About 15 years ago, I first put a post-it note on my monitor with a prompt that I found incredibly useful. Over the years, I’ve used it a lot personally, to the point where I wrote scripts to randomly send notifications reminding me about it once my brain got used to the note and started […]
We’ve all heard the advice to “do things that don’t scale” at the early stages of startups. I quite agree with it. Unfortunately, as with many pithy sayings, it can be overused or abused. When we fail to understand the logic that drives it and where the same approach doesn’t apply, we are bound to […]
Miscommunication is an odd thing. When you are used to writing a lot every day—but in code, not prose—you get used to thinking that words are easy. You write something and the compiler understands precisely that (unless you have a bug, of course). If only things were as easy when we have to talk to […]
Here’s a nice story that I found out about as I was writing my book: Hermit crabs have to get new and larger shells as they grow. Moving to a new shell requires a leap of faith, as they are vulnerable while trying on the new shells. This danger is unavoidable: the other option is […]
When I talk about the concept of making innovation habitual in R&D organizations, many tech executives recoil at first. It might sound daunting or as if it would require even more time from their already-too-busy teams. Some think it might cause chaos where each engineer can do as she pleases. In this article, I will […]