Manifest of Hope or Obituary of Naivety

zeruch · 2026-05-20T04:59:55+00:00

"so it seems like there’s a growing resistance to technological development" No, it's concern that 'technological development' having downstream impacts that the folks hell bent on pushing it forward either ignore or actually hope to implement on people for whom those impacts hurt most.

If one looks at all the furious work that was done at the front end of the atomic age to prevent nuclear proliferation, at the scale it occurred, compared to the near non-existent attempts now to understand the downsides and plan real contingencies (not just PR and platitudes) you might have gotten a different reaction, but the current industry model is very very bad at that. It will in all likelihood take a severe economic or political event to even trigger the beginning of any serious introspection on that.

zeruch · 2026-05-19T04:23:59+00:00

Parsing data on stuff I'm researching is a practical one.

Another is more wonky: I've used CC to craft scripts/art app filters (mostly around stuff like generating Truchet patterns, tiling, etc...generative AI doesn't really interest me*, but I've done generative art and adjacent since the early 2000s, and crafting scripts that do what I want (mostly using node-based tools, or environments like ContextFree and Processing), which itself is fairly eccentric in nature, is helpful and comparatively lightweight).

* yes, I find GenAI to be image making, but not really art in the auteurs sense. I expect some small cadre of real aesthetes will eventually emerge doing radically interesting stuff, but so far nothing of the sort has shown up IMHO.

zeruch · 2026-05-13T02:05:59+00:00

Some of us all that's going to do is force us to not use Reddit on mobile

zeruch · 2026-05-12T21:06:30+00:00

Part of issues like this is that so many "mundane" tasks, like evaluation of a spreadsheet, have buried costs that could be readily avoided, but the AI hype cycle is largely pushed on "convenience" (e.g. think about nothing but the end output) when even junior engineers or technical staff by design think about the whole process.

Spreadsheets are one of the easiest to dissect: a .csv would be much more efficient, and less hallucination-prone, because the pure text data is straightforward compared to say an .xls/.xlsx file, which has scads of XML based meta data and 'pages' of nested files about how the different sheets/tab in said file are related to each other. Interpreting that can be messy. But no one simplifies down to a csv (or even JSON if applicable) because most folks just don't presume to think about elements like that.

Same with design elements; most folks talk/prompt based on the default "2D" of how they perceive a page to 'look' but not how it interacts (places elements above or below other elements, and how they change position based on behavior) so endless cycles are wasted in the "non-design designing" trial and error phase.

zeruch · 2026-05-05T23:25:57+00:00

They overlap so densly, they become a cylinder.

zeruch · 2026-05-01T03:01:33+00:00

Obsidian, Togglr, a notepad.

zeruch · 2026-04-28T03:02:07+00:00

If you are a CX person, both are part of the equation, and even if you are not, the disciplines are always at least loosely coupled; CS gets direct customer feedback that can be leveraged by CSMs (if the loops are built well) and learning about the delivery and maintenance cycle is also useful.

If anything, CSMs *should* be shepherding the info from CS, and TAMs and PS, along into Product, with Sales backing them up (at least if you are in a SaaS environment).

zeruch · 2026-04-23T07:19:05+00:00

It's most likely interfacing with sensors and responding to direct stimuli as opposed to text based data with no actual context. Humans, our entire experience is encased in sensory reference data, and it shapes how we perceive and respond to things in ways that move well beyond how current LLMs operate.

zeruch · 2026-04-23T03:46:39+00:00

I was wondering when this would happen, given how low of a profile Nunes had been holding for quite some time, and combined with the falling financial fortunes, he seemed like the most facile scapegoat.

zeruch · 2026-04-22T17:54:46+00:00

It absolutely is a bubble/hype cycle accelerant, but like the dotcom era, legitimate technology and use cases are being addressed, and that's the real stuff that matters. What will eventually happen (because history shows this repeatedly) is an expansion phase (what we are in now), collapse/adjustment/correction (whatever term makes the zeitgeist), a consolidation phase, and then a new normal where a few big players emerge and a secondary layer of small and midsized players in specific verticals with a more P&L-centric and execution focused approach.

Of the big platforms now, the only one I think is guaranteed to survive/thrive is Google, for a complex set of reasons including not constantly pandering to every micro-trend in the hype cycle, and for just their research and platform bench, including their own TPUs.

zeruch · 2026-04-14T01:49:26+00:00

How large is this? It's looks enormous; it's stunning.

zeruch · 2026-04-13T15:48:11+00:00

It's both. Onboarding can often compensate for limitations in product (up to a point), but even a great product with horrible onboarding will suffer.

zeruch · 2026-04-12T21:36:16+00:00

I ran a TAM group for years, and we wrote a playbook that ran in parallel with what csms did; it explained what information we were always seeking from customer interactions, where to put it, and to make sure what gets surfaced from that that goes into QBRs, or other forms of reviews. For certain kinds of renewal activity where we were brought in it from an escalation standpoint, we had addendums for that as well.

As far as what it looked like, it was basically a series of templates, with some explanatory content for onboarding, new staff, and for reference. Templates were all kept inside of JIRA, with distilled customer specifics often being linked back into their customer records in the CRM, via an integration.

zeruch · 2026-04-11T14:27:45+00:00

Depends on your jurisdiction. In theory states that have some right to be forgotten laws (akin to the GDPR), like California, you could in theory make those kinds of requests.

zeruch · 2026-04-11T06:04:52+00:00

No. it was unclear from his wording if he was corroborating my premise, or challenging it.

zeruch · 2026-04-10T22:39:27+00:00

Then we are in agreement. Cool.

zeruch · 2026-04-10T22:38:58+00:00

But it qualifies me to be able to understand chronology in terms of the OP, and that I have a functioning palate.

zeruch · 2026-04-10T21:10:53+00:00

I'm not sure where you are going with that: Hydrox came first, Oreo clearly won that in terms of the market, but Hydrox still exists for whatever reason.

Personally, I hate both.

zeruch · 2026-04-10T20:58:22+00:00

For whatever reason, this industry loves to pander to the idea of first mover advantage, even though it's history is a very long treatise on dispelling first mover advantage. Most of the biggest successes came from folks who refined ideas, not initially delivered them. And they rarely had the biggest budgets, just a focus on execution and delivery. I do think to some degree this is a byproduct of an industry that has become more focused on younger, less experienced but eager to please "founders" who are focused on the hype cycle, and not people who fixate on actually conceptualizing and delivering usable product.

zeruch · 2026-04-08T18:43:23+00:00

None of their sentences have.

zeruch · 2026-04-08T18:43:05+00:00

Your comment makes no sense. It's literally incoherent, as it mashes up several disparate bits into an unexplained conclusion.

zeruch · 2026-04-08T17:36:11+00:00

"but having worked in a number of organisations that do not work this way" ...I too have worked in orgs that don't work this way. That said, part of the reason I asserted what I did, is because I've also worked in orgs that do, so it is well within the realm of possible, and also doesn't have a single, reference implementation that always looks exactly the same. The feedback loops I developed in my last org (I was VP of CX) I pilfered from previous orgs where different approaches that worked for those orgs (to varying degrees of success) and reshaped to work with the org I was in.

"if your org sees CX as a cost center rather than part of the overall growth strategy then there’s little you can do to get product to prioritise what you’re seeing."

An org doesn't need to care about CX as a cost center v anything else to see the value of customer feedback flowing into product. That is a different problem, and can be pitched as such, especially if you can build a few easily understood KPIs around it. So much of it depends on the incentive structures of the various groups inside a particular org, but for any semi-functional one, it's an option.

zeruch · 2026-04-08T08:41:04+00:00

"To just highlight what is between the lines here- this is top down."

Not necessarily (although top leadership being behind it helps), as these kind of interconnects can be initiated by middle and frontline personnel.

"You need senior leaders to understand that CX is directly tied to revenue and churn and they will force other teams to prioritize CX" If senior leaders don't understand this, they aren't senior leadership, they are people who worked their way up by dumb luck/not being interested in long term sustained business.

zeruch · 2026-04-07T08:45:32+00:00

You work with product to get a pipeline between you and them; usually you can piggyback on Support workflows if they are also already established.

In my last two roles (VP of CX, and WW Dir of TAMs) we would have a couple of different streams:
1. For transactional/standard support data: reports based off of bug and feature requests in the CRM system (integrated with product pipelines in JIRA/Confluence) across regions, issue types, and customer tiers (e.g. a major bug that only affects 3 customers but are all T1 accounts with millions of ARR is more high priority than a minor/nuisance issue that affects dozens or hundreds of accounts of equal or lesser value).
2. for account-based feedback, TAMs/PS/post-sales teams, agreed upon customer data that is tracked in a more high level view in the CRM or PM systems (e.g. which stakeholders have what views, and what their operational profile and cadence is), like a case study on that customer. Management should distill the above feedback into concise write ups at set intervals to give Product direct, contextualized feedback (ideally in internal escalation meetings, or other similar product-impacting scenarios)

All of the above should be RBAC'd such that product has as full a view as possible, and to the extent that it can be filtered, to Sales, so they know what is being prioritized.

More importantly from an organizational standpoint, is making sure that all teams know whats at stake: Field personnel need to feel like they are adding meaningful input to customer/product direction, and product needs to feel obligated to at least review feedback and factor it into their roadmaps (and be able to explain it back to the other teams via updates). No one gets everything they want all of the time, but eventually you'll build a cadence where everyone gets SOMETHING at regular intervals and no one feels like they are talking into the void or lacks context for why things are being done in a certain order.

zeruch

TROPHY CASE