Skepticism, Martian Westerns, and Better Call Saul
Monthly Wrap from April
Another month, another host of great articles, listens, books and other finds from Product Thinking and around the internet. Here’s what you may have missed.
(Also, I’m excited to note that I’m expanding my newsletters and posts. With AI becoming such an important topic, I’ll be exploring AI, NLP, and technology more in depth. You should see that soon and it’s called Next Horizon).
Product Thinking
Other Articles
Diseases Didn’t Just Shape History, They Control the Future
“Historians tend to see the natural world as a stage on which humans—sometimes great men, sometimes groups of people—act,” Kennedy says. “We have to change the conceptualization of history, we have to see ourselves as part of an ecosystem.”
From species to nations to religions, disease have shaped all of human history.
Deep dive: Why is outcome-led so tricky?
I’ve helped make these types of transformations several times at organizations, and they are incredible difficult. The inertia of building features rather than driving outcomes is difficult to overcome.
“To transform to an outcome-led approach an organisation must change its basic management paradigm. This means reconfiguring team governance and company culture so that product engineering teams are empowered and supported.”
Why Used Books Make the Best Travel Souvenirs
I discovered this idea on a trip to Italy. We kept walking past a used bookstore and something called to me. I had to go in and peruse the piles of books and eventually picked up a couple old copies of books by Petrarch in Italian. They are real gems, especially as I continue to learn Italian.
Good Listens
Driving Change: Insights from Agilence's Russ Hawkins
Join me as I interview Russ Hawkins, the president and CEO of Agilence, a leading data technology company, on the Product by Design podcast. Russ has spent over 35 years in the technology industry driving change from the inside, and he shares his experience on how external change can require internal change to bring organizations to their full potential.
Service Design, UX, and Change Management - A Conversation with Justin Zalewski
What are the most important questions a business needs to ask itself, and what are the biggest barriers to change? In this episode, we explore how service design can help answer those important questions and be a force for change within any organization. Service design is a connector between the disciplines of UX design, UI design, product, engineering, customer experience, etc. While many of the principles of good service design aren’t exclusive to service design, there is an emphasis on co-creation, iteration, people-centricity, and a holistic perspective.
Books
The Strange
I finished reading The Martian Chronicles a few months ago. And am familiar with True Grit from the film (though I’m reading the book now). This book, The Strange, felt like The Martian Chronicles meets True Grit. Which apparently is how Amazon describes it (which I found out after I read it and after I had that exact thought).
So if either of those books speak to you, you’ll enjoy this one. It is an old western set on Mars.
Interesting Finds
Better Call Saul
I never thought Saul was the most interesting character in Breaking Bad, so I originally didn’t have any interest in Better Call Saul. But then I saw a few clips of the show and got hooked. I’ve been watching for the past month or two, and just started Season 6. It is amazing storytelling. It doesn’t matter if you like Breaking Bad or not, everything about this show is incredible.
