Data Operations

Posts about data operations, analytics, and organizational data management

189 posts

Your chat should actually get work done

You’ve met AI as chat. It looks like Claude in the sidebar, or ChatGPT in a tab, or perhaps a Sparkle icon. The first interaction feels magical —> you type something, and get a response that almost seems like a…

Everyone has a launch plan until you ship it

  “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth” – Mike Tyson, 1987 People have been paraphrasing Mike Tyson’s boxing quote about about business plans since he said it. If you think it doesn’t apply in software,…

Build the info radiator

If your house had more simple information “radiators”, would it be easier? Every remote worker has the same problem. Somebody in your household (a kid, a spouse, a roommate) needs to know whether you’re in a meeting right now. The…

Build toys with known outputs

I keep going back to the Dad Joke format as a first pass for new tech For about four years now, I’ve been asking my computer to tell me dad jokes. Not constantly. Every eighteen months or so, when some…

Use your Exoskeleton

AI speeds up the game. It doesn’t remove the product decisions needed. Emoji seem like a small thing, but the ones that stick make it to the keyboard of every mobile phone in the world, so the process is pretty…

Design Navigation from the Inside Out

Instead of starting with a nav item, identify what users want In 2023, I wrote about building software from cow paths. The idea was simple: study how people actually work and design around those natural paths. Don’t invent workflows in…

The Three Minute AI Skill Test

The first time I used a large language model, it felt like cheating. I dropped in messy notes and got back a cleaner argument than I could have written in one pass. It surfaced connections I had not named yet.…