better? Last month I said I wanted to write more, but didn’t specify that I wanted to write better, which I think is my true goal. Writing more is one way to get there, but I answered a different question instead. I answered “how do I write more?” instead of…
Works in progress
