PicoBlog

Hello and welcome to Gossip Time, a weekly guide to the stars by Allie Jones. This week: a pop star and a tight end hit the stage, an actress hits a sour gummy, and Ben Affleck hits the bricks. Maybe Taylor Swift can pick our next president? She did a masterful job casting Travis Kelce as her current public boyfriend — he is perhaps her first romantic partner to truly understand her fame and know what to do with it.

As I was scanning the news last week, I saw an article on Taylor Swift. I don’t consider myself a Swiftie and I don’t even listen to her music. But I fell down a rabbit hole because some of the headlines around Ms. Swift and motherhood piqued my interest. I know many of her fans relate to her lyrics and songs, so on I read. Mainly, this one in the New Yo…

Taylor Swift named her new album The Tortured Poets Department, and when your colleague muses aloud, I wonder if we could get an actual poet to weigh in, and when you are an actual published poet on staff—before I wrote a memoir, I published three poetry collections, please buy one that is still in print—you know what to do. I remain frustrated with the Decoder Ring being the new default approach to pop music fandom.

For five days this month, Taylor Swift was a major presence about a mile from my house. I live in Philly, a mile from Lincoln Financial Field where she stopped for three nights for her long sold-out Eras Tour. When I opened my windows, I could hear her performing. If you’ve been living under a rock, Taylor Swift is a singer-songwriter who first gained recognition in the mid-2000s for her country music style and “relatable” lyrics.

Hope everybody either had a delightful holiday, or that you are mid-delightful holiday, and the pleasures continue, unabated, until all the bills roll in. Today I am going to re-print something I recently wrote for the Daily Beast, because I just have to. I had so much fun writing it, and ended up reading and re-reading it many times through happy tears, like a complete drip. The prompt was: “600 words on your personal hero of 2023” and friends, I searched my soul.

People often distinguish between problem solving and problem definition.  The product manager’s responsibility is to define the problem to be solved. The team's responsibility is to solve the problem. There are issues with this. I don’t think the distinction is as helpful as we think. Every problem is a nested solution to a higher level problem. Every problem is a collection of nested problems. For example “our enterprise deals take too long to close” assumes that accelerating enterprise deals will have some sort of positive business impact, or will solve a higher level problem.

Unexpected time to write today… (I wrote a post about Product-Reality Fit yesterday). Have you ever been in a discussion about the definition of a problem and found the whole conversation going in circles? You're not alone. Talking about problems is problematic. Consider something as simple (it is not simple) as the distinction between “a problem” and “the problem”. (Caveat, this post will seem basic for people skilled in RCA, safety science, incident analysis, human factors, etc.

I've always been bothered by how teams use words and phrases like maintenance, keeping the lights on (KTLO), and business as usual. I get what they mean, but there always seems to be a stigma around this work. This is problematic because work in this category is often the highest leverage/value work a team might tackle. When we maintain a car—oil changes, tire rotations, etc.—we aim to keep the car running smoothly and safely.

I received great feedback on my last post on tradeoffs and polarities. In that post, we explored tradeoffs like quality vs. speed at different levels of skill and experience. Someone suggested I tackle scale and efficiency. Ok!  A common—probably because it is common—perception of the relationship between scale and efficiency is that as companies scale, they become less efficient. Bureaucracy increases; culture erodes; coordination costs multiply; operational complexity increases; risk aversion dampens innovation; motivation and the "