Inspiring Tech Quotes

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

It's easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.

If you are in a position where you can reach people, then use your platform to stand up for a cause. HINT: social media is a platform.

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

Further, your industry is constantly moving, and we must create products for where the market will be tomorrow, not where it was yesterday.

A full-out rebellion would take a major amount of luck and coordination. The Tech Nos and Domotor looked at me, waiting. No one else would be able to organize both sides. I drew in a deep breath. We had the technology, the intelligence and the people—put enough sheep together and you have a herd, a force to be reckoned with. We needed a leader.

I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.

Don't bore the universe.

There are worse things than dying." "Really?" said Meg. "Of course," said the tech. "Living badly.

I’m not standard; I’m deviant. But I’m not alone. I’m a complete freak of nature, and I emerged from a set of circumstances that are improbable on an astronomic scale. The same is probably true for you too.

The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.

What you're really seeing is Agile for delivery, but the rest of the organization and context is anything but Agile.

The nation once idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.

Finally, it's all about solving problems, not implementing features. Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It's about business results.

I was just a kid growing up in Jamaica with dreams, and I want people to know that it’s possible to dream bigger and accomplish those dreams.

one of the most critical lessons in product is knowing what we can't know,

The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.

product managers are constantly asking developers to look at the code to tell them how the system really works, then you're probably missing a principal product manager.

Rather than being measured on the output of their design work, the product designer is measured on the success of the product.

That is, there are two essential high‐level activities in all product teams. We need to discover the product to be built, and we need to deliver that product to market.

If you are not embarrassed or ashamed of your first version then you are shipping too late’.

Historically, in the vast majority of innovations in our industry, the customers had no idea that what they now love was even a possibility.

No matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.

In the model I'm describing, it is management's responsibility to provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle. The difference is that they are now prioritizing business results, rather than product ideas. And, yes, it is more than a little ironic that we sometimes need to convince management to focus on business results.

The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work. There are many reasons for an idea to not work out. The most common is that customers just aren't as excited about this idea as we are.

Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.

To summarize, these are the four critical contributions you need to bring to your team: deep knowledge (1) of your customer, (2) of the data, (3) of your business and its stakeholders, and (4) of your market and industry.

Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned

We say if you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value. The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers' struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Bad teams gather requirements from sales and customers.

The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement was played out in lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. (When Clarence Thomas described his successful but contentious 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching,” it was the epitome of tastelessness but also a sign of how far we have come.) The oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and confine their wives; today it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a fifty-fifty ratio of male and female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment. It’s just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed. These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.

Where a lot of novice product people go sideways is when they create a high‐fidelity user prototype and they put it in front of 10 or 15 people who all say how much they love it. They think they've validated their product, but unfortunately, that's not how it works. People say all kinds of things and then go do something different.

If the first time your developers see an idea is at sprint planning, you have failed. We need to ensure the feasibility before we decide to build, not after. Not only does this end up saving a lot of wasted time, but it turns out that getting the engineer's perspective earlier also tends to improve the solution itself, and it's critical for shared learning.

Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilisations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it - to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

A bilo je to itekako dražesno, smatrala je Mary. Nekako je humanije, promatrati različite rukopise, različite tinte, različite načine na koje bi netko nekad nešto krivo napisao. Bio je to vizualni ekvivalent razgovora, svatko bi u zapisu ostavio nešto sebi svojstveno, unikatno - za razliku od unosa uvijek istih, provjerenih natipkanih riječi. Međutim, to je donekle otežavalo traženje neke određene bilješke ili napomene. S druge strane, iščitavanje svega od početka moglo bi vam pomoći da primijetite nešto što vam je možda ranije promaknulo.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations. Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable. Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks. The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.

The unfortunate truth is that right now men's voices dominate and we see the results. Popular products from the tech boom - including violent and sexist video games that a generation of children has become addicted to - are designed with little to no input from women. Apple's first version of its highly touted health application could track your blood-alcohol level but not menstruation. Everything from plus-sized smart phones to artificial hearts have been build at a size better suited to male anatomy. As of late 2016, if you told one of the virtual assistants like Siri, S Voice, and Google Now, 'I'm having a heart attack,' you'd immediately get valuable information about what to do next. If you were to say, 'I'm being raped,' or 'I'm being abused by my husband,' the attractive (usually) female voice would say, 'I don't understand what this is.

Use Google Sheets as a Multilingual Chat Translator Communicating with someone who speaks and writes in another language isn't the easiest task, but this Google Sheet incorporates Google Translate so you can have a real-time chat conversation with anybody in the world. Over at the tech blog Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal created a Google Sheet that's powered by Google Scripts, and translates all language pairs that are supported by Google Translate in real-time. This means that once you save a copy of the Google Sheet to your own Google Drive, you can share it with anyone who writes in another language and have a real-time chat within the document. Just enter your contact's name along with yours in the cells provided, select each participants native language from a drop-down menu, and start typing in the colored fields. It may not be a 100% perfect translation, but it's a great way to communicate quickly with someone in another part of the world. For instructions on downloading the Google Sheet and how to operate it, check out the link below. Use Google Sheets for Multilingual Chat with Spears of Different Languages | Digital Inspiration

Discuss netiquette.xyz internet rules to follow with friends and family. Use the site as a reference. Set boundaries. Share.

I know a few organizations that have tried hard to achieve this, but I have never seen this succeed. The systems always seem to grow in complexity and size much faster than anyone can document, and with software, the definitive answer always lives in the source code itself

How much money you'll make, and how much it will cost?

I did think about what the endgame could look like. I saw myself pursuing success as a nontechnical woman in tech: becoming a middle manager, then an executive, then a consultant or coach who spoke at conferences, to inspire more women. I could see myself onstage, forcing a smile and holding a clicker, feeling my curls go limp in real time. I could see myself writing blog posts on my own personal buisness philosophy: How to Squander Opportunity, How Not to Negotiate. How to Cry in Front of Your Boss. I would work twice as hard as my male counterparts to be taken half as seriously. I would devote my time and energy to a corporation, and hope that it was reciprocal. I would make decisions based on the market that were rewarded by the market, and feel important, because I would feel right. I liked feeling right; I loved feeling right. Unfortunately, I also wanted to feel good. I wanted to find a way, while I could, to engage with my own life.

It's way too late in the game to get the real value of design, and mostly what's being done is what we call the “lipstick on the pig” model.

Unfortunately, projects are output and product is all about outcome.

People are always searching for a silver bullet to create products, and there is always a willing industry—ready and waiting to serve with books, coaching, training, and consulting. But there is no silver bullet, and inevitably people figure this out.

Risks are tackled up front, rather than at the end.

Products are defined and designed collaboratively, rather than sequentially.

They have finally moved beyond the old model in which a product manager defines requirements, a designer designs a solution that delivers on those requirements, and then engineering implements those requirements, with each person living with the constraints and decisions of the ones that preceded. In strong teams, product, design, and engineering work side by side, in a give‐and‐take way, to come up with technology‐powered solutions that our customers love and that work for our business.

The Group Product Manager Role There's a role in larger product organizations that I find especially effective. The role is titled group product manager, usually referred to as GPM. The GPM is a hybrid role. Part individual contributor and part first‐level people manager. The idea is that the GPM is already a proven product manager (usually coming from a senior product manager title), and now the person is ready for more responsibility. There are generally two career paths for product managers. One is to stay as an individual contributor, which, if you're strong enough, can go all the way up to a principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work. This is a very highly regarded role and generally compensated like a director or even VP. The other path is to move into functional management of the product managers (the most common title is director

The Group Product Manager Role There's a role in larger product organizations that I find especially effective. The role is titled group product manager, usually referred to as GPM. The GPM is a hybrid role. Part individual contributor and part first‐level people manager. The idea is that the GPM is already a proven product manager (usually coming from a senior product manager title), and now the person is ready for more responsibility. There are generally two career paths for product managers. One is to stay as an individual contributor, which, if you're strong enough, can go all the way up to a principal product manager—a person who's an individual contributor but a rock‐star performer and willing and able to tackle the toughest product work. This is a very highly regarded role and generally compensated like a director or even VP. The other path is to move into functional management of the product managers (the most common title is director of product management) where some number of product managers (usually somewhere between 3 and 10) report directly to you. The director of product management is really responsible for two things. The first is ensuring his or her product managers are all strong and capable. The second is product vision and strategy and connecting the dots between the product work of the many teams. This is also referred to as holistic view of product. But lots of strong senior product managers are not sure about their preferred career path at this stage, and the GPM role is a great way to get a taste of both worlds. The GPM is the actual product manager for one product team, but in addition, she is responsible for the development and coaching of a small number of additional product managers (typically, one to three others). While the director of product management may have product managers who work across many different areas, the GPM model is designed to facilitate tightly coupled product teams.

Here's some very practical and important advice for you to consider. Holding a weekly planning meeting where you throw a bunch of ideas at the engineers—and demand they give you some sort of estimate either in time, story points, or any other unit of effort—is almost certain to go badly. If you put an engineer on the spot, without time to investigate and consider, you are very likely to get a conservative answer, partly designed to make you go away.

Along the vertical dimension, we have a progressive level of detail. As we flesh out each major activity into sets of user tasks, we add stories for each of those tasks. The critical tasks are higher vertically than the optional tasks.

Let's start at the top—the source of ideas. This model leads to sales‐driven specials and stakeholder‐driven products. Lots more to come on this key topic, but for now, let me just say that this is not the source of our best product ideas. Another consequence of this approach is the lack of team empowerment. In this model, they're just there to implement—they're mercenaries.

Likewise, we have no idea what it will cost to build. Without knowing the actual solution, this is extremely hard for engineering to predict. Most experienced engineers will refuse to even give an estimate at this stage, but some are pressured into the old t‐shirt sizing compromise—just let us know if this is “small, medium, large, or extra large.

First, collaboration is built on relationships, and product teams—especially co‐located teams—are designed to nurture these relationships. Second, to innovate you need expertise, and the durable nature of product teams lets people go deep enough to gain that expertise. Third, instead of just building what others determine might be valuable, in the product team model the full team understands—needs to understand—the business objectives and context. And most important, the full team feels ownership and responsibility for the outcome.

The objectives do not need to cover every little thing the team does, but they should cover what the team needs to accomplish.

the morale of the engineers is very much a function of you as the product manager. It is your job to make sure they feel like missionaries and not mercenaries. You do this by involving them deeply in the customer pain you are trying to solve and in the business problems you face. Don't try to shelter them from this—instead, share these problems and challenges very openly with them. They will respect you more for it, and, in most cases, the developers will rise to the challenge.

Architectures drive technologies, which drive skill sets.

the compromise is straightforward. The product team asks for a little time to do product discovery before commitments are made, and then after discovery, we are willing to commit to dates and deliverables

there's a common tendency to have each functional department create their own OKRs for their own organization.

After a few millennia of inspiration, the primitive clay oven gave rise to the gleaming modern steel version. A high-tech oven alone does not, however, turn a bake-mete into a pie as we know it. One more important development was necessary. Pastry had to be invented.

The Modern Tech Hungry Culture Is Taking A Heavy Toll on Our Inner Peace. Ironically, We Are Now More Connected but Feel More Disconnected!”.

All other things being equal, a co‐located team is going to substantially outperform a dispersed team. That's just the way it is.

She's always scorned his squeamishness, citing the replacement of his vagina with a dick. Joon thinks that's invasion of a far more nail-biting nature. She has no idea. It was fucking heaven. He'd do it again a million times over. And it's one hell of a long way from chopping open your head for the sake of more tech.

As you'll soon see, coming up with winning products is never easy. We need a product that our customers love, yet also works for our business. However, a very large component of what is meant by works for our business is that there is a real market there (large enough to sustain a business), we can successfully differentiate from the many competitors out there, we can cost‐effectively acquire and engage new customers, and we have the go‐to‐market channels and capabilities required to get our product into the hands of our customers.

Many teams get into a lot of grief with the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) because on the one hand we are very motivated to get this out in front of customers fast to get feedback and learn. And, on the other hand, when we do get out there fast, people feel like this so‐called product is an embarrassment to the brand and the company. How could we possibly consider launching this?

Immersive tech like virtual reality inspires such rich emotions that it’s ripe for abuse. It’s still in its infancy, though, so it’s too soon to know whether it will be used responsibly.

In this talk, I tell the story of how, when I was first a manager at New York Tech, I didn’t feel like a manager at all. And while I liked the idea of being in charge, I went to work every day feeling like something of a fraud. Even in the early years of Pixar, when I was the president, that feeling didn’t go away. I knew many presidents of other companies and had a good idea of their personality characteristics. They were aggressive and extremely confident. Knowing that I didn’t share many of those traits, again I felt like a fraud. In truth, I was afraid of failure. Not until about eight or nine years ago, I tell them, did the imposter feeling finally go away. I have several things to thank for that evolution: my experience of both weathering our failures and watching our films succeed; my decisions, post–Toy Story, to recommit myself to Pixar and its culture; and my enjoyment of my maturing relationship with Steve and John. Then, after fessing up, I ask the group, “How many of you feel like a fraud?” And without fail, every hand in the room shoots up. As managers, we all start off with a certain amount of trepidation. When we are new to the position, we imagine what the job is in order to get our arms around it, then we compare ourselves against our made-up model. But the job is never what we think it is. The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.

The purpose of product discovery is to quickly separate the good ideas from the bad. The output of product discovery is a validated product backlog. Specifically, this means getting answers to four critical questions: Will the user buy this (or choose to use it)? Can the user figure out how to use this? Can our engineers build this? Can our stakeholders support this?

If, for example, your company provides a two‐sided marketplace with buyers on one side and sellers on the other, there are real advantages to having some teams focus on buyers and others focus on sellers. Each product team can go very deep with their type of customers rather than have them try to learn about all types of customers.

engineering gets brought in way too late. We say if you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value. The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

Every product begins with the people on the cross‐functional product team. How you define the roles, and the people you select to staff the team, will very likely prove to be a determining factor in its success or failure.

CHAPTER 12 The Engineers In this chapter, I describe the engineering role (also commonly known as developers or, in some circles, programmers). But as with the last chapter, I'm not trying to speak here to the engineers—I'm aiming this discussion at product managers who need to learn how to work effectively with engineers. There's probably no more important relationship for a successful product manager than the one with your engineers. If your relationship is strong, with mutual and sincere respect both ways, then the product manager job is great. If your relationship is not strong, your days as product manager will be brutal (and probably numbered). Therefore, this is a relationship worth taking very seriously and doing everything you can to nurture. This strong relationship begins with you.

unless I knew the product would be something that users and customers wanted.

It's also important for tech product managers to have a broad understanding of the types of analytics that are important to your product. Many have too narrow of a view. Here is the core set for most tech products: User behavior analytics (click paths, engagement) Business analytics (active users, conversion rate, lifetime value, retention) Financial analytics (ASP, billings, time to close) Performance (load time, uptime) Operational costs (storage, hosting) Go‐to‐market costs (acquisition costs, cost of sales, programs) Sentiment (NPS, customer satisfaction, surveys)

group

We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.

They are empowered to figure out the best way to meet those objectives, and they are accountable for the results.

will tell you there's never a perfect way to carve up the pie. Realize that, when you optimize for one thing, it comes at the expense of something else. So, decide what's most important to you and go with that.

There are essentially three ways for a product manager to work, and I argue only one of them leads to success: The product manager can escalate every issue and decision up to the CEO. In this model, the product manager is really a backlog administrator. Lots of CEOs tell me this is the model they find themselves in, and it's not scaling. If you think the product manager job is what's described in a Certified Scrum Product Owner class, you almost certainly fall into this category. The product manager can call a meeting with all the stakeholders in the room and then let them fight it out. This is design by committee, and it rarely yields anything beyond mediocrity. In this model, very common in large companies, the product manager is really a roadmap administrator. The product manager can do his or her job. The honest truth is that the product manager needs to be among the strongest talent in the company. My intention in this book is to convince you of this third way of working. It will take me the entire book to describe how the strong product manager does his or her job, but let me just say for now that this is a very demanding job and requires a strong set of skills and strengths.

Every business depends on customers. And what customers buy—or choose to use—is your product. The product is the result of what the product team builds, and the product manager is responsible for what the product team will build.

The successful product manager must be the very best versions of smart, creative, and persistent.

By persistent, I mean pushing companies way beyond their comfort zone with compelling evidence, constant communication, and building bridges across functions in the face of stubborn resistance.

preparation for this role. Start by becoming an expert in your users and customers. Share very openly what you learn, both the good and the bad. Become your team's and your company's go‐to person for understanding anything about your customer—quantitative and qualitative. Work to establish a strong relationship with your key stakeholders and business partners. Convince them of two things: (1) You understand the constraints they operate under. (2) You will only bring to them solutions that you believe will work within those constraints. Become an undisputed expert on your product and your industry. Again, share your knowledge openly and generously. Finally, work very hard to build and nurture the strong collaborative relationship with your product team. I'm

Realize that any product vision is a leap of faith. If you could truly validate a vision, then your vision probably isn't ambitious enough. It will take several years to know. So, make sure what you're working on is meaningful, and recruit people to the product teams who also feel passionate about this problem and then be willing to work for several years to realize the vision.

Our work is important but rarely is it the most important thing in our lives. Companies usually survive just fine without your putting in those extra twenty hours when you could be eating dinner with your family, sleeping, or going for a run. By hiring employees with different lives and different work styles, tech companies could engender new perspectives and creativity. And they would give employees the ability to have a longer-term perspective, not just for their own lives, but for whatever product they're rolling out.

Finally, while we're busy doing this process and wasting our time and money, the biggest loss of all usually turns out to be the opportunity cost of what the organization could have and should have been doing instead. We can't get that time or money back.

Who decides what products we should build? How do they decide? How do they know that what we build will be useful?

One of the absolute hardest assignments in our industry is to try to cause dramatic change in a large and financially successful company.

Tech is our future. Our future is Tech.

A product team is a group of people who bring together different specialized skills and responsibilities and feel real ownership for a product or at least a substantial piece of a larger product.

When a product succeeds, it's because everyone on the team did what they needed to do. But when a product fails, it's the product manager's fault.

QUANTUM LEAP TO BUYERS WORKSHEET Name: ___________________________ Date________________ Instructions: This is a brainstorming session. Take 15 minutes with a pen to paper and write out 10 ideas for each question. All ideas count! Who can I team up with, who is already established, to reach my right buyers? Which large companies would my work be a fit with? (i.e. If you draw robots as your main theme, think tech companies) Which Large Charities? (i.e. If your art is inspired by a cause or world problem, which charities or celebrities care about the same things?) Which Trade Shows? (I.e. if your work is music inspired, think NAMM Show or other music industry shows)

But one of the most important lessons in our industry is to fall in love with the problem, not the solution.

Please believe me when I say that there are few things more powerful to a product organization than reference customers. It is the single best sales tool you can provide to your sales and marketing organization, and it completely changes the dynamics between the product organization and the rest of the company.