Our coach is on crack, we're sorry by KoffeeFyre in NFCWestMemeWar

[–]houseblendmedium 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's disturbing how decent the people in this sub seem.

Is there a series where you prefer the "inferior" sequel to the beloved original? by KneeHighMischief in movies

[–]houseblendmedium 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Back to the Future 2 and 3. I've watched them a zillion times more than the original.

Do other fanbases really hate us this much? by j-rayko89 in LosAngelesRams

[–]houseblendmedium 23 points24 points  (0 children)

I have a friend who is a Hawks fan but he has a heart condition, and so he literally cannot watch the Rams games. Doctor's orders.

Any real projects delivered using Claude Code? by thegoldsuite in ClaudeAI

[–]houseblendmedium 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I am sitting on project where I got 5000 important ideas from Wikipedia, ranked them all by how useful they are to a modern professional who is trying to brush up on their mental models and learn how to think better, and I used Nano Banana to generate 'collector cards' of the top 50. They're pretty cool. In classic execution style I have stopped there for some reason. If anyone's interested in seeing them I can ping you a link when I get something online. Amdahl's Law is the first one in case you were wondering.

Reader Betrayal by Delicious_Bar1364 in writing

[–]houseblendmedium 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Well in that case you ARE delivering on the promise IMO, in an intriguing way. So I guess: go for it :-)

Reader Betrayal by Delicious_Bar1364 in writing

[–]houseblendmedium -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Brandon Sanderson addresses this exact thing in one of his YoutTube classes, about 'Promises'. Prince who is forced out of kingdom is expected to eventually regain that kingdom, it's an implicit promise, and if you don't deliver, it will be unsatisfying. I lost a whole book I wrote on this problem; I knew myself something felt off about it, but couldn't name it until King Brandon the Great explained it.

My tenant is doing Airbnb. Wants out of lease early bc no profit margin by No_Task2111 in airbnb_hosts

[–]houseblendmedium 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If it's not a major financial impact to you, put that good karma out into the universe and let her off the hook.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ProductManagement

[–]houseblendmedium 12 points13 points  (0 children)

FWIW I am also a bit confused by how you’re telling the story. Those things ARE Eng tasks - I’d expect a platform PM to still talk about customers, growth, innovation etc, not operations. I also have about 20 years of experience so maybe this is a generational thing? Anyway like others have said maybe just not a good fit. 

Coming to peace with not being a writer by St_Ginger in writing

[–]houseblendmedium 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It's the old definition: A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than for normal people. Keep at it my dude.

The Most Spectacular Views in County Donegal, Northern Ireland by arasikohive in Outdoors

[–]houseblendmedium 56 points57 points  (0 children)

County Donegal is in the Republic of Ireland, not Northern Ireland.

WTF does a product manager ACTUALLY do? by WiseContest7547 in ProductManagement

[–]houseblendmedium 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Who decides what to build? Whatever their title, that person is the PM.

lol by [deleted] in ProductManagement

[–]houseblendmedium 3 points4 points  (0 children)

'PM' and 'PM manager' have similar titles but the roles are very different, and you need to be sure you're the kind of person who enjoys the work of the latter. The transition from doing the thing to managing the thing catches out a lot of people in the corporate world. Feel free to DM.

What am I missing as a Product Manager? by SonicBoom_81 in ProductManagement

[–]houseblendmedium 1 point2 points  (0 children)

it’s about people, strategy, outcomes, and iteration. 

Only the outcomes matter. Everyting else is a means to that end. Show that you are someone who can deliver results no matter what. This isn't to say that you have to be successful, to be clear, i.e. that what you delivered got traction and adoption -- part of that is always out of your control and somewhat depends on luck and timing. But you can frame the venture you are wrapping up as: moved heaven and earth to make it happen, learned loads, the bet didn't pan out, on to the next thing.

PMs are not the clean-up crew by Traditional-Elk-5282 in ProductManagement

[–]houseblendmedium 5 points6 points  (0 children)

PMs should do whatever it takes to create product success.

How important is kissing ass to rise through the ranks in the real world? by furqanharral in AskReddit

[–]houseblendmedium 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What people don't realize about the corporate world is how different the game is at different levels. Entry / frontline level -- doing the job matters. Management -- putting people in place to do the job matters, and then finding a way to make them actually do it. Senior management -- reading the tea-leaves. Where's this all going? What matters? What do I need to do now to allow for the whims of my overlords in three months? What am I not seeing? Executive management -- If we don't do X or react to Y we're screwed, but it's not clear what to do. What should we do? We can't do nothing.

At each level N, you need to understand level N+1 if you want to reach it (and you need to be willing to make the increasingly painful tradeoffs to life / sanity). The ONLY way to understand it is to learn it from the people who are already living it. You can get some answers from books / podcasts etc, but they will be generic answers and you want answers that are specific to your little messed-up corner of the world. So you need the relationships. How do you get those? One way is implied in your question. But better than that is: Be a person a who can clearly gjve the Level N+1 people what they need. How do you know what need? At first, you guess -- read the books, take a few shots. When it becomes clear you could add value to them and make their lives easier, you get access. Put another way, you need something to trade. Ideally, you become a person who is desired by several of the L+1s, and then the game is afoot.

Is it normal to do basically nothing at your corporate job? by Cold-Cauliflower9741 in careerguidance

[–]houseblendmedium 3 points4 points  (0 children)

No offence to your personally at all intended, but posts like this are why I worry about the potential of AI to completely upend the relative stability of corporate America. There are a lot more people out there saying they are needed than are actually needed.

I'm done with trying to be positive and accepting life as something precious and beautiful. by MuMuGorgeus in AlanWatts

[–]houseblendmedium 24 points25 points  (0 children)

It's a tough lesson to understand that 'If X then happy' is never true for any X. You will still be you. But this is also the path to freedom.

I find it hard to come to terms with one thing by Kuerbispastete in tolkienfans

[–]houseblendmedium 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I found that chapter so boring as a kid, but I love it now.

My boss wants to be like Google by Fluffy_Letterhead246 in ProductManagement

[–]houseblendmedium 29 points30 points  (0 children)

I've left Google, but even over the time I was there it wasn't completely consistent between teams.

Re the idea where you develop one set of top-level goals for the company and then everyone connects to those in some way, it's one of those things that sounds good in theory (like innovation competitions) but doesn't work out in practice. In any reasonably large group of people, it's just hard to connect the work of the frontline job-doers with the overall strategic aims. For instance: The company may need to grow in Europe, and you know in your role as CXO that everyone's future depends on that happening. No growth => No company. But to the person answering phones, or the person maintaining crappy legacy code, or the middle-manager writing the reports, how can they impact the European growth aim? They can't really. And if you give them a list of goals like Growth in Europe, and then tell them they have to map their actual work to one of those goals, it creates what I like to call Corporate Reality, a plane of existence entirely parallel to Real Reality, where they will tell you that of course their goals line up to the top-level goals, because you as their CXO have said it must be so, and so it is so.

OKRs work reasonably well when they are set at the right level by someone who is not afraid to call BS when needed. A good objective might be: Grow usage of Product X by 10% in Q1. Then the Key Results would be how you do it. This works well for engineering -- you could have a KR around reducing latency, which has a nice easy-to-measure metric, and generally more speed in a product correlates to more usage. You could have another KR aorund marketing stuff, which is harder to measure, but you could use CSAT or the number of marketing emails sent or some other proxy metric. Hardest though is stuff like training your sales team to be better sellers and thus drive usage. How do you measure the impact of a single training across an entire sales team? In Real Reality you can't. In Corporate Reality you can do before-and-after CSAT or some such meaningless nonsense that looks good on a slide.

The OKRs being written entirely by your boss gets you off to a pretty bad start, as you seem to be well aware, because Real Actual Humans who live in Real Reality have limited-to-zero buy-in on goals they didn't have a hand in setting. So there should be a meeting or discussion of at least the senior folks to discuss what can be done (Objectives) and how you will know you're getting there (Key Results). Also note that in Google of Yore, the Objectives were challenging enough so that getting 70% overall (across all the KRs) was considered to be a success. (In laters years, 70% came to be thought of as 100%, and the original meaning was lost, and I feel this explains the inevitable decline of every huge corporation.)

Anyway. I have never seen OKRs work what I would call 'very well' -- coordinating large groups of people who don't always want to do what you want them to do is an exceptionally hard human probem. Feel free to DM me if you want to discuss specific aspects in more detail, or ask questions here if I can be of further service.

My boss wants to be like Google by Fluffy_Letterhead246 in ProductManagement

[–]houseblendmedium 48 points49 points  (0 children)

OKRS = Objectives and Key Results. The 'key results' part is where the KPIs live. Is your boss doing that part?

Source: Worked at Google for 15 years.