There are four kinds of product ideation that can be thought of along two axis, organic vs inorganic and bottom-up vs top-down.

Idea extraction: observing and talking to other people to find problems.

Scratch your own itch: finding problems you personally have.

Idea safaris: starting with an industry, observe what happens at popular watering holes and look for patterns.

Live in the future: become the kind of person that has more interesting product ideas, get to the edge of a field that is going to be a big wave. Look for smart people and hard problems (they tend to be clustered) and join in.

Read the essay The Grand Unified Theory of Product Ideation.

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Given a corpus of language, the frequency of a word (how many times it shows up in the corpus) is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table of words. For example, ‘the’ appears 2x as much as ‘of’ (7% of words, 3.5% of words respectively). This is another example of the Pareto principle.

A mission should be boiled down to a single aspirational statement that encompasses what the team actually does that’s valuable (not necessarily what leadership says they do), metrics describe the observable effects as the team succeeds in the mission.

The test for a useful mission is to be able to frame it as a question that can be asked frequently that leads to useful conversations about what the team should be doing. ‘Are we doing everything we can in the next day, week, month, year that furthers the mission of $MISSION’?

See also:

• Engineering management
• Remote teams need to be more deliberate about everything

The internet as a system contains values such as freedom and privacy that are deeply embedded in the implementation and it’s evolution. For example, by default the system is open, anyone can share their work by publishing (hosting a website) and anyone can access everything.

This is most obvious when observing an opposing ideology try to exert control over the internet–Chinese censorship and firewall, ‘shutting down’ the internet during protests in Iran. It’s counter to how it works and how people expect to use it.

See also:

• Audrey Tang first mentioned this in an interview with Tyler Cowen

Combating misinformation and disinformation campaigns using humor. Taiwanese hacker and Digital Minister Audrey Tang talks about how, for example, hours after a post containing misinformation is detected, Audrey’s team will publish a joke that contains the real information in it. Since meme’s and jokes get shared very quickly, this helps to rapidly inoculate the public and dispel the negative effects from misinformation.

See also:

• Audrey’s interview with Tyler Cowen
• Taiwan is using humor as a tool against coronavirus hoaxes

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Physician that lost his surgical license (due to someone dying during an operation) who went on to perform over 4,000 lobotomies. He created a technique known as the icepick method which allowed for a lobotomy of the prefrontal lobe to be performed through the eye socket with minimal anesthesia. This allowed the operation to be performed at psychiatric hospitals rather than requiring facilities for surgery.

He also performed a lobotomy on Rosemary Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s sister. At the insistence of her father to protect the political lives of John and Ted, she was given the surgery at the age of 23. Afterwards, she had the mental capacity of a two year old and lost the ability to walk. The Kennedy family covered it up and separated her from the family claiming she was “reclusive.”

An animated film from Studio Ghibli about Jiro Horikoshi, the engineer that designed the famous Japanese ‘Zero’ fighter plane. One of the themes is the power of creation as passionate engineers (“engineers turn dreams into reality”) and the terrible consequences of their usage.

Using a standing desk improves job performance, work engagement, anxiety, and quality of life. Daily sitting time of people using standing desks is 83.28 minutes less per workday than those with traditional sitting desks.

Personally, I find standing desks help with concentration and being more present during meetings.

See also:

• Effectiveness of the Stand More AT (SMArT) Work intervention: cluster randomised controlled trial, a year long study from University of Leicester on the psychological health effects of standing desks

PQ

In Hollywood set design, you need to optimize in a way that optimizes for the most impact on screen–money spent off screen is effectively useless to the end result, the film.

This is a good analogy for product work. Product work is hard because it necessitates change and therefore can involve significant internal effort (off screen to continue the analogy) to produce the end result (on screen), even if it’s small.

See also:

• patio11’s blog post ‘What Working At Stripe Has Been Like’ which talks about working in hypergrowth and why ‘off screen’ effort/spend is natural and necessary.

Cubic feet per square meter is a measurement of how much air breathability and air resistance a fabric has. A higher CFM is more breathable, but less wind resistant and a lower CFM is less breathable and more air resistant. For example, a fleece typically has a very high CFM (200+), but usually does not block the wind. Similarly a windbreaker has a low CFM (3-5), but can feel like wearing a garbage bag under high exertion.

See also:

• This comment on r/Ultralight with a list of CFM ratings for many jackets

The point in which the lineage of any two people currently alive can be traced to the same common ancestor. This point is believed to be between 5300 and 2200 B.C. While family trees are believed to be exponential, in reality there is much more inbreeding in human history. This results in a much narrower family tree and, as a result, all humans are more closely related.

The most famous personal injury attorneys from New York due to non-stop advertising, Cellino & Barnes created a breakthrough business that was very successful (each partner was making $10MM per year at one point). They learned that most people don’t have money to hire a lawyer upfront so they charge a third of any monetary rewards from a settlement. They also realized that they need to stay top of mind for when an injury happens.

Advertising seems to fit so well is that 1) the avg person doesn’t know many lawyers 2) when you need one you need them immediately 3) advertising on TV constantly reinforces the association of their firm and ‘personal injury’ which improves recall at exactly the right moment.

Source: Cellino & Barnes Breakup

See also:

• Ads work via cultural imprinting

The Nova SDS011 sensor is an inexpensive ($30) air quality sensor that uses laser scattering to detect particles at 2.5 and 10 nanometers (PM2.5 and PM10 respectively). By taking the concentration of particles you can calculate the air quality index.

Air quality index is calculated from the value of a pollutant concentration (pm2.5, pm10) and a table representing quality based on a standard. Each country has their own guidelines. For example, India’s ‘Poor’ category is equivalent to ‘Unhealthy’ in the US. It’s also interesting that it’s framed as pollution on India and China, but it’s framed as a health concern in the US.

Example of calculating air quality index using python for pm2.5 with the EPA’s breakpoints:

PM25_CONCENTRATION = 70.0

# A lookup table of concentration high, low, index high, low, and label
PM25_CATEGORIES = [
    (0.0, 12.0, 0, 50, "good"),
    (12.1, 35.4, 51, 100, "moderate"),
    (35.5, 55.4, 101, 150, "unhealthy for sensitive groups"),
    (55.5, 150.4, 151, 200, "unhealthy"),
    (150.5, 250.4, 201, 300, "very unhealthy"),
    (250.5, 350.4, 301, 400, "hazardous"),
    (350.5, 500.4, 401, 500, "hazardous"),
]

# Find the breakpoints using the table
if PM25_CONCENTRATION > 500.4:
    category = PM25_CATEGORIES[-1]
else:
    category = None
    for c in PM25_CATEGORIES:
        low, high, *_ = c
        if PM25_CONCENTRATION >= low and PM25_CONCENTRATION <= high:
            category = c
            break

c_low, c_high, i_low, i_high, _ = category

aqi = ((i_high - i_low) / (c_high - c_low)) * (PM25_CONCENTRATION - c_low) + i_low
aqi = round(aqi)

print(f"The air quality index is {aqi}")

The air quality index is 158

The price of solar panels drops 20% for every time the quantity shipped doubles. This is similar to Moore’s Law for computing power and shows the increased efficiency as more experience is gained by an industry. This relies heavily on early buyers willing to buy at a premium thereby funding the future efficiency.

This can be applied more broadly to any emerging technology. If Swanson’s Law holds, increasing the amount of early buyers will accelerate the industry towards lower, more accessible prices. For example, in the case of climate change, buying early carbon capture technologies at scale could accelerate progress in reducing overall greenhouse emissions.

The user’s evaluation of the quality of a product is not separate from the aesthetics. This is especially important for products that are not observable by the user e.g. software or infrastructure. They can’t physically inspect the quality and rely on other signals as a proxy—the website, UX, documentation, etc. This isn’t strictly logical (you can simultaneously have a beautiful website and a terrible product), but an important factor nonetheless.

The idea that, as a result of mass surveillance, data collection and social media are leading to behavioral changes. People are filtering more of what they say and are less likely to engage with novel ideas or be wrong for fear of negative effects (everything from getting a job to a loan or even proper health care).

The solution argued by https://www.socialcooling.com is privacy since privacy is the right to be imperfect.

However this doesn’t fully explain what we actually see today—an acceleration of extreme ideas and fringe groups. Either people are not aware of the consequences or don’t care. The opposite might be true—it’s actually social heating and people are becoming more extreme as a result of the loss of privacy.

If everything is public or under surveillance, actions could have negative externalities. This puts more pressure on people to be perfect and project the values of the in-group. Privacy is a solution by providing space free from judgement individually or as small groups to explore ideas and take certain actions without fear of judgment.

See also:

• Social cooling

Using one’s natural tendency to procrastinate in a way that’s productive. Assuming the highest priority item on a todo list is the least likely to get done, then the items below it are much more appealing to do as a means of procrastinating. Therefore, being thoughtful about what is the highest priority item (it must not actually be that important) is a way of stimulating productivity of everything else. If the top priority task actually does become important and needs to get done then find an item that is higher priority.

Read the original description from John Perry

Neglected UX is when parts of the user experience are not quite broken, but subtly incongruous. For example, there might be elements using slightly different styles or UI patterns that are out of sync with the product.

The neglected UX within an app tends to add up over time (UX entropy) before it is noticeable enough to become a high priority. Addressing the issues with neglected UX tends to take a lot of time and is rarely apparent to others.

A book about business strategy by Hamilton Helmer which outlines seven ‘powers’ that are the cause of successful companies. Usually you see a few of these elements working in concert. For example Pixar exhibits process power (developing computer generated films) and a cornered resource (writers, directors, and Steve Jobs).

The seven powers are:

• Economies of scale
• Network effects
• Counter positioning
• Switching costs
• Process power
• Branding
• Cornered resource