Introducing The Little Owl We all have ideas that we would like to build and see them flourish. But thats the things about ideas, they aren't always good. The little owl helps you keep track of your good ideas.
Humane's AI Pin to start shipping in March In today's context, Humane's AI pin is probably the first device where I see personal computing heading towards.
Decentralize your Backlog Ideas are cheap. They come up all the time and end up in the backlog. Remember, really important ideas almost always come back.
Reading while being away I have been away for a few weeks, traveling and attending conferences. While the conferences have been giving me an insight into the amazing things organizations are building (very heavily focused on AI/ML), I have been reading some fascinating articles during my down time. How to start a Go
AI/ML reads that kept me intrigued this week Cade Metz for The New York Times: ‘The Godfather of A.I.’ Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead On Monday, however, he officially joined a growing chorus of critics who say those companies are racing toward danger with their aggressive campaign to create products based on generative artificial intelligence,
10 seconds! It took me ~10 seconds to open the Apple's high-yield savings account today after answering ONE question and accepting the terms. It took me less than a second to set up my Apple Credit Cards cash back to go to my savings account. After playing around for about
An Apple a Day vs All Apple All Day: (Apple's “Healthy” Pursuits) Its the automation and the ecosystem is why I rely on my Apple Watch. I don't have to exclusively perform a task to keep tabs, it just does it for me.
Coming Soon: New Update to LearnTheFlags LearnTheFlag has been doing well and I have been enjoying using it with my son to teach him about the different countries in the world. The latest addition of the Map view and including the Wiki link has been great. The Map view is pretty simple. The idea was to
What Would Adam Say? Is Apple a Blessing, or a Curse in Disguise? Apple's convenience, ease of use and Ecosystem is what people are hooked on. How long would it be until you are also banking with Apple products?
Evolving LearnTheFlags app Even before I launched the app, it was evident from the TestFlight results that it was important to show the countries on a map.
LearnTheFlags is Live! We are live and you’re officially invited to see what’s new. Download on the App Store today. I got the mail a while back and I'm beyond excited!! Give it a try and on to Version 2.
Getting ready with my first (ever) App! I have been testing my app for the last few days with friends & family and as of last night I have submitted my app to the AppStore 🤞🏽
Building an app to learn SwiftUI Later, someone recommended me the 100 day challenge by @twostraws (Paul Hudson) on Hacking with Swift.
AI everywhere I'm now on a hunt to find out applications that are now integrating these generative AI tools. It has been a while where I have been this excited and I look forward to see what new AI capability is someone going to bring out tomorrow.
Building and growing along with your product To scale as a product manager means relinquishing control. When you grow, your product grows, your organization grows.
How a glitchy controller started a trend I see my son capturing videos, and now wants to have an Instagram/YouTube account for his Fortnite adventures.
Forming Self-Organizing teams Give your self-organizing team they autonomy they need and control the chaos.
Banana UX for Product Managers Having worked as a UX designer, this is possibly one of the best way to explain User Experience Design to anyone, let alone product managers.
How Apple has so far avoided layoff: Lean Hiring, No Free Lunches These numbers are simply staggering.
Writing effective One Pagers You know your one-pager is working when it sparks a conversation and interaction within the team. These conversation help create shared understanding around values, outcomes, impact, opportunity, viability and risk.
A thread by Nikita Bier on Product Management & Entrepreneurship A thread by Nikita Bier : After 10 years of building consumer social apps, I've decided to start exploring new areas. Building these products is an unforgiving grind—but I learned a lot along the way. For those embarking on this path, here's everything you need to
Focus on the One Thing! Today, instead of making a long list of tasks, I simply look at my agenda and identify what's the one thing that I do today will have the highest impact.
Why employee churn is lethal to Software Even as a product manager when I pick up a software to further build it out, certain features need context becasue outright they just feel weird. Only after talking to first generation product manager, it becomes clear why a feature was built the way it is.
Measuring HTTP Performance In order to effectively measure HTTP based application performance, it is important to understand what happens when you type a URL in a browser and hit enter.
Reading List for the Holidays 0 P-22: Rest in Peace Iconic L.A. mountain lion euthanized after ‘extraordinary life I first saw the picture of P-22 in front of the Hollywood sign on the National Geographic Magazine Cover a few years back. It was a fascinating story of how a Mountain Lion (P-22) survived crossing
Are you also Closed Captioning? I highly recommend to get a good quality sound bar. Make sure your sound bar has atleast 3 channels, so that the center (dedicated) channel will give you the dialogue and the remaining background sounds are channled through the other speakers.
Apple Pushing to Launch Search Engine to Rival Google For Apple to work on a search engine akin Google means that the opportunity is much larger than $15 Billion.
The Backbone Controller I have tried multiple controllers for the iPhone for myself and my son and the Backbone controller by far has been one of the best. If you are in the market for one, give Backbone a try.
ChatGPT: A new toy! AI is real (or has been real for a while) and you are only going to see it grow from here on. There will be years before this will be far from perfect but thats the nature of AI/ML. It takes time to get better.
What is Apple's App Store's future plans? According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple now has to deal with the Digital Markets Act, that was recently passed by the European Parliament. And this would mean Apple will require major changes to Apple’s business beginning in 2024. Jason Snell writing for Six Colors has one of
Apple's Ad Service - lets look at tracking I have already said, that the services pie is gong to grow a lot bigger for Apple and advertisement is going to be one of the major drivers for this.
Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year Yes, Apple HomePods are expensive. Well, hardware is expensive and you can’t sell devices at a loss for a decade. Let that sink in.
Feds likely to challenge Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision takeover Josh Sisco for Politico: The Federal Trade Commission is likely to file an antitrust lawsuit to block Microsoft’s $69 billion takeover of video game giant Activision Blizzard, maker of the hit games Call of Duty and Candy Crush, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. A lawsuit
Apple is building an Ad (Services) Empire The highlight for me during the entire earnings call was that Services now account for 33% of Apple’s gross profit and the fastest-growing segment in FY22 - up 14% YoY.
Elon Musk's open letter to Advertisers Dear Twitter Advertisers pic.twitter.com/GMwHmInPAS — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 27, 2022 I also very much believe that advertising, when done right, can delight, entertain and inform you; it can show you a service or product or medical treatment that you never knew existed, but is right for you.
The new iCloud experience is here (Public Beta) It's fast and looks great! Needs more widgets :) https://beta.icloud.com
Apple (still) exploring iPads with larger screens In my humble opinion, merging the two platforms would simply be a disaster. There is continuity now between your Mac and iPad; and it works amazingly well! That's blurry enough for me.
User Experience (UX) Metrics for Product Managers using RUM RUM has been around ever since I started my first job (well over 20 years I recon) and the issue I fell is that people still don’t realize how best to utilize RUM.
GitHub hits $1 Billion ARR Frederic Lardionis writing for TechCrunch: “We kept GitHub GitHub and it remains this independent entity within Microsoft similar to LinkedIn,” he told me. “I think we did a fantastic job with doing this and kept GitHub in its original form. You don’t see more Microsoft in GitHub.com than
Moonwalkers: New options for the commuter Moonwalkers are show attachments with motorized wheels - like Heelys that you see kids wearing around. But these are for adults and according to the company behind moonwalkers - they boast that it can increase the wearer's walking speeds by 250%. I have lived in Princeton and worked
Obviously we'll have to comply... Apple’s Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak (@gregjoz) join @JoannaStern at #WSJTechLive to discuss products, privacy and power at the tech giant https://t.co/fNo2JGwMB4 https://t.co/aGrTlZrUo4 — The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 26, 2022 Greg Joswiak (Joz) remarks when asked about EU regulations mandating a USB-C
Absolutely love these one off data correlations Cricket is a religion in India. And when Virat (King) Kohli was batting the way he was after a couple of years; everyone stopped and watched. I remember witnessing such moments when Sachin Tendulkar was playing an innings of his life.
Apple increases its subscription prices Benjamin Mayo for 9to5Mac: The Apple Music monthly price has been upped by ~$1 for individuals and ~$2 for families. Apple TV+ is rising by $2 (which only has one tier and supports Family Sharing on all plans). Apple One is also going up by approximately $3 per month And…
New Products from Apple iPad We didn’t get to see yet another Apple event in October as expected but we did see new product releases. New iPads and AppleTV were announced, and a short video was perfect to digest what was accounted for each new devices that came out. The new iPad is
Gas app was able to cut Redis Engine CPU utilization by 80% Today we cut our Redis Engine CPU Utilization by 80% and survived to live (and grow) another day! We were CPU constrained & maxed out scaling limits for our ElastiCache cluster. We had 2 hours to reduce utilization before our next traffic surge or we were toast. What did we
Apple is now gonna be a Bank Will Feuer at WSJ: Once users set up their savings account through the Apple Card, future rewards from the card, called Daily Cash, can be deposited automatically into the savings account, Apple said. Users can also add their Daily Cash rewards to an Apple Cash card, which is a digital
Google says Matter is still set to fix the biggest smart home frustrations Jennifer Pattinson Tuohy writing for The Verge: We’ve committed to our new Nest Thermostat being on Matter, and we are still evaluating if the learning thermostat can handle Matter. It does have Thread. But just because it has Thread doesn’t mean we can run Matter on it. So,
Meta’s VR announcement at Connect 2022 Lipstick on a pig by Nick Heer: Zuckerberg preemptively responded to criticisms like these by reminding everyone that this category is just getting started. But that is a bit of misdirection. Oculus, the virtual reality hardware company Meta bought, was founded in 2012; Meta bought it in 2014. On a
Instagram is dead What a wonderful piece of writing by Om Malik: It was a wonderful gathering place for photographers to showcase their work and build an audience. Not a day goes by when some photographer friend or the other bemoans how Instagram is no longer a place for photography. When I started
Apple Apps enterprise ready? Apple announced new features for their messaging platform. While all of us can enjoy editing and unending the messages and complain that Twitter can't get a simple editing feature; there is something else that no one has mentioned yet. Even Apple Mail now boasts about Unsend Mail, Schedule
Drama at Twitter continues... 🍿 Well, everyone wants to make sure they get a fair deal: Elon Musk says Twitter deal on hold pending details on fake accounts; shares sink 9%. Elon Musk announced Friday that his Twitter deal is on hold until he receives more information about how many fake accounts there are on
Moving away from 1Password I have been using 1Password for a very long time. However, for the past year or more, I have come to rely on Safari (on macOS, iOS and iPadOS) to suggest me strong passwords, storing them for me and ultimately, me making a manual copy/paste to 1Password. Last month,
Go 1.18 released with Generics support Go 1.18 isn now generally available. This release supports generics which a lot of us have been waiting for. This is still the very first version to support generics and I believe this feature will gain more support and updates in the upcoming features.
Star"bucks"!!! With the earnings season in full swing, this tweet just blew my mind: Wow Starbucks, what a great gig. Starbucks has ~$1.6 billion in 'stored value card liabilities' i.e. the Starbucks Card. So ~6% of the firm's liabilities are comprised of coffee addicts paying
The New York Times buys Wordle New York Times buy Wordle: Wordle was acquired from its creator, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, for a price “in the low seven figures,” The Times said. The company said the game would initially remain free to new and existing players. I'm very happy for Josh
Scaling with Process vs. People Marty Cagan writing for SVPG on scaling your product with people instead of processes: I loved reading this article particularly because he simply uses quotes from former CEO’s who have focused on people rather than processes to scale new heights for their product. My favorite quote here is from
What's in a Good Error Message? Good error messages are important. When things go wrong, these error messages are the only communication channel between your software and customer. A good error message will allow your customer to recover well or submit a support ticket - and thats $ we are talking about.
Killing a feature is also important When it comes to adding a feature to your product, there are countless ways of doing this - and we still mess it up. However, when it comes to killing a feature there isn’t much out there.
Learning golang - my journey As a product manager by trade, I don’t need sit and learn programming languages as I’m not expected to site down and write code. But the engineering in me wants to keep building. Looking at data is a big part of my day-to-day work. You might have a
Product vs Feature teams The lack of giving up control and delegating to your product team is probably the biggest reason I see very few product empowered teams.
Tight & Loose Cultures and its impact You have to listen to the podcast to understand why a country or its culture is shaped the way it is. It's not just entire countries, but even states within the US have tight or loose culture.
Applying a ‘Time-To-Market’ KPI in product It is very common to get into the phase of doing more before releasing to the market. The TTM metric forces you to be frugal about your MVP.
Your Product is already obsolete - How to Survive All startups go through three distinct phases – birth, growth, and survival. You start by making the product work, then you have to grow the product, and then, crucially, you have to focus on survival – on keeping it relevant.
Avoid feature bloat and deliver your product strategy Features too have an iceberg problem. They may seem to be small features but turn out to have huge costs. This can happen when you decide to ship a feature for a specific customer or a use case instead of shipping new products.
New User Onboarding & Time to Value When customers first sign up for your product, they will either get what they are looking for; or they won’t…
Measuring Feature Adoption When it comes to SaaS Products, product managers typically have product adoption as one of their top KPIs to track; especially when launching a new product. The logic is pretty simple, improving product adoption means higher retention, lower churn and move revenue.
Measuring your WiFi Quality I live in a townhome and this router sits on the first floor. With all of us working from home; the connection has been spotty in some of our rooms. The download speed is great when you get a good connection but the stability is worst.
Product Roadmaps Simply put, a product roadmap is a high level plan that organizations use to communicate their plans to achieve their product vision. Product vision is typically driven by the Company’s overall vision.
User Experience (UX) Metrics for Product Managers These tools ensure quality. This helps with SEO, accessibility and best practices and measures performance metrics. Performance metrics are important to understand how your page loads as this impacts user experience.
When (& Why) to adopt Kanban One of the biggest frustration with the scrum model is the last few days of sprint where everyone is rushing to deliver what was committed to at the beginning of sprint, cause splitting user stories or carrying them over is bad practice.
Product Metrics: How & What Software products today are much more complex (in a nice way). Some of this complexity comes with a treasure trove of data. We then integrate with other software & SDK’s which help us understand users behavior and experience.
One more gadget: The Ember Mug 2 It keeps my coffee at my desired temperature. The battery on this lasts long enough for me to take my mug and walk around or go to a hour long meeting. Because of the ceramic coating, they do feel fragile, but I’m assuming the stainless-steel makes it durable.
iPad Pro gets a trackpad iPad Pro was announced this week with a load of Hardware goodness. But what got the most attention was that iPad Pro now has a trackpad. Well, the Magic keyboard did (not the iPad) and the iPad OS was updated to support the trackpad. You can always get the regular
Dropbox: Rewriting the heart of our sync engine Once you have a successful product at your hand; things start to get complex. It's not that the world has got complex problems; adding features and at times making this simple add complexity.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2020 kicks off in June with an all-new online format Apple Newsroom: “We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The current health situation has required that we create
It’s Roadmap season Within the organization Roadmaps are a fearcly debated topic. It's not the principle of a product roadmap; it's the misunderstandings they bring.
Technology is changing us (for the good I think) Designing for mobile is different and not just with regards to the shape and size. Because mobile devices are lighter and more portable (in some cases), we find it more convenient to use them. And because we use them so often, we feel a unique, emotional connection to them.
Documenting UX It does capture details; however, chances are when I see someone else’s wires, I may not like a solution. How do you support your solution?
Banner Blindness The most prominent result from the new eyetracking studies is not actually new. We simply confirmed for the umpteenth time that banner blindness is real. Users almost never look at anything that looks like an advertisement, whether or not it's actually an ad.
Please add "AI" to your Ads... By now I’m immune to the ads that show up on the website and thanks to Readability, I don’t have to look at them constantly. When these ads started, they were irrelevant, some non-sensical ad would just show up randomly on the webpage. However the business model worked.
Graphic Recording for Documentation So to solve that issue, what I did was come up with a story line - one liners (and explanation when I had to explain a concept) with bit sized graphics.
Outlook for iOS - job well done! Acompli released an Outlook like app last year and Microsoft did not waste much of a time in snapping up this company. The result, Microsoft official Outlook for iOS app and in quick time. Microsoft launched Office for iOS and Android sometime last year. The lack of Outlook as an
How much (Prototype) Fidelity? Following up on my article I wrote some time back, "Wireframing is NOT Prototyping" - a common question that got asked was, well if its not prototyping, what is it and what level of fidelity one should expect? I have read books and blogs and a lot of
Wireframing is not Prototyping The last few years the wireframes have looked more and more different and detailed. Images, actual look and feel, every single mouse movement or tap or gesture and what happens next, etc. That definitely throws cheaper and faster out of the window.