I am tired of hearing people talk about passion in product development/management, it’s often considered a positive attribute. I see it on almost everyone’s resume and hear it in every interview.

I want to offer that it’s not a good thing.

1. it is limited
2. it does more harm than good

My recommendation, stop saying you’re passionate about X and stop looking to hire people who are passionate.

Love > Passion

Beyond passion, I want to hire and work with people who love what they do.

What does that mean? Well, we can all think of people or things we love and compare to…

I read 7 Habits of Highly Effective People about 5 years ago. Since then, I’ve worked on improving these habits. I thought I was overdue to share my impressions— as I continue to work on all these habits.

All these years later, I’ve deviated from the book, I’m not sure by how much. I hope to add some helpful context or perspective. I would love to hear thoughts on my adaptations and interpretations, if they helped you or didn’t.

To start, let’s define success

Covey studied 200 years of literature, he identified a change in how humans define success. Prior to the 1920's, success was…

Note: originally written and shared in my ProductBC community last Christmas, but I felt the need to share this message about ethics in business more broadly today.

As I do every Christmas, I watched George Bailey struggle to maintain his business based on good values, but low/no profit. Whereas the savvy businessman Mr. Potter made a whole lot of profit, providing services that were profitable, but low on values — often profit coming from taking advantage of those less privileged.

Of course, the wonderful lesson of this story isn’t focused on running a successful business… nevertheless, what could this story…

The most challenging problems take teams to solve — the manhattan project or choosing to go the moon, if you needed examples. So how do we work together?

In most software companies I’ve worked at (as well as heard in many talks) leaders will discuss the “Healthy Tension” they create between Product-Design-Development. This often arrises from different goals, let’s presume for example that Product’s goal is for overall value and business viability, Design’s goal is usability, and Development’s goal is technical feasibility.

Tension arises because each area has their own goal. Having your own goal as a subset of the…

Everything is a story. The human experience is a story, even our first hand impressions only exist as one of many possible perceptions. Then, only remain in memory as one of many possible stories of that perception. The power of stories is nearly infinite. And we can choose to make all our stories good ones.

What does that mean for software? That means every product is a story. It’s a story we tell ourselves and a story we might tell others. Every communication to customers, stakeholders, and teams is a story. It’s also about the stories people tell each other…

In my first blog post I covered the motivational benefits of autonomy, mastery/competence, and purpose/relatedness resulting in improved performance, learning, creativity, and happiness. Bringing insights from motivation research into a software team was one of my keys to transition from researching the world of high-level sports performance to managing software products and teams. Fostering motivation has helped my teams with two key areas that are keys to success: focus and perseverance.

Now, over 7 years later, I still return to sports for inspiration. …

This may seem obvious, but in my career, seems often overlooked. A simple principle is to only standardize a process when it helps with motivation and making good decisions more than it hurts our ability in those areas.

For example, when we have compliance issues, it is helpful to standardize a process because we are not all compliance experts. Further, it helps improve our motivation, because we don’t want to have to think about compliance all the time, nor fuck up == improved motivation through perceived competence and opportunity for mastery of what we do care about.

Standardization hurts autonomy…

When we look to create long term impact, the lasting organizations with the largest influence are those of conscience. Conscience meaning that they are virtuous and hold to their values. When the organization’s values and story have holes, their weakened position will allow others to win out.

This post is a bit different than usual, as it’s inspired by one of my favourite movies, the 2006 movie Kingdom of Heaven Director’s Cut (important to watch the Director’s cut if anyone is interested). [Spoiler Alert] In the movie, we witness the story (a liberal interpretation of history) of Balian de Ibelin.

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