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We’re back with part 21 of Overheard in Product—a series where we round up all of the tantalizing conversations from product folks that you may have missed on the web last week.
This week, we overheard: career expectations vs. realities, dumb ideas, habit forming, sketch notes, and…
…procrastination.
Let’s get to it.
Christina Zhu, software engineer at Square, nailed the feeling of career expectation when in school versus the reality.
Folks were equally empathetic and supportive—and in praise of Flexbox.
Andrew Chen, General Partner at a16z, schooled us on the Dumb Idea Paradox for consumer startups.
The TL;DR is that counterintuitive behavior—along with user traction—can be an indicator of a new market.
Food for thought: What consumer startups are you surprised are doing well because you originally wrote them off as a “dumb idea”?
Sophie Alpert, software engineer at Humu, spoke about the importance of building something other than products at company.
She tweets later in the thread, “I guess my hope (and expectation) is that if we can build the right culture and the right habits, that’ll mean we make all other decisions better.”
Food for thought: How much of your day is focused on building products and how much is focused on building culture and habits?
IBMer Chris Noessel made an incredible sketchnote of Sarah Doody’s UX London talk.
One of my favorite sections is Sarah’s 3 principles of anticipatory design: transparency, more human connection, and trust.
Food for thought: In the description of Sarah’s talk, she asks this question, “As technology becomes smarter and smarter, designers are faced with a dilemma…do we make decisions on behalf of users, or do we advise users but leave the decision up to them?”
A fascinating article by FastCompany reframed procrastination as not a time management problem—but an emotional problem.
It turns out, “You know that tackling your to-do list will make you happier, less stressed, and more content, but you (all too often) don’t do it. Trying to think or plan your way through the problem won’t do any good because it’s irrational. It’s an emotional problem.”
The article ends with advice to use this saying to push yourself along, “What’s the next action?”
By breaking up your project into small actions, you can alleviate some of the emotional toll that comes with imagining what the task will feel like when we’re doing it.
So, what’s your next action today?
