Communication

“Influence is one of the biggest and hardest skills to develop. It's no different in a growth practitioner and in some cases it can even be harder because sometimes people come in with a preconceived notion of what growth is and isn't and you have to change their mind.”

“Martin Fowler at some point had this term called semantic diffusion back in the 2000s, which kind of means that someone comes up with a term, everybody starts butchering it with their own definitions and then you kind of lose the actual definition of it. That is what is happening to evals or agents or any word in AI as of today, everybody kind of sees a different side to it.”

“Kayfabe is a word that comes from professional wrestling and it means a thing that everybody knows is fake and yet everybody acts like is real. And I think it's one of the defining forces within an organization, any organization. So kayfabe in the small is optimism, enthusiasm. The problem that you get is as organizations get larger, this compounds. So then your layer above you does the same, and levels up you can be many orders of magnitude off of the ground truth.”

“What I'm trying to convey in my tone is also, 'You know what? It's Tuesday. We got to have this conversation. I'm sure it's going to end well. I'm not mad.' The more even keeled and even matter of fact you can be about something that's kind of just run-of-the-mill feedback, the better.”

“These silos between designers, product managers, and engineers. Everyone feels that pain of, we have low bandwidth communication, which is language and then text on Slack and Zoom calls. The common language that everyone shares is code. What if the language becomes actually working prototypes and working applications?”

“Make the title the takeaway of the slide so that the person looking at it has to do zero work to take away. Replace 'The team' with 'Our team is veterans of whatever industry.' Every single slide it's a takeaway, not a label. It'll make everything flow a lot better.”

“When people say 'I want someone that's strategic,' they're really saying 'I want someone that can articulate a compelling and simple why behind decisions.' The second piece is 'I want someone who will champion and be a change agent for things that are hard but best for long-term interests.' If you have one without the other, people won't see you as strategic.”

“It takes a lot to master using tools like Lovable. Being very curious and patient is super useful. Explaining exactly what you expect and what you're not getting is even more important with AI than with humans. Don't say 'it doesn't work' - explain exactly what you're expecting and which parts are working and which parts are not.”