In the previous post I talked about clearly defining a product and communicating the definition to the whole team. Once you have your product definition in place, there are two things that you control that can increase your chances to succeed: Quality of the team How well the work is aligned with the goals We’re into product management, so now I’ll talk about Micro Focus, which is making sure that the everyday work of the whole team is actually promoting the stated goal of the company.…

This is the first in a series of posts on product management. Two Kinds of Focus In a startup project, the ability to focus is an absolute prerequisite of success. There are two kinds of focus here, I’ll call them “Macro” and “Micro”. Macro Focus means what is it exactly that your team is going to build. Micro Focus is making sure that every action and task a team member does is focused correctly.…

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Ben Pieratt writes about doing creative work in a letter to a friend: Creation is entirely dependent on ownership. Ownership not as a percentage of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build and grow and fail and learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, and without tangible results, it becomes stunted. We have to see the fruits of our labors, good or bad, or there’s no motivation to proceed, nothing to learn from to inform the next decision.…

The story behind the Stuxnet worm that infected computers in Iran is pretty fascinating. From the Wikipedia article: The complexity of the software is very unusual for malware. The attack requires knowledge of industrial processes and an interest in attacking industrial infrastructure.[1][3] The number of used zero-day Windows exploits is also unusual, as zero-day Windows exploits are valued, and crackers do not normally waste the use of four different ones in the same worm.…

Over on the new Delver Blog: In addition to chatting with your friend, you can share your browsing with them by clicking the “start sharing” link at the bottom of the chat room. This means that your friend will see what products, catalogs and profiles you’re browsing on Delver. You can use this to show your friends things you like and talk about them at the same time. It’s like going shopping together.…

Jonah Lehrer on Old Writers and the connection between age and work in other areas of creativity: For instance, Simonton has found that poets and physicists tend to produce their finest work in their late 20s, while geologists, biologists and novelists tend to peak much later, often not until they reach late middle age. Simonton argues that those disciplines with an “intricate, highly articulated body of domain knowledge,” such as physics, chess and poetry, tend to encourage youthful productivity.…

Search Patterns and Misconceptions Earlier today, in the first half of the opening game of World Cup 2010 between South Africa and Mexico, a Mexican forward scored a goal. The referee from Uzbekistan disallowed the goal because it was scored from an offside position. It was immediately clear to me that the referee made a very big and obvious mistake, as at the time the ball was passed to the forward who scored the goal, a South African defender was standing right on the goal line.…

Google steals a page from Bing’s book and puts custom backgrounds on Google.com:…

This isn’t terribly new, but just somewhat new - Facebook doing some basic CF-based interest suggestions: Works okay :)…