Eleganthack

I was walking Nina home from a friend's house, thinking about Annie Duke's Thinking in Bets, when it hit me: every choice we make is a bet. Most are so small we never notice them (a new taco place, a shortcut through traffic). Some are enormous. And the e

I teach a class called Design for Behavior Change. But let me tell you a secret: all design is behavior change. Most of the time the behavior we're changing is getting people to buy stuff. Paula Scher brings the funk to poster design. I admit to having a

Years ago I was at a Web 2.0 conference in New York, sitting next to a young guy with the sweetest baby face. Seriously, when people say someone has the face of an angel, this kid did. The speaker on stage was terrible, and the two of us spent a happy fif

Often when I help a company roll out OKRs, the same thing happens. We set the company objective, we craft key results, everyone's excited. And then someone raises their hand. "What about customer support? Don't they get OKRs too?" It's not customer suppor

I've been thinking about scale the same way I've been thinking about speed: as something Silicon Valley treats like a moral good when it's actually just a strategic choice. The internet is drowning in posts about how to scale. Scale your team, your infras

I was reading a post on Anthropic's blog about AI product management, and the author talked about speed as if it's a virtue. She never said why speed was supposed to be a good thing. She just assumed everybody wanted it. But should they? Speed and scale g

There's a Cold War that runs through almost every product team. The frontline folks-designers, PMs, engineers-are quietly frustrated. "Management is completely disconnected from reality," they mutter. "They don't understand what our users actually need."

People find out I read twenty-three AI newsletters (and unsubscribed from as many more) and immediately ask the same question: which ones should I read? Fair. Here's what's in my rotation and why. First, the infrastructure. Beyond newsletters, I have a cu

Last month a product designer showed me her new prototype. She'd spent two weeks vibe-coding a tool for tracking "gratitude journaling streaks." The interface was beautiful. Confetti animations for seven-day streaks. Gentle notifications. Then she showed