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Human-in-the-Loop AI for Knowledge Workers
How is AI going to impact jobs that center around knowledge work? Straightforward mechanical jobs are already being automated away. For example, cashiers are being replaced by vision AI that automatically detects which products customers have removed from shelves, and taxi drivers are being replaced with self-driving cars. Knowledge work on the other hand, seems like it’ll likely…
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Learning How LLM Apps are Built with LangChain and Databricks
The more that I learn about LLMs, the more I’m convinced that they are among the most consequential innovations in the history of computing, right up there alongside the relational database, the graphic user interface, and the internet. With LLMs on track to start influencing most spheres of human endeavor in the near future, my…
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Deepening My Understanding of AI/ML with Fast.ai and Duke’s AI PM Course
I recently started a personal project to sharpen my technical chops in AI/ML so that I can understand its capabilities and collaborate more effectively with my teammates. Since I first started studying the field as part of an ML-based project that I worked on in 2015, the state of the art has changed radically, so…
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What Does It Mean to Be Product-Led?
Many companies with product managers don’t practice true product management. Instead, they simply scribe feature requests and relay them on to development teams without doing any of the analytical work necessary to determine what should be built. This analytical work is actually the core function of product management. In “Escaping The Build Trap”, Melissa Perri…
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Becoming an Experimentation Organization
The more I read about online experimentation, the more I realize that it represents a paradigm shift in the way that companies do business. When I first heard about A/B testing, I initially assumed that it was just a limited-purpose tool for tweaking designs. What I didn’t understand at the time is that controlled experimentation…
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The Basics of Business Strategy According to Michael Porter
Having productive conversations about business strategy can be challenging because the term itself is often understood to mean different things by different people. Many people use “strategy” interchangeably with words like “plan” or “approach,” whereas others use it in a narrower, more specialized sense to refer to the way that businesses position themselves vis-a-vis competitors.…
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Julie Zhuo’s Guide to Managing Intrinsically Motivated People
Software companies get a lot of press for providing their employees with more freedom and autonomy than has traditionally been expected in the workplace. For example, perks like remote work and flexible hours have become standard fare. This shift in companies’ managerial stance towards employees has been driven by the recognition that tech workers are…
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Using OKRs for Goal-Setting
How do modern companies measure performance? To answer that question, I turned to Measure What Matters, the book widely considered to be the authoritative source on OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), the tech industry’s most prevalent goal-setting framework. OKRs have been widely adopted as a way to define goals and measure success towards them, but…
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The Power of Online Experiments
Ever since A/B testing frameworks emerged in the late 2000’s, online experimentation has become increasingly common in digital products. Even though I was already familiar with the tactical aspects of running A/B tests to compare alternative designs, I knew that the world of experimentation went much deeper. The Power of Experiments: Decision-Making in a Data-Driven…
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Observing the UX
I just read several chapters of Observing the User Experience at the recommendation of my sister, a UX researcher. She recommended this book to me because I told her that I wanted to read a big picture overview of the field of UX research. The book surveys the main techniques in a UX researcher’s toolkit,…