3rd party evaluation of the quality of different colleges/universities. The big-cheese is U.S. News. Rankings are typically conducted by magazines, newspapers, websites, governments, or academics. In addition to ranking entire institutions, specific programs, departments, and schools can be ranked. Some rankings consider measures of wealth, excellence in research, selective admissions, and alumni success. There is also much debate about rankings' interpretation, accuracy, and usefulness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_and_university_rankings_in_the_United_States (more)

Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward. Most people enroll in college in large part because they believe it will provide the knowledge and skills they need to secure a good job and join or remain in the middle class, while employers often rely on colleges as a principal supplier of professional talent. However, college is not a guarantee of labor market success. While the typical college graduate continues to fare substantially better in the labor market than workers with no more than a high school education, a sizable share of graduates do not experience the economic outcome they expected from earning a bachelor’s degree. Among workers who have earned a bachelor’s degree, only about half secure employment in a college-level job within a year of graduation, and the other half are underemployed. (under-employment) (more)

undergraduate College Education intended to lead to Medical School (more)

magazine now better known for its college ranking lists (and other school lists)

literally "after-death" (investigation into causes) - see also incident analysis, retrospective (more)

a type of diagram - most often intersecting circles to represent sets (more)

Universal Inbox/Universal Outbox (more)

Dan Davies: to the vector belong the spoils. I’ve nearly finished reading “The Ordinal Society” by Kieran Healy and Marion Fourcade. It’s a great book. (more)

Cory Doctorow: The reverse-centaur apocalypse is upon us. In thinking about the relationship between tech and labor, one of the most useful conceptual frameworks is "centaurs" vs "reverse-centaurs": (more)

tax on (excessive?) use of clean water (more)

Summary: Spend a short amount of time estimating the dev-hrs/days for each User Story or task as a anchor for discussion/collaboration, but don't treat it like a commitment. (more)

Product Development team's To-Do List in order of attack... see My Product Development Process. (more)

Traditional "management", even most software product management, is Industrial-Age Command-and-Control thinking that is net-negative for managing creatives. We need a re-framing of Agile Software Development with a business-building software Product Development mindset. Rapidly Iterative based on FeedBack. A bit post-Lean-Startup. Product-Led, Customer-Driven. (more)

Summary: Break your customers into Segments, and try to focus on 1 (more)

Customer who feels the pain you address as compelling, values your solution, has money to spend, would be very disappointed if you went away, will provide word of mouth, etc. (more)

neo-Enlightenment for a Network Society: see (2021-07-07) Network Enlightenment (more)

aka Eat Your Own Dogfood - principle of using your own product.

Steve Yegge thinks Google is better than Amazon at just about everything except using SOA to turn everything into Platform-s. Our Google Plus team took a look at the aftermarket and said: "Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let's go contract someone to, um, write some games for us." Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them... A product is useless without a platform, or more precisely and accurately, a platform-less product will always be replaced by an equivalent platform-ized product... Ironically enough, Google Wave was a great platform, may they rest in peace. But making something a platform is not going to make you an instant success. A platform needs a Killer App... Apple Computer gets it, obviously. They've made some fundamentally non-open choices, particularly around their mobile platform. But they understand accessibility and they understand the power of third-party development and they eat their dogfood. And you know what? They make pretty good dogfood. Their APIs are a hell of a lot cleaner than Microsoft's, and have been since time immemorial... FaceBook is successful because they built an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work. So Facebook is different for everyone. Some people spend all their time on Mafia Wars. Some spend all their time on Farmville. There are hundreds or maybe thousands of different high-quality time sinks available, so there's something there for everyone... The Golden Rule of Platforms, "Eat Your Own Dogfood", can be rephrased as "Start with a Platform, and Then Use it for Everything." You can't just bolt it on later. Certainly not easily at any rate. (more)

Gayle Laakmann McDowell (Google, CareerCup), Jackie Bavaro (Asana): Cracking the PM Interview: How to Land a Product Manager Job in Technology ISBN:0984782818. Note this isn't the same as becoming a good product manager. (more)

Lenny Rachitsky interviews Martin Cagan on Product management theater. What is driving this recent spiciness in your writing? (more)