Why it’s ok for engineering and product to fight — Let me know if this has happened to you before: Engineer: I’m not sure we’re going to be able to get done features A, B, and C by the deadline you gave us. Product Manager: What if we [built it differently, pushed through the weekend, deprioritized that other thing you’re…

What if I told you that breakfast cereal saved AirBnb? — Story 1 — Scrappiness in the face of annihilation What if I told you that Airbnb was saved by breakfast cereal? In 2008, Brian Chesky and the early team behind Airbnb, which at the time was AirBed & Breakfast, found themselves with $20k debt and no way to pay it off.

Discovery It started innocently enough. I was going to work out, and I needed a funny gif to mark the occasion. But nothing is ever simple I’d found something wonderful. My mind raced with potential origin stories for this work of art… Perhaps it was an obscure Eastern European workout video…

Bad Air. Before Germ Theory was popularized, the spread of disease was often attributed to “Bad Air emanating from rotting organic matter”. Germ Theory replaced this notion of how diseases spread, but it didn’t happen all at once. Louis Pasteur’s seminal work demonstrating how bacteria spread disease took place in…

When you’re thinking of others, you can’t help but make great stuff — I was traveling home to see my family for Christmas when I came up with my latest product idea. I had heard someone somewhere talking about a bingo game they played on a road trip with their family. …

The skills that you need to start being great — Consider all of the software products out there that have pervaded your life, for better or worse — Instagram, Lyft, Gmail. There are some incredibly talented software developers behind the scenes putting fingers to keyboard in service of making these programs work the way they need to, but who’s the…

We all want to improve every day, right? The mantra of, “I want to be a little better today than I was yesterday” is something I find appealing, but sometimes it can be stressful. Doing more with our time often seems like a daunting task, but occasionally opportunities present themselves…

The Productful Conversation behind great, accountable development plans — Product Managers are force multipliers for their engineering counterparts. Come up with a good plan, comprised of good requirements, and you’ll make the most of the opportunity offered by talented engineers. Done poorly, though, product management can negate the impact of great engineers with bad plans and poor requirements.