Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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Guardrails and Plimsoll Lines
In an era where we have to assume that our data is being collected, and the data we collect, I think we need to get more nuanced about our guardrails. We need to think about what the worst possible outcome is, and then what the worst likely outcome is. We need to consider the dangers in different…
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Identify the problem, then offer the solution
You’ve got trouble, right here in River City It starts with P and that rhymes with T and that stands for trouble. The good people of River City were not dying to spend a lot of money on trombones and band costumes because they’re shiny. It’s because they understood a new problem and wanted to…
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How long has this been going on?
It’s easy to feel like AI* was the domain of science fiction and IBM moonshots until ChatGPT burst onto the public consciousness like Kool-Aid Man. It’s easy, but it’s not correct. What even is AI? LLMs have been around a lot longer than that, fixing your spelling and grammar and missed semicolons at the end…
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Brand and the Trust Thermocline
How do you feel about getting on a Boeing airplane right now, March of 2024? Maybe not as secure as you did last year, or before the 777 stories started appearing? 10 years ago, we never gave it a thought. Air travel was (and still is) much safer than the drive to the airport. We…
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Pardon our dust: revamping a website
I am both intensely curious and a little lazy, and I am passionate about effective communication. It’s not such a bad thing to know about myself.
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Progressive Delivery and AI*
The year is 2024. A group of writers who thought they had a complete book proposal looks at the landscape of technology, curses, and starts outlining a chapter on AI. We all write about AI now, except for the bits where AI writes about us. Progressive Delivery is “Delivering the right product to the right…
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My spicy Product Marketing opinion
Product-led growth is important, but it can’t be the whole product marketing plan. Some differentiating features don’t work or can’t be shown in a freemium model. And in an economy that prizes efficiency over expansion, counting on developers to have time to noodle around with experiments may not be sustainable.
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Book review: Kill It With Fire, by Marianne Belotti
I read this book slowly, not because it is long, or difficult, but because it is incredibly thought-provoking. Belotti has spent time doing the grinding work of upgrading the brownest of fields, and has managed to retain a sense of curiosity and fresh thinking that comes through in every example. The book’s layout is clear,…
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Brand defense
Watching Elon Musk’s “go fuck yourself, advertisers” interview gave me full-body cringe. I couldn’t help but sympathize with Andrew Russ Sorkin, who was just trying to ask some reasonable questions and give this dude a chance to recover what is left of X’s brand. They weren’t softball questions, but they had answers that could have…
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It’s December Eve, are you ready?
You are probably familiar with the retail rhythms of the seasons. You can think of it as what kind of candy you can buy, when chocolate moves smoothly from ghosts to pumpkins to tree decorations to hearts. If you work in any kind of e-commerce, from November to mid-January is a code-freeze all-hands-on-deck experience. Software…