Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers offers advice on sticky business situations. His past experience, good and bad, is served up for your benefit. The writing is crisp, direct and eschews simple answers. When you inevitably find yourself in complex, difficult to manage situations, […]
Author Archives: Mike Rivera
5 Reasons to Invest in Research
Arguments to help you promote research within product development
Personas and Jobs To Be Done
Thoughts on the growing divide between jobs to be done and personas
Explore Pixar‘s Relationship with Their Customers
Ed Catmull, CEO of Pixar, was asked to comment on kids as consumers. Specifically, the question asked about Pixar’s views on the trends they see amongst their five-year-old demographic (skip to the 24:10 mark in the video). His answer: Five year olds actually haven’t changed as much. Clearly, the teenage world has changed a lot more […]
Book Review: Remote: Office Not Required
I read Remote: Office Not Required over the weekend (it’s a fast read) to see what I could learn about working with remotely located coworkers. I came away with a simple change of perception that will likely change the way I operate in the future. Our company has two offices which, in a sense, makes us a […]
Elevate your understanding of the Jobs-to-be-Done Four Forces Diagram
“Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers: Understanding the Psychology of New-Product Adoption” by John T. Gourville provides support and context to better understand The Rewired Group’s Four Progress Making Forces Diagram. In particular, the article provides context for the push and pull concepts within the four forces diagram outlined below (and includes some of Clayton Christensen’s […]
My First Concert
I headed to my first concert three days before I turned 20 to see PJ as they were breaking big on MTV. Because I designed promos and ads for the events council at CU I was able to get in early and free. I stood right in front of Stone Gossard (he’s the one with […]
Change and the Habit of the Present
Christina Wodtke gave some needed depth to an old cliché: people don’t like change. Whether or not change is adopted, she argues, is not determined by a simplistic and innate dislike for new things. It’s determined by how well the change is communicated and how smoothly people transition to it. Wodtke writes: “…when a big […]
Bad Feedback
I visited Ustream’s website and needed to update my password. The form they offered to do so indicated that what I entered wouldn’t work. The error it gave me said I used an illegal character, but they didn’t indicate what character was the issue. I’m left to guess what character is problematic. Why not tell […]
Trust Us, We’re Experts
A site that purports to teach HTML/CSS has a buy button with an HTML/CSS bug.