The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
Fishbowl: When Engineering Needs to Hear Sales Calls Without Being in Them
Every enterprise deal was stalling on self-hosted test runners, and engineering thought sales was inventing the requirement. Putting two account executives, a solutions engineer, and the head of sales in a circle — with engineering listening — settled it in half an hour.
- Product·3 min read
Fishbowl: Letting the Whole Team Overhear the Argument
Four people had been fighting about half-day accrual rounding in a private thread for months. Putting them in a circle with fifteen colleagues silently listening around them ended the argument in fifty minutes.
- Product·3 min read
Heard Seen Respected: Repairing a Handoff Nobody Wanted to Talk About
Two designers had spent a quarter watching their work get reinterpreted in code with no conversation, and had gone quiet about it. Twenty minutes of paired listening — where the only allowed response is silence — got the conversation started.
- Product·3 min read
Heard Seen Respected: The Retro That Had to Happen Before the Retro
A theme update wiped custom CSS for two hundred merchants, and support had warned us it would. Before anyone could talk process, the two teams needed a structure where the only permitted response to a story was silence.
- Product·3 min read
Conversation Cafe: What to Do With a Decision the Team Didn't Get to Make
Leave Balance was moving to per-employee pricing and the decision was final. The support team would absorb the fallout either way — so we gave them ninety minutes to think out loud about it before the emails went out.
- Product·3 min read
Conversation Cafe: Sitting With Bad News Before Trying to Fix It
We shipped a test generator that wrote four hundred wrong assertions into customer repos. The instinct was an action plan by lunch. What the team needed first was a talking piece and four rounds of nobody being allowed to interrupt.
- Product·3 min read
Impromptu Networking Over Video: Connecting Two Teams Who'd Never Met
An in-house LMS team and four contract integration engineers were about to build cohort scheduling together, having never spoken. Three rounds of two-person breakout rooms did in twelve minutes what a month of standups wouldn't have.
- Product·3 min read
Impromptu Networking: Fifteen Minutes That Fixed a Twenty-Person Kickoff
A two-way email sync kickoff had twenty people in the room and about six of them talking. Three rounds of five-minute pairs on one repeated question got every voice into the project before the first slide.
- Product·3 min read
Design Storyboards for a Migration: What a Merchant Does with a Major Version Nobody Wants
Polo Themes had a major version ready and merchants who had every reason to stay put. Storyboarding the upgrade — including the five weeks of not upgrading — turned a release plan into a migration the shop could actually survive.
- Product·3 min read
Design Storyboards: Drawing the Path from `npx shortest` to a Merged Pull Request
Shortest's install command took eleven seconds and our activation numbers were dismal. Storyboarding the whole path — install, first run, first review, first merge — showed that the product ended two days before the moment that mattered.