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Product management is a generalist’s field. You do a little bit of user research, a little bit of strategy, a little bit of design and a little bit of engineering. Everyone you work with is better at what they do than you are, yet you still have to find a way to help them.

Within a field of generalists, I am a generalist PM. I’ve worked across agriculture, ad tech, consumer social, and most recently fintech. This makes me doubly a generalist.

Perhaps because of this, I am especially appreciative of the art of being a useful generalist, which Ross Simoini captures so well in this article. Here’s an excerpt:

In this way, the generalist must have a high tolerance for complexity, confusion, and uncertainty. Generalism does not offer the clearly tiered progression offered to the specialist. Working across various fields means you will likely spend long periods being unskilled at them. The generalist can acquire new talents, but they are also a perpetual amateur in a cycle of discovery and failure. There are benefits to this process: slowness encourages a certain quality of attention; novelty encourages a sharp perspective; and an outsider’s position keeps you immune from the insider’s tunnel vision.

Specialism, on the other hand, offers an easily measured form of success. In fact, specialization usually defines a spectrum of success and failure.“Best” and “worst” can exist only when the boundaries of success have been narrowed to a single parameter: the best RBI hitter in baseball; the most dividends earned in a single day.

I left this article thinking there should be a Society for Generalists the way there is are professional groups for specialities. Worth reading the entire thing, especially if you’re a generalist.

A brilliantly insightful speech on how to foster creativity . Here's a quick summary:

Now here's the negative thing: Creativity is not a talent. It is not a talent, it is a way of operating…

You see when I say “a way of operating” what I mean is this: creativity is not an ability that you either have or do not have.

It is, for example, (and this may surprise you) absolutely unrelated to IQ (provided that you are intelligent above a certain minimal level that is) but MacKinnon showed in investigating scientists, architects, engineers, and writers that those regarded by their peers as “most creative” were in no way whatsoever different in IQ from their less creative colleagues.

So in what way were they different?

MacKinnon showed that the most creative had simply acquired a facility for getting themselves into a particular mood — “a way of operating” — which allowed their natural creativity to function.

Cleese describes an “open mode” where sort of meander or play with a problem. In open mode, there's no right or wrong. Crucially, it's extremely difficult to be open with time pressure. He tells relays this story about how Alfred Hitchcock would help move his writers into “open mode”:

“When we came up against a block and our discussions became very heated and intense, Hitchcock would suddenly stop and tell a story that had nothing to do with the work at hand. At first, I was almost outraged, and then I discovered that he did this intentionally. He mistrusted working under pressure. He would say “We're pressing, we're pressing, we're working too hard. Relax, it will come.” And, says the writer, of course it finally always did.

Then there is a “closed mode”, where we implement our solution and are rigorous about speed, efficiency, details, and outcomes.

The most creative people as ones who can move most quickly between these two modes.

Cleese then gives 5 tricks for getting yourself into open mode:

1. Space where you will be undisturbed at least until a specific time.

2. Time to get into open mode, usually at least 30 minutes, where your mind wants to go back towards execution. Then after about 60 more minutes, usually the most creative time is past and you need a break.

3. Time to play with the problem, to stick with the discomfort of not having a solution. The most creative people spend the most time in this space of not knowing or considering alternatives before picking a path.

4. Confidence in yourself, to handle the discomfort of not knowing the answer, and to be wrong as you try things out.

5. A 22 inch waist (humor) , Cleese's way of reminding us that nothing moves us into open mode faster than humor.

I have bookmarked this to read again in 6 months. Sent to me via the Flux Collective .

That is the subject of my latest Browser Bets episode with Andrew Flowers of AppCast.

Here’s a snippet:

Andrew: The quits rate in the US had an all-time high of three percent in November of last year, that's the latest data we have. So what does that mean? It means in November three percent of all workers quit their job and in the 20 years that the bureau of labor statistics has been tracking this that's the highest point. My bet in quantitative terms is that the quits rate in the US by the end of 2022 is going down below two and a half percent which is where it it peaked before the pandemic.

I respect Andrew a lot, but I actually think he’s wrong here. I mention this in the show, but I’ll say it more succinctly here. I think three things are going to keep this number high for the rest of the year:

1. A structural shift towards remote work. I’m on the record as thinking that back-to-the-office is never going to happen for a certain categories of workers. But adjusting to this new normal is going to take time and some employers are going to try to force employees back… and these employees are going to quit to take jobs that allow for more flexbility.

2. The retirement of the Baby Boomers. This is simply a demographic tailwind, perhaps pulled forward by employers trying to enforce return to work (if you’re going to retire in 6 months anyway, do you really want to commute again?)

3. Remote jobs will have a higher natural quit rate. If you’re a remote worker, there’s way less friction in quitting a job. There’s no new commute, there’s minimal disruption in your schedule. You get shipped a new computer and log in to different video calls. For remote first workers, it’s going to be easier to hop between jobs and this will show up in the numbers.

Only time will tell who is right. You can join in on the bet here.

I loved this podcast between Ezra Klein and Alex Tabarrok for multiple reasons, not the least of which is my continuing obsession with the importance of trust in flourishing societies:

ALEX TABARROK: I mean, very similar to this, I think undermining trust in government. Andriei Shleifer has some work showing that trust, as you know, is down in the United States. And the kind of weird thing is, is that trust in government is down, but actually, this doesn’t lead you to kind of a libertarian paradise where people say, I don’t trust the government, let’s use the market.

Actually, what happens is trust goes down in all kinds of institutions. And if anything, people become more in favor of government. Not that they actually think it’s going to work, but they just think everything is unfair. And they think that nothing is going to work, and they become removed from the political process. But decline of trust doesn’t lead you to something which I want. And it’s unfortunate, in a way, because you would hope that people would sort of — well, if not the government, then the market. But that’s not the way it works.

Oddly enough, right, the societies in which people have the most trust, not only do they trust the government more, but they actually also trust markets more. These things work together. So if you have a lot of trust in government, then you’re actually willing to have free trade because you figure, well, the bottom half of people are still protected. You’re willing to have vaccines, which actually gets the economy going. So it turns out that trust in markets and trust in governments correlates actually pretty highly.

And later:

EZRA KLEIN: But that strikes me as somewhat to the side of the issue I’m bringing up here, which is that if you want to align the incentives of more groups to push for more overall growth, as opposed to pushing for just their slice of a stagnant pie, to mix my metaphors here, then you actually want lower levels of inequality. And I even see that in the housing example you turn to there. I’ve attended these meetings in S.F., and I try to watch what happens with them.

And something you cannot miss in a city like this, which has insane levels of internal inequality, just insane, like nothing I’ve ever seen, is that there’s no trust.

This certainly matches my intuition that trust in society is self reinforcing. But how to start moving towards trust to begin with? That I wish I had a better answer to.

I’ve researched and consulted on megaprojects for more than 30 years, and I’ve found that two factors play a critical role in determining whether an organization will meet with success or failure: replicable modularity in design and speed in iteration. If a project can be delivered fast and in a modular manner, enabling experimentation and learning along the way, it is likely to succeed. If it is undertaken on a massive scale with one-off, highly integrated components, it is likely to be troubled or fail.

That is from Bent Flyvbjerg in HBR.

Two things this article pointed out that I hadn’t considered before:

• Long timelines in a project create risk because it leaves more time for things to go wrong. I’ve rushed to ship a product before for fear of the competition, but the concern is more general than that. The longer it takes to get going, the more likely that the environment changes — a project sponsor leaves the company or an interested beta customer changes their plans. Even more so for public works.

• Projects that are useful in stages are more resilient. I’ve prioritized shipping a project in iterative chunks as a way of testing a hypothesis about my product before, but never considered that the faster you get a project producing, even partially, the more time its benefits compound and the faster it pays back it’s costs.

The entire article is worth a read, especially if you’re in the midst of planning or executing a major project. The example of the Madrid subway is both obvious and eye opening.

One more thing it made me consider: modularity creates resiliency. One of the ways cathedrals like Notre Dame were able to be built over hundreds of years was by using patterns that were easily understood and able to be extended. Calamities could come and derail projects, leaders could die, but new ones could take their place and take up the work again because of the modularity of the system.

Thanks to The Browser for bringing this one to my attention.