Published
Weekend Reading — Load-bearing Excel spreadsheet
This week we play Wordle from a cassette player, muse about covert ops and org charts, and discover the best hyper-focused industry newsletter.
this zip-fastener ship by yasuhiro suzuki unzips tokyo’s sumida river waters
Tech Stuff
TIL that if I want to hijack the HTML that gets copied with the Clipboard API, I should not forget to also copy the plain text
Otherwise pasting text outside the browser in other apps won't work
Alex Kyllo “load-bearing Excel spreadsheet” … I can’t … 🤣
Someone deleted a load-bearing Excel spreadsheet, how's your morning going?
Katie Anderson Tell me your first computer loaded programs from a cassette player without telling me …
Eye for Design
The Ugly Truth About Net Promoter Score Surveys On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend NPS?
Say you're a product manager. You respect users of your product/service. You have the authority to collect their feedback and use it to improve the product/service. You've searched all the different ways to collect feedback about user experience. What kind of survey would you use?
So what does that say about a company that's sending out NPS surveys?
Products are no exception: a good user experience takes the form of a story. The IA feels familiar and gives context and flow. The product itself will fit into a user’s sense of their own life story, and users are drawn to that.
Delia Ayoko “for anyone who finds it useful.”
Peoples
Product idea It's a browser extension. It activates when you read a thought leadership Twitter thread or Medium article. You click the button, and it reveals the "behind the scenes".
John Cutler 👇 Apropos, the difference between management bullet points, and people's real-life experiences:
I facilitated a discussion on "don't bring me problems, bring me solutions" today, and it was so amazingly interesting.
Some paraphrased quotes:
"I've never had the luxury to bring problems. What is it like?"
1/n
Business Side
Why Pebble failed 10 years ago Pebble launched on Kickstarter raising $10m, a huge milestone back then. Quirky and fun smartwatches for hackers. But startups are hard, and Pebble didn't manage to survive. Interesting to read about it from the founder:
Startup founder lesson learned — never forget to define and talk about your long term vision for the future. When things are going well, it’s easy to get caught up in growth. But you need this to carry your company through hard times.
Alex Hillman 👇 For freelancers and consultants, a good way to size up the project, get to know the customer, and de-risk:
Bunch of replies asking how this “fixed price discovery project” thing works, so lemme break it down!
Most service biz owners approach new projects one of three ways: hourly, project based, or the most sophisticated…retainers.
But…
What's your early detection system? Ryan Rumsey asks:
What are the earliest visible signs a company is starting to ship their org chart?
Many good replies to that thread, but these two in particular:
When we start talking about giving every team their own page in the web UI without having anyone be responsible for making the user experience make sense.
If your company is shipping its org chart, then the real product designers are the people in charge of the org chart.
If you need a refresher on the term, head over to Don’t Ship the Org Chart
Covert ops Brandon Dail The ideal:
I’m starting to think that every product org should have at least one senior+ engineer who isn’t beholden to a roadmap and who just goes around making little quality of life improvements everywhere
Nate de Jager The reality:
Just realizing not every engineering manager runs covert operations with their team. Some of the best work of my career was done in shadow sprints. 😅
Everything Else
Ben Joseph “2022/2016/1990/1975”
Remember: it took four unsuccessful mambos before we got Mambo Number 5. Be patient with yourself.
LADbible “Just seen how giraffes eat grass and I don't think I'm ever going to get over it 😂😂”
Professors: How do you usually handle tipping in your classes? I write my venmo up on the board the first day so students can express their appreciation for an especially well-delivered lecture. Other ideas worked better for you?
Zach Raffio “The urgency with which I need them to play brothers”
One Mind PsyberGuide This looks interesting. This website reviews mental health apps and online resources. They look at user, credibility of the research work behind the app, and privacy policy.
Kevin Parry “I recreated the @netflix intro with $30 worth of yarn”