I remember reading a story, when I was first managing people, about Bill Gates and his approach to resources at Microsoft. According to the story, he regularly rejected requests to add resources to the development teams. When I first heard…
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What is the reciprocity principle? If you've never heard of the reciprocity principle, you've surely experienced it. If I say to you, “thank you,” what are you going to say back? If I pay you a compliment, like, “I love…
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Competition is Good In 1995 Kim Polese was the product manager who launched Java to the world, from Sun Microsystems. The next year she left Sun with Arthur van Hoff and started a company named Marimba. I know, that's a…
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We all have bias when we make decisions. It's not bad. The other day I saw this tweet. I don't know Louis Nicholls directly, but a quick look at his Twitter feed and site, and I can tell he's sharp.…
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Can we talk about the subscription business model for a bit? With millions of people out of work, tons of business closed down, and no clarity on what the new normal will be, the recent Subscription Impact Report by Zuora…
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A case of too many options Something happened today, which I'll get to in a minute, that drove me to write about online conversions. Before I get to that, let's chat for a second about situations with tons of options.…
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Let's talk about the power of networking… If you’ve spent the last several years becoming an amazing software developer, first let me just say that you're awesome. There are very few people on the planet (by percentage) that can make…
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The stress of not being a market pioneer It's a regular question that I hear when talking with people about new products. Especially in the WordPress ecosystem, people regularly ask the question. Are all the good product ideas already taken? The underlying…
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This is an open letter to the developer who spent a year developing a WordPress theme and couldn't sell it anywhere. An Open Letter to Chris Dear Chris, My name is Chris too. And that's not the only thing we…
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For more than eight years, I was lucky enough to work at a software company focused on vertical markets. I didn't step into the company with any expectation that it would be any different from any of the software companies where I'd…
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