At first blush, learning how to be an effective product manager seems like learning a new set of jargon: agile, kanban, AARRR, OKRs, KPIs, product-market fit, low/high-fidelity mockups, design systems, user pain, task completion rates. However, the most critical lessons I’ve learned the past three years has been the far…

I knew I wanted to write something, but I didn’t know what I should use. Should I use Google Docs or Word or Pages? Or a notepad or IAWriter or Scrivener, or newer, shinier tools like Notion and Coda? And where should I post? Was Medium better or a newsletter…

the night before you leave a place, a city, sit for a good long hour outside of a cafe and look into the street — breath in the light-dotted night air greedily try to absorb something of these streets, buildings, people try to grab a word, a sentence, a fragment

An astonishing data point: From 2017 to 2018, podcast ad revenue grew more than 50%, and is expected to hit $1B next year. Here’s a collection of links I found interesting when taking a deep dive into the current state of podcast advertising. I. Overview of podcasts as a medium How people experience audio, from Spotify Stream of Context Multi-device users stream Spotify for 2.5 hours per day, 1, which means we're constantly learning about how people…www.spotifyforbrands.com

As a Chinese-American who grew up in the U.S., moved to China as a teenager, then returned to the U.S. for college and work, cultural differences between the two countries is often on my mind. I just returned from a two-week trip around several major Chinese cities, and this trip…

And thus the worst curse was created. The worst curse was not a bodily affliction — not an endless growth of boils, incontinence, or sharp, unidentifiable pains in the middle of the night — but a barely audible whisper that questions everything you think. It was the curse of endless doubt. When you think “This is A,”…

Language is truly mind-boggling. This entire multi-millennia process of how we’ve managed to encode bits of reality and subjective experience into sounds, then connect those to little lines and curves, and now use this system to disseminate ideas and information, worldwide, instantaneously. The fact that you are reading these words right now is itself…

Let’s say you want to get better in some way. And in trying to get better, you realize that you can always be better. Now you feel bad about where you are at. You are unhappy. You think, if only I were better, I would be happy. You started in…

At Microsoft, PM stands for program manager, whereas at most other tech companies, it means product manager. Depending on the company, you can also find roles such as technical program manager and project manager, the latter especially common in a swathe of other industries. There are some notable differences between…