Everything Costs

I have been lucky enough to work — mostly — in places that are primarily motivated by accomplishing something. How interesting that something actually is can vary quite a bit, but compared to organizations that work simply to maintain the status quo, or divide up the spoils of some long entrenched operation, most of my […]

Angles, Superfruits, and Supply Chains

This is a weird angle, for a couple reasons. There’s a fairly exhaustive amount of reporting in this piece that has me absolutely believing this headline is true — that small children are climbing giant scary trees to harvest the açaí that I can only assume goes into the acai bowls we get on the […]

Engage

I saw this piece on Eric Clapton’s sudden turn to COVID politics in the Washington Post, and thought a lot about people in my life (many who are older) who have taken sudden political turns. “He’s the anti-Bono,” says Bill Oakes, who managed Clapton’s label throughout the 1970s. “He is the epitome of someone who […]

About Understanding

The Department of Why I have been working in something called “Product Marketing” for a long time now. What that something actually is has varied from job to job, sometimes to pretty wild degrees. When I look at (or write) job descriptions for product marketing, even inside of very similar companies, it tends to focus […]

Decency

This afternoon I saw this WSJ quote on Twitter: In case the tweet dies (and the tweet always seems to die eventually if I embed it in something I write), it’s basically an anecdote about a woman who worked for a long time in a hard, pretty thankless job for a big corporation until the […]

Moving Fast and Changing Nothing

In my line of work, I hear a lot about “MVP”, or “minimum viable product”. I complain about MVP all the time, because while the term is historically used to describe making products that are sufficiently safe for public usage (which is good), in my line of work it’s a concept that actually exists to […]