Hi all, I hope this note finds you and your loved ones safe and healthy. With the current COVID-19 situation, I wondered when it will be a good time to provide a pre-launch update. The answer was clear. No time will be a good time. I must admit that too often I have found myself … Read more

Does this sound like nitpicking? Details matter! Simple, visible details that are regularly overlooked create a sort of background “cognitive grinding”. And be sure, this builds up a negative (often subconscious) emotional response from your customer towards your product. Once a customer told me: “if it does not look good on the outside, how can … Read more

I struggle writing a blog post in the middle of a planet level crisis. The truth is that a large part of me just wants to stay silent in reverence (and denial) for all the new, sudden suffering taking place in the world right now. When I think of all the different world catastrophes that … Read more

It is true, vision always runs ahead of execution. It is so easy to see what is inside our heads. But at 1:00 AM, I finish a day painstakingly laboring at what I think is possible, it feels that ever y t  h  i   n   g       t  a  k   e    s      f   o    r     e      v      e        r     … That’s fine. “It is supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do … Read more

Some years ago a business in our same building closed shop. They were a Title Company and they had lots of cool office supplies they let us take. Among fancy semi-transparent Post-It notes and other goodies I picked up a packet of red pens. “These will be great for red-marking contracts, resumes and things like … Read more

The worst way to start my day is staring at blank page. Let me explain. After a productive day, it is very rewarding to shut down my workspace with a sense of accomplishment. I often recap what I did and make a point to savor the progress. And then I realized this is the worst … Read more

Listening to a podcast talk about how we are conditioned to pick up our phone too often, I had an idea to try with the apps on my phone; or iPhone, in my case. The experiment consisted on moving the apps that ‘pull me in’ (i.e. the apps that ‘use me’) to a second, less … Read more

It is great to measure, and a lot of my consulting time was devoted to implement ways to measure things. Soft things, like innovation and value. All these measures are good, and at the same time I must remind myself and my clients that these measurements are proxies, pointers, guidance. Not the real thing. – … Read more

There is a charming term used in natural language processing called ‘perplexity’. It measures the strength of the prediction made by a model. It is related to the average number of branches offered at certain point. When there are a lot of choices offered, all of them with similar ‘weight’, the more perplexing it is … Read more