Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow wrote about "learning by doing" decades ago. He knew that productivity and expertise improve through experience. The messy, repetitive works is often where you learn the patterns that eventually become judgment. Knowledge can be taught, but judgement is built through lived experience. The first draft you rewrite. The customer call you listen to. The bug you fix and fix again. The factory floor you walk. Small decisions you make every day teach you judgement. And, judgement is the thing everyone wants from senior people in the workplace. If we automate away every entry-level task without replacing the learning loop, we are removing a part of the process that creates experts. The goal should be to use AI to accelerate learning, remove friction, and give people better tools to build expertise faster. haverford.edu/sites/default/… Thanks @Fortune & @tbove4 for sharing this story. Link in the comments.

If you don’t have constraints, then make up constraints. After @generalmagicmov many of us walked away realizing the same thing: Big visions fail when the problem space is too big. My friend @DavidEpstein captures this beautifully in his new book, Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better. At General Magic, we were trying to build the future all at once. The vision was extraordinary. Too extraordinary. The technology, infrastructure, interfaces, networks, batteries, displays, and user behavior all needed to evolve simultaneously. We were building everything, but for who? When we built the iPod, we didn’t try to reinvent everything. We focused on one clear problem: people wanted their music collections with them everywhere they went. That focus forced hard decisions: no endless feature list, no bloated interface, and no trying to please everyone. We constrained the team size. We constrained the timeline. We constrained what version one needed to be. The famous scroll wheel itself came from working within constraints. We needed a fast, intuitive way to navigate thousands of songs on a tiny screen with limited hardware resources. Constraint drove simplicity. The same thing happened on the iPhone. We used internal “heartbeats” aka aggressive prototype deadlines to force learning cycles. The first versions were wrong. Then the second versions were wrong in different ways. But the deadlines forced us to stop, regroup, simplify, and learn before complexity spiraled out of control. At Nest, we took it even further. Before the product was done, we built the prototype of the packaging first. Literally the box. Why? Because the box forced clarity. If someone saw this thing sitting on a shelf for five seconds, would they immediately understand: what problem it solved, why they needed it, and why it was different? The constraint of the box forced the team to prioritize what actually mattered. That’s what David gets exactly right in this book! Constraints are not creativity killers. They are creativity filters. The best teams shrink the problem space. They create boundaries that force learning, prioritization, iteration, and clarity. That’s the pattern. You shrink the problem until it becomes solvable. Then you move. Great book, David. Everyone building products, companies, or creative work should read this one.

Most tech companies break out product management and product marketing into two separate roles: Product management defines the product and gets it built. Product marketing wires the messaging- the facts you want to communicate to customers- and gets the product sold. But from my experience that's a grievous mistake. Those are, and should aways be, one job. There should be no separation between what the product will be and how it will be explained- the story has to be utterly cohesive from the beginning. Your messaging is your product. The story you're telling shapes the thing you're making. I learned story telling from Steve Jobs. I learned product management from Greg Joswiak. Joz, a fellow Wolverine, Michigander, and overall great person, has been at Apple since he left Ann Arbor in 1986 and has run product marketing for decades. And his superpower- the superpower of every truly great product manager- is empathy. He doesn't just understand the customer. He becomes the customer. So when Joz stepped into the world with his next-gen iPod to test it out, he fiddled with it like a beginner. He set aside all the tech specs- except one: battery life. The numbers were empty without customers, the facts meaningless without context. And, that's why product management has to own the messaging. The spec shows the features, the details of how a product will work, but the messaging predicts people's concerns and finds way to mitigate them. - #BUILD Chapter 5.5 The Point of PMs