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The Role of GenAI in Higher Education in the Applied Disciplines
Written with Christine Loveridge, as part of BlueDot’s AI Governance Course July 2024 Professional practice in many disciplines is being transformed by AI, and higher education needs to keep pace. Many universities, to their credit, have recently adopted guidelines about AI usage in education, but they often fall short. Some myopically ban student usage of…
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Product Discovery According to Teresa Torres
Teresa Torres’ book Continuous discovery habit is the best product management book that I’ve read to date, full of slick techniques and novel perspectives. Torres provides a fairly structured methodology for how PMs should figure out what to build, and this blog post distills my main lessons learned from reading her book into a quick…
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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…