But honestly, I appreciate the Peanuts special more for how it looks directly at the Christianity of it all. It’s not trying to hide the ball. It is … Why Linus’ Speech Matters (to Jews) Shared by my good friend Shanan; a wonderful read.

This was a great story about how Google’s search distribution deal dramatically increased cost of entry for Neeva, a putative competitor. This also reminded me of the Monster/AB InBev deal mentioned in “The Little Book that Builds Wealth:” To be fair, it is occasionally possible to take the success of a blockbuster product or service and leverage it into an economic moat. Look at Hansen Natural, which markets the Monster brand of energy drinks that surged onto the market in the early part of this decade.

This is a great article from Ars Technica that explains how a bunch of published and defacto standards come together - more or less - to make Mastodon go and create a decentralized social web.

Twitter and Facebook appear to be in trouble. Twitter has been hemorrhaging users, with the Elon deal as a tipping point. Facebook just laid off thousands in an effort to re-focus on their core business and improve profitability. In light of that, and the sudden traction of Mastodon and the Fediverse, I started thinking about what the Fediverse could look like for brands. The Fediverse is decentralized. That makes it different.

This post was originally published on Inside Q4, stories and lessons learned from the Q4 Inc. R&D team. Hiring is a flow, not a project. The requirement was extreme: hire 15 Product Managers (and one Director of Product) in the next year and a half. When I arrived at Q4 in October of 2021, we were entering a period of hyper-growth in Product Design, Engineering and Product Management. We had huge ambitions and needed to scale our team — fast.

Much has been written about the Apple + Google Covid-19 Exposure Notification framework. This is the software that is now part of Android and iOS (13.5+) and powers Covid-19 detection apps for Android and iPhone like COVID Alert (much of Canada), COVIDWISE (Virginia) and dozens of other jurisdictions around the world . I’m in Ontario and use COVID Alert on my iPhone 8 Plus. The apps are fantastic pieces of work from the Canadian Digital Service and its private sector partners Shopify and BlackBerry.

Distributed teams are hard. Distributed teams, where some people are in office and others at home, are harder. Widely distributed teams with people working across countries and time zones are exceptionally hard. Widely distributed teams in a pandemic are damn near impossible to get right. Culture clash alone is an enormous challenge. I once had a fantastic American product manager piss off an equally strong director of engineering (in India) by complaining that the tool the PM needed “had fallen and can’t get up.

Since leaving Borealis I’ve spent time some time getting to know “no code.” Low Code Application Platforms (LCAPs), or “low” or “no code,” “No Code,” seem to have broken through. The promise is that non-programmers can point-and-click their way through building mobile/web Apps and deploy them straight to Google Play, the App Store, or a corporate app store. Last November Gartner assumed that “by 2024, three-quarters of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives” and “low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.

A year ago I wrote that 2016 would be the year that consumer AI went mainstream. In one sense, I was wrong. The average consumer still doesn’t interact with an AI application on a typical day. Siri, Cortana, Google Home, and Allo are making inroads but still have small reach when compared to, say, Android or iOS as a whole. Look Deeper Looking back, I realize that my angle of attack was wrong.

6. Prepare your intent. A little preparation goes a long way toward saying what you wanted to say and having a conversation achieve its intended impact. Don’t prepare a speech; develop an understanding of what the focus of a conversation needs to be (in order for people to hear the message) and how you will accomplish this. Your communication will be more persuasive and on point when you prepare your intent ahead of time.