I’m Head of Product at Phished. Previously CPO at SweepBright and co-founder of Mono.
When all you have is an LLM, then all you see are language problems. And while many things are language problems, there are many more things that look like language problems that are actually people problems, design problems, math problems, economics problems, or incentive problems, to name a few.
Even with the enormous help of AI, we must still follow the problem—solution chain and first be very clear about the problem we’re solving, and then work on an appropriate solution.
We’ve become so obsessed with process in the product world that it’s making me a little dizzy sometimes. There’s an almost endless debate on social media and at meet-ups about the best way to do this or that, about waterfall, agile, scrum, and god forbid: SAFe. Especially at bigger orgs this seems to be a real topic.
What happened to two engineers, a designer and a PM simply trying to have at it and ship the best possible software they can?
Sit in a room, jump on a call, do whatever you need to do. Simply ship software.
Every flat org I’ve encountered has invisible mountains in the form of paychecks twice as heavy for some as for others. But that’s not what truly bothers me.
What truly bothers me is that senior leaders frequently demand from their teams standards they themselves don’t consistently uphold. They criticize others for not communicating proactively while comfortably hiding in their own information bubbles.
This is the authority trap. I’ve seen it almost everywhere and it’s deeply toxic. It breeds resentment, fractures trust, and slowly poisons team cohesion.
The solution is simple: leaders must visibly practice the behaviours they demand from everyone else. You can’t just point to transparency and accountability as occasional virtues when something isn’t going your way. They must be daily habits.
Anything less isn’t leadership.
It’s hypocrisy.
“When a faucet drips 1ml of water every 5 seconds, how much water have you lost at the end of the week?”
That’s the assignment we got as eleven year olds. Safe to say most of our class got it wrong because they couldn’t believe the number was so big. It was a great experience to learn to trust the numbers over your gut feeling.
A common trope in business is that reputation is gained over years and lost in a second. While it’s certainly true that there are spectacular examples of instant reputation loss, I’ve found that more often reputation slowly drips away. One millilitre at a time. Until the vat is empty. So when we’ve sprung a leak, it’s often best to fix it immediately.
I sport. I sweat. Other people also sweat on me because it’s a contact sport. And over time, especially synthetics like rash guards can start to be hard to clean.
You’ll find a lot of instructions online for how to clean your Gi or Rashguard, geared towards the US market, with US products and US measurements. On top of that a lot of them simply did not work for me. So I thought I’d share the European version that works for me every time.
It says monthly, but I do this depending on training volume. And I do the smell test. No need to clean more than necessary.
The sooner after the gym you wash, the less time bacteria have time to multiply.
Your training partners thank you.