/project/2023-04-02T08:30:00-04:00Product discovery for vulnerable populations: Part 1, scheduling2023-04-02T08:30:00-04:002023-04-02T08:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2023-04-02:/posts/2023/product-discovery-for-vulnerable-populations-part-1-scheduling/Scheduling interview in a complex, highly stigmatizied setting<p>Over the past year, our product team at Sonara got to a state where we have a stable and sustainable product discovery process. We've been talking to 1-2 customers every week, building a product in the highly stigmatized and complex world of opioid use disorder (OUD). </p>
<p>As anyone who works in a company trying to better the lives of vulnerable, stigmatized people in a healthcare setting, product discovery is a challenge across the entire interview cycle: Getting interviews on the board, making people show up to said interviews and managing the conversation to get the best stories. I want to use this entry to discuss some of the unique properties of creating a product discovery process in a complex environment, and ways the team and myself worked through them.</p>
<p>In this post, I'm discussing the process of scheduling an interview and will discuss the other components (show-rates, the interview itself) in a future writeup. </p>
<h2>taking the path of inconvenience</h2>
<p>One common stigma we had to break early on is assuming the cohort of people we work with is homogenous (read: Not all people who live with opioid use disorder has a similar story). </p>
<p>It's very tempting to hop on to Reddit or use a user interview service, talk to some people and make generalizations based on what you hear on the larger population. What we found out is that going that route reveals only part of a pie: Functional, tech-savvy, people with access to technology, expressive and opinionated. </p>
<p>From a business standpoint, we are building a product that aspires to improve the lives of people in treatment for OUD wherever they are in their treatment journey. While talking to a small-yet-engeged portion of our target demographic is a great start, it encouraged us to build an equity-first product discovery process where we're looking to understand a context of a story from multiple angles: The person who is new to treatment, the person who may not be stable yet, the person who is in treatment for several years and 'been there, done that'. </p>
<p>Below are a few learnings we discovered we uncovered while scheduling interviews with people over the past year.</p>
<p><img alt="A sketch showing product interview scheduling in a humoristic way" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2023-04-discovery/sketch-interviews.jpg"></p>
<h2>emails are a flaky way of scheduling</h2>
<p>how awesome would it be to write a bunch of emails inviting people from a vulnerable population to an interview and have them respond? Probably 1 in 30 awesome (not including the show-rate, this is putting an interview on the board). We got very few email responses regardless of copy, headline, compensation and promises of a wonderful time. The majority of people did not check their emails (I got to see a "inbox is full" for the first time since email has a 2MB capacity), some people don't have an email address, some people have an email address but won't give it to you or their provider. </p>
<p>What did help is meeting people where they are, while coordinating with their care team and giving them a heads up: Reaching out to them in-person at a treatment center, or send them a text after their counselor gave them a heads up.</p>
<h2>privacy is super important</h2>
<p>For patients in a vulnerable population that live in a highly stigmatized ecosystem, privacy and the sense of privacy is incredibly important - especially when engaging with technology. So when interacting with patients, we always work under the assumption that no one should know about their situation but them, and if by any chance someone else will get access to their mobile device, they won't be able to understand that they are interacting with a company that's helping OUD patients. Luckily, there is another company in the market also named Sonara (<a href="https://m.sonara.ai/">sonara.ai</a>, we are <a href="https://www.sonarahealth.com/">Sonara Health</a>) so in the off-chance a message is compromised, someone can always claim they are applying for a job. Thank you Sonara.ai!</p>
<p>Privacy makes the choice of words for the text very important: When we communicate with a patient we make sure we identify ourselves ("this is Omer from Sonara") and also including open, choice-giving words: For example, the word "invite" works because invitations put the control at the hands of the invitee - invitations can be politely declined, we won't be offended, this doesn't play by the rules of appointment scheduling and is not mandatory. The word "interview" has some real-life connotations like a job interview, where there is a power dynamic between the interviewer and an interviewee. Inviting people to a conversation, allowing them to tell their stories and compensating them for their time may sound more attractive. </p>
<h2>physical compensation cards sometime work better, compensate in a way that values a person's time</h2>
<p>In the vein of doing things the hard way, physical gift cards has added value for some people because they can sell or trade them, whereas a digital gift card isn't worth all that much. Also, digital gift cards are less effective if the person doesn't have access to an email address. </p>
<p>We've experimented a lot (and still) around interview compensation and the heuristic we landed on is:</p>
<ol>
<li>Understand what works best for the person, while still being scalable </li>
<li>Compensate in a way that respects a person's time investment </li>
</ol>
<p>Every now and then we have a person genuinely surprised when we say that we value their time. we treat our time investment in interviews the same way we treat meetings at work: We're making an ask of someone's time, which is a scarce resource, to make our product better - so we should compensate them appropriately. </p>
<p>--</p>
<p>Like a lot of the best product discovery practices, it boils down to empathy - If you considered the best medium for your invite to be sent, a compensation that is mindful of a person's time, and the experience of the person when they get the interview invite, you sent a pretty good invite. </p>
<p>Up next - making people show up after they accepted an invitation. </p>2020 → 2021: 4 key learnings from the year everyone wants to write off2020-12-31T10:30:00-04:002020-12-31T10:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-12-31:/posts/2020/2020-2021-4-key-learnings-from-the-year-everyone-wants-to-write-off/what I've learned in the past year about myself, work and the future<p>2020 was a lot of things but most of all, it was a year of learnings. Coming out of the <a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2019/2019-2020-yearly-takeaways/">2019 yearly takeaways</a> post, I thought my 2020 will be structured and straightforward: Set yearly goals, break them into monthly goals and piecemeal those into weekly goals - small chucks of effort that will get me to the place I wanted to be, great success! </p>
<p>And then COVID hit and everything spiraled and I had to make some interesting decisions, more on that below. </p>
<p>One of the consistent activities I kept doing in 2020 is reading. It's interesting to look back at 2020 based on the books I read since I don't follow a reading list and usually pick up books that spark my interest depending on context and day to day life. Coming off 2019 which revolved around leadership and productivity, 2020 started with 'start with why' and as the year went by I focused mostly on introspection, understanding motivation and change management. </p>
<p>Below are some of my key learnings from the passing year. I chose to review learnings by month since the timeline for 2020 was special - a year that started off with euphoria, continued into chaos and ended with resilience and experience. Here goes. </p>
<h2>January & December - Start with 'Why', ask better questions</h2>
<p>It's interesting how the first and the last learnings both deal with the art questioning from different angles: Living in a world where answers are abundant and accessible (seriously, one of the items Amazon suggested I buy this holiday season is glasses frame with Alexa embedded in them), one of the major skills I'd like to work on is asking better questions.</p>
<p>My favorite is probably 'Why': Why are doing what we are doing? why our customers are our customers? why things are done the way they are? Most of all, what makes questioning amazing is that by formulating a question a person draws from their perception, philosophy and belief system and let it out into the world to echo off other people's mental models. In that sense, questioning is one of the most inclusive frameworks I know.</p>
<p>2020 was a year of existential questions: Am I essential? What is my role as a leader within all this? In what business are we really in right now? Thinking through all of those, I cannot wait to see what questions 2021 bring. </p>
<p><img alt="stayed home a lot in 2020" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-12-year-in-review/2020-year-in-review.jpg"></p>
<p><em>above: the amount of creative images encourgaing people to stay home in 2020 was really impressive (Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@alexas_fotos?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Alexas_Fotos</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/stay-home?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a>)</em></p>
<h2>March & April- Build for impact, be willing to adapt</h2>
<p>One of my favorite quotes that I heard PR professionals say is 'never waste a good crisis'. I definitely didn't had those thoughts in mind during the hectic first weeks of COVID but thinking back on it, it was the perfect opportunity to shift culture towards building for impact (or as I described it back in April '<a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/what-is-essential-covid-19-week-3-learnings/">building for what's essintial</a>').</p>
<p>March and April of 2020 was also a time of disillusion and plan-changing. Coming off the heels of the high level strategic thinking of January through February, the following months were all about prioritization and execution. In a very short timespan we had to change the way we deliver software and understand our customers, all while living in the uncertainty of a changing workplace culture and market. </p>
<p>Looking back at the goals I had set for 2020, they seem so out of touch and distant with what I ended up with. I'm really happy I had the courage to take a hard look at my plan for 2020 so early in the year and think 'I'm going into uncharted territory here and need to adapt'. Adaptability became one of my most important learnings of the past year that will definitely carry on to 2021: Looking at situations in the context of how they contribute to the greater goal over looking through the prism of how things were done historically. </p>
<h2>May & June - investing in consistency so I don't exhaust my willpower</h2>
<p>One side effect of our team being adaptive and changing almost every aspect of how we work and think was burnout. Burnout was hard for me to recognize at first since I'm used to working in 'crunch mode' but this one felt different since I couldn't plow through it using willpower alone. </p>
<p>So just like every time I face something difficult - I got curious. Just like <a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/non-functional-requirements-are-my-favorite-and-i-will-make-them-yours-too/">non-functional requirements</a> for software, sustainability and consistency are key components for doing optimal work. Willpower is finite and have diminishing returns (kind of like technical debt when you think about it), developing habits around the same activities make them effortless and more importantly - consistent. </p>
<p>It's interesting to think about how I managed to work in both adaptability and consistency into my work and personal life at the same time. Looking back at major decisions I made a lot of it had to do with handling them as an experiment: Having a hypothesis in mind on how certain actions would instigate change, committing and building towards it, understanding the impact and prioritizing the next set of actions. </p>
<h2>August & September - The importance of identity</h2>
<p>Whether it's professionally or in personal life, I believe that identities that define us can drive us towards positive, impactful action. The summer-fall of 2020 was the time I had my mid-year reflection, I usually try and have my mid-year reflection around June but with COVID and all the craziness I gracefully dropped the ball and picked it up in August - here's to being adaptive! </p>
<p>During the mid-year review I made a list of all the identities that define me (product manager, writer, runner etc) and looked at how my goals and actions in the past eight months reflected on each identity. What I ended up discovering is that some identities pull me more towards my mission statement while others, while important, are distracting me from it. </p>
<h2>closing thoughts</h2>
<p>There is this notion of throwing 2020 into the abyss and writing it off as a terrible year that no one would like to remember; but thinking about it retroactively 2020 was a year of learning, change and adaptation while dealing with various levels of adversity - if anything I'd like to encapsulate how I felt and acted during these moments and build a more resilient, empathetic 2021 on top of it. </p>
<p>Happy new year! 🍻</p>The case of 'not enough product manager'2020-12-02T10:30:00-04:002020-12-02T10:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-12-02:/posts/2020/the-case-of-not-enough-product-manager/a recurring theme from my conversations with other product managers and how I address it<p>Over the past year I've been talking to dozens of product managers through my 'product talk' conversations. For those of you who are unfamiliar, these are hour-long, one on one conversations where we hang out and talk about our perspective of product management <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>During these conversations there is one theme that keeps coming up; one that I like to refer to as <strong>the case of 'not enough product manager'</strong>. Here's how it usually goes: The other person and I are talking about our day to day and different things we do as part of our roles, and at some point they will say something along the lines of "I'm not doing everything a product manager does, only X and Y" or "I know it doesn't count as product management but I'm working on X" and the occasional "I know that product managers should be doing X and I'm working on Y and Z". </p>
<p>At this point the first thing I want to do is shout "YOU ARE ENOUGH!" into my screen, but my conversational manners get the better of me. After hearing the 'not enough product manager' in different variations I started asking questions: why do so many <sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> product managers who are, in my humble opinion, great at what they do feel that they are not meeting expectations?</p>
<h2>my product management is (somewhat) different than yours</h2>
<p>As a profession, product management is evolving and branching out in a dazzling manner: Between the what's considered 'core' product skills and unique needs of organizations there an abundance of job descriptions and tools available for product managers to adopt and expand the horizons of the profession.</p>
<p>Because there is so much good frameworks and writings out there about what a product manager 'should' be doing, it's easy to think that a product manager should be doing <em>everything</em> on the laundry list. In real life, however, while the core of product management within the organization is similar, the emphasis on certain aspects of the role which dictate the day to day life is depends on the organizational goals, structure and the nature of stakeholders. </p>
<p>In my conversations with product managers this comes up as a gap between the expectations coming into the role and what the person does in their day to day. As a product manager for a medium size company told me -</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>"When I got into the role I thought I was going to do a lot of product discovery, understand the users' needs and come up with solutions based on that. Over time I found that the company doesn't want to dedicate resources to discovery and put more emphasis on feature management and deliverables. I feel that I'm doing some parts of product management but not others"</em> </p>
</blockquote>
<p><img alt="You are enough image" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-11-enough/ur_enough.jpg"></p>
<p><em>Basically this. Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@iamfelicia?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Felicia Buitenwerf</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/motivation?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></em></p>
<p>Which brings me to the next component of 'not enough product manager' - </p>
<h2>comparing ourselves to other PMs</h2>
<p>As professionals and constant learners, we are exposed to a huge variety of information from our peers: Companies we follow publish articles on frameworks and methodologies they use, we participate in product related discussions in online communities and get exposure to information coming out of high-visibility product management programs and courses. I literally have two books on my table from two great CEOs on how they run their product organizations, and both have different and valid philosophy. </p>
<p>Coming back from learning about product management in other organizations into our own world bring up comparisons. While comparison can be helpful in uncovering knowledge gaps and points of interest, they can also trigger the 'not enough'.</p>
<p>Here's a paraphrase of what a senior PM told me in a conversation - </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I've been following this product manager from another company on Twitter and the methods and form of thinking they use is so advanced in comparison to my organization and how I work on things in my day-to-day, I feel that when I'm not implementing those advanced frameworks at my workplace I'm not practicing product management to its full extent. </p>
</blockquote>
<h2>on being enough</h2>
<p>I wish I could claim that I'm some sort of zen-master that's above the feelings of vagueness and comparisons, I'm not. However, with product experience and self-reflecting I practice I learned a few things that may be helpful if you find yourself caught in the 'I'm not enough' similar mindset.</p>
<p>Regardless of what your day to day as a product manager looks like, whether aspiring or senior, it's the identity you adopt that determine who you are: You are a problem solver, dedicated to understanding the ecosystem your consumers live in, identifying their pain points and think about ways you can build a better world of them. This kernel of truth is what I defer to when feelings of not being enough are creeping in - I am enough because I advocate for the people using my products and I'm entrusted with the privilege of building something for them. </p>
<p>Adopting empathy and curiosity in the context of a product (also in life, but we're product focused here) isn't something you need a product manager certification or a special title for: As an aspiring product manager, developing product sense and asking 'why things are built the way they are' and 'how could this be better' isn't something that's gated behind that product gig you're after.</p>
<p>Personally, being enough is about the ongoing process of getting clarity around the evolution of my role within the organization and the skillset required for tomorrow's challenges. Often times when I talk to people already working in product, they talk about dissatisfaction that comes from a gap between what was in their job description versus what their day to day actually look like and my perspective to that is one that examine the evolution of the role against the organizational business goals and mission. </p>
<p>Being enough is also embracing vulnerability and getting curious about my blind spots. This is how I solve for comparing myself to other professionals. Instead of channeling information I gather to 'I'm not enough', I get really interested: Because product management is so diverse there is always another framework, another job description or another set of skills to chase. </p>
<p>It also means that while I'm focusing on some of the aspects of product management, others may be focused on other parts that I don't get to practice - and that's where curiosity comes in: When I have my weekly meetings with product managers I get a glimpse into product management in other organizations and often items have a moment of "huh, that's a really important thing for a PM to be doing, I'll look into it" and incorporate it into my self-development sessions <sup id="fnref:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup>. </p>
<p>Just because you're not working thinking about X Y Z doesn't mean you're not enough of a product manager, just because you're volunteering as a product manager and not getting paid doesn't mean you're not enough. </p>
<p>You are enough, and you're awesome. </p>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Learn more about my product talk meetings, feel free to schedule some some at - https://slashproject.co/product-talk/ <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>That's not a hyperbolic 'so many', it's literally in 70% of my conversations <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>Read more about how I practice my product skills of work at - https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/product-management-solitaire-things-i-do-to-keep-my-product-skills-sharp-off-work/ <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>what does it mean to be a 'master of product'?2020-11-18T10:30:00-04:002020-11-18T10:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-11-18:/posts/2020/what-does-it-mean-to-be-a-master-of-product/how do evolve from being 'jacks of all trades' and empower cross-functional teams<p>I've been reading Cliff Gilley's writings for several years now, starting with the The Clever PM<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> all the way to some thought provoking discussions on Quora. What's keeping me engaged with what Cliff have to say is his non-compromising, buzzword-free approach to product management; seeking the core reasons behind what is product management as a profession, what are we doing and why we do it. I'm a fan. </p>
<p>Over time I lost track of Cliff's writing, especially with me being less present on social media, until my RSS reader pushed me a new blog post by him over at the Gartner Blog Network called 'Product Managers Must Become “Masters of Product”<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>'.</p>
<p>In his article, Cliff writes about how historically product managers were urged to become 'jacks of all trades' and in order to evolve they will need to become 'masters of product'. Part of that transition will include detachment from 'doing other people's jobs' and push stakeholders (marketing, sales, customer support etc) into using their own resources to gain autonomy. By doing that, product managers will be able to focus on "understanding the customer and their motivations<sup id="fnref2:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>".</p>
<p>Cliff's words really hit home for me. During my time at my current workplace<sup id="fnref:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> and transitioning from a place where I was a 'jack of all trades', I was met with strong autonomous teams that needed a different approach to product management. I showed up to my first day at work equipped with all the tools to handle the ambiguity and chaos that is a startup environment and encountered well-structured teams with processes that were established over decades. Here's my journey and take on evolving from 'jack of all trades' into an aspiring 'master of product' and what value one brings to the organization.</p>
<p><img alt="masters of product" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-10-masters-of-product/product-masters.jpg"></p>
<p><em>above: Your typical 'masters of product' training. photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@h4x0r3?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Thao Le Hoang</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/zen?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></em></p>
<h2>a master of product is a master of context</h2>
<p>While teams in the organization have different levels of control over their resources and freedom to self-build, they also need to make sure that their expertise and efforts are in line with the customer and the organizational goals. Working with autonomous teams, I found that giving the members of the team context into their daily work improves the teams' outputs and reduces waste in the form of unnecessary iterations, backtracks and time. </p>
<p>Context is different depending on the person or team it's delivered to: The sales team may be interested in customer segmentation and how it contributes to solving problems for their clients. They may also be interested in what is currently being developed in engineering so they can retain existing clients by giving them an outlook into the roadmap. That's not to say that the sales team's leadership isn't capable of procuring cross-functional information themselves, but when information is processed and framed it opens up cognitive space to ask follow up questions and gain even more context instead of worrying about obtaining the information in the first place. </p>
<p>Being a master of context means first and foremost owning the product's 'why' and having a good grasp on who is the target audience, what are their pain points and how does the product provide solutions to these pain points while maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage. Armed with the understanding of the 'why' the master of context can then learn how each stakeholder's effort contributes to the business goals and effectively communicate it. </p>
<p>As Cliff mentions in his article, there is a fine line between communicating context and handing stakeholders the 'what should be built' on a silver platter: To me, the question of 'what' is owned cross-functionally between the product manager and the expert level stakeholder. Designers, engineers, sales team members, architects and other professionals should be empowered to have the foresight to envision how their capabilities can be translated into success metrics and how those roll up into business goals.</p>
<h2>working as a master of context across the organization</h2>
<p>One key argument in 'masters of product' is that product managers should "focus on doing their core jobs so well that the other reliant organizations in the company can take their outputs and run with them" to a point where the product manager isn't the automatic go-to person to prioritize issues and resolve trade-offs. </p>
<p>As a person who heard plenty of 'we're doing this because is what product wants' in my professional life, one of my responsibilities as a product manager is to advocate for the customer and more importantly, instill customer-centric thinking in stakeholders. In a customer-led organization, the goal is changing the terminology to 'we're doing this because as a customer I could achieve...". Getting stakeholders into a customer-first mindset requires finesse as each stakeholder has business goals to pursue and as a 'master of context' I want to view their goals through the customer's prism.</p>
<p>Transitioning into a scenario where teams are set up for autonomy require two key components from a product management standpoint: The first is relinquishing some control over outputs in favor of providing the team with more agency on the 'how': When a product manager acts as a 'master of context', they need to provide just enough 'why' and a facilitate a productive discussion on the 'what' that will enable the team to be creative about the 'how'.</p>
<p>The second component is the PM using the extra bandwidth and mental capacity created by not having to be in the drivers' seat, and use them to break organizational silos and build better communication channels cross-functionally. Once the communication infrastructure is created and teams are feeding each other information, the product manager can then refine their ability to improve product discovery, diving deeper into the voice of the consumer, vetting hypothesis and fleshing out additional context to drive the product roadmap. </p>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>https://www.cleverpm.com/ (on hiatus since 2018) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>https://blogs.gartner.com/clifton-gilley/becoming-masters-of-product/ <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>read more about me at https://slashproject.co/about/ <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I've decided to shut down my 300K MAU side project, here's what I learned2020-11-04T10:30:00-04:002020-11-04T10:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-11-04:/posts/2020/ive-decided-to-shut-down-my-300k-mau-side-project-heres-what-i-learned/esports radar us shutting down today while growing, here are some lessons<p>Last week I had the pleasure of writing my first 'website is shutting down' email to few hundreds that subscribed to receive daily updates from esports Radar: A service that provided curated, real-time esports headlines on a large variety of platforms. </p>
<p>When sunsetting side-hustles, I found that the positive things (experiences, pieces of code, sometimes customers) are often embedded in the next project while the learnings about that didn't work tend to fade away. The purpose of this post is to dive into my learnings from what didn't work along and why I ended up shutting down a seemingly successful website so I can keep those lessons in mind as well. </p>
<p>The problem I was solving for using esports radar was very real: The world of esports news is highly fragmented between different sites with very little syndication or quality control. As a player of a specific game that's interested in its esports scene it's a lot of cognitive work for me to get out to the different news sites and filter by my favorite game, so I'll probably get my content on Reddit or stick to a single news source. What esports radar did behind the scenes is scraping the vast majority of esports news websites out there, analyze the articles, categorize them and using a set of 12 signals, compare them to other articles discussing the same topic so the output is a digest of all the esports news for the most popular games using the best source available. </p>
<p><img alt="esports radar on launch" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-11-esports-radar/esr-promo.png"></p>
<p><em>above: esports radar launch photo, December 2018</em></p>
<p>Building esports radar as an infrastructure, I was able to serve the digest over a large variety of platforms: Other than a website and mobile edition esports radar was serving news to over 5,000 discord servers, over 1,000 websites using syndication, Google Chrome extension and Google Home news application (I have to admit, saying "hey Google, give me esports headlines" and listening to my own website in action was kind of awesome). At the time of sunsetting the service, esports Radar had a little over 300,000 monthly users and rising. </p>
<p>With are growth and scale, also came the realization that operating costs are going to grow and with no clear way to sustain itself and about $500\year in operating costs it was time to focus my energy my existing projects. </p>
<h2>set your business goals up front</h2>
<p><em>* Unless it's a for-funsies project. In that case forget about business goals</em></p>
<p>Early on in the process, when I was going through the product discovery phase, I got validation from the market that the problem I was solving for is accurate: esports news sites are fragmented, getting around the web fishing for information is a pain point and a clean, fast way to consume headlines is a viable solution. Even though I didn't put a lot of upfront resources into discovery, I started working on esports radar knowing that if I build it, users will come. </p>
<p>With hardly any marketing I reached 1,000 daily users within a few days. I then kept adding access points and content distribution endpoints until the number of daily users grew and retention was solid. The problem started when I was about a year in, sitting on a side hustle that had a large user base but can't sustain itself. I built it, they came - now what?</p>
<p>Looking back at the process, I had a good sense of user segmentation but didn't think much about how does the solution I'm building for the chosen user segments translates into business goals. Don't get me wrong, I didn't go into esports radar expecting to scale into the big bucks but I was hoping it would sustain itself based off a 'if you like this service, donate' model. A donation model for self-sustainig a project is could be fine, but when looking at it through the prism of the user persona (people who are looking to read esports headlines) I could have estimated that donations wouldn't work.</p>
<p>Of course, there are other ways I could have monetized based on volume alone (ads, sponsored content within RSS feeds) but even at this point I feel that literring the site's content with ads in favor of covering the operating cost is not a trade-off I'm willing to make. The best thing for esports Radar at this point is going back to the drawing board and re-think the model and solve it in a next iteration, or a future project altogether. </p>
<p><img alt="esports radar september 2020 data" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-11-esports-radar/esr-data.png"></p>
<p><em>above: data snapshot from September 2020, website is growing - but is it good growth?</em></p>
<h2>build key metrics as proxy to business goals</h2>
<p>As a product manager, I always ask my team and my stakeholders 'what is good growth'. Looking back at the different products I was working on, the definition of 'good growth' always came down to a subset of key metrics that impacted business goals. It's always nice to have high engagement and retention numbers but when those metrics don't act as proxy metrics for a business goal they are just nice numbers to look at.</p>
<p>When I launched esports Radar I built dashboards and set up the metrics infrastructure for growth: Looking at usage per platform and expending to new platform as I identify need, looking at usage metrics for each news outlet, optimizing the aggregating engine and more. In that sense, I built the website for user acquisition and retention and that's exactly what I got - growth and retention. </p>
<p>Because esports Radar did not have a model to make it self-sustainable its growth didn't matter much from a business perspective. In hindsight, the way I should have done it is going into building the project with a hypothesis in mind on, given the target audience that was well defined, how will this project sustain itself and build that into my MVP. </p>
<h2>know when to shut down even though it's emotionally hard</h2>
<p>Shutting down a project is hard, especially when the data shows 'growth' (which we already established there is a difference between growth and good growth). From my vantage point the hardship comes not from the act of shutting down itself, but more from the loss of routine: One less project to check up on, one less roadmap to manage, few less emails per week from users asking features - they will definitely be missed.</p>
<p>But ultimately, that blessing is also the reason why closing esports Radar is necessary: I need to make cognitive space for newer projects that will be built on the lessons, thought process and potentially bit and pieces of code from the one that just got shut down. </p>
<p>So in a sense, some part of esports radar will continue to live in a future project, and that's kind of nice. </p>Non-functional requirements are my favorite and I will make them yours too2020-10-21T10:30:00-04:002020-10-21T10:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-10-21:/posts/2020/non-functional-requirements-are-my-favorite-and-i-will-make-them-yours-too/what are NFRs and how you start thinking about them<p>The more I grow as a product manager the more I enjoy diving deep into the world that's beyond the functional. While I absolutely love working on the functional portion, the connective tissue between the product and the user, it's often the non-functional portion of the product that often enables a lot of the front-facing magic. </p>
<p>Can you think of an app or website that felt fast that it gave you a sense of reliability, that 'it's just works'? Or a product that's using sensitive data and make you feel safe by demonstrating the most rigid security requirements? Those probably had well defined non-functional requirements (or NFRs for short) built into the development process, and likely the team's culture. </p>
<h2>non-functional requirements overview: my high-level, oversimplified version</h2>
<p>If you search online for definitions to non-functional requirements you'll find them at various levels of depth and how they are implemented in different industries (non-functional requirements are not unique to software and often being referred to as 'quality metrics). I encourage you to research and find out how different kinds of NFRs are being implemented but for the purpose of this post, here's my short, personal take:</p>
<p>From a high-level perspective, I really like Wikipedia's high level definition for NFRs - </p>
<blockquote>
<p>requirement that specifies criteria that can be used to <strong>judge the operation</strong> of a system, rather than specific behaviors <sup id="fnref2:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here are a few examples for non-functional requirements I frequently use (you can find many, many more on the wiki page <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>) - </p>
<p><strong>Speed</strong> - <em>"the web page should load to a point of being fully operational in less than 10 seconds"</em>, <em>"the search API should return a result within 2 seconds after recieving a query"</em>.</p>
<p><strong>Maintainability</strong> - <em>"the feature should be maintainable within one sprint's length by a single developer"</em> </p>
<p><strong>Throughput</strong> - <em>"the endpoint should be able to process 1000 queries per second without failing"</em> </p>
<p><strong>Reliability</strong> - <em>"the feature should maintain uptime of >99% while running in the background of low-end mobile devices"</em></p>
<p><strong>Usability</strong> - <em>"the feature should be usable for new users without prompts or help text"</em></p>
<p>To me, non-functional requirements are an integral part of any user story or epic. NFRs represent a wide array of acceptance criteria that set a quality and performance standards to what is being built, and when we define them they complement the functional requirement by setting expectations around quality. As with any metric, we need to make sure that NFRs are measurable, feasible and bought-into by the team. </p>
<p><img alt="fluffy cat" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-10-nfrs/fluffy-cat.jpg"></p>
<p><em>a non-functional requirement for this cat would be something like: "should not overheat when cuddled in a room temperature of over 35°C". Photo by Lina White on <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/87VMOKCumjc">Unsplash</a></em></p>
<h2>what makes NFRs awesome</h2>
<p>Even though that most NFRs are technical in nature you don't have to be a technical product manager do define them. In fact, I use non-functional requirements as an opportunity to engage with the technical team (architects, engineers, DevOps) and have a conversation around quality through the prism of a feature that is being built.</p>
<p>Discussing non-functional requirements with the technical team not only sets a realistic expectation around performance, but also makes everyone view what is being built on the feature level but also as part of a sustainable and maintainable system. Defining NFRs help reduce 'product waste' (non-usable functionality, over engineering and technical debt) and in my experience spark conversations around maintenance and documentation. </p>
<p>As a product manager, thinking about non-functional requirements when defining functional requirements helps me build empathy towards the different technical teams involved (as I view the build process from their end) on top of the user empathy which forms during functional requirements writing. </p>
<p>In some cases I found that defining NFRs also help with the QA process by taking a lot of subjective biases out of the equation and instead focuses makes the discussion more metric driven. Every now and then QA would send me feedback along the lines of 'feels slow', not intuitive' or 'may cause issues on low-end mobile devices'. Defining non-functional requirements reduces the number of 'feels...' during QA and keep the conversation around measurable properties.</p>
<h2>NFR tradeoffs and how to start</h2>
<p>It wouldn't be right to have all this text about how great non-functional requirements are without talking about some of the trade-offs: Since a lot of the discussion around NFRs should be collaborative between product and the technical teams, going into this discussion can raise resistances - especially if the organization is siloed to a point where there is a clear separation between technical and functional measurements - people would feel you're spending time in their turf. </p>
<p>If that's the case, I would start discussing non-functional requirements with the architecture or engineering teams through the prism of the functional requirement: In most cases I can think of, the metrics behind non-functional requirements are not the key success metrics for what is being built - they are acceptance criteria or a proxy metric to a functional KPI so I would start the discussion with with the 'why and what' and introduce NFRs as a topic for discussion.</p>
<p>For example: Imagine we want to optimize a 'download' page and know from a data standpoint that page loading time is one of the factors that impacts the conversion rate for download. I'd start a conversation about how would we measure and optimize the page's load time and use it as an acceptance criteria for the user story. Another point of discussion could be incorporating load time as a product success metric (as long as there is significance) so the technical team is engaged with a metric that is connected to a more front-facing feature. </p>
<p>Knowing exactly where to draw the line and set measurable and feasible non-functional requirements can be difficult at first, especially for smaller organizations - and that's totally fine! When getting used to working with NFRs it's more about the conversation and building collaboration between teams.</p>
<p>--</p>
<p>As a reminder, I'm always happy to chat about non-functional requirements, and product management in general, on <a href="https://slashproject.co/product-talk/">my product talk 1-1 meetings</a>. </p>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-functional_requirement <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a><a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref2:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Project story: The Animal Crossing Pen Pal Club2020-09-27T10:30:00-04:002020-09-27T10:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-09-27:/posts/2020/project-story-the-animal-crossing-pen-pal-club/First time building on top of an existing product. And a super fun one to build on top of!<p>Visit the project site at <a href="https://animalcrossingpenpal.club">animalcrossingpenpal.club</a></p>
<p>--</p>
<p>My journal notes from March and April 2020 are all a big blur. Reading my thoughts I can vaguely rememebr my past self trying to embrace the chaos that is that first few weeks of COVID-19, rallying the team and figuring out what is essential and how are we changing the way we operate so we can deliver faster but also keep ourselves sustainable. It was a lot to handle <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>.</p>
<p>In the midst of all this craziness, Nintendo released a new game in the Animal Crossing franchise. This game was an antithesis to everything that was going on in the world: When everything was on lockdown in real-life my Animal Crossing island was a place I could walk outside and explore; when we needed a good reason to physically be around other people, I got rewarded by the game for hanging out with my neighbors. When everyone were working late and hard, sending in-game postcards to people in-game gave me respite, a sense of community and a shot of optimism first thing in the morning.</p>
<p><a href="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-acpc/acnh.png"><img alt="animal crossing new horizons" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-acpc/acnh.png"></a></p>
<p><em>above - people hanging out virtually in the midst of covid-19! escapism in its purest form</em></p>
<p>Apparently I wasn't alone. The New York Times declared animal crossing '<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/animal-crossing-covid-coronavirus-popularity-millennials.html">a game for the Coronavirus moment</a>', the Wall Street Journal <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-animal-crossing-became-coronavirus-therapy-11587318513">explored it as therapy</a>, it was presented as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/may/13/animal-crossing-new-horizons-nintendo-game-coronavirus">a global phenomenon</a>, appeared in <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hbe2.221">academic peer-reviewed articles</a> and many, many more blog posts and news sites segments. </p>
<h2>discovering the problem statement</h2>
<p>During the first two months of the pandemic I found it very hard to keep up my habit of practicing product management skills outside of work <sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> but I did, with very low intensity. It was more about showing up and keeping the structure alive than doing meaningful work, until one evening I stumbled across a scenario that gave me purpose for the weeks to come:</p>
<p>To alleviate the loneliness that was an inherent part of the early-pandemic state of mind, one of my favorite things to do in Animal Crossing was writing in-game postcards to other players. There was nothing more satisfying than logging into the game sometime in the afternoon and finding postcards from random, anonymous avatars telling me about their favorite food, English word or just how their day was at work. At some point, questions like 'where are you from' and 'how old are you' came up, mixing the perfect alternate reality with the real world. </p>
<p>Not to anyone's dismay, I find having casual online conversations with people 20 years younger than me anywhere between inappropriate and uncomfortable. I don't do it. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure some of them are the nicest people on the planet with great intentions, but in a casual in-game setting it feels wrong. So even though I ended up blocking most of them (with a polite message explaining chatting across the age chasm isn't something I feel comfortable doing) I was back at square one - lonely in an amazing virtual world with only cute NPCs to comfort me.</p>
<p>At that point my product sense kicked in: What I was experiencing didn't feel like a "me" thing, so I got curious and dug deeper. Back then, if you wanted to find in-game pen pals you had to either find a group on Facebook and hope someone there is into it, search twitter and cold-DM people asking to correspond or find people on a message boards, reddit or Discord. By large, all these solutions had pain points associated with them - some required you to compromise your anonymity, some were too hard and some required you to ask the 'how old are you' question up front which doesn't feel nice and some, like sending a cold DM, are down right creepy.</p>
<p>After mapping all the different options of 'how people would find an in-game pen pal' and considering the pain points for each segment, a problem statement emerged: <strong>As an animal crossing player, I want to find people my age to send in-game postcards to, so I don't feel lonely</strong>. </p>
<p><a href="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-pm-solitaire/animal-crossing-ppc.png"><img alt="animal crossing pen pal club homepage" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-pm-solitaire/animal-crossing-ppc.png"></a></p>
<p><em>above - the homepage of the Animal Crossing Pen Pal Club</em></p>
<h2>building an MVP</h2>
<p>What I like about a well defined problem statement is that after writing it down it provides clarity for the rest of the process. After tweaking the problem statement the next step was finding out if this was a problem worth solving. Fortunately, during the research phase I mapped the different places where someone might look for animal crossing in-game pen pals and started vetting out my hypothesis - it turned out to be a good problem to solve. </p>
<p>Building the MVP version of <a href="https://www.animalcrossingpenpal.club/">animalcrossingpenpal.club</a> took about a weekend; I used Jango as framework since I was already familiar with it and spun up the backend rather quickly. I spent the majority of the time coding the matchmaker which is the secret sauce behind the service - not only it matches people based on age group, the matchmaker know how to handle an odd number of matches, handle unique matches (so people don't match with each other twice in a row), match based of responsiveness and additional cool signals. Since good matching contributes to user satisfaction (my only success metric) it's one of the main components I iterate on and optimize. </p>
<p>Being a nice-to-have side project to keep my product skills sharp, the pen pal club does not have a fully fledged product roadmap. Instead, I've built several feedback loops that give me a rough idea on what should I be focusing on next. </p>
<p>For example, two days after matching, an email is sent out to all the club members containing a short survey about this month's matching and checking if everything went smooth. From the survey I was able to learn that there are two major factors that impact people's experience: Responiveness (the time between being matched and the time connecting in-game) and frequency (the cadence of sending in-game messages). The best case scenario from an experience standpoint is where matched people connect in-game quickly and start corresponding at least once a day. </p>
<h2>project learnings</h2>
<p><strong>The animal crossing pen pal club was the first time I worked on a side project that solves a problem on top on an existing product.</strong> It was very interesting thinking about the problem statement not in the context of an industry or an action but rather something along the lines of 'what pain points exist within the microcosmos that is Animal Crossing'. Having an existing product as a constraint also help with thinking about user segmentation and potential problems they have since they all live within the context of a small ecosystem.</p>
<p><strong>Boilerplates matter.</strong> Working on the MVP for the pen pal club I felt that there was a go-to market deadline on it. It was roughly a month post-launch of the game and established websites were getting 'million clicks per day'<sup id="fnref:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> alongside new services that were popping up on a daily basis. I don't think I was able to spin up a fully designed django project in a weekend without good boilerplate templates I had in advance. I used the skeleton and homepage structure of a former project of mine (projectignite.app, now off-air) to make the pen pal club one pager front-end and backend database logic and it went great. </p>
<p><strong>build an MVP following the user's journey</strong>. Looking at my target audience and after mapping out the user journey, I knew the optimal experience would be on mobile devices so MVP for the pen pal club included a super solid mobile experience (fast load times, device testing, low-bandwidth friendly) and an ok-ish desktop experience. Even though it was a bit more inconvenient on the dev side I'm glad I stuck to my user journey and implemented accordingly. </p>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I wrote about some of my COVID-19 early learnings <a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/leading-a-team-through-ambiguous-times-covid-19-week-1-learnings">here</a> and <a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/what-is-essential-covid-19-week-3-learnings/">also here</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>Read more how I keep my product management skills sharp off-work <a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/product-management-solitaire-things-i-do-to-keep-my-product-skills-sharp-off-work/">here</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2020/05/11/nookazon-animal-crossing-new-horizons-trading/ <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Product management solitaire: Things I do to keep my product skills sharp off-work2020-09-20T10:35:00-04:002020-09-20T10:35:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-09-20:/posts/2020/product-management-solitaire-things-i-do-to-keep-my-product-skills-sharp-off-work/breaking out of my own thought processes and habitual behaviour<p>Product management is part of my identity: I've been practicing it for over 13 years and it's so fulfilling ,important and its principals impact the way I think and act. One of the most exciting things about product management is that as a discipline it's pragmatic and ever-changing (frameworks evolve, new paradigms are introduced and industries that require different form of thinking emerge) but at the same time product management leans on solid foundations: empathy, humanization, market fit, problem statements, prioritization, solutions, measurements and more. </p>
<p>Over the years, I found that working in product-centered organizations immerses me in learning specific user groups, understanding their pain points and develop empathy towards them. At some point, the team and I get so good at product discovery and delivery that we enter a state of flow - every professional member of the team, engineering to design to analysts act in harmony to deliver product solutions based on true needs and optimized processes. It is this point utopian state that make me feel a bit uncomfortable. </p>
<p>Our brain loves heuristics and automated thinking: In order to reduce cognitive stress and allow ourselves to focus on bigger and important things, our brain spends a lot of energy up-front to learn different situations and creates automated responses and behaviors and from there it's auto-pilot until the next set of variables arrive. For example: We spend a lot of time, effort and brainpower building a product roadmap and building delivery workflows - once we do the process is set on rails and we start the sprint-to-sprint-epic-to-epic dance. While this repetitive behavior is what makes us great professionals and masters of our craft, it's can also be restrictive in terms of our ability to think outside our (very nice) box. </p>
<p>About three years ago, I felt that in order to evolve professionally I need to practice product management outside of a work setting. Back in the day, my goal was to experience other product management frameworks hands-on so I can import learnings back to my work environment and elevate the team. What I ended up with was much more than that - it became a series of habits that is helping me improve my craft and that is what I want to share with you in this post. </p>
<p>I named my exercise time "product management solitaire" after the version of the card game Klondike that got popular after shipping with an early version of windows. In my mind, those off-work product management exercises are more game than work and are part of my personal time (In games, 'Solitaire' often refers to a single-player even though one of them involve other people). </p>
<p><img alt="windows 3.11 solitaire" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-pm-solitaire/win31-solitaire.png"></p>
<p><em>above - screenshot of Klondike Solitaire that shipped with Windows 3.11. Robot card back was the best.</em> </p>
<h2>plan a product, then build it</h2>
<p>If I could highlight only one thing out of everything I do to improve my product management skills off-work, it would be building your own product. Building something yourself isn't necessarily about the end result or releasing something to market - it's more about the journey and thinking that goes into building something from scratch <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>. From ideation through research to an actual product with everything that goes in between. </p>
<p>Building something new starts with a good problem statement, a pain point for a specific person or group of people. Sometimes it even start with a statement: <em>"I check my email too much, it feels like pulling a lever in a slot machine"</em>, <em>"I read a lot of books but I'm not retaining a lot of the knowledge"</em>, <em>"I spend a lot of time resisting buying video games and it's cognitively taxing"</em>. After some time, those type of statements turn into personas, problem statements and user stories. Early on, I'm trying to get a focused, easy to explain definition of why I'm building what I'm about to build and for whom. </p>
<p>After understanding the problem statement I approach the new product using the same product frameworks I'm familiar with, or sometimes even test out new models I read about and excited to try: Setting KPIs, key metrics, what does a minimum viable product look like, how can I test an early and get a product market fit - those are some of the questions I'm investing time in early on and working my way from there. </p>
<p>Let me reiterate: The goal of building something is practicing your product management thinking on real-world problems. Naturally, the more you get your daily reps in and spend time developing a problem statement the more you'd want to actually build it - but it's totally fine if everything starts and ends as a rough program or even on paper!</p>
<p>More often than not, I'll code a rough version of the product for some extra hands-on practice. Other than programming experience, full-stack developing a product is great for learning new technologies and frameworks. More importantly, it helps me see development from the engineers' point of view (to some extent). Coding also gets me a better idea on what it takes to scale and how each component of the technology stack works. Especially in areas like DevOps where I don't get much exposure to at work (seriously DevOps people, you are doing sacred work).</p>
<p>Here's an incomplete list of things I've built during the past year - </p>
<ul>
<li>A terminal-based Twitter client for mindful use (<a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/i-havent-logged-into-social-media-in-a-very-very-long-time-and-its-totally-fine/">I wrote a bit about it here</a>)</li>
<li>A program that automatically presents weather and checks email every time I open my terminal window in the morning (part of my morning ritual automated)</li>
<li>An pen-pal club for Animal Crossing with matchmaking based on age group - <a href="https://www.animalcrossingpenpal.club/">this one's live</a></li>
<li>A machine learning based tool that reverse engineers how automated candidate tracking systems work </li>
</ul>
<h2>practice 'product sense' outside your comfort zone</h2>
<p>When you apply for a product position at most tech companies, all of them will have some sort of a question that involves generic 'product sense'. Something along the lines of 'how would you design an alarm clock for the visually impaired?' or 'design a better grocery store experience'. This type of questions is meant to look for structure, user empathy, creativity and understanding of constraints and metrics. </p>
<p>Product sense as a thought exercise has major benefits even if you are not currently looking to interview for a new job: Thinking about designing or improving a product that is out of your comfort zone (my favorite thing is picking random objects around the house) trains your product mind to prioritize and ask critical questions - who is this product for, what does it do for them, what user cohorts are out there, which one is the most beneficial, what are their pain points, can I reach a problem statement for that group, what metrics should I watch for and much more. </p>
<p>There are different frameworks out there you can use to answer product sense questions and the most common is probably the Circles method <sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup> explained in Lewis C. Lin's book 'Decode and conquer'. That being said, I encourage you to look for more - there are plenty of frameworks out there that are worth exploring. As you warm up to product sense and strategy questions you will find adaptations and integrations that make a framework your own. </p>
<p>With enough practice, I got to a point where in about 40 minutes (I like to time myself so I can keep my thinking fast and focused) I can come up with improvements or design for a service or a product on a feasibility spectrum that ranges from practical to a moonshot. </p>
<p><a href="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-pm-solitaire/product-notes.jpg" target="_blank"><img alt="product notes" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-pm-solitaire/product-notes.jpg"></a></p>
<p>The artifact you'll have in hand after your product sense practice will look pretty similar to the above - prioritized solutions based of a problem statement you defined for a user segment in the context of an existing experience. The next form of advanced training is to pick the MVP you designed and think about key metrics and what would make the most sense to measure as a factor of success. </p>
<p>I often like to look at metrics through the product lifecycle lens of acquisition, activation, engagement, retention, monetization and non-functional requirements (NFRs). Theory-crafting around what metrics would drive my hypothetical products to success and why, was helping me feel comfortable talking about data and more importantly ask data-oriented questions at the right time. It's all about repetition - the more you do something the more it becomes automatic you can focus on the next level of thinking. </p>
<h2>product talk</h2>
<p>We've spent time building products in our comfort zone and practicing product work for imaginary products outside our comfort zone; zooming out of those two, there's a multiverse of product thinking out there that is unknown to us. Try as we might, we are constrained by our own personality, identity and how we approach problems. </p>
<p>In order to break out of our my thought patterns, and even though I was playing product management solitaire, it's time to play a little bit of hyper-focused multiplayer: Every week, I spend an hour meeting with product managers from all over the world for a casual conversation about what they do and why (and food).</p>
<p>Talking to other product managers, aspiring to seniors, I found different ways people approach problems, how they navigate their own company culture and challenges they are dealing with. It also makes me feel like a lot of the challenges I'm dealing with are shared across organizations and industries which is comforting. But most of all, talking to product managers in a casual environment exposes me to a variety of opinions, cultures and thought processes that are so different than mine and that's awesome. One of my absolute favorite things to do is get curious about people and those meetings literally supercharge me. </p>
<p>If you are interested in hopping on one of my one-on-one <a href="/product-talk">product talks here's a link for you</a>. </p>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>For additional discussion on journey vs end-result [read my post on goals and systems (https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/goals-vs-systems-and-finding-your-ikigai/). <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><a href="https://www.impactinterview.com/2016/06/circles-method-product-design-framework/">https://www.impactinterview.com/2016/06/circles-method-product-design-framework/</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>I haven't logged into social media in a very (very) long time and it's totally fine2020-09-13T10:35:00-04:002020-09-13T10:35:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-09-13:/posts/2020/i-havent-logged-into-social-media-in-a-very-very-long-time-and-its-totally-fine/a snapshot of what life without using social media look like<p>This isn't going to be one of those "I haven't used Twitter or Facebook for over two years and managed to learn 4 new languages, launched 2 companies, became a Zen master and tending my own vegetable garden" blog posts. That being said, I have been out of the mainstream social media social media ecosystem for a while now, life is pretty good and so I wanted to share some of my learnings those of you who are either interested, curious or asking me about it. </p>
<h2>Why</h2>
<p>The last time I posted on Facebook was around 2018 and I can't remember when was the last time I saw what my Twitter feed looks like, at least on a browser - we'll get to that. Up until several years ago I self identified as a digital maximalist: Picked up and tinkered around with every new product on Product Hunt, raced to get my vanity user name on different services and generally spent a lot of time building this perfect system to consume, organize and keep track of the huge amount of information I was exposed to. </p>
<p>At some point I probably crossed a threshold that made me feel overwhelmed. I'm not entirely sure whether it was the amount of emails from different services or losing track of the amount of time I spend scrolling through feeds. I remember being anxious about retaining Twitter followers and having this inherent pressure and thinking "I should probably post something" and "I haven't responded to this person in a while" and even "I need this person to follow me so I'll engage with their content". All this got me questioning my relationship with technology in general, but also curious about what exactly am I trying to achieve. </p>
<p>Let's talk habit loops and use cases for a second: if you read any modern book about habit forming you are probably familiar with the habit loop (<a href="https://jamesclear.com/habit-triggers">here's a quick rundown if you don't</a>). When I first started to use social media more than a decade ago my core use case was aligned with the social media company's mission - we both wanted me to connect with my friends, getting unmediated access to thought leaders and getting inspired. On top of that, social media services made it super easy and approachable to do it, so whenever I had a need for human connection or inspiration, social media was the answer and habits were formed. </p>
<p><img alt="simple habit loop" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-social-media/habit_loop.png"></p>
<p><em>Above, a simple habit loop: cue - working on my computer at the office, looking for human connection, routine - checking Twitter, reward - seeing profile pictures of people who share common interest as me, feel connected. result - checking Twitter is now associated with working at the office</em></p>
<p>Over time two things happened: Social media and I started to have differences about how to best solve for my use case. My original intent stayed the same - connecting with friends, getting inspired. On the social media side of things companies figured out that in order to financially sustain themselves they needed me engaged and retained in what people refer to as the attention economy <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> (or in layman's terms, spending a lot of time on the website engaging with things). So instead of a feed that serves my needs, my social media content stream became full of controversial stuff I don't care for from people I wouldn't want to engage with. </p>
<p>Instead of going on social media trying to maintain a large number of low-intensity relationships, I chose to invest in a handful of meaningful relationship to solve for my need for human connection. </p>
<p>On the inspiration end side of things, I figured that if there is someone I value their opinion and would love to hear their perspective of the world, I'll just read their book. So instead of following someone on a social media website trying to fish for a good insight amongst the huge amount of mundane information, I get an edited, long-form perspective. Obviously, there are some people who I'm interested in their opinion who did not publish a book - for them I had to tailor a special solution that also fit my consumption habits, we'll get to it shortly. </p>
<p>By looking closely into my relationship with technology, I was able to think about the things that matter to me the most and build solutions that fulfill those needs. What I found out in the process is that there are a handful of sites and services I really need and got me towards what I'm trying to achieve while the majority are a distraction. </p>
<h2>Missing out on things</h2>
<p>The first thing people ask me about staying outside the social media ecosystem is "how are you handling missing out on things?". Fair question. In the age of ephemeral content there is a lot of platforms that will blast you with information and even more information to stay on top of: The latest story, the latest meme, the cool video about the latest show everyone watches or the vacation photos that got posed in the team's Snapchat account off-work. </p>
<p>When it comes to "missing out" on information, I think about this quote from Cal Newport <sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The amount of mental effort and cognitive I have to spend to process raw information is very high and when outcome is "not missing out", the reward isn't worth the investment. When a lot of content nowadays is that's considered "missing out" is ephemeral or time sensitive, being constantly on top feels to me like drinking from a firehose. Sure, I can optimize my information consumption but the water pressure of the firehose is still the same, and the end result is the endless chase after the next thing I shouldn't be missing out on. </p>
<p>Sitting outside the cannot-miss-out ecosystem has two interesting side effects: People I'm communicating with are sharing with me their own processed information (so I do get to see our teammates' baby photos after all). More importantly, I learned to moderate my news consumption so I'm less mentally taxed by current events that are mostly out of my control (I wrote a bit about that when talking about <a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/leading-a-team-through-ambiguous-times-covid-19-week-1-learnings/">mental health during the first weeks on COVID</a>). </p>
<p>The key to handling "missing out on things" is intentionality: If there is something that's important enough to be tracked ,I'll design a system around how and when I'm consuming it. If it's not important enough, I rather spend my "life currency" on things that get me towards where I want to be. </p>
<h2>Staying professionally up-to-date through community</h2>
<p>Staying professionally up-to-date requires, among other things, getting communally involved. This means joining slack groups, participating in online forums and tinkering around with different services, some of them have attention economy components to them. Unlike missing out on mundane things, improving my craft through the product management community has value and I find it a good add-on to reading books and my product management solo-practice (which is a good idea for a future post). </p>
<p>When it comes to engaging on social networks for the purpose of improving, I always ask myself - is the group I'm looking at has values that are close to mine? And if it does, can our relationship help inspire and elevate me in my craft. </p>
<p>If both boxes are checked, I join the group with two rules set in place: The first one is being intentional about "product practice time". Just like anything else, I set aside time that is meant for group participation. This could be hard sometimes as there are some interesting rolling discussions and when I check the platform I find that the discussion is over or a good point I had is no longer relevant. When this happens and I feel that I'm missing out on stuff, I remind myself that I really don't. </p>
<p>My second rule is not giving away (or asking for) internet points (likes, hearts, bulbs, claps, cheers or fistbumps). Personally, giving away internet points reinforces that fact that content that I create online needs recognition and assign my self-validation to a feature that's designed to keep my engaged on a website. So if you are reading this post on a shared social website, don't feel obligated to give me internet points - we're cool. </p>
<p>The social network that got me the longest to tweak was Twitter because here's the thing - twitter's kinda fun! But it's also a huge time suck for me. What I ended up doing is programming my own read-only twitter interface that get original tweets (closest to my original use case - getting inspired by thought leaders) from people I'm interested in professionally and puts links they shared on a separate list. I'm checking my "mindful twitter" program once a day-ish and it's definitely less taxing than the alternative I used to have. </p>
<p><a href="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-social-media/mindful_twitter.png" target="_blank"><img alt="Mindful Twitter Screenshot" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2020-09-social-media/mindful_twitter.png"></a></p>
<p><em>My mindful Twitter interface, hard at work</em></p>
<h2>What do I do with all that free time</h2>
<p>When I settled into a cadence of habits that doesn't include social media I found out that suddenly I have time; more like an ocean of time. It got really weird early on and I found myself sitting on my chair staring into the void after finishing everything I had planned for the day - and it felt really refreshing!</p>
<p>Part of today's #hustle culture (that got slightly worse due to COVID because everyone <u>needs</u> to come out of this pandemic skilled up <sup>not really</sup>) is spending a vast majority of our time absorbing input from all over the place in the form of podcasts, books, articles, social media feeds and whatnot. The major benefit I got from both focusing my input on fewer, more impactful sources is allowing myself time to process.</p>
<p>I have enough mental mindspace to take in what other people created, think of ways to retain the most important pieces of information and embedding them into my thought process. Practically speaking, I collect notes from books, articles and conversations through rapid logging (so my mind isn't encumbered by information, I just write it down). The important learnings go into the computer at the end of each day and the morning of the next I have a program that sends me an email with one thought or quote from me to think about. I then use this quote to think about the source, the context and how does that apply to things I'm doing that day. </p>
<p>Input-free time is also a good opportunity to getting curious about myself and ask all the hard 'why's. Drowning in a sea os input was a great way for me to numb and turn my brain into a "read, sort, optimize" machine, but things got really interesting once the machine was off and it was just me and my thoughts.</p>
<p>And there's also downtime. In preparation for writing this post I was looking at the 16 basic desires theory <sup id="fnref:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup> and was delighted to find to out that having true downtime isn't related to any of the sixteen human basic desires: It's not about power, acceptance, individuality or (arguably) not even the need to be safe. Downtime is the time when I allow myself to do nothing, mentally reset and not worry about progressing towards the next goal (<a href="https://slashproject.co/posts/2020/goals-vs-systems-and-finding-your-ikigai/">it's all about systems anyways</a>).</p>
<p>The last thing I'm doing in my free time is exploring things outside of my comfort zone. Don't get me wrong, I love my comfort zone but I'm also curious about challenges that wait outside of it - like handy work around the house, or skateboarding, installing light fixtures or learning a complicated board game. I would say that very few things outside of my comfort zone stuck around but the fact that I could tie my learnings back to my personal and professional life is pretty great. Oh, and I can install a ceiling light fixture now so there's that. </p>
<h2>how do I start?</h2>
<p>Reducing the intensity of my relationship with social media is a net positive and if you read all the way through here and thinking about doing the same, that's awesome. Honestly, I can tell you all about the planning phase: evaluating your relationship with technology, write down use cases, think about your values and how technology benefit them, read books, but looking at my journey retrospectively the best way to start is by doing.</p>
<p>You want to get to a point where habits that are in line with things you want to achieve take precedence over your social media time. So how about picking something positive, blocking some uninterrupted time on your calendar and do it. Put your devices on 'Do not disturb' (or some place out of your reach) and do your thing. At some point during this journey you would probably find out that you have better things to do than feed-scrolling anyways. </p>
<p>Good luck, have fun! </p>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p><a href="https://www.worldcat.org/title/digital-minimalism-choosing-a-focused-life-in-a-noisy-world/oclc/1038242757">https://www.worldcat.org/title/digital-minimalism-choosing-a-focused-life-in-a-noisy-world/oclc/1038242757</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#%2216_basic_desires%22_theory">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivation#%2216_basic_desires%22_theory</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>Social media share image by Victoria Tronina <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/eNXZvDGqGbM">on Unsplash</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:4" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>goals vs. systems and finding your Ikigai2020-09-01T09:35:00-04:002020-09-01T09:35:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-09-01:/posts/2020/goals-vs-systems-and-finding-your-ikigai/finding your calling in a world that focuses on goals<p>I recently finished reading <em>Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life</em>. <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>It was a short and informational read about how the inhabitants of Okinawa, Japan perceive longevity while living in a place that has the highest life expectancy in the world (also known as a "blue zone"<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>).</p>
<p>According to the Okinawans, one of the key principals of living a long and happy life is the search and later on following their "Ikigai" (pronounced ee-key-guy). Ikigai loosely translate into "calling" or "reason to live" and can be as specific as cooking rice or as abstract as "making people feel better". </p>
<p>Your personal Ikigai sits at the center of your natural abilities, passion, what the world needs and what you can get paid for<sup id="fnref:3"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:3">3</a></sup>. </p>
<p><img alt="Ikigai Chart" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/ikigai.png"></p>
<p>The book doesn't dive deep into how one should find hers or his IKigai and instead talk about how eating better, socializing, being resilient and following the <a href="https://ikigaitribe.com/ikigai/the-10-rules-of-ikigai/">ten rules of Ikigai</a> contribute to having a better life. Overall, I left the book feeling that it stayed somewhat on the surface level, more of an introduction to Japanese perception of longevity but left me wanting. </p>
<p>What really got me thinking in the book's ending statement: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If you don’t know what your ikigai is yet, as Viktor Frankl says, your mission is to discover it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>that comes right after - </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is no perfect strategy to connecting with our ikigai . But what we learned from the Okinawans is that we should not worry too much about finding it. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>How can we make something a mission but not worry too much about ever completing it? If we take both of these statements at face value they sound conflicting, but I believe I found a way they can coexist and teach us something even more important about Ikigai.</p>
<h2>goals vs systems</h2>
<p>Most of the people I know are living their life around goals: OKRs or other accountability based goals at work, new years resolutions, birthday goals, heck - I am using a framework for yearly → monthly → weekly goals for over two years and feel good about it. I've been hard at work to perfect my goal setting frameworks so they are more accurate, actionable, achievable and can be broken down and cascaded. </p>
<p>Goals are awesome. Except for when they don't. </p>
<p>Goals are binary - you either meet your goal, or you don't. Because of this 'win or lose' mentality we attribute to goals, they are also emotionally charged: meet your goal and everything's great, fail to meet a goal and you are up for a bundle of shame, disappointment and self-judgement. In order to protect ourselves from the binary nature of goals we designed concepts like 'fail fast' that are all about setting a goal and working through the most efficient way to confirm or refute it. </p>
<p>Goals are either a zero or a one. They are not iterative, they are milestones. and milestones are temporary - a nice, decorated checkpoint we pass through on our way to a destination but when get to ur destination and meet it - what do we do then? Don't get me wrong, goals can be important: In healthcare, a doctor's goal is making sure a patient lives. In defense, the army's goal is to win a war. In some cases we wouldn't want anything else than a goal that very explicit and defines clearly what success look like. But in the case of Ikigai, the journey of self discovery is as important as finding your calling, maybe even more. </p>
<p>Unlike goals, systems represent our way to bring forth identity, principals and heuristics, in order to create a framework that drive us toward things we want to achieve. They are the source of habits and incremental change. </p>
<p>What I like about systems-first thinking is systems are inherently vulnerable. In Japanese culture, there is an emphasis on <em>wabi-sabi</em><sup id="fnref:4"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:4">4</a></sup>, the appreciation and acceptance of the imperfect and to me systems are the same way. Unlike the rigidness of goals, systems are evolutionary and require us to think pragmatically so we can adapt the system towards what we want to achieve. It's not always about the perfect execution and hitting goals - I found that a lot of times the value lies in the journey, the collaborative thinking about the subject and how are we going to incrementally improve in order to get to where we need to be. </p>
<h2>finding your Ikigai using systems</h2>
<p>Writing this post could be a part of a goal to write on a daily basis, but the way I see it it's a part of a system that serves me as a writer. It's a small actionable piece in the iterative process to improve and find my framework for growth. </p>
<p>I believe that in its core, this is what ikigai is all about: Putting systems in place to strengthen your identity and unravelling your so called <em>reason to live</em> along the way. This is also way I don't find the two last statements of <em>Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life</em> necessarily conflicted - you should make finding your Ikigai a priority by discovering the right systems that would enable you to get there.</p>
<p>It's all about the journey. </p>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Ikigai-Japanese-Secret-Long-Happy-ebook/dp/B01NAG34EH">Amazon</a>) <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>For further reading about "blue zones" I recommend <em>Blue Zones: Lessons For Living Longer From The People Who’ve Lived The Longest</em> by Dan Buettner (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blue-Zones-Second-Lessons-Longest-ebook/dp/B007WL6D60">Amazon</a>) even though most concepts described in the book are repeated in "Ikigai". <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:3">
<p>The Ikigai chart is derived from works in the public domain by Dennis Bodor (SVG) and Emmy van Deurzen (JPG) - <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ikigai-EN.svg">Wikimedia commons</a>. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:3" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:4">
<p>See wabi-sabi on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi">Wikipedia</a> <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:4" title="Jump back to footnote 4 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>when you're down in the arena, don't get right up2020-08-28T09:35:00-04:002020-08-28T09:35:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-08-28:/posts/2020/when-youre-down-in-the-arena-dont-get-right-up/living a life in the arena means getting curious about the floor<p>One of my favorite all-time quotes belongs to Theodore Roosevelt in his immortal speech "Citizenship in a Republic"<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> commonly known as "the man in the arena". It's so good I'm going to put my favorite part up here - </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Living in the arena is a choice I made a long time ago and impacts many verticals of my life; from work to family life, dealing with good news or facing adversity. Living in the arena means vulnerability, transparency, going all-in on an endeavor where success isn't guaranteed - it's counter-intuitive to putting on armor, being reserved and never hurt but I wouldn't take it any other way. </p>
<p>There is a lot of words in Roosevelt's speech dedicated to the tenacity and iterative process of living a life in the arena: you put your heart into something, you may fall down, you get up and do the same thing the next day. Not a lot of words, however, are dedicated to the time spent on the ground - where you are getting yourself covered in dirt and you are in a low point. Your arena experience tells you to get up but at that specific moment you are at ground floor. </p>
<h2>getting curious about the floor</h2>
<p>At first I was hurrying the process of getting up. Like a soldier or a ninja rolling when they fall to get into a risk assessment position, I was quick to brush off the dust from the fall and hurry into the next. The fall hurts, it happened in the past, why should I even be worried about over analyzing events and things beyond my control; All we have is now, right?</p>
<p>But then at some point I started getting curious about lying in the dirt. Things happened and emotions were felt, what triggered those emotions? What is the underlying need behind them? What can I learn from falling before getting up and brushing off the dirt?</p>
<p>Allowing myself to lie on the ground in the arena and having this conversation allows me to grow while falling. In "man in the arena", Roosevelt is talking about failing while daring greatly. I believe there is something to be said about spending a healthy amount of time on the arena's floor as a way to enable personal growth and a better way to "strive valiantly", rise with purpose and put your heart on the line for the next worthy cause. </p>
<p>I'm going to end with another all-time favorite quote of mine, this one's from Randy Pausch in his book "The Last Lecture"<sup id="fnref:2"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:2">2</a></sup>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_in_a_Republic <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
<li id="fn:2">
<p>https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2318271.The_Last_Lecture <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:2" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>what is essential: COVID-19 week 3 learnings2020-04-02T09:00:00-04:002020-04-02T09:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-04-02:/posts/2020/what-is-essential-covid-19-week-3-learnings/thoughts on essentialism at work, managing time and expectations<p>Week 3 of COVID-19 is almost over, and we made it through March '20 - phew! Looking back at my notes from the past month or even from two weeks ago, everything seems as if it happened three months ago. It's like between the rapid changes in how we work and manage our everyday lives time has managed to stretch so everything seems jumbled. </p>
<p>From a personal standpoint keeping a routine and managing my notes helps a lot. In this new order where the work-life balance is fuzzy and the crisis is managed on a day by day basis, capturing my contribution and value on a daily basis serves as an anchor I can reflect on and then project to my team. </p>
<h2>essentialism at work</h2>
<p>For the past couple of weeks, a word that keeps coming up is 'essential': What is essential work, when is essential to leave the house, who is an essential team member. </p>
<p>This process of ruthless prioritization against the very essence of a problem is something I believe will stay with us for a while after the crisis is over. As a product manager, I'm used to asking a lot of WHYs and critically think about why are things done they way they are; but more often than not the organization, that is built on top of years of accumulated knowledge and experience, prioritizes against perceived problems and heuristics. </p>
<p>That's where I see things changing: The people who sees this crisis through are making decisions not just against budgets and projections, but against questions like - why are customers are our customers? what are they going through and what is the most efficient way we can help. I see a lot of people centric thinking, a lot of repurposing, creative problem solving and just as important - pushback to initiatives that goes against what is really mission critical. </p>
<h2>managing time, but also expectations</h2>
<p>These days, it's all about prioritization and expectation management. I was writing a lot about time management and the concept of reclaiming energy in 2019 but my main takeaways these days, in conjuncture with managing my time is managing my expectations that goes along with it. </p>
<p>"work time" at home does not equal "work time" at the office, "big task" here does not equal "big task" there. Admittedly, the more I try to shoe old expectations into the new order, the more I realize that best case - it's not going to work and worst case I'll end up feeling frustrated. </p>
<p>if this crisis is to be managed on a daily basis, I'm following suit and managing my time, focus and expectations on a daily bases - keeping resources aligned with what's in front of me and reassessing as I go. What's essential is what matters and my daily achievement is figuring out what essential is.</p>leading a team through ambiguous times: COVID-19 week 1 learnings2020-03-22T12:35:00-04:002020-03-22T12:35:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-03-22:/posts/2020/leading-a-team-through-ambiguous-times-covid-19-week-1-learnings/the covid-19 crisis is very different from anything I've seen but has some sense of familiarity. Right now my team's mental health is my number one priority<p>My team and I were ready for the coronavirus crisis, or so we thought.</p>
<p>Working for a children's hospital we were definitely on top of the news, progress and flow of information but it almost seems like one afternoon a big red switch flipped and we went from "working while a crisis is in the background" mode to full on crisis management when the outlook for the future is fuzzy at best.</p>
<p>I'm writing this blog post after a first full week of spending time in unfamiliar territory with the team. We all have good experience with crisis management but this one felt different: While transitioning to working 100% remotely was fairly easy from a technology perspective, the challenges revolve mostly around people and in this post I'm going to document some of my learnings around team management and how the team and I approach them.</p>
<h2>two types of behaviors I've seen people adopt when facing an uncertain situation at work</h2>
<p>Right of the bat, while the circumstances for this crisis were very different it had an odd sense of familiarity: Working in the startup-tech world I had the privilege<sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup> to witness companies shutting down, sometimes first hand and how different people react to working under ambiguity and uncertainty. From what I've seen there are two special behaviors people adopt that are very different than how they normally operate -</p>
<p><strong>1. Hustling out of their mind</strong></p>
<p>Read any article about work culture and self improvement and they'll go in depth explaining how #hustle is a bad idea. What you should be doing is understanding your self worth and assign value to your work - working 16 hour days, responding to emails as soon as you get them and jumping on any task in your wheelhouse is bad for you and is your highway to burnout at work, right?</p>
<p>Well, you take a quick look at <a href="/r/CoronavirusRecession">/r/CoronavirusRecession</a> (please don't), read some articles about the financial impact and people mentioning the '<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furlough">F-word</a>' and channel that anxiety into the need to prove your worth to the organization. You'll do everything, get involved in every project, work any hour and make sure your name is in every inbox and mentioned in any meeting so people know that you're contributing.</p>
<p><strong>2. Shutting down</strong></p>
<p>The opposite of the people above. Drinking from the firehose of information, charts, news on top of all the ambiguity and anxiety mentioned above makes very productive people channel all their knowledge into consuming and trying to make sense of all the information which gets them into overdrive and they shut down.</p>
<p>Those people will fall off the grid, won't contribute and become very reactive - they will wait until some mentions their name and put something on their todo list but otherwise just float around in space.</p>
<h2>how do I cope</h2>
<p>My team and adjacent teams I work with are full of amazing, talented people who are very good at what they do and their skills aren't suddenly taken away by a crisis. Based on that assumption and the fact that there is currently no end period for how long we will have to work under uncertainty, I decided that my team's (and the people around me) mental health is the most important factor that will have an impact on (a) how people will be performing day to day and (b) the state that people will be at when the crisis ends.</p>
<p>I was fortunate to anticipate change where I work on on T-1, a day before the crisis fully changed how we work and got people to the state of ambiguity I prepared a three bullet priority list that will be the framework on how people that I manage will operate under. When people are thrown into a state of uncertainty a thought through framework is like a safety net under a tightrope walker - it's something to lean on as they figure out the 'what's now' and the 'where to start'.</p>
<p>Here's my personal three 'support' list I delivered:</p>
<ul>
<li>Support of the team managing the crisis</li>
<li>Support important initiatives that are currently in flight</li>
<li>Support each other</li>
</ul>
<p>The first two bullet points relate to how we deliver software and technological outcomes using agile and maybe I'll get into it in a future post. I'll say that it was very interesting seeing how crisis act as a catalyst for software delivery and how quickly we managed to establish a new process and then rally and organize around it.</p>
<p>The last bullet point, supporting each other is the one that I'm putting the most weight on. Here are three points I was delivering to our team during one of our update meetings this week. I think they encompass most of what I think on managing a team's mental health during this crisis and am making an effort to live by these days.</p>
<p><strong>1. Empower people around you, delegate</strong></p>
<p>Instead of hoarding tasks, jumping into every possible call and building a 16 hour workday does three things: It's your quickest way to burnout, it's coming as a cost to people around you (significant others) and it's creating anxiety among team members who want to contribute.</p>
<p>Empathize. Imagine how a team member (who is talented and really good in what they do) feel when you're in a meeting saying how crazy busy you are and name dropping all those people you are in meetings with. Instead, delegate more than you think you should, reach out to people with "hey, I could use your help".</p>
<p>Making team members feel viable, including them in the conversation and allowing them to contribute during times of ambiguity is invaluable - you them, and ultimately for the team leader and organization.</p>
<p><strong>2. Home work time ≠ office work time</strong></p>
<p>There are about 2,334,836,927 articles about teams working remotely around the web right now so here's my humble contribution to the pile of tips and advise: I don't expect my team members sitting next to a computer 8:00am-6:00pm being 100% productive.</p>
<p>I expect people to have a routine where the job gets done but the time spent working is fluid and full with breaks, taking care of other people living at home, exercise and life things in general. We have process on how to communicate urgent things and outside of that, allowing people the space they need to find the new work life balance.</p>
<p><strong>3. Talk to each other</strong></p>
<p>Out of everything here, if you had to do one thing - talk to each other.</p>
<p>Find a person, have a video conversation with them, ask them how they are coping, what does their work day look like <em>("working from home too? Wow, so innovative!")</em> and keep that human to human touch going. Listen to each other, ask what you can do to help and get through it together.</p>
<p>If you need to someone, I'm here for you - <a href="https://slashproject.co/about/">here are all the ways to you can reach out</a>.</p>
<p>Stay healthy out there!</p>
<h2>Footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>I use the word privilege here because in retrospect the lessons I learned during that time were invaluable with not much personal risk. Also it's very easy to use the word 'retrospect' here because it certainly did not feel easy or 'learning' back in the day. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Keeping a strong mental by taking care of BLT2020-02-14T11:22:00-04:002020-02-14T11:22:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-02-14:/posts/2020/keeping-a-strong-mental-by-taking-care-of-blt/working on my bored, lonely, tired to keep my mental strong<p>Last year I started a process of, what I called at the time, <a href="/posts/2019/reclaiming-energy/">reclaiming energy</a>. <br>The process involved evaluating my relationship with different initiatives I was engaged in and weighing them against my yearly goals and values. Looking back on the process I'm happy to report it worked - big time: I was able to keep my project list to a handful of things I am excited about and able to give each one the attention it deserves. </p>
<p>One of the major bi-products of reclaiming energy is that I suddenly had time on my hands, lots and lots of time. After I gave all my projects the love they deserve, the challenge became "how do I use the extra time in a way that coincides with my values and goals?". </p>
<p>At first I tried to wing it but quickly discovered that without any plan I'm actually engaging with things that are counter productive or simply doesn't make me happy <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup>. I also found out that there are three factors that impact my mental state the most and drag me into those counter productive behavior: Boredom, loneliness and tiredness - or BLT. </p>
<h2>understanding boredom</h2>
<p>The more I research boredom the more I get a sense how much of a fuzzy, made up concept it is. In my recent reading history I witnessed a lot of great authors try to dissect boredom from different angles: Cal Newport refers to boredom as a state that leads to "passive consumption", in all of her three books Brené Brown writes about certain aspects of boredom as a route to what she refers to as "numbing" as a shortcut to habits we want to avoid or addictive behaviors.</p>
<p>For me, in the equation of bored-lonely-tired, boredom reflects choice. I wrote about it in short on <a href="/posts/2019/the-time-merchant/">the time merchant</a> but if I try to package boredom into a definition, it would be "a junction where time investment decisions are made". It's almost as if boredom, in its classic definition is a result of other symptoms: loneliness, tiredness, lack of excitement, lack of interest etc. </p>
<p>Even with all this knowledge, the concept of being bored feels so culturally embedded that sometimes I'll be in a situation and think "oh, it's boring". The way I found is the most effective for me is to first acknowledge what I'm feeling and revert to a list of activities that excites me: Writing, coding, reading, running, analyzing data, solving problems, learning - having a quick list of "I'm happy\excited when..." is very helpful. </p>
<h2>tiredness and loneliness</h2>
<p>I first got exposed to HALT when reading on how AA use emotion, feelings and needs to avoid addictive behavior. HALT stands for <a href="https://bradfordhealth.com/halt-hunger-anger-loneliness-tiredness/">Hunger, Angry, Lonely and Tired</a> as situations where the person need take care of themselves as fast as possible. When documenting situations where my own investment of time was counterproductive or made me feel unhappy, loneliness and tiredness were top environmental factors. </p>
<p>There is a ample amount of research on how lack of sleep impact our mental performance (<a href="https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/spacing-out-after-staying-up-late">here's a favorite talking about sleep deprivation and mental state</a>) and loneliness is maybe one of the more interesting products of our generation that is born into social media and low intensity connections. </p>
<p>When either tiredness or loneliness is present, time the follows is always improperly invested. I found out that often times, if left untreated, the easy way out of "tired" or "lonely" is a form numbing which maybe fixes the symptom for a short time but unhelpful for the long run. </p>
<p>I found the most success dealing with tiredness and loneliness by employing the AA method of stopping everything in its tracks, acknowledging the feeling and coming up with clear actions to address it: I'm tired - take a walk, I'm lonely - text a person. The short break in the work flow is always beneficial over whatever behavior is coming next as a result of being too tired or feeling lonely. </p>
<p>On to the next!</p>
<h2>notes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Note that "counter productive or unhappy" doesn't mean "waste of time". I believe time is never "wasted": improperly invested - maybe, used in a short-sighted way - could be. But even the thingI do that in hindsight I probably shouldn't have done (e.g playing video games over research) is never a waste but a choice. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Talking to strangers: Book review2020-01-12T11:22:00-04:002020-01-12T11:22:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2020-01-12:/posts/2020/talking-to-strangers-book-review/book review of Malcolm Gladwell's latest and my principals of talking to strangers<p>This post started as a book review for Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Talking-Strangers-Should-About-People/dp/B07NJCG1XS/">Talking to Strangers</a>". Halfway through I felt like there are enough "classic" book review out there (<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/04/books/review-talking-to-strangers-malcolm-gladwell.html">the NYT one is pretty good</a>) and a more interesting take would be looking into my learnings, how "talking to strangers" effected me and what will I probably retain from it.</p>
<p>The core of truth behind <em>talking to strangers</em> is simple and equally brutal: We think we know people, but we don't. We may have a better chance to know people that are similar to us, or have a slightly better chance when a stranger's behavior is consistent with what they are saying. For the most part, in the sea of grey area that's in between the very few clear-cut cases, we're actually doing ourselves a disservice by trying to use our heuristics and pre-perceptions to understand strangers, we just have no idea.</p>
<p>In the book, Malcolm Gladwell is covering three major themes through storytelling:</p>
<ul>
<li>Default to truth - how as a society we always believe the the person in front of us is honest</li>
<li>Transparency - how we (wrongfully) tend of interpret external signals and associate them to emotions</li>
<li>Coupling - looking not only at the stranger but both at the environmental and contextual elements.</li>
</ul>
<p>When I look at those three facets holistically, <em>talking to strangers</em> becomes a story about identity, of both ourselves' and the people we are interacting with in our everyday lives. I'm going to focus on the interaction part, keep the self-investigation part for some other time.</p>
<h2>my two guiding principals for talking to <s>strangers</s> people</h2>
<p>The chaotic thing about talking to strangers is that every time we interact with people, we interact with a snapshot of that person in the current moment: Who we are right now is not who we were yesterday and most definitely not who we were 3 or 5 years ago. So even if we think we know a person (which according to Gladwell, we really don't unless we take into account contextual and environmental factors) we only really know them for the period of time in which we interact.</p>
<p>When trying to cope with all that mess and trying to think how am I dealing with talking to strangers (or less than strangers) I came up with two guiding principals that I've been practicing for a very long time and they both help me with the interaction itself or post-processing it.</p>
<p>The first one if the <strong>language of feeling and needs</strong> portrayed in the best way possible in Marshall B. Rosenberg's book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships-ebook/dp/B014OISVU4">Nonviolent Communication</a>. When it comes to the core of human interaction, Marshall Rosenberg writes that we are driven by requests that are combination of feelings and needs. I'm paraphrasing a little but the subtext of requests is something along the lines of - <code>I need ____ because I feel ____</code>.</p>
<p>Of course, we don't really know what goes into those blanks so according to the principals of nonviolent communication, our best course of action is empathy, listening and openness (as oppose to judgement and diagnosis that is often a projection of our set of heuristics and prejudice on a situation). That's exactly what I try to do when I'm in a conversation and it's not always easy: In a world where we really like to help and very solution oriented, it's very tempting to go "I think I get you, here's how to solve it" but I found out that the more I listen, the more accurate and honest the request from the other person become.</p>
<p>My second guiding principal is the basic assumption that <strong>people are doing their best</strong>, explained in detail (and colorful language) in Brené Brown's book "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rising-Strong-Ability-Transforms-Parent/dp/081298580X">Rising Strong</a>" (and repeated throughout her newer ones as well).</p>
<p>This one took a little bit more time to sink in, I have to admit. I rumbled with the concept of "are people really doing their best?" as a blanket statement quite a bit because I'd like to believe otherwise but as Malcolm Gladwell taught me, I probably have no idea. So this is my way of reconciling the chaos that is talking to strangers - people are doing the best they can with the tools we have.</p>
<p>Could they be doing more? Is that REALLY the best they can do and if so, what does it say about them? about me? I found out that whenever I'm dealing with those questions I'm putting my own judgement and assessment on other people's feelings and needs which is a wild guess at best, if I really want to fill in the blanks there's no better way of doing it than be explicit and find out for myself.</p>
<h2>should you read talking to strangers?</h2>
<p>Like every other Malcolm Gladwell book, you're not going to get any hard advice on the topic of talking to strangers. What Gladwell is really good at is storytelling around several points he want to make and work that Rubik's cube until hopefully something clicks with you.</p>
<p>Unlike similar books on human interaction, <em>Talking to strangers</em> is what you make of it. I started reading the digital edition and quickly switched to the audiobook version, for two reasons: First, Gladwell is all about storytelling and the narrated version bring news segments and acted parts that make the storytelling better. Second, since there's not a lot of note taking in the book, the audio version made me jot down my thoughts as I go and write this review instead.</p>
<p>If you are ready to have your heuristics and judgement challenged by research and high-profile cases, this is a good book for you. If you're looking for more concrete advice, start with Nonviolent communication.</p>2019 → 2020: Yearly takeaways2019-12-31T11:00:00-04:002019-12-31T11:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-12-31:/posts/2019/2019-2020-yearly-takeaways/switching decades, some retrospect on the past year<p>For the past two years on December 31<sup>st</sup> I made it a habit to take some off work and go on a full day personal workshop with a very simple simple structure: Half the day goes towards digging deep into the past year; reviewing events, goals and writing down insights while the second half of the day goes into setting goals for the upcoming year.</p>
<p>I was never much of a "new year's resolutions" type of person. Instead, I feel more conformable understanding what values I care about and set measurable, actionable goals around them. Later, I deconstruct those yearly goals into my monthly planning cycles to hold myself accountable. It's basically a simplified personal OKRs, only without HR involved.</p>
<p>We're not here to talk about my 2020 goals through. What I want to highlight in this post are several insights from the passing year both as reference but also as way to re-calibrate my goal setting process next time around.</p>
<h2>yearly mood pattern matches my personal chronotype</h2>
<p>Over 2019 I was documenting my mood (ranked between 1 an 5) each month as a way to compare how diffrent events that occured throughout the month effect the next one but mostly as an exploratory way to find out how working on different project impact my happiness levels overall.</p>
<p>Here's how 2019 looks like -</p>
<p><img alt="my 2019 monthly mood chart" src="https://slashproject.s3.amazonaws.com/img/post/2019-mood-chart.jpg"></p>
<p>Suprinsgly, this pattern is faily similar to my daily cylcial pattern <a href="/posts/2019/no-email-before-1100am">i was writing about in june</a> after reading a book discussing the effect of time and timing on our habits and daily performance. The main takeaway here is taking extra time to plan and think through the middle portion of something I have planned since it's apperantly have an effect.</p>
<p>Whether it's the middle portion of a project, middle of the day or the Q2 of a year, it's worth giving this part some extra attention so I can start and finish strong, but also have the hooks in place to have a good middle point grind. A nice refernce to how important the middle portion is can be found is Brené Brown's book "Rising strong" where she talks about her discovery workshop where day 2 (the middle part) is the day that enables the major breakthroughs or as she puts it: <strong><em>"you can't skip day 2"</em></strong>.</p>
<h2>vague goals lead to vauge interpretations</h2>
<p>One of my 2019 goals was to "build my professional network". Having started working in a new industry a year prior, I needed to build a network of both peers in other organizations and neighboring industries. Looking at it in retrospective I was able to contact a cohort of people, made good connections that will develop throughout the year which is great, but as a goal I could not describe, at the beginning of 2019, what a "professional network" truly look like.</p>
<p>The result of setting this vague goal was twofold: I started working on it during Q3 of the year (which was OK considering circumstances in Q1 and Q2) but I remember that with each monthly planning my thought process was "well, this goal seems pretty vague, I'll have to deconstruct and build sub-goals around it to make it really work". After start working on it, I didn't have a clear vision on what the endgame look like for this goal: At what point am I looking at my goals list and declare this one 'done'?</p>
<p>Vague goals leads to vague planning leads to a somewhat unsatisfactory sense of completion. Is the thing I have now was the one I had in mind 12 months earlier when I was looking at my 2018 data and set the goal? No clue.</p>
<h2>my writing goal needed scope, or did it?</h2>
<p>I'm a little bit on the fence with this one: Another goal I had in 2019 was to write at least once a week which I managed to successfully meet. I actually wrote more than once a week but the thing I was missing was an answer to the question "to what extent am I writing?". When I first decided writing would be a goal, I had this blog in mind in the context of looking at tech things and writing about them, talking about different projects I was working on and reflecting on workplace dynamics.</p>
<p>What ended up happening is that due to the broad nature of the goal (lack of platform, lack of scope from a topic standpoint) I did meet the time criteria but most of the writing took place backstage, with breaking down my habits, understanding feelings, needs and interactions. Some of it was great self-exploratory writing which I got many benefits from but probably wasn't the original intention.</p>
<p>My main takeaway here is, unlike the vague goal setting argument from earlier, that there is some hidden power is scoping a goal but leave some of it open ended, especially when in comes to creative work like writing. Leaving some variables out but still keeping a loose sense of a scope (such as "once per week") allowed me to explore the limits of the subject matter ("writing") and get to interesting results and bi-products.</p>
<p>That being said, I don't have any open ended goals planned for 2020 - onwards we go!</p>Migrating from Jekyll to Pelican (2019 edition)2019-12-29T21:30:00-04:002019-12-29T21:30:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-12-29:/posts/2019/migrating-from-jekyll-to-pelican-2019-edition/notes from making the migration from Jekyll to Pelican. Updating as I go<p>Boy oh boy I'm exhausted. I just spent the last 9 hours migrating this blog from the pretty awesome, Ruby based <a href="https://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a> to the comforting arms of the Python based <a href="https://blog.getpelican.com/">Pelican</a>. In hindsight all of this could have possibly been avoided if only<a href="https://muffinman.io/macos-catalina-ruby-bad-interpreter-error/"> Ruby didn't start throwing errors</a> at me after upgrading to macOS Catalina, but here we are.</p>
<p>Even though I'm kind of done for the day, I thought I'd jot down some of my notes in favor of those of you who may stumble upon this post in the future. As of right now Pelican dev stories are pretty rare to come by so here's my humble contribution.</p>
<h2>Migrating posts</h2>
<p>This part was easy peasy as both Jekyll and Pelican use markdown as the way to generate HTML. I did have to change the structure of the YAML header just a tiny bit to accommodate for the way Pelican works.</p>
<p>This included mostly removing parenthesis and capitalizing some of the variables. (un?)fortunately I had only 24 posts in total so I knocked that out pretty past.</p>
<p>Basically this -</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><span class="c1"># the Jekyll way</span>
<span class="nn">---</span>
<span class="nt">layout</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">post</span>
<span class="nt">title</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">About impact</span>
<span class="nt">subtitle</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s">"totally</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">not</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">morbid</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">thoughtd</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">about</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">biology</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">and</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">creating</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">impact"</span>
<span class="nt">date</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">2019-10-09 10:00:00 -0400</span>
<span class="nt">categories</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s">"200words"</span>
<span class="nt">author</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s">"Omer</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">Kaplan"</span>
<span class="nt">image</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s">"cookies.jpg"</span>
<span class="nt">image-credit</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="s">"John</span><span class="nv"> </span><span class="s">Dancy"</span>
<span class="nn">---</span>
</pre></div>
<p>Is now this (no lines, less quotes) -</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span><span class="c1"># the Pelican way</span>
<span class="nt">Title</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">About impact</span>
<span class="nt">Date</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">2019-10-09 10:00:00 -0400</span>
<span class="nt">Category</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">blog</span>
<span class="nt">Summary</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">totally not morbid thoughts about biology and creating impact</span>
<span class="nt">Author</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="l l-Scalar l-Scalar-Plain">Omer Kaplan</span>
</pre></div>
<h2>Migrating templates</h2>
<p>Also good news on that front! While Jekyll is using Liquid as the templating engine, Pelican is using Jinja2 (<a href="https://stackshare.io/stackups/jinja2-vs-liquid">apparently one is for Ruby people, the other one's for Python people</a>) which I have a lot of experience with working on multiple Django projects, I was genuinely excited to make the jump.</p>
<p>In real life, while there wasn't much difference in the syntax itself (I did use more Jinja functionality though, which was a nice shortcut), the settings file for Jekyll is, expectedly, different than Pelican's settings file terminology so for example <code>{{ site.base_url }}</code> becomes <code>{{ SITEURL }}</code> which messed up a lot of the relative links I had inside posts, mostly to images and CSS files.</p>
<p>From a structure perspective, the <code>templates</code> and <code>static</code> directories pretty much held their structure, I did had to rewrite most of the parts that touched relative links, like the <code>include</code> file for <code><head></code> . The good news is that going through the code those files were due for a rewrite anyways.</p>
<h2>Migrating functionality</h2>
<p>In the previous iteration of the blog, and mostly to the fact that I was learning to code as I go, all the functionality like read times, next and previous posts, capturing categories and more were self-developed from scratch. Jekyll is gem packed <sup>see what I did there?</sup> with <a href="https://github.com/planetjekyll/awesome-jekyll-plugins">plugins</a> and for some reason I did not use that to full extent.</p>
<p>On Pelican, however, the plugin engine is not only easy to implement it's also Python based which is to me feels like getting into a nice, conformable onesie if I ever own one. I got the functionality from the previous version of the blog brought if pretty fast and will probably fiddle around with plugin writing once I get more comfortable with the framework.</p>
<h2>Migrating issues, documentation, support etc.</h2>
<p>Stackoverflow isn't ... well, overflowing with Pelican tips, that said even as a newcomer I felt I didn't really need it for the limited amount of functionality I had to migrate. The documentation was pretty good and written in lament terms so I could troubleshoot things and when I couldn't figure something out, there is<a href="https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes"> a theme library available</a> where I could peek into other people's code and see where I messed up.</p>
<p>The only thing that sucked is that for some reason Google gives back search results from the documentation for version 3.6 while as I'm writing this post the latest version is 4.2.0, that was a pain to rediscover.</p>
<h2>Deployment to GitHub pages, maintenance</h2>
<p>Jekyll have a seamless, pretty sweet integration with GitHub pages and it was panicking to lose that for 30 seconds but the documentation has a good solution for that as well and within 5 minutes I was up and running on production. No SSL issues or anything.</p>
<p><strong>24 hours later update</strong>: OK comparing to Jekyll, deploying to GitHub pages is still a bit underdeveloped. Jekyll has this slick integration where it builds the site automatically from the source code while Pelican make you build the site yourself and push to a different branch. I lost an hour or two to messing around with Git error messages.</p>
<p>In terms of maintenance I don't foresee any major issues as I took time to simplify the code itself. I do have to make some additional steps to set up my IDE every time I sit down to maintain the code but based on last year's commits, it should be fine (it's a <a href="https://martinfowler.com/bliki/Yagni.html">YAGNI</a> case for sure.)</p>
<p>All in all, 8.6\10 would migrate again. Or just stick to Python for a few years, let's do that.</p>About impact2019-10-09T10:00:00-04:002019-10-09T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-10-09:/posts/2019/about-impact/totally not morbid thoughts about biology and creating impact<p>Maybe it's from working around healthcare professionals and being exposed to some tough individuel stories or maybe it's from reading <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lecture-Randy-Pausch/dp/1401323251">the last lecture</a> not too long ago, I had this thing dawn on me:</p>
<p>Even though we are essentially healthy people, fueled by Soylent, long distance running, yoga, meditation and mindfulness - as a biological based organisms we are not long for this world.</p>
<p>And I don't mean it the morbid way, more like in a reality conscious, fact-of-life kind of way. I think Tim Urban framed it pretty well on his blog <a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/fire-light.html">Wait but why</a> (paraphrasing here): On the very basic level we are biological containers meant to carry encoded genome information and pass it on to other containers.</p>
<p>So that whole bundle of bio-truth led me to think about impact. Being very <a href="https://slashproject.co/200words/2019/04/04/time-merchant.html">time and timing aware</a> the question to me isn't "what legacy I am going to leave behind" because (a) that is pretty morbid and I'm not about that and (b) legacy is very subjective and it sounds like a thing other people would retrospect on rather a thing that I can influence. The question I'm asking myself is <strong>"am I making an impact today"</strong>.</p>
<p>Trying to break down what "Impact" means, I identify three levels of impact -</p>
<ul>
<li>Myself</li>
<li>People that are close to me</li>
<li>Impact at scale</li>
</ul>
<p>Creating positive impact on myself is something that I'm constantly working towards and is reflected in my <a href="https://slashproject.co/meta/2019/03/09/mission-statement-20.html">personal mission statement</a>: Being mindful, empathetic and aware is constatant work and slowly becoming a framework for personal growth. It's an everyday at a time kind of business and the impact is well felt.</p>
<p>From there it's all about taking those core principals and put them to scale: How can I model my personal mission statement and project those values to my family, team and people around me and one level higher, how do I make sure that workplace project I'm involved at positively impact a large amount of 3rd circle people.</p>
<p>I'm going to focus on stuff that matters, is what I'm trying to say.</p>No email before 11:00AM2019-06-20T10:00:00-04:002019-06-20T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-06-20:/posts/2019/no-email-before-1100am/on daily schedule optimization using my personal chronotype. I'm also a bird<p>I always knew I was a morning person. In fact, one of my favorite quotes is that my optimal work day is one that starts at 4AM and ends at 2PM. Other than scheduling my workouts in the morning I didn’t think much of it until I read “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/When-Scientific-Secrets-Perfect-Timing/dp/0735210624">When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing</a>” by Daniel Pink which had an interesting impact on the way I optimize my morning time.</p>
<p>Without giving away too many spoilers, one of the core principles of the book is considering the question of “when” when diagnosing a situation, and being time conscious.</p>
<h2>I’m a lark</h2>
<p>One exercise that Daniel Pink is asking us readers to do pretty early in the book is analyzing our Chronotype (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronotype">?</a>) which long story short is our circadian rhythm analysis analysis: When do we cognitively peak and when our brain is on cooldown.</p>
<p>For a week, I logged my alertness levels (some arbitrary measurement I invented that takes into account happiness, focus and the ability to think clearly) on a scale of 1 through 7. Here’s how it looks like.</p>
<p>This fits nicely into what Daniel Pink classifies as a “Lark type”. People who are at their peak in the early morning, going through a slump the longer the day goes and rebound for a quick burst in the evening before crashing around 10:30PM.</p>
<p>In short, I’m a morning person and now I have a graph to prove it, big surprise. That said, I didn’t want to stop there so having a sense of my best time of day, here’s how I optimized.</p>
<h2>morning time = prime time</h2>
<p>From the moment I wake up which is around 5AM I have about 8 hours to do my absolutely most important tasks of the day and every second I invest in “brain on cooldown” tasks is using my brain power in a sub-optimal way.</p>
<p>I used to block a nice chunk of the early morning for what I called “email & admin” which is basically replying to emails, delegating work, following up on previous day items, reading news and planning the day ahead. Most of those tasks either got pushed to further in the morning (I don’t look at emails before ~11:00 unless they are from key people\projects which get pushed to me using some automation), planning goes back into the previous day and my sole focus goes into the biggest, most important set of tasks for the day.</p>
<p>Sometimes it beyond my control, but I try to schedule meeting for after lunch and have a morning task to prep for them. Everything else is basically noise.</p>
<h2>noon time = social time</h2>
<p>As a workplace extrovert, communication and interaction is one of my favorite things to do and watch unfold. That’s why scheduling meetings, following up and interacting acts as a counter to my brain wants to go on cooldown while still keeping me happy and energetic. It’s also a great time for those email accomplishments that got pushed from the morning.</p>
<p>By 3PM I’m basically mentally exhausted and that’s a great time for all those low-touch, passive things: Reading and highlighting, taking a walk, anything of that sort. The afternoon time is great for all those errands I have to make, notes to capture and any non-analytical tasks.</p>
<p>In his book, Daniel Pink suggests that this time is great for creative work as the analytical side of the brain is basically shut down, I haven’t noticed any breakthroughs there but I’ll report back if anything happens.</p>
<h2>evening time = rebound time</h2>
<p>While it may have something to do with the kids’ bedtime, I have a mental “rebound period” between 8-10PM. While I sometimes dedicate those two hours to do work (which I’m not proud of but life is life) I try to use those hours of alertness for leisure time - go for a tun, learn something new, code a bunch, win a couple of league of legends matches. Anything that’s fun but also not passive. That’s also the time when I try and determine what’s the most important thing I have to do for the next day.</p>
<p>The passive time come into play around 10PM when my body is done for today and the unwinding process begins towards the next day.</p>Nobody is talking about climbing down from mount Everest2019-05-29T10:00:00-04:002019-05-29T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-05-29:/posts/2019/nobody-is-talking-about-climbing-down-from-mount-everest/I'm happy I was able to get some insight out of a random article on the internet<p>I don't usually read random articles on new sites but this morning a BBC article on the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-48401491">overcrowded lines at the peak of mount Everest</a> caught my eye, mainly over the surreal view of mountaineers waiting in an hour and a half line.</p>
<p>Towards the end of the article, right when I was about to remind myself the reasons I don't read random articles on the internet I ran across this quote from German climber Ralf Dujmovits:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>"I lost so many friends who died during the descent over the years - many accidents happen during the descent because people are just not concentrating enough anymore..."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This 'climbing down from the Everest' scenario is something I've noticed about other people and myself and goes beyond climbing mountains: The month of April was a great month for me from a habit forming perspective and even though a lot of habits I formed during March and April stuck around May was somewhat of a relapse and I spent the past couple of days to figure out why and what are the main contributing factors.</p>
<p>Telling the story of climbing down from mount Everest isn't the thing people would want to hear. They want to hear about the summit, the feeling of relief and exhilaration on the highest peak in the world. But once the novelty runs out, you still have to make the journey back down with as much concentration and intention, only slightly more experienced and motivated.</p>
<p>I think one important component of understanding that post-novelty timeframe, between the last exciting activity and the next is to try and make the descent a part of the journey with as many takeaways and information retention is possible. Not a cool story to tell for sure, but could be good against falling back into comfort zones and habits. </p>Hi, what's your name?2019-04-17T10:00:00-04:002019-04-17T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-04-17:/posts/2019/hi-whats-your-name/I went to St. Louis and came back with an insight<p>At work or in real life encounters I am usually the extrovert type of person: Feeling good around people, always up to tell a story in a conversation and feeling really recharged and exhilarated afterwards. However, when running solo in conventions or big crowd events all I want to do is go and hide in some corner switching to full on introvert mode.</p>
<p>I always watched those people who get into a convention and make 20 friends an hour and it looked like something that it’ll be really hard for me to pull off.</p>
<p>Last weekend I was attending the LCS finals in St. Louis, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp-WpnHn0kY">10,000 people</a> league of legends event. As expected, I was sitting by myself getting ready for a solo experience when this college age guy sat next to me with some of his friends and instead of giving me the nod, we looked at me and said four words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hi, what’s your name?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My evening then transformed from me hiding in the crowd to a us talking, laughing and connecting in my usual extrovert manner.</p>
<p>Makes me wonder how many opportunities for communication I missed over not just going and just talking to people.</p>The time merchant2019-04-04T10:00:00-04:002019-04-04T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-04-04:/posts/2019/the-time-merchant/"Some thoughts about time as capital"<p>Over the past month I've been giving my daily habits a hard look, asking a lot of 'why's and how can I use my time (mostly leisure, post work time) to benefit things I value. One theme that kept coming back during this introspection was time: Does this activity worth my time? If so, how much time should I put into it?</p>
<p>The more I did went through this exercise the more I started treating time like capital. Oversimplified to death, in the world of working capital you want to have more assets than liabilities - so basically more time dedicated toward things I value and less detractors, obligations and low-touch activities.</p>
<p>I also found out that the perception for the value of time is different between people: I would come to a meeting 10 minutes before the time with notes and my thoughts in order because I value mine and the other person's time. Investing time also equates to investing attention, something <a href="https://slashproject.co/200words/2019/01/16/reclaiming-energy.html">I started to understand two months ago</a>.</p>
<p>The tricky thing is that time doesn't overflow or banked so at the end of the day it's always a question of 'did I hit net positive' on my investments today.</p>Out of office as an opportunity for team outreach2019-03-31T10:00:00-04:002019-03-31T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-03-31:/posts/2019/out-of-office-as-an-opportunity-for-team-outreach/I used the most corporate feature in the world to build better relationships<p>The family and I went on vacation last week and just before we left I had to go through the corporate exercise of setting an automatic "Out of office" message. Now, I could go for the obvious yet effective</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I'll be out between <em>[start_date]</em> and <em>[end_date]</em> with limited access to email. Please call my department at <em>[phone]</em> for any inquiries. Thanks!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Instead I went with -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hi! ✨</p>
<p>I'm out of office returning Monday, April 1 (even though it's April fools I'll be here, promise) and will have limited access to email.</p>
<p>For urgent stuff, don't hesitate to text me at xxx-xxx-xxxx or dial the marketing awesome solve-your-problems line at x1234.</p>
<p>While you are waiting my return, feel free to get to know me better and read about -</p>
<p><u>Why do I bring a notebook to meetings over a laptop</u></p>
<p><u>Prioritizing user problems</u></p>
<p><u>My personal mission statement</u></p>
<p>Have a great week!</p>
<p>Omer</p>
</blockquote>
<p>My thought process around the more personalized, self promoting format for the out-of-office message was that I have an opportunity to deliver a message to internal members of my organization in an informal way.</p>
<p>My thought process around the more personalized, self promoting format for the out-of-office message was that I have an opportunity to deliver a message to internal members of my organization in an informal way.</p>
<p>Another benefit of those out of office messages that I didn't think about was how <em>deep</em> into the organization those messages actually get (!) As a member of several cross functional teams (and as a result - email listings) every time someone from a distant team looped me in on a conversation, they got the message and got exposed to the 'get to know me better' part.</p>
<p>The results were awesome: One of the parts that's important for me to be successful is laying broad communication lines that also run deep and cross-pollinate. While formal meetings and work email have their merits, there is great value is exposing informal, more personal aspects of communication to build that ever so vital social capital.</p>
<p>I got plenty of great feedback on the actual content from people in teams I don't usually reach, which in turn gives me the opportunity to form additional connections. So OOO messages as personal marketing? I say it's a thing.</p>Why do you bring a notebook to meetings?2019-03-25T10:00:00-04:002019-03-25T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-03-25:/posts/2019/why-do-you-bring-a-notebook-to-meetings/People ask me this question on a monthly basis, might as well blurb about it<p>Every month or so, usually when I'm in a meeting with a new team or even with a group of people I've been meeting regularly, there's this one person that will ask me something along the lines of <em>"you are such a digital person doing digital person things, why do you bring a notebook to meetings instead of a laptop?"</em></p>
<p>This question came up enough times this year that I feel like it's worth documenting in case I need to come back to it and refine.</p>
<p>So why <strong>do</strong> I bring a notebook to meetings? <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
<p>To me, meetings should be approached with the intent to listen. There is so much information blasted at us when a person explain even the most trivial thing we heard a billion times: Body language, the way they choose to emphasize certain topic and much more. It's almost there is so much information going on between the lines than it's almost equivalent to the one going into the lines themselves so adding whatever information is on a laptop screen (and will surely be there after the meeting is over) is just noise denying me from information I wouldn't be able to get otherwise.</p>
<p>And that just the listening part. If the first part of an intentful meeting is being receptive, the other part is the feedback I'm giving to the other people present which includes all the social gestures and nuances of doing what what our brain has adapted to in millions of years - reading and processing social experiences in real time.</p>
<p>The notebook is there rarely as a note taking tool, even though I'll sometime use it as such, but as a way to open up the space in front of me, have more visual space and show that I'm fully attentive and receptive to other people. Being <em>"the digital person doing digital person things"</em>, a fair share of my day is indeed spent in front of a computer so if I am given the opportunity to be social IRL - I might as well take it with both hands.</p>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Obviously if I need to present \ demo \ prototype a thing I'll definitely bring a laptop to a meeting. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Prioritizing Problems2019-03-12T10:00:00-04:002019-03-12T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-03-12:/posts/2019/prioritizing-problems/To create positive impact through empathy, innovation and meaningful use of technology<p>Here's an interesting sentence I just picked up while reading this interesting product management book -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Success is a function of a team’s ability to uncover a problem <sup id="fnref:1"><a class="footnote-ref" href="#fn:1">1</a></sup></p>
</blockquote>
<p>The reason I was so drawn to that quote was that it aligns beautifully with a team initiative I'm working on these days: <strong>Prioritizing problems over solutions.</strong></p>
<p>When prioritizing user stories in its classic form <code>as a user I want to do _____ so I can ____</code> I found out that the conversation went quickly into solutions that would empower the user to do new things or extend their ability to do use existing affordances, all fun and games but I was often left with a feeling that even though the general direction is forward we're working around core issues instead of tacking them heads on.</p>
<p>Prioritizing problems does three things for the team:
* It will make us go into a continuous product discovery process involving direct communication with users to formalize a list of issues
* after prioritizing will allow us to create hypothesis around what solution would address the most important problems in the optimal way from a user standpoint.
* Make the key results clear + easy to communicative.</p>
<h2>Footnotes</h2>
<div class="footnote">
<hr>
<ol>
<li id="fn:1">
<p>Banfield, R., Eriksson, M., & Walkingshaw, N. (2017). <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Product-Leadership-Managers-Products-Successful/dp/1491960604/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=">Product leadership: How top product managers create and launch successful products.</a> Beijing: OReilly. <a class="footnote-backref" href="#fnref:1" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text">↩</a></p>
</li>
</ol>
</div>Mission Statement 2.02019-03-09T10:00:00-04:002019-03-09T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-03-09:/posts/2019/mission-statement-20/To create positive impact through empathy, innovation and meaningful use of technology<blockquote>
<p class="large">To create positive impact through empathy, innovation and meaningful use of technology.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Creating positive impact</h2>
<p>Positive impact is both the aspiration and the lens in which the rest of the mission statement is filtered through. Whatever the project, task, interaction or road ahead looks like, the main focus should be on positive outcomes and coming out of the other side a better version of me.</p>
<p>For me, creating positive impact resonates with empowerment, inspiration and leadership and on the other side of the coin, critical thinking when it comes to ‘hacking’, ‘shortcuts’ and short-sighted solutions. Creating positive impact is much about the journey as it is about the end result and the legacy it leaves behind.</p>
<p>From a structural perspective, creating positive outcomes is the ‘what’, the rest of the mission statement talks about the ‘how’.</p>
<h2>Empathy</h2>
<p>Puts <a href="https://agilemanifesto.org/">people above processes</a>, humanization and meaningful relationship over quantity and low-bandwidth interaction. Deeply rooted in the <a href="https://www.cnvc.org/node/6856">non-violent communication</a> language, empathy to me is interaction around feelings, needs, authenticity and compassion.</p>
<h2>Innovation</h2>
<p>Innovating to me is about creativity, looking into the box and simultaneously thinking about what can built on top of the tools it offers. It’s the never ending desire to learn new things and enhance my own skill-set and knowledge base.</p>
<h2>Meaningful use of technology</h2>
<p>Coming from healthcare, <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/ehrmeaningfuluse/introduction.html">meaningful use</a> refers to a scenario in which providers use their clinical software in a way that’s beyond documentation and beneficial to the patient. My take on meaningful use is, when using a product, staying true to my original use case, maximizing the value I get from it while blocking out the excess and the noise.</p>
<p>Meaningful use puts a cap over the open ended solutions found in innovation: having some value or a small increment of it out of a product isn’t enough - it has to align itself with creating positive outcomes but also significantly improve a thing I already value.</p>
<p>Meaningful use also calls for mindful and intentful use of products, while carefully evaluating new technologies before introducing them to my toolbox.</p>Optimization of fun2019-02-28T10:00:00-04:002019-02-28T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-02-28:/posts/2019/optimization-of-fun/I got to play a transformer and fly! Why aren't people happy<p>I got to play the first 10 hours of Anthem, the new co-op third person action game from Bioware and had a pretty good time: The game is gorgeous from a design perspective and even more importantly, I got to play a transformer and to fly around in this amazing world mixing a tropical landscape and future tech.</p>
<p>What was interesting to me after talking about the game with some friends (and consuming some videos on YouTube) I got the impression that the sentiment about the game is bad, and this is over generalizing because disappointment comes from different angles, because the game isn't fun <em>enough</em> or it <em>didn't reach it' full fun potential</em> and <em>they'll get it right eventually</em>.</p>
<p>I wonder when did we begin min\maxing and investing in optimization of fun. I took the experience as it is and had a good time. Can it be more fun? Maybe. Can ANY experience be better and optimized? Most likely. It's just a bit of a shame that some people would dismiss a good time they had with a game, or anything really that fulfilled their initial expectations based on the fact that it could be better.</p>
<p>Fun is fun!</p>Meaningful Use2019-02-19T10:00:00-04:002019-02-19T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-02-19:/posts/2019/meaningful-use/Keeping products in line with the original intent<p>When I joined Facebook<sup>*</sup>, somewhere in 2009 it was with a lot of good intentions in mind: Keeping in touch with my friends while enjoying a feature rich environment we didn’t have back in the day. It was an age where we pretty much jumped on any social media platform that would come up, grab our vanity username and enjoy the novelty.</p>
<p>Slowly but surely, I drifted away from that original purpose to a point where if I opened my Facebook feed right now, I’ll probably see a bunch of posts and pictures from people I hardly even want to be in touch with, no to mention the little value I’ll get from said ‘feature rich environment’ that’s mostly designed to keep me engaged with the service.</p>
<p>I’m starting to think about how am I going to design and manage my products towards meaningful use: <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/ehrmeaningfuluse/introduction.html">this term</a> floats around in meetings and in essence it’s about using a product in a way that provides actual value. My take on it is: <strong>Design a product in a way that keeps the user in the scope of his original intent, or support it as it evolve.</strong></p>
<p>* Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, you name it.</p>Personalized and Actionable2019-02-06T10:00:00-04:002019-02-06T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-02-06:/posts/2019/personalized-and-actionable/User feedback that blew my mind + followup questions<p>User feedback is often insightful but sometimes it's mind blowing and inspirational: A recent review I got started with the usual "Love you website, very useful to me" and so on but then he ended up with something along the lines of "I find myself looking for a more personalised experience, other wise it's not very actionable to me".</p>
<p>Absolutely mind blowing. Here's why -</p>
<p>I always thought <a href="https://www.esportsradar.app/">esports Radar</a> was doing people great service by providing them with esports news on-demand, putting them in control on the medium in which they want to consume it. Now, however, this user would like to see this web service as a part of a more holistic approach: Not only that I'm in control of the core experience, I should look into the user experience <em>after</em> they consume the content.</p>
<p>I wonder -</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p>What 'emotional payload' of feelings and needs does the user come to my website with and how can I personalise the experience to accommodate for them?</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>What is the role of the content that is consumed in my users' journey and what is it supposed to serve? How can I make it actionable to meet those expectations?</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>Mind -> Blown.</p>Reflections on gaming2019-01-30T10:00:00-04:002019-01-30T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-01-30:/posts/2019/reflections-on-gaming/Uninstalled my favorite game after 1,500 hours of gameplay<p>After 4.5 years, 1,500 hours of gameplay and probably couple of hundreds of dollars in investment I uninstalled <a href="https://heroesofthestorm.com/en-us/">Heores of the Storm</a>. The game I thought I'll play until Blizzard turns of its servers and invested hours in mix-maxing - uninstalled. And it feels good, really good.</p>
<p>It's that the game isn't good from a gameplay or community perspective, it was just that for me it wasn't fun anymore: I wasn't having fun losing, I felt indifferent when winning and regardless of those neutral or negative feelings I kept hitting the 'Play' button to get another dose.</p>
<p>These days, gaming is all about relaxing and putting this break between a long day of work and the few free hours I have at the end of the day but above all it should be a fun, positive experience to close out the day and I'm really glad I was able to ask myself the 'why' and let go.</p>
<p>I have zero regrets on any of those 1,500 hours of HotS. I met great people through it, it inspired me to get into competitive gaming and I'm most likely be back someday but until then, I'll see you around.</p>Auto Pilot Off2019-01-27T10:00:00-04:002019-01-27T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-01-27:/posts/2019/auto-pilot-off/Finding intention behind those boring, repetitive mundane tasks<p>Adulting can be tedious and Sundays are the culmination of my mundane responsibility tasks: As I'm writing this post I'm at the tail-end of a chain that included highlights like "cook launch for four", "fold 2 loads of laundry", and "cook dinner" is just around the corner.</p>
<p>For months (years, eons? you lose track of time with kids) I was doing all those tasks on auto-pilot and feeling wiped at the end of the day. I felt it takes time from the important stuff could get done, not to mention the ability to use the weekend time to unwind, relax and spend time with my loved ones.</p>
<p>Today I tried a different approach of looking at those mundane, adult-must-do things: Instead of trying to blaze through cooking I though to myself "I love to cook and I have an opportunity to do it three times a day, how awesome is that!" or ''I really like how the closet looks like after everything is nice and tidy".</p>
<p>Turning off the auto-pilot, being really present in the moment and think about the intention behind a task was refreshing. I wonder what other things I can apply that to. </p>Reclaiming Energy2019-01-16T10:00:00-04:002019-01-16T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2019-01-16:/posts/2019/reclaiming-energy/Yearly re-focus, should happen way more often honestly<p>2018 was the year where I picked up recording and production, got back on my exercising horse (which got pushed aside with my latest programming project) and speaking of programming, I also trained myself on programming in Python and actively working on a full-stack web project - all while staying on top of a super dynamic and awesome full time job.</p>
<p>That is a lot of mental overload.</p>
<p>Like your typical mobile game, I feel like my day is running on two major resources: <strong>Time and energy</strong>. Time is the ever present constant (<a href="https://www.quora.com/Time-physics-Is-time-constant">apparently this is debatable</a>) and as time elapses through the day I'm using energy to make decisions based on the different projects I'm working on, whether they are the most mundane home related responsibilities or very specific work tasks.</p>
<p>While I can't do much about time, I'm going to start 2019 by managing my energy economy more efficiently. The first step is looking at my huge project list and cut everything that doesn't provide me with value or doesn't correspond with my 2019 yearly goals. The next step would be creating new projects and tasks that augments everything I want to achieve but for now, I'm reclaiming energy.</p>Everything I learnt about running Twitter bots (2018 edition)2017-11-25T10:00:00-04:002017-11-25T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-11-25:/posts/2017/everything-i-learnt-about-running-twitter-bots-2018-edition/Do's and don'ts on how to run a Twitter bot, starring CheerBot<p>For the past 10 years, I've been fortunate to be involved in making software that was adopted mostly by teenagers and fell in love with the demographic. Born into the hi-speed wifi era, teenagers are using the digital ecosystem the amplify and empower their relationships and social circles. Sometimes though, this ecosystem, especially around social networks, can bring out feelings of loneliness and being excluded from a community.</p>
<p><strong>What's all that has to do with bots?</strong></p>
<p>Around 7 months ago I went on a mission to use code to spread positivity and created <a href="http://slashproject.co/cheerbot">CheerBot</a>. CheerBot is a bot that lives on Twitter with one goal on its mind: Send positive messages to people that needs them the most. The thought process behind CheerBot is a simple one: Positive messages can come a long way, especially coming for our friends which we often times take for granted. Getting an occasional "you are loved" or "one of your friends wants you to know they have your back" at the right time proved to be transformational and the reactions to CheerBot so far are truly amazing.</p>
<p>Building CheerBot exposed me to the Twitter API for the first time and gathered notes along the way. I went from not knowing what I'm doing and getting blocked by Twitter to going on vacation and keeping CheerBot running on 90% uptime (as long as I have internet, CheerBot is running). Here's my story.</p>
<h2>The early days: Getting blocked by Twitter, a lot (how not to run a Twitter bot)</h2>
<p>In the early days, the core flow for CheerBot was:</p>
<ul>
<li>A user sends a private message (DM) to CheerBot with the syntax: Cheer @friend</li>
<li>CheerBot will tweet a random positive message at the friend "Hey @friend, one of your friends wants you know that you're not alone".</li>
</ul>
<p>What a rollercoaster it was. People responded super well to the concept and sending roughly 30 cheers per hour. Their friends got exposed to it, loved it and wanted to cheer other friends. Positivity was spreading!</p>
<p>The problem was I couldn't keep CheerBot up for more than a couple of hours straight. The "your application was restricted from performing write actions" (basically messaging people) screen happened a lot and users were disappointed when it wasn't consistently working and I was scrambling for a solution. What's worse is that as I was trying to figure out the issue the and tweak my code accordingly, the restriction happened more often, from hours to half-hours to minutes.</p>
<p>My first reaction was "CheerBot is a positive project for the community, I should get a free pass!". I went through a full appeal process with Twitter's safety team, was re-granted access but got restricted shortly after, went through a discussion in the official forums - they won't respond to individual cases. Was looking into <a href="https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/twitter-automation">Twitter's automation rules</a> - kind of ambiguous. I was feeling skeptical about CheerBot's future at this point. I even tried couple of moonshots like getting in touch with the Twitter community projects team and Twitters's sales team to get some insight on how big players are getting a pass doing similar things (hint: 💰).</p>
<p>Then I actually got a hold of a nice person from Twitter's support who couldn't tell me much about how to go around the restriction rules but said the following: "CheerBot is a great positive project and I would hate to see it go. You have to understand that for each great project like yours we have hundreds of spammers and malicious projects. You're super driven, you'll find a way".</p>
<h2>My path to 90% uptime, how to avoid restrictions</h2>
<p>The following months after were a crazy research frenzy on how Twitter's spam protection actually works and what can I do to keep CheerBot's core functionality intact while not going into Twitter's red zone. Some of the information is <a href="https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/a/2014/fighting-spam-with-botmaker.html">available online</a>, some I got from Twitter agents I worked with in the past (obviously they couldn't spill the beans, but were helpful) and the majority of it I got though tons of trial and error and deduction.</p>
<p>Over the past couple years Twitter has done some major leaps in detecting automated patterns and bot behavior, most of it through machine learning and to an extent it's a cat and mouse game between the bad people who use bots for phishing and scam and Twitter's security algorithms. The more a bot adopts patterns and usage habits that fits a human user, the more difficult is it to block it. In addition, automated services push tweets through the API that has its own rules on connections, how often can you tweet and who are you tweeting at in relation to the user that initiated the request.</p>
<p>After a ton of research, there are couple of flow limitations that either flagged CheerBot or triggered a restriction:</p>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>You don't want to send unsolicited @ mentions:</strong> Even though a user sent CheerBot a message and asked to cheer another person, that doesn't mean the other person gave his consent to receive a mention. Yes, as a user you can spam @ mentions to whoever you want, as an automated program this will get you flagged.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>The ratio of @ mentions to other stuff matters:</strong> Looking at the bot account globally you want to have a reasonable ratio of @ mentions to other type of tweets. When CheerBot was all about the @'s, even though it had all the right rules in place to be user friendly, in ended up getting restricted every couple of days. So through trial and error I figured that diversity matters.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Don't do the obvious bad stuff:</strong> make sure people on the receiving and of tweets aren't being spammed, make sure links are appended correctly and if possible use Twitter cards if you're hosting the links since content of direct messages and tweets is also monitored.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>Encourage positive interaction:</strong> Building credibility of CheerBot as an account was one of the things I believe is keeping it on the safe side of things. It was kind of easy for CheerBot since reactions were really positive and people are happy to engage with it (no brag! well just a bit) but overall, people liking, responding and on the backside not reporting the tweets made by the bot is what is giving it critical mass in being considered a positive force in Twitter's ecosystem.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Here's my current working model for CheerBot</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p>CheerBot is working in 30 minute timeframes and has several spam checks.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>When you send CheerBot a private message (DM) and cheer a friend, it'll first check if you're sending multiple cheers to the same friend over a short period of time (if so, you're spamming cheers and CheerBot will ignore that).</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>If the user level spam check clears, CheerBot will check how many cheers were sent overall during the 30 minute timeframe. if those are busy 30 minutes, CheerBot will apologise and tell you to try in a little while. I'm working on a queue system to save the cheer for when it's safe so the user isn't bothered. The thought process here is to avoid sending multiple @ tweets over a short period of time.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>When both personal and global checks are clear, I'm looking into the user's relationship with the person he'd like to cheer and that effect what type of tweet goes out: If the person being cheered follows both the user who sent the request and CheerBot, CheerBot <a href="https://twitter.com/Cheer_robot/status/998682674196828160">will send an @ mention to the person</a>. If the person follows the user but not CheerBot there is a very small number of those @ mentions that are being sent in a day and he may get it, but usually<a href="https://twitter.com/Cheer_robot/status/998214776214958080"> CheerBot will tweet on its own account</a> and encourage the friend to share it.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p>After a cheer is being sent, CheerBot will check how many consecutive @ mentions was sent in the current timeframe and if needed, make a random cool tweet on the account.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Additional stuff that helps</h2>
<ul>
<li>
<p><strong>I try to combine both manual and automatic operations on the account:</strong> As a part of CheerBot's development I gather feedback, run surveys and talk to users from the account so I assume it makes it more human than a fully on automatic bot account.</p>
</li>
<li>
<p><strong>A lot of stuff CheerBot do is slightly randomized</strong>: CheerBot can react very fast to every request but there is actually a small, random time between every user action and bot reaction. I'm sure Twitter's spam protection algorithm sees right through it but it makes me feel like it's not full on botting. I learnt that is also makes the user experience slightly better since there is a slight delay between a user sending a text and getting feedback, people tend to be more conversational with CheerBot rather than treat it like a bot.</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>CheerBot's such a fun ride and I'm happy to try and help if you have have any questions about running a bot on Twitter.</strong></p>
<p>Feel free to send a message my way <a href="https://twitter.com/OmerKaplan">@omerkaplan</a>!</p>Power of the ooVoo habit2017-11-25T10:00:00-04:002017-11-25T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-11-25:/posts/2017/power-of-the-oovoo-habit/Both a book review and a perspective on ooVoo recent events<p>Interestingly enough, this post was supposed to be a mash up of book reviews I finished reading recently about habit forming, among them are <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Power-Habit-What-Life-Business-ebook/dp/B0055PGUYU">Power of habit</a>, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Hooked-How-Build-Habit-Forming-Products-ebook/dp/B00LMGLXTS/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1512145439&sr=1-1&keywords=hooked">Hooked</a> and early impressions of <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Contagious-Things-Catch-Jonah-Berger-ebook/dp/B008J4GQKW/ref=pd_sim_351_3?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=7FFJR246A50J5NJZDTZR">Contagious</a> (I'm all about the habit train recently) and it just so happens that life threw an actual use case my way to make that analysis all that better.</p>
<p>Last week we announced the <a href="https://oovoo.com/blog/posts/oovoo-shutting-down">gradual shut down of ooVoo</a>, a 10 year application and the product I was actively working on for the past 6 years. Over the course of the week since the announcement I found myself mostly talking to users, listening to amazing stories and sharing some of my own. I'll tell you this though, being the "last guy who goes out the room and turns off the light" and escorting a powerhouse of a product into shutting down is a powerful experience professionally.</p>
<p>I'm humbled and grateful that the community I was waking up for every morning also gave me a great experience saying goodbye 🧡</p>
<h2>Gushing aside, let's talk habits!</h2>
<p>Over my career at ooVoo, I've been a part of some really strong, needle moving, up-and-to-the-right releases and some not as successful. There were a lot of words written about the latest ooVoo release where the company basically pivoted and changed the focus of the app from a communication tool into a social sharing network backed up by video calls.</p>
<p>While early testing and focus were not perfect but not heavily alarming (at least on the user facing side of things) the community response once the upgrade went live to production was very explicit, numbers went down and reviews were one star all day every day.</p>
<p>I had some time to process and reflect on the latest product moves at ooVoo while reading those books I mentioned above so even though I can probably write a short book about those 6 years of product managing a video communication app targeted at young adults, here are some recent, fresh takeaways.</p>
<h2>Green dots matter</h2>
<p>One of the hottest debates between design, product and engineering that would raise its head every couple of months is whether should we remove the green dot icon that indicates a person is online.</p>
<p>The argument on one side was that green dots are obsolete: In the age of push notifications, VoIP push notifications, Apple CallKit and the Android counterpart that needs better branding, there is a basis for the claim that everybody's online all the time. When you video call someone, it's on us to make sure the other person gets the call from a technical perspective and do a good work in communicating the process for the person that is making that call.</p>
<p>In real life, users revolted when we took out the green dot. From a technical perspective we saw the same amount of calls connect but a decrease in the number of calls actually being initiated. In addition "Seeing who's online" went to the top of our community requested features.</p>
<p><strong>Green dots used to be ooVoo's habitual cue for video communication</strong>.</p>
<p>Other than giving users a sense of "hey, I'm not alone out here, some of my friends are actually online and there's an community connected to this service", the green dot was the element that kicked off the habit of starting a group call with your friends. Using the framework presented in "The power of habit", the loop would look something like this:</p>
<p>I crave for human connection ► I see a green dot (cue) ► I ooVoo a friend (routine) ► I have good time talking (reward)</p>
<h2>Too fast, too furious 🔥</h2>
<p>Another thing that caught people by surprise was the discrepancy between the positive reaction for making ooVoo a social network based on collaborative stories and the actual community resistance at scale. From initial user groups and power users small group testing, the concept of collaborative stories made sense and was well received but in real life, people steered away from the new and shiny and felt like the ground was dropped beneath their feet.</p>
<p>From a habitual perspective, the change was introduced fast and too aggressively to a point that even though the UI was slick and the feature was conceptually appealing, users were scrambling to find the old and familiar and feeling shifted between confusion ("How do I find my friends?") to anger ("Why did you change my ooVoo?!") to desperation ("This whole update is confusing").</p>
<p><strong>Keeping one hand in the old and familiar while "sandwiching" in new and innovative changes was most likely the way to go.</strong></p>
<p>From conversations I had post launch with users, the sense of confusion became more evident that all this new-ness was maybe nice but took out one of the most important assets of ooVoo, that fact that is "Just works". Making ooVoo "just work" took a lot of time an effort and included very subtle changes to the UI and automating common pain points in order to remove as much cognitive overload as possible.</p>
<p>Once the new update hit production, it was a new product a user had so take all in, make all the judgement calls whether he like it or not, go through the learning curve instead of just picking it up, use it and go.</p>
<h2>To be continued 💡</h2>
<p>My notebook is getting filled with ooVoo shutdown insights every day so I'm sure there will be some follow up to this post. 1,000 words is my rough limit between something I'd digest over a read and something I'll chuck into my reading list as long-form.</p>
<p>I'll close out with this though: ooVoo was an amazing product to work on over the years, outside of the great people I met along the way, my heart goes out to the hundreds of thousands of people who's life we got to touch and change for the better using technology.</p>
<p>Much love.</p>Transparency is scary2017-10-03T10:00:00-04:002017-10-03T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-10-03:/posts/2017/transparency-is-scary/Talking directly to your product's community can be dreadful. My solution is to just own it<p>I was just reading a post on Ars Technica titled <a href="https://arstechnica-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/arstechnica.com/gaming/2017/10/overwatch-director-says-its-scary-to-be-open-with-players/?amp=1">"Overwatch director says it’s “scary” to be open with players"</a>. The tl;dr on this one is that Jeff Kaplan, game director for Overwtach, posted a long replay on the game's official forums talking about the community backlash when developers post to the point they just holding back.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And if you'll allow me to speak openly for a moment -- it's scary. Overall, the community is awesome to us. But there are some pretty mean people out there. All of our developers are free to post on these forums. Very few of us actually do because it's extremely intimidating and/or time consuming. It's very easy to post the wrong thing and make a "promise" to the community that no one intended to make. Once we say we're working on something, we're not allowed to "take it back". It's set in stone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As a product manager, I'm right there front and center; sitting on the meeting point of the people who use our product, the people who are actively building it and the business. I can tell you this first hand, there are some mean people out there. That said I feel like <em>mean</em> could be looked at through a very wide prism where some definitions of <em>mean</em> are actually beneficial, some even present opportunities.</p>
<h2>50 shades of mean</h2>
<p>First things first: Some people who use the product and leave negative feedback are downright trolls. In the daily effort to convert feedback to actionable items, with all the good will in the world, comments like "I hate everyone who has ever worked on this product, I hate every line of code in it" (true story 🙃) are something that is very hard to work with, so I keep a nice corner in my heart of those people, but that's about it.</p>
<p>But there are other types of "mean" I can definitely work with: I'm a great believer in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication">non-violent communication</a> language\methodology\way-of-life so feedback like this is a gold mine to me -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>JESUS BRING BACK THE OLD OOVOO. this is the only app i really used to use and now that it's gone i'm so mad and so is everyone else.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>You could easily brush off this feedback as "mean" or "low priority since there's not a lot of information" but reading it now, even couple of days later I'm literally heartbroken. The first lens I'm going through when reading feedback is <strong>empathy</strong>. And this feedback makes it very easy for me - this person is upset and if he's upset, I am now upset.</p>
<p>With the latest update, we literally transformed years of habitual use and made simple actions this person used to doing and made them exponentially more complicated. Some to a point of confusing and being unusable! How dare those guys change something that was working perfectly well?!</p>
<p>I can so on a route of over explaining the business, the trends and the million and one reasons for the change (<a href="https://support.oovoo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115001873527-Why-did-you-change-my-ooVoo">and I have, actually</a>) but to this person who wrote the review, his life was changed and the first thing I could take in while reading this feedback is "this is really frustrating".</p>
<blockquote>
<p class="large">This form of feedback is the best way for people to assume some sort of control (even if perceived) over the course of the product's development and priorities</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Now that I've put myself in this person's position and got a potential taste of his feelings, we can visualize and focus on his needs. He was used to another interface, perhaps is having a hard time to find functionality and that is actually feedback we can turn into actionable items. I wrote on this part briefly when I was talking about <a href="http://slashproject.co/retro/2017/07/14/dealing-with-1-star-reveiws.html">dealing with 1 start reviews</a>, basically this type of feedback is one that enable us research, scale and act upon. It actually has the power to move the needle at scale, all out feedback that could be considered "mean".</p>
<h2>Transparency is scary, but so worth it</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Most great developers I know just love being head's down making or playing games. The "public speaking/posting" part of the job is downright scary and intimidating. It often feels like there is no winning.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I get it Jeff, transparency is hella scary. You start with the best of intentions of giving the community insight into the inner workings of the development team and outlook of things to come just to get a big ball of toxic goo thrown your way. And as a game director, you can handle it. But it's the team that is spending days, nights, weekends, holidays working and thinking about the game you are concerned about and rightfully so.</p>
<p>From my experience, negative community feedback doesn't have a direct effect on the development team. It's more of a cumulative effect that is slowly adding up to the daily grind of development and corroding through self confidence, sense of validation and overall faith in the (great) product.</p>
<p>And to that, my solution has always been - <strong>not only own it, double down on it</strong>.</p>
<p>What has always worked for me in a scenario where there in a large or rising amount of negative feedback is to be over communicative and over transparent. It's super scary path to take, especially in a negative environment.</p>
<p>When talking to users who left negative feedback about why they did it and what did they hope to achieve by doing that, I found out three major takeaways -</p>
<ul>
<li>It's sometimes lack of trust or knowledge that leads people to leave negative feedback in hopes to get insight from the development team (pretty sure that was the case in the original post on the Overwatch Forums).</li>
<li>This form of feedback is the best way for people to assume some sort of control (even if perceived) over the course of the product's development and priorities.</li>
<li>More than actions, people who use the product needs to be listened to.</li>
</ul>
<p>Out of those three, the third bullet is the one I struggle the most these days since "listened to" gave giving people the sense of security and trust is individual and is mostly around perception. The good news is that knowing my product's community, the channels they use to communicate and what they need, everything we have done on that have produced great results and feedback from the community.</p>
<p>I'll end with a product review we just got the other day that blew my mind -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was about to rate 1 star and write a review about how ooVoo was lying about listening to us, but the first thing I saw was a fully thought out response on the first review. And many more replies on reviews. Now I realize what happened and that the team really are listening and trying to come up with a successful combination of old and new. I was so glad when I learned this. Thank you for really listening to us after all!! I can't wait for the result.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If that's not a reason to try hard every waking hour for the community, I don't know what is.</p>How people read the web and the rise of blockquote2017-09-04T10:00:00-04:002017-09-04T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-09-04:/posts/2017/how-people-read-the-web-and-the-rise-of-blockquote/<blockquote>
<p class="summary"><strong>Summary</strong>
* According to Nielsen Norman Group, 84% of the people skim through web conent.
* I believe that longform writing is still valid, but we should keep the user in mind.
* Ensuring readbility and accesability will benefit both onlone writers and readers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>People are not really reading cotent. Suprised?</p>
<p>In a …</p><blockquote>
<p class="summary"><strong>Summary</strong>
* According to Nielsen Norman Group, 84% of the people skim through web conent.
* I believe that longform writing is still valid, but we should keep the user in mind.
* Ensuring readbility and accesability will benefit both onlone writers and readers.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>People are not really reading cotent. Suprised?</p>
<p>In a recent report named <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/reports/how-people-read-web-eyetracking-evidence/">“How People Read on the Web: The Eye tracking Evidence”</a> the Nielsen Norman Group reviewed recent findings on how people approach reading text online. In the age of short, clickbait-y snackable content it should be no surprise that in broad strokes, the eye tracking research found that 84% of the people skimmed through the text to find key attributes and words that were associated with their original intent.</p>
<p>The research goes into detail on the patterns in which people scanned the content (notably the <a href="https://www.nngroup.com/videos/f-pattern-reading-digital-content/">“F pattern”</a>) and different experiments done with text and formatting used to create higher conversion rates. If you are into digital content or thinking about how to optimize your commercial content there is a lot of value in that report. Also shoutout to Nielsen for NNG for putting a $20 price tag on their reports, pretty affordable in comparison to other research companies.</p>
<p>In my own, small, personal world of blogging, I’m a great believer in hitting the publish button regardless of the fact if someone would read or not. That said I found some really good user stories in the research and there is some things I can probably do to make text more accessible and adjusted for today’s reading patterns.</p>
<h2>Don’t get me wrong, long form writing is still awesome</h2>
<p>Here’s a personal user story that needs to to be hashed out right off the bat: Long form writing is still a personal favorite of mine and no matter how what any eye tracking research say or how many text optimizations and conversion rate tricks a website has, a big part of the blogging gist for me are good, well written long form posts (the crappier and stripped down the UI the better).</p>
<p><strong>But I totally get the other side as well:</strong> We’re at an age where there are tons of smart people making tons of smart posts and I don’t need a 1,500 word post to get the point, capture the best quote and share it on Twitter so everyone will think “hey this guy reads that guy on Medium and got the exact quote the sums up the whole thing, he’s gotta be legit”.</p>
<p>So one thing I was looking for in the research is the middle ground, the spot where I would still feel great with writing 1,000 words on whatever while still making it -
* <strong>Sharing friendly:</strong> If someone do find value at a portion of the text, I'd like to make it easy on them to capture and share it. At the current iteration of the blog the only option is to share the entire post, but maybe there is value to bring the highlights forward a little bit more.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Digestible:</strong> On the other side of the sharing loop, if someone shared a post of a portion of it, I’d like the reading experience to welcome those 84%, not on the expense of my own writing style and length.</li>
</ul>
<blockquote>
<p class="large">We’re at an age where there are tons of smart people making tons of smart posts and I don’t need a 1,500 word post to get the point.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>The rise of blockquote</h2>
<p>One element that links the ability to highlight portions of the text and robust enough to fill different functions from a user experience perspective is good ol’ mr <code>blockquote</code>.</p>
<p>Blockquote is used to bring in text from other places (quotes is a very popular example) and break the overall chronological text flow. I’m going to try using several types of blockquote and see how I feel about them going forward:</p>
<p><strong>Summary:</strong> At the top of this post you can see I worked out a new type of blockquote called <code>summary</code>. In posts that are mainly informational or somewhat long I feel that it would be beneficial for people to know what they are about to read and give them the opportunity to skim through if they choose to do so. </p>
<p>I’m also considering the option of having some sort of a share intent on the summary blockquote but right now I’m leaning against it since there are plenty of sharing intents throughout the post (including the one constantly overhead). So maybe pass on that.</p>
<p><strong>Shareable Quote:</strong> Putting shareable content front and center can help break the writing flow in favor of introducing ideas that are yet to come or remind ideas that were introduced previously in the text. If you look couple of paragraphs above you'll be able to see an initial implementation of a full screen shareable quote.</p>
<p>For this post specifically it feels a little bit forced, but long run I bet they’ll be a better place for those. The next step I’d like to take with those big, bold, quotes is to have an nice easy way to share them, probably another quick JavaScript project coming up.</p>
<h2>Closing thoughts</h2>
<p>Circling back to the Nielsen research, one of the main points that hangs up there in the air is that online reading habits has been changing throughout the last couple of years and the transition to online content skimming isn’t over yet.</p>
<p>I’ll keep writing and hitting that publish like no one’s watching 😅</p>Jekyll post read time and conversion tracking2017-08-18T07:00:00-04:002017-08-18T07:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-08-18:/posts/2017/jekyll-post-read-time-and-conversion-tracking/Calculating read times in Jekyll and linking with Google Analytics<p>Lately I’ve been learning some Javascript and thought it’ll be really nice to get out of the course’s projects and mess around with some real-life implementation (that’s not to say that being the 100,00th programmer that writes a rock-paper-scissors game in Javascript isn’t important 😅).</p>
<h2>“How many people read a post all the way through?”</h2>
<p>The goal of this project is to use Google Analytics’ conversion goal tracking in order to try and estimate how many people read a post all the way through.</p>
<p>The overall plan was to take the <code>estimated reading time</code> feature and compare it to the <code>time the user is actually spending on the page</code>. If the user spends more time on page than the estimated reading time, it's a conversion and we should send an event to Google Analytics 🎉 if not, don't do anything.</p>
<h2>Step 1: Calculate the estimated reading time</h2>
<p>I was always impressed by how sites like <a href="https://www.medium.com">Medium</a> show an estimated reading time on each post. Apparently that it's largely based on several researches done on how many words per minute we read on average [<a href="http://ezinearticles.com/?What-is-the-Average-Reading-Speed-and-the-Best-Rate-of-Reading?&id=2298503">Read more</a>].</p>
<p>You could go ahead and grab all the words in a post, parse them in Javascript and parse the words. Luckily, Carlos Alexanndro Becker <a href="https://carlosbecker.com/posts/jekyll-reading-time-without-plugins/">wrote a code snippet</a> in Liquid that does the same thing using <code>content | number_of_words</code> we get for free in jekyll. PHEW 😅</p>
<p _="%" endhighlight>{% highlight liquid %}
{% raw %}
{% assign words = content | number_of_words %}
{% if words < 360 %}
1 min read
{% else %}
{{ words | divided_by:180 }} mins read
{% endraw %}</p>
<h2>Step 2: Get the user's time on screen</h2>
<p>That was my main Javascript and jQuery practice. Whenever you go into a page, I take a timestamp and then on <code>unload</code> take another and do a quick math comparing it to the estimated reading time we grabbed from step 1.</p>
<p _="%" endhighlight>{% highlight javascript %}
{% raw %}
<script>
var calcRead = {{words | divided_by:3}}; //converts 'words' time to seconds
var startTime = $.now();
var endTime = '';
var actualRead ='';
$(window).on("unload",function(){
endTime = $.now();
var actualRead = Math.round((endTime-startTime)/1000);
if (actualRead >= calcRead) {
ga('send', 'event', 'Post', 'Read', '{{ page.title }}');
}
});
</script>
{% endraw %}</p>
<h2>Open issues, things to improve</h2>
<p>There are some open issues that can improve this super simple script: From running with it live around two weeks I've seen that if someone forgets a tab open I still send a conversion event even after 40+ minutes. The general assumption going into this exercise is that someone will take a reasonable amount of time to read a post, maybe one way to approach it should be firing the event if the conversion happen within 5 minutes of goal time.</p>
<p>I'm personally a fast reader, so when it comes to long form writing I may finish reading before the estimated reading time, that's also a consideration. In that regard, from a design perspective there is merit to take people who "skim" through the post and send a different conversion for them.</p>
<p>Anyhow, hope you find this useful ☺️</p>"Why I do what I do, a reply to @lisettevoytko"2017-08-01T10:59:00-04:002017-08-01T10:59:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-08-01:/posts/2017/why-i-do-what-i-do-a-reply-to-lisettevoytko/<p>I was reading Lisette’s latest post on Medium <em>(link at the end of the post since that's a bug for some reason)</em> and started writing a reply when I suddenly realized I've been typing for 20 minutes. So instead pouring 800 words into Medium's comments here's my structured, articled …</p><p>I was reading Lisette’s latest post on Medium <em>(link at the end of the post since that's a bug for some reason)</em> and started writing a reply when I suddenly realized I've been typing for 20 minutes. So instead pouring 800 words into Medium's comments here's my structured, articled yet definitely not as beautifully written. Lisette is the master of adjectives and colorful descriptions, go read her stuff.</p>
<p>I was supposed to be a journalist.</p>
<p>Well, kinda. After excessively watching X-files I thought I want to be an FBI agent but that went by pretty fast. Let’s go off the assumption that for a decade “a journalist” was the direction I was heading. Eventually, I found out fairly fast that journalism, the way I perceived it at the time, happens at the very top of the pyramid where the journalist can lean on the strong back of an editor and the ecosystem which houses his\hers articles.</p>
<p>So I became an editor, then an editor-in-chief.</p>
<p>I think that it was my position as an editor, almost 12(?) years ago is where I found one of the main fundamental guidelines that keeps me going to this day -</p>
<h2>It’s all about the people</h2>
<p>Fast forward a decade, I’ve been a product manager in tech for a little over 10 years now and regardless of the company, the product, the team, management and all the background noise, the thing that keeps coming back and keeps me in focus is the fact that in tech, much like in editing a homepage or writing an article, there are people using it on the other end.</p>
<p>The best thing about having people using\reading products we make is the fact for a period of time we get to make a connection and touch people’s lives. And how awesome is that during time where people are using things we put thought and hard work into we have the option to change their lives for the better?</p>
<p>I’m sure it all sounds It’s all very idealistic and far fetched. Things like “your product make people’s lives more awesome” is stuff you read out of pitch decks and brand guidelines and is usually so high up there that is has good potential to stay an ambition at best. It was only recently, call it 2 years that I found out what works for me and what has put in much more value in every code snippet, excel spreadsheet, presentation or blog post.</p>
<h2>Empathy</h2>
<p>Back in the day, I was reading “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Marshall-Rosenberg/dp/1892005034/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8">Nonviolent communication</a> (is it really $5 on Amazon now?!) and among the many things I took from NVC as a framework there was the idea of “true giving" and empathy I was really attracted to: At a very high level, the idea of true giving the way I understand it is doing whatever you're doing out of joy and intent (or that way Marshall Rosenberg phrases it: “the joy of a little child feeding a hungry duck".</p>
<p>And to me, doing things out of joy involves a great deal of empathy. Circling back to my journalist life, one of the first things that I heard is that it’s a good thing to “put yourself in your audience’s shoes” and to an extent, I’ve amplified it to putting myself in my user’s shoes, staying for a while with hopes that I can leave some of myself behind.</p>
<p>From doing the empathy thing for a while, I can tell that it’s sometimes scary, especially when workplaces are all about normalization, consensus and buzz words. Empathizing with users often means exposing my (or the brand) vulnerable self so a true human connection can happen. It takes practice, it’s scary but pays off for me every time.</p>
<h2>What’s burnout?</h2>
<p>Going back to Lisette’s post, I was reading the parts that talk about burnout, all nighters, co-workers that create pressure to stay all night, answering Slack messages over the weekend - all real things in tech, and tried to think where so I stand in all this.</p>
<p>Working on the same product for 5 years and doing product management for a little over 10, I don’t feel burnt out and in fact it’s not even on my top of mind. That’s not to say that everyday of my product life is unicorns, smiling emoji with sunglasses and charts that go up and to the right but whenever it’s intense, I go back to what’s important - touching people’s life, even for a brief period of time and leave them in a better state than I found them.</p>
<p>This is why I do what I do.</p>
<p><strong>[Original Post]</strong> <a href="https://medium.com/@lisettevoytko/from-a-to-z-a-short-history-of-my-professional-successes-and-failures-b57ee6341feb">From A To Z: A Short History Of My Professional Successes And Failures</a></p>1-Star reviews: Don't get tilted, take action2017-07-14T10:57:02-04:002017-07-14T10:57:02-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-07-14:/posts/2017/1-star-reviews-dont-get-tilted-take-action/<p>Over the last couple of years Apple and Google has gone down a trend of empowering users in their application stores by giving app reviews a prime real-estate when searching for an app, as well as giving peer reviews more weight (mostly by Google).</p>
<p>The thing with reviews is that …</p><p>Over the last couple of years Apple and Google has gone down a trend of empowering users in their application stores by giving app reviews a prime real-estate when searching for an app, as well as giving peer reviews more weight (mostly by Google).</p>
<p>The thing with reviews is that when it’s going good it’s going great: Good reviews spins up more downloads and good set of user expectations going into the app. On the flip side, when bad reviews flow they tend to set a lower set of expectations which leads to a more challenging onboarding which leads to potential more bad reviews, less downloads and app perception issues.</p>
<p>I’ve been on both sides of the app reviews and while keeping an app on the high end of reviews and product\community management from that position is also a discussion to be had, for my own personal #retro I'd like to focus on the more tilting experience of handling a flood of 1-star reviews.</p>
<h2>Understanding 1-star reviews</h2>
<p>From my personal perspective, user reviews are a community pulse and more specifically the pulse of users who were passionate enough to take additional time after using the app and let us, as the developers and the rest of the community their thoughts.</p>
<p>1-Star reviews is particular are often very emotional (and sometimes explicit) and reading those on a daily basis automatically parses them in my head to two main questions -</p>
<ul>
<li>What is that person is feeling?</li>
<li>What does the other person needs?</li>
</ul>
<p>So for example, when a person says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The update is horrible. You will lose all of your saved media. It's entirely convoluted--pointless colors and tiles and "modern features.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>What I’m hearing is <code>I’m feeling confused</code> and <code>I need a more straightforward way to access my main use case</code>. I think that when thinking on each review in terms of feelings and needs two patterns emerge: A very explicit ones with features, bugs, crashes and product related items that people need that can be addressed and validated by data and a more feelings oriented pattern that provides an indication of pain points that users are unable to express in words.</p>
<h2>Taking action</h2>
<h3>Replying to 1-star reviews</h3>
<p>Working with 1-star reviews and more importantly 1-star review-ers requires a good amount of empathy, problem solving ability, patience and above all, the realization that we’re not here to convert 1-stars to 5-stars (even though that’s a nice bonus that happens every now and then), I look at the goal of working with 1-star reviews as <strong>“empathizing with the feeling, addressing the need”.</strong></p>
<p>The most trivial, common tool given us by both major app stores is the <strong>reply to reviews</strong> ability. I assume that replying policies vary based on the company, my take on replying to 1-star reviews is acknowledging the feeling and being honest about any action that is being taken. Between the volume of reviews and how we got trained to think about customer support over time it’s easy to forget that there is a human on the other end of the review with a unique case and unique needs so in the case of the review above, I replied the following -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hi <em>User</em>, thanks a lot for leaving such a long and thoughtful comment. I read everything and totally hear you on the simplicity note: We're working towards clarifying access to video calls as well as discussing messaging. The most important thing to me is you connecting to your BF 💛</p>
<p>For any questions, feel free to reach out via Twitter\Facebook.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When replying to reviews there is a small thing to be said about timing: Since this is a dialogue, replying in a relatively timely manner goes a long way to kick off a discussion. I try to touch base with the user within a few hours and even though there are things I defiantly want to reply to, if the review is relatively old I usually let it go.</p>
<h3>Channel frustration into action</h3>
<p>The most positive outcome from a 1-star review to me is a continuous dialogue that leads to actionable solution on the other person’s side. Since there is no cookie cutter solution for each user and his specific use case I usually like to establish multiple channels a personal can help us help himself or feel well informed and noticed.</p>
<p>So far one initiative that has been beneficial is setting up a place where people can submit feature requests. This is a part of a larger process that currently runs though my head and involves more community transparency and involvement in the product roadmap, but that’s maybe a different topic for a different post. When it comes to common questions like “what happened to that feature?” or “I don’t like how the new feature looks like to behaves” a place where a person can feel have direct contact with the developers is really helpful and if as a company we can follow up on these requests it’ll be even cooler 😎</p>
<h3>Actively requesting feedback</h3>
<p>Each time we release a new version of the app there is a golden opportunity to talk to our community using the “what’s new” section. This area is rather broad and there a lot of opinions, philosophies and best practices involved but long story short, in period of times where the community pulse feels like a support is needed, I’d like to remind people using the app that we’re here, listening and that everybody’s a part of the iterative process.</p>
<p>Here’s how I signed the latest version -</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thanks for being on ooVoo! • We are reading all the feedback received and are working to bring you more frequent updates and improvements. For feature requests and general feedback feel free to contact us on Twitter, Facebook or reach out to customer support.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another proactive channel we can work at when it comes to 1-star reviews is our social media channel. Often times I can see overlap between questions and comments from app reviews float up on Twitter and Facebook which is great since on social media we have the option to proactively solve issues and address frustrations in a public environment. I was actually fortunate enough to see numerous cases of a direct link between good social media presence and 1-star reviews get converted to 5- stars. We may not be able to solve a specific need over Twitter, but the personal attention, owning up to issues and humanizing the company goes a long way.</p>
<h2>Closing thought</h2>
<p>When I look at reviews though the prism of feelings/needs, every feedback is informational and good feedback. I’d take a 3,000 1-star reviews over a scenario where nobody’s talking.</p>
<p>As long as I can keep the dialogue going, listening and understanding the community I’m a happy, motivated camper 🏕</p>Lessons from launching a massive product overhaul2017-07-11T10:00:00-04:002017-07-11T10:00:00-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-07-11:/posts/2017/lessons-from-launching-a-massive-product-overhaul/<p>As I’m writing those lines, I’m playing a part in the launch of the new version of ooVoo, currently the largest independent video calling application. Without going into the product, tech and strategy reasons of the upgrade, the new ooVoo is kind of a big deal to the …</p><p>As I’m writing those lines, I’m playing a part in the launch of the new version of ooVoo, currently the largest independent video calling application. Without going into the product, tech and strategy reasons of the upgrade, the new ooVoo is kind of a big deal to the company but most importantly the users.</p>
<p>It’s different in the fact that for the first time in years ooVoo has shifted the balance of the product from a full-on video synchronic experience into a video experience that co-exist alongside an asynchronous collaborative stories-like experience.</p>
<p>The launch day and the immediate time that followed it felt like a rollercoaster where I felt that we’ve seen it all: Production-breaking technical issues, old time users being locked out unable to log in, rage in the reviews, rage in the app, rage in social media and small communities who adopted the new experience and tried to convince the ragers to stick around. Being inside the rollercoaster it’s hard to look at everything that’s happening in macro-view and appreciate the bigger picture as well as chalk down some insights and references for future releases and that’s why I’m talking a quick pause to jot down my takeaways before they fade into the joy that’s the iterative process.</p>
<h2>#1 Everybody plans with the user in mind</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Data is great, sometimes a decision point needs a user’s face behind it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For a lot of people being isolated and building a brand new product, especially from a technological perspective, can take away from the focus on the users and user stories of the original product. I would also argue that the farthest away the team is from touching the user (e.g. core services > backend > front-end), the easier it gets to make decisions based solely on data, level of effort and project timelines rather than look to the user in the eyes and saying <em>“you will not get this on launch”</em> or “<em>that will no longer be supported”</em>.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong, I love data (here’s a heart ❤️), I think data will light the way especially when talking scale. On the other hand, when breaking scale into the micro-communities that construct it, we’re looking at cohorts (see? Data words!), actual humans with use cases and stories that will be impacted by a decision being made. That’s where I believe my role as a product manager shines, by banging the drum of “there are humans on the other side” and putting names behind patch notes will get incredible value when planning becomes execution.</p>
<h2>#2 The community is a part of the change</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Empathy, feeling and needs makes a difference</p>
</blockquote>
<p>During our upgrade of the new ooVoo, we did our best to communicate the big change in FAQs, preliminary targeted emails, social media and other form of communications. Those got us a certain distance but once the button on the big change has been pressed, the segmented communication didn’t scale against the number of micro-communities who’s UI and to an extent usage habits we’ve changed overnight when their device auto-updated. Also the technical issues right off the bat didn’t help to reduce the amount of confusion 🙈</p>
<p>That’s why communication and in my humble opinion over communication is key. Long gone are the days where the users community is passive and playing the bug numbers game we can shift users from one end to the other. Being human, and being given channels to express their feelings, makes people take the opportunity in both hands and tell their friends and seek other community members with the same opinion while they are at it.</p>
<p>As a tactical and strategical play, the team and I embraced the rage and confusion (there was a portion of positive in there, for the record) and the overall notion was one - <strong>empathize</strong>. For a product manager, or any team member, or human in general being able to both put yourself in the other person’s shoes while being a vessel for his feelings is a great feat and feels incredible when true empathy happens and you <em>get</em> where the other person is coming from. It’s perfectly ok to be upset, it’s perfectly ok to uninstall and go use a competitor. I argue that true empathy is one of the best retention channels we can have.</p>
<h2>#3 Believe</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>Believe in the product, believe you’re here to do good</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Living in Twitter, Facebook and App Store reviews for couple of days and absorbing all the negativity is scary. It’s very scary as a product manager and I’m sure it gets exponentially scarier as you get closer to being at the helm.</p>
<p>It’s almost in the DNA, like anticipating the tiger in the bush our mind already plans how to put down the fire: “OK, let’s give everybody what they ask for”. And that may be the right call somewhere along the line but for the first immediate period of time, and if we are already user minded (point #1) and empathizing and over communicating (point #2), I’m asking myself mostly to believe and see the bigger picture: We have built the new product for a reason, we have spent time and effort validating, the new product has the potential to do good for people.</p>
<p>Being pragmatic and flexible is great, especially when it comes to software and having the courage to disproof a hypothesis and adopt the anti-thesis is nothing to sleep over. That said, remembering where you started at and the journey it took you to get there may hold more answers than any short-term decision and compromise. So believe.</p>Mission Statement (1.0)2017-07-04T14:57:02-04:002017-07-04T14:57:02-04:00Omer Kaplantag:None,2017-07-04:/posts/2017/mission-statement-10/<p>/project began as a summer coding project, one I’ve been doing every year to brush up on new technologies, mess around with code and generally experience that amazing feeling of building something from scratch <em>(I also get to do things in terminal which makes me feel like a hacker …</em></p><p>/project began as a summer coding project, one I’ve been doing every year to brush up on new technologies, mess around with code and generally experience that amazing feeling of building something from scratch <em>(I also get to do things in terminal which makes me feel like a hacker so there’s that).</em></p>
<p>The longer I worked on /project I came to realize that this is a project I want to stick around for a while. Usually when finishing my summer projects I chuck them away and go into passive content consumption mode until next year but with this one I feel there is value in writing. With that, the first thing on my <a href="https://github.com/omerkaplan/project/projects/2">/project/writing</a> board it writing a mission statement to install a sense of purpose and focus in this project.</p>
<p>If I can help it, I’d like to see /project lean on those three pillars -</p>
<h2>Tell Better Stories</h2>
<p>From a content perspective, I’d be really happy to have /project more casual and less structured than other articles I’ve published in the past year. With any publication I’ll try and focus on what interests me the most in and outside work - the human angle.</p>
<p>Storytelling and sparking conversations and emotions have always been something I gravitate towards whether if it’s in my work as a product manager, eSports consumer and a guy who use products in general.</p>
<p>Oh yeah, and use more emoji ✌️</p>
<h2>Open Source It</h2>
<p>I’m a great believer in “information wants to be free” and in a similar fashion, I think it’ll be really valuable if I keep the full project accessible and well documented in case anyone would like to go through the same learning process as I am.</p>
<p>While the code base is fully accessible and fork-able on GitHub, I have also made the technical and writing backlogs open so the next iterations on /project are always visible and available.</p>
<p>So the aspiration here is for better, cleaner code, readable documentation and a solid-structured project as a whole.</p>
<h2>Keep cadence</h2>
<p>More personal than the two sections above, I would hope that /project would become a habit. If anything, I should encapsulate that feeling of “this thing is almost ready to go live” and have it drive me through the days, weeks 🤔, months 🙃 to come.</p>
<p><strong>So there we go.</strong> a nice way to wrap this up would be to end with a quote I read somewhere on twitter and probably butcher. In a context of writers’ anxiety someone wrote “if no one will ever read it, would you still post it?” My answer is a definate yes.</p>