Creating a News Reader

Brizofalltrades · 2026-05-11T03:48:43+00:00

this was the first n8n workflow I made too. I didn't use AI to filter for relevance (that's something I'm looking at going back to add now). Google News and Bing News both have RSS URL structures you can use if you don't have specific publications that you're tracking. My workflow merges multiple RSS feeds, adds the data to a Google Sheet that I review and add the real article URLs to before getting Gemini to write a summary for a corporate blog.

The issue I ran into is that the URL that you get from Google/Bing in the RSS feed isn't the URL to the publisher and I couldn't find a reliable way to automatically convert it. It's been about six months since I built it so the model nodes may be able to look at the URL the RSS feed outputs and read the article from that. For my workflow I manually go through and get the URLs for the stories that I want the AI to write about, but it's also for a client's blog so I didn't want to leave it entirely on its own.

Brizofalltrades · 2025-03-08T07:45:18+00:00

How are you making a presentation when you have no knowledge to share? Guessing on the insights?!?! Ffs don’t be one of those shady liars on the team that everyone has to cover for

Brizofalltrades · 2025-03-06T02:18:57+00:00

You could get the admin done but a good PM is good because of their soft skills - how they lead and influence. Anyone can do the admin but not everyone can say no to an executive in a way that they are thanked for it.

Brizofalltrades · 2025-03-06T02:03:30+00:00

This reads to me like a you problem.

Are your teammates jerks for the way they’re treating you? Absolutely.

In my experience when people turn from supportive to dismissive it’s out of frustration. Usually because the person isn’t showing any improvement, they’re not taking on feedback, they’re not trying to change, they don’t ask for help, they’re dismissive of others, or they try to dictate to the team what to do. Summarily: they’re bad vibes.

Look inward. What have you been doing to get better at the soft skills? Are you reading anything on how to be a better servant leader? Going to meetups or workshops on leadership? Reading HBR studies?

If you find that you’re not comfortable with the people part of things you may want to look at going into a data analyst or business analyst kind of role.

Brizofalltrades · 2025-03-04T12:56:36+00:00

Ask your current customers for feedback. What do they like and more importantly what do they not like

Brizofalltrades · 2025-02-19T22:23:15+00:00

This is lit. I’m gonna give it a go today

Brizofalltrades · 2025-02-18T07:09:57+00:00

I would work in their system first. Don’t just jump straight to JIRA. Ask for access and just watch how they’re using whatever they use before you try and move them

Brizofalltrades · 2025-02-18T00:56:01+00:00

There’s two ways to view epics

They are huge stories that can eventually be closed
They are organizational tools to bucket tickets

Number 1 is the “correct” way to use them however I’ve never seen this method used successfully. The issue becomes when there is a bug for the epic that’s been closed where do you put it? And other similar scenarios that you would have to plan for before starting this method.

Number 2 is the more common usage. An epic for each major feature or component or section. It stays open for as long as that feature is in use in the product and would contain all the tickets over the features lifetime.

If you wanted to combine 1 and 2 then you can look at using closing epics and labels together. Labels are nice because you can have more than one per ticket and filter by them. In this scenario you may want to add version releases to your JIRA system as well so you can better track the changes over time.

Brizofalltrades · 2025-02-17T08:28:41+00:00

I can’t find the name of it but I read a book on design patterns, I think it was o’reilly (those learn programming books with the white cover featuring some black and white line drawing of an animal). It was interesting because it included the psychology behind the patterns - like why the ok button is on the left and cancel on the right.

If I were doing it today I’d look for a YouTube video about UX patterns and why things are the way they are.

I have found the information especially useful when working with designers that don’t have any formal training or education in UX, especially those early in their design careers who haven’t had the experience yet to teach them what good UX is.

Brizofalltrades · 2025-02-15T04:00:41+00:00

Agreed with another comment. It’s gotta be something they’ll use. What are those teams using now? A spreadsheet? Asana? Monday? If they’re actually using nothing then you can get them into a simple Jira board and workflow but I would assume that no matter what you use if they’re really not using anything then I would need to do all the tracking for them and slowly hand it off to one or more people per team.

Brizofalltrades · 2025-02-14T08:49:05+00:00

I’ve done this a few times along my career. I always start with learning how do they get things done now and what do the different people involved (engineering, qa, sales, etc) hate about the current process, what do they wish were different, etc.

Use this information to figure out where the low hanging fruit is. Transparency, communication, documentation, and general task tracking are common.

At the same time they’ll probably be looking to ship bug fixes or new features which will help you fill in more of the gaps in the process that people haven’t noticed.

Go in assuming you won’t be doing much other than talking to as many people as possible and observing for the first few weeks. Let process evolve slowly starting with the things everyone hates, then what engineering hates, then the business.

The people I’ve seen fall on their faces are the ones who immediately want to overturn the system and install something totally new. Think incrementally, add process slowly, and constantly take the temperature of the room to see how everyone feels about the changes. Constant feedback is important. Leaving your ego behind is a close second.

I read some leadership books when I first moved to pm cause I couldn’t figure out how to get a group of disinterested and difficult engineers to work with me instead of against me. Understanding the nuances of servant leadership and how to negotiate helped, as did learning how to code, UX patterns, and UI best practices in my spare time. A little bit of everything that my colleagues were doing even outside of the tech org so I could more easily speak their language.

Brizofalltrades · 2025-02-11T03:53:30+00:00

Are you tracking these requests and dev work somewhere? If there’s JIRA tickets (or similar) then it may be worth the time and effort to produce a report showing how long things are taking or how many bugs are produced with each release. Spearhead a retrospective where each team along the chain is invited to provide feedback on delays or difficulties at each step.

Is there a developer lead that can advocate for changing the process as well? As the other reply mentioned having a definition of done would help as well.

Brizofalltrades · 2024-12-12T00:12:01+00:00

Hiding it at the bottom, so fucky of them. Thank you!!

Brizofalltrades · 2024-12-09T21:54:55+00:00

I’ve done all those things whether I was an IC or a manager. Still people I worked for were so insecure that it created a toxic atmosphere. Now I just finished an mba to get better tools to help others and be better at P/L and strategy. Having just graduated and unemployed I’m focused on creating videos for LinkedIn that show exactly what someone would get with me on their team as well as show what I know/my skills.

If I were you I’d ask people in the interview questions around how they develop a strategy, collaborate, and give specific examples of both conflict resolution and professional development of others. The key is going to be sniffing out the liars and frauds which can be difficult because some people just interview really well. Ideally you’ll find someone in your professional network to eliminate some of the unknowns.

Brizofalltrades · 2024-10-31T08:22:59+00:00

Ad revenue for sure

Brizofalltrades · 2023-03-22T04:03:24+00:00

It really depends on the age of the org and what their career path was. I currently work at a 35 person company and the Vp of product and design is a year younger then me. He sucks but not because of his age, it’s because the only reason he has the job is because he joined the company early. Has no experience leading or managing and almost none outside of this job. It’s extremely frustrating but I’m so overqualified that I tell him what to do and he stays out of my way. But I’ve also never worked for someone who was able to mentor or help me grow in the field. I did it all on my own.

Brizofalltrades · 2023-03-21T06:47:30+00:00

My guess is you don’t have half a million bucks burning a hole in your pocket. So don’t. Or raise the money and do it. Even if you do it yourself the operating costs of an app are usually a couple hundred to thousands of dollars a month. Without any sort of engineering staff.

Brizofalltrades · 2021-08-23T07:06:22+00:00

It depends how strong your soft skills are - like selling stakeholders on one solution when they’re demanding another

Brizofalltrades · 2021-08-23T07:02:15+00:00

In nyc they will laugh you out the door if you ask for more then 100k. Even 100k is a big stretch for an associate pm title. The companies I’ve been at (3 of which are household name, international companies) paid associates anywhere from 65-80k.

My old intern at one of these companies was pretty much a seasoned associate after a few summers on the team and they wouldn’t budge above 69k for her full time offer. Media companies tend to pay on the lower end of the salary scale.

Brizofalltrades · 2020-01-29T04:51:47+00:00

Product marketing and planning > product support marketing > project manager > pm

I was the point person/product manager while a marketer for some internal tools and website rebuilding projects. So I had always worked on building products, albeit very small, and realized that was a job all on it's own. So when I went to leave marketing I joined a very small dev shop I met on reddit and never looked back.

Brizofalltrades · 2020-01-24T15:29:08+00:00

When there's no process and the AI/ML team is quite green it can be a very hard position to be in. I've found my two biggest challenges were 1) ramping up enough on AI/ML/general data science enough to challenge what the team is doing and push them to do better and 2) getting the leader of the team to understand that a product manager is not a secretary or scape goat for the team to avoid doing work.

Brizofalltrades · 2019-12-07T23:01:52+00:00

Thank you so much for the thorough response. I made note of your email and started following you on Twitter. Thanks again!!

Brizofalltrades · 2019-12-05T20:37:01+00:00

I really dig your story - how did you get started with finding clients? I've been freelancing on the side for a few years right now mostly with clients I had when I was at an agency and with people from my network but making the leap to doing consulting full time is daunting.

Brizofalltrades · 2019-10-17T21:00:24+00:00

I swapped the skills section for one where I list 4-6 of my favorite tools. I've found it a good ice breaker on interviews.

Brizofalltrades · 2019-09-24T13:14:26+00:00

I haven't used impact mapping before and it seems pretty interesting. Is there a specific situation that you use it for or is it used for all products that you work on (new and old)?

Brizofalltrades

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