In my position I probably shouldn’t have a favorite AWS product, just like you shouldn’t have a favorite child. I do have a fave service but fortunately I’m not an (even partial) parent; so let’s hope

At a recent happy hour, I struck up a conversation with a product manager. I told him I was a product designer, and he asked “one of the good ones, or one of the bad ones?” A designer on his team — a

John Allspaw has a great tweet on problem discovery: I’ve always loved the tweet, but I only recently noticed the paper he cites in the thread. It’s called “ The Art of Problem Discovery: Adaptive Thinking for Innovation and Growth “, by Brian Mathews. In the prologue, the paper tells the origin…

Shouts & Murmurs September 16, 2019 Illustration by Luci Gutiérrez Hello, I am a woman on a blue-and-green sphere that has dollops and doinks of mountains all over it. Some of the mountains on my cosmic sphere splooge out thick liquid fire spurts that run downhill and cool and turn into vacation…

Note: This story has not been updated for several years. [This post is adapted from an item from the November Six Colors members-only newsletter. Become a subscriber today to support the site and get

If there is one debate that is the endlessly circling “Star Wars versus Star Trek” of product development, it is what I refer to as “The Tradeoff Between Quality and Time” (TTBQT). Here’s how it typically goes: Alice: The way we’ve built X is pretty janky/slow/hacky. I have a better solution. Bob:…

When it comes to the so-called “consumerization of the enterprise,” a workplace tool that looks an awful lot like Pinterest seems like it would be the trend’s final form. Brooklyn-based Air is buildin

If you took a minute to think back and pick your favorite conference talk, I have no idea what it was about, but I bet the talk was designed to tell a story. Likewise, I bet your favorite book, even i

This is a draft guide for staffeng.com Most career ladders define a single, uniform set of expectations for Staff Engineers. These career ladders attempt to identify the commonalities across many folks performing similar roles in their organization, but in the end these ladders are a tool that apply…

hing to do with the coronavirus: what this change really means is the biggest missing piece in the Anti-Amazon Alliance is now all-in. Swiffer and Shelf Space

Posted April 18, 2020 Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for th

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On March 30, 2020, we enabled folks to opt into a beta dark mode on Stack Overflow. Let’s talk about the work that went into it. Dark mode opt-in banner I’m Aaron Shekey, Stack Overflow’s principal pr

I was at Amazon for about six and a half years, and now I've been at Google for that long. One thing that struck me immediately about the two companies -- an impression that has been reinforced almost

A greater portion of the world’s work, organizing, and care-giving is moving onto digital platforms and tools that facilitate connection and productivity: video conferencing, messaging apps, healthcare and educational platforms, and more. It’s important to be aware of the ways these tools may impact…

To stop coronavirus we will need to radically change almost everything we do: how we work, exercise, socialize, shop, manage our health, educate our kids, take care of family members. We all want things to go back to normal quickly. But what most of us have probably not yet realized—yet will soon—is…

Lauren Smiley 13 min read· Mar 25, 2015 -- Press enter or click to view image in full size In the new world of on-demand everything, you’re either pampered, isolated royalty — or you’re a 21st century servant. By Lauren Smiley Angel the concierge stands behind a lobby desk at a luxe apartment…

Are you chained to the green dot? Turn it off and break free. As a general rule, nobody at Basecamp really knows where anyone else is at any given moment. Are they working? Dunno. Are they taking a break? Dunno. Are they at lunch? Dunno. Are they picking up their kid from school? Dunno. Don’t care.…

The Shift We’ve always hoped that our digital tools would create connections, not conflict. We have a chance to make it happen. Credit...Rebekka Dunlap By Published March 17, 2020Updated April 2, 2020 For someone who has barely left his house, I’ve had a shockingly busy few days. First, there were…

When meeting notes startup Hugo decided to instate a maximum of four hours of meetings per week, they noticed something interesting. By forgoing meetings, and sharing company information through notes

“Technical debt” is a metaphor for all software design choices that turn out to be suboptimal, no longer valid, or just plain wrong. These choices incur a cost on future development, and the shortcuts taken today will later slow you down until you “pay back” the debt by fixing the problems. And it’s…

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Over the years, Apple has built up a portfolio of services and add-ons that you pay for. Starting with AppleCare extended warranties and iCloud data subscriptions, they expanded to Apple Music a few y

Last June, more than two years after his father-in-law assigned him the task of bringing peace to the Middle East, Jared Kushner held a big kickoff conference in Bahrain to unveil the economic portion

I first met Mark Zuckerberg in March 2006. At the time, I was the lead tech writer at Newsweek and was working on a story about what we were calling Web 2.0—the notion that the next stage of the inter

The Original Renegade A 14-year-old in Atlanta created one of the biggest dances on the internet. But nobody really knows that. Jalaiah Harmon, 14, performing the Renegade, a dance she created that ha

Credit... Bráulio Amado and Jordy van den Nieuwendijk Opinion How to Make Your Marriage Gayer Same-sex spouses feel more satisfied with their partners than heterosexual ones. What’s the secret? Credit

3 min read· Mar 28, 2014 -- Earlier today, Dustin Curtis wrote a post about the recent Facebook desktop redesign. Dustin makes a few assumptions about the rationale behind the redesign, including how

Agile Lite: Agile without all the burnout "Agile software development" is a great idea that's been overcomplicated by the publishing and consulting industries. Agile Lite is an attempt to simplify the situation. You do not need a book or a workshop to explain Agile Lite. You just need a text file…

Nothing gets an investor’s heart racing like the phrase “software margins.” It’s shorthand for the concept than businesses which are primarily bits (not atoms) have some very attractive characteristic

Career coaching by August 11, 2015 Flashpop/Getty Images Over the years, I’ve asked hundreds of executive students what skills they believe are essential for leaders. “The ability to give tough feedback” comes up frequently. But what exactly is “tough feedback”? The phrase connotes bad news, like…

No Mercy/No Malice If it does, the stock will shed 30%+ in the first year Published inMarker · 5 min read· Jan 22, 2020 -- In 2015, one of my students asked me to invest in his business. He was sourci

Pandemics China James Palmer January 27, 2020, 6:40 PM As news of the novel coronavirus spread online, one video became emblematic of its claimed origin: It showed a young Chinese woman, supposedly in

Kindle competition is coming soon Published inOneZero · 4 min read· Jan 4, 2020 -- Photo: NurPhoto/Getty Images The Kindle has hardly changed in almost a decade. Sure, it’s had some incremental improv

The first American automobile maker, Duryea Motor Wagon Company, was founded in 1895; 34 more auto-makers would be founded in the U.S. in the following five years.1 Then, an explosion: an incredible 2