Dear son, As you embark on your career and join the workforce, allow me to offer you some advice. First, remember the secular values you were brought up on: think for yourself, question everything, don’t follow the herd, be true to your core morals, believe only in the disprovable, don’t follow false idols, respect others, …
My newly published poetry collection, Synapse Juice: Poetry for the Inquisitive Mind, is now available on Amazon. I dedicated it to my source of inspiration: free, untethered time. I wrote it on planes, trains, cars, and buses, where the rare and tranquil purity of thought fostered distilled creativity. Here’s a taste: Cradle to Grave Most …
There’s an epidemic among girls, boys, and adults of all ages. People affected by it proudly declare their perceived disabilities and needlessly berate themselves. I often hear statements like “I’m not smart enough for this,” “I’m not good at math,” or “I’m not a technical person.” Shutting out an entire field of knowledge may help …
The customer is always right, period. If you have one customer, your life as a product manager is fairly easy – just do what they ask you to do. If you have millions of customers, use statistical analysis to figure out what product to build. The middle range is where it gets more challenging. Product …
Good communication skills are critical for product managers, as they constantly communicate with stakeholders across their company and beyond. Communicating with enterprise customers is exciting, but take the wrong turn and you step into a minefield. Beyond the obvious – listen more than you speak, be engaging, and stay positive – product managers are often …
Now more than ever, corporate employees know that every email they send, every document they write – and in many cases – every word they utter is likely being recorded and can be traced back and used against them down the road. This comes on top of their fear of being criticized, yelled at, shamed, …
Agile methodologies have been trending up and down (but mostly up) in the last two decades. Agile is no longer for software development only; creative teams “go agile” in businesses ranging from graphic design to semiconductor engineering. I had the opportunity to implement agile processes in various settings and learned that it works well if …
Famous business people like to go on record describing a killer interview question they always use. I have my own question, and I can humbly claim that it’s better than any other I’ve seen so far. The question is very simple: “What would you like to do when you grow up?” Before you keep reading, …
Unless you’re at the very edge of the bell curve, you must have had a chance to work with people who are smarter than you. Chances are, some of them were a tad difficult to work with. It’s easier to deal with a fool who overreacts and blows things out of proportion than with a …