A tasty dish

It’s been a little quiet around here this month for 2 reasons:

1. I’ve been working on something a little different for the month of May. Watch this space starting next Tuesday.

2. The cohort for Leading Smart Creative Teams is shaping up1, which means now I have to finish the detailed design for it. I did the thing where I pre-sold to see if there was sufficient interest - and there was! It has been a lot of hard fun pulling this thing together.

But I wanted to do a quick post because I realized I’ve been sitting on something that I’ve meant to share for a while. Over the past couple months, I’ve had a bunch of people reaching out for consulting projects where it turns out that what they really need is just some basic tools and frameworks for thinking about product. The beauty of the internet is that almost anything you might need is available out there for free; the disaster of the internet is that there’s also like 9 layers of garbage that you have to excavate to find it, and if you don’t know how to tell if it’s garbage then there’s a good chance you end up consuming garbage.

About 6 months ago, I began putting together a tightly curated guide to get people started developing products the right way - and I want to share it with you today.

Check it out here, and if you know someone else who might find it useful you can use that little button below…

And in the meantime, a few random reads & watches that I’ve gotten into lately:

• This article about the future of renewable energy storage fascinated me, both in understanding the complexity of the power grid and in demonstrating how solutions might look more like natural biological processes. (Possible paywall)
• There’s a thing that I’ve been meaning to write in depth about for a while related to designing public services for people to enthusiastically use. The most recent video from Not Just Bikes gets at a lot of my thoughts.
• I am a total Craig Mod fanboy, and his recent photoessay for the NYT is a perfect example of why.