Welcome to my notes! I regularly publish notes to better understand what I’ve learned and to explore new ideas. I would love to hear from you—leave a comment or reach out on twitter @alexkehayias.
What’s on my mind lately?
When things are going poorly, a natural response is for managers to get closer to the details.
When building products, we’re constantly aware of how imperfect the things we build are.
The problem with unlimited vacation days is that it creates a bimodal distribution of usage—some employees take too little time off and some employees take way too much time off.
I use Alfred to switch between applications using keyboard shortcuts. On average, I use Alfred 127 times per day, mostly to use keyboard shortcuts.
An AOR list (areas of responsibility) prevents a tragedy of the commons at your company.
Impeccable agreements create accountability and motivation. This improves productivity and morale for high-performing teams.
Knowledge work is often limited by time spent thinking versus doing, but typing fast helps you think faster.
In my day-to-day business dealings, people are surprised when they receive LaTeX-generated documents for business proposals, memos, etc.
It’s obvious that living life without fear is a good thing, but what about life without hope?
Real world systems for operating a complicated process don’t start out perfectly designed complete systems.
Adding new dependencies to a codebase is a net positive until it’s not.
As much as product builders want to be self-serve and low-touch, there will always be limitations and improvements to make.
There is a patch of the cosmos which is 300 million light years across with significantly fewer galaxies.
Being afraid of something can cause us to make the exact wrong decision because fear is bad advice.
A self-coaching book about coaching Matt Mochary. Links to this note Areas of Responsibility List
Hospitals separate the triage room from the waiting room otherwise you would have patients with time-sensitive medical issues waiting and dying.
It’s easy to get swept away by requests from other people and other demands on your time.
The problem with first-principles thinking is that you don’t know what you don’t know.
When building a B2B service that has a public signup page, it can be useful to exclude signups from a free personal email provider.
The first sentence of every paragraph should be a BLUF. Readers can see the point right away without having to read through the entire paragraph.
This note does not have a description yet. Links to this note Product Design Partner
Founders get away with a lot in founder-led sales. They know the product and the problem inside out.
In the early days of a startup with a product in the market, it seems intuitively correct that you should hire some experienced salespeople to get you more sales.
A Twitter thread of findings from studies about Long COVID and its association with neurological symptoms.