Max 🐈 Saltonstall

Reflecting on some recent advising sessions, something I don't see talked about as much is how critical it is to have an incredibly strong, unified* Design leadership team in order to build an even stronger design team and product. Why this is so critical 👇 What I’ve seen happen when you DON’T have that unified Design leadership team: 1. Massive gaps in the user experience – Let’s start with the obvious one. When Design leaders are staying neatly in their corners and not communicating, the experience degrades pretty quickly. Especially where the "seams" of their teams/org are. We've all seen (and let's be real…probably have been guilty of at times) the navigation structure that clearly shows the org chart vs. what users actually need. This can happen way too quickly without that unified team. 2. A lack of Design’s ability to influence product direction — The best Design leadership teams work together, pushing each other, to have a unified perspective of what the big things are to tackle in the user experience that leverages the unique expertise of the Design functions, all the way from it being grounded in research, to it having a compelling narrative. When they have that unified perspective and are all consistently sharing that perspective, it is so much easier for cross-functional partners to understand and buy-in on it. 3. Design works against Design — When Design leaders don't have a shared perspective on what is important (both in the user experience and the culture), don't have the right level of visibility into each other's work, or even worse, when they don't have mutual respect for each other, it leads to the leaders (mostly) inadvertently working against the progress of the other leaders/teams vs. together toward a unified vision. 4. A limit to the flexibility and scalability of the Design team – To build great experiences at scale, having the flexibility of shifting people to focus on different parts of the product is critical. When the culture and processes are dramatically, instead of it being exciting for that person to focus on a new space, it is incredibly disorienting, slows everything down, and can quickly lead to burnout. *A note on when I say "unified". I don't mean at all that they agree on everything. In fact, the opposite. They push each other the most, early and often. However, they have shared respect, cultivated by their leader, and shared responsibility around aligning within a timely manner. THEN they support each other in any way they can with hurdles they may each face (e.g. cross-functional buy-in or team-wide communication). ——— Is this interesting? Let me know if you want me to share more on how exactly you can cultivate this strong design leadership team –OR– if you want more personalized advice around this, set up some time with me here: https://lnkd.in/g-vyymtW

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Unfortunately OpenAI o1 isn't "reasoning" or "thinking" as we humans define it. OpenAI has (intentionally?) muddied the UI/UX waters by introducing verbs like "thinking" / "analysing" etc. to encourage users to anthropomorphize what is going on behind the scenes. o1 is more like iterative prompt generation, and then doing next token prediction for each prompt using an agent. So, yes — it may generate better answers in some contexts, especially the ones where RLHF has been used on its chain-of-though processes (prompt generation), like maths and programming, but its likely to fall into many of the same general traps as next token prediction. The structure and sequence of tokens doesn't *generally* allow you to infer logic. Syntax is not semantics, and the jury is still out on what level of semantic generalisation LLMs can encode, to say nothing of their implementations of algorithms for logical inference and search. #LLM #OpenAI #o1

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📣 BIG NEWS - I’m looking for my next full-time role in open source community program management 📣 I often focus on glue work that enables OSS communities, so to share a bit more about what I’ve worked on — here are some places you might know me from: ✨ I ran the brand recognition and community trust building efforts at Deis, an early Kubernetes dev tooling start-up that was acquired by Microsoft in 2017, where I worked with Matt Butcher to create The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes! ✨ Phippy becoming the mascot for CNCF? I helped orchestrate the donation and release of the original book and characters under CC-BY in the spirit of open source! I also started off my professional speaking journey by presenting the donation and new book - Phippy Goes To The Zoo - on the keynote stage at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA ’18 in Seattle. ✨ With Helm, the Kubernetes package manager, I’ve been there since the inception — from its debut at the first KubeCon in San Francisco, to planning the inaugural Helm Summit conference in Portland and then hopping the ocean to Amsterdam for our Helm Summit EU event, to helping launch Helm 3, I’ve been managing our developer community efforts since 2015. ✨ With the Microsoft acquisition of Deis, we were brought in to help turn around Microsoft’s open source reputation. With that objective in mind, I worked on the Cloud Native upstream team doing community management for 10+ open source projects including Helm, Brigade, Virtual Kubelet, Open Service Mesh, Porter, and more! Additionally, I helped consult other teams within Microsoft, including Akri and Dapr, on how to execute on open source community efforts. ✨ For the last 1.5+ years, I’ve been focused establishing Fermyon as a leading innovator in the emerging open source WebAssembly ecosystem. From building out and running our marketing calendar, to scaling out our conference presence, to guiding decisions on community interactions, I wore multiple hats on our team driving marketing deliverables, with a community-focused flavor. If your team (or anyone you know) needs help optimizing how you do OSS (whether it’s marketing, community management, or program management), please let me know! Intros and referrals would be much appreciated. In the mean time, check out my personal website for more details: www.karenchu.online Please & thank you!

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You know there's some momentum happening if Marty Cagan decides to write about a product topic you've been at work trying to enable for years. Love to see it, and BIG shout out to Stacey Langer for providing her expertise in this article! 🧘‍♀️ Here are a few other pros that came to mind for the product model: 1. The government product model makes product (public) value and risk management possible. Product risks—such as value, desirability, viability, and feasibility—are not risks that traditional project management models can effectively manage. Government agencies interact with the public through the services they offer, but government digital experiences are not always inherently valuable. It’s what these digital services do for users that create individual and public value. Building tech alone ≠ value. 2. Evidence-driven decision-making uses discovery, iterative delivery, and testing with actual end users, where you continuously learn. This enables many things, mainly building with your users while validating the solution direction. It can also enable an incremental funding option specifically for products/services (traditionally called ‘projects’) that are especially complex, high priority, and/or contain many unknowns. 3. Driving technology from a place of vision and strategy measured in outcomes that can align and even influence policy changes. 🤸‍♀️ Some realities in trying to adopt a product model in gov: 1. The word ‘product’ often can be confusing, especially when it doesn’t fully represent what is being built and managed. A lot, if not most, of the technology work happening in government often involves solving service design challenges. So, in gov products, you focus on solving for the end-to-end experience, which can mean processes and non-tech things. 2. Conway’s Law and government systems replicate the organizational structures in agencies, which are often siloed and isolated. This is often represented as 'legacy tech.' Much of the work in 'product' in government is modernizing legacy systems, which requires the same principles as the product model but often a different emphasis on its varied approaches. Not all products or digital services start from the same place; many are not greenfield. 3. Traditional ATO structures can stop the product operating model in its tracks. To overcome this, it is important to integrate the ATO into the product model, utilizing a ‘continuous ATO’ operating model. But see point 2 above. At the end of the day, the product model isn’t a process you learn to implement and then just implement. It’s not just ‘Agile’ or Scrum or DevOps. Those methods can (or sometimes can’t) enable the product model. It's a mentality and discipline for continuously using new inputs to deliver value throughout a product's LIFE. It's a cultural change as much as an operating change, and there is no 'single way' to do it. However, operating from product thinking principles can help us start from the right place.

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Reader feedback for my latest post about how to use AI and my PRD template to never have to write a PRD from scratch again. Read the full post here: https://lnkd.in/eJjVXJUJ

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Recently took on the challenge of building an app from scratch using a new tech stack by leaning into ChatGPT. The outcome was much better than I expected and I only had to deep dive into the code in a few tricky situations. https://www.jimoto.life/ (It originally started out as an app to help my in-laws find a good neighborhood to move to, but I got carried away with a few other fun features... 😅 code, layout, even the background image and color schemes are AI generated/suggested.) ChatGPT is a must have for anyone in tech for sure . #ChatGPT #AI #AppDevelopment

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We're hiring for some *very* special roles at Mozilla in our Innovation Studio as we build out some additional innovation pods. Principal Product Manager, New Products AND Senior Staff Product Designer, New Products. Are you an entrepreneur who wants to build new stuff with the support of larger organization when you need it? Are you passionate about building an AI future? Enterprise offerings? What about technology that helps families and protects kids? AI-generated Website builder? Yep. Products that make online shopping better and more trustworthy? Yep. Bug bounties for GenAI exploits?!? You betcha. The agent of the future - beyond the browser? Holy 🐄! Having a track record of building and shipping 0-to-1 is a MUST for this role. So is the ability to get stuff done independently and fast. The future of the internet depends on it! These are all areas we're exploring in our New Product Strategy. Come work with me, Imo Udom and tons of talented folks at Mozilla. Apply at the links below. If you're going to DM me I want to hear about the successful 0-to-1 project you built, what problem it solved and what it achieved.

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The biggest mindset shift most senior PMs / Designers / Eng Mgrs / TLs who are building customer-facing products in midsized & large companies must make: Your main job is to make your product win. While it may seem like this Job # 1 should be obvious to all, it really isn’t. Here are some other leading contenders for Job # 1: - Main job is to make my manager happy - Main job is to make execs happy - Main job is to keep stakeholders happy - Main job is to keep team members happy - Main job is to build excellent systems - Main job is to get promoted - Main job is to launch as promised - Main job is to create user delight - Main job is to create customer value (some people LOVE saying this one) Now, I understand that we live in the real world and that there are “good reasons” why the above contenders are at least worthy of consideration. But I am saying what I am saying precisely because we live in the real world and because I think you should do your best to improve your odds of *long-term career success*. You see, as a passionate & ambitious product person who builds the mindset of making your product win as your Job # 1, you will do things & learn things that most of your other peers are not doing & learning. And by doing that over the long arc of your career, you will position yourself to reach closer to whatever is your optimal success potential. This is clearly not the only possible path and it may not be the right path for some / many (no single path can be). But it is at least worth considering if it seems to feel right to you. Most people spend years / decades in mid-sized & large companies and yet are never even told that this is an option they should consider for their long-term career success. If that is you, I want you to view this post just as a possibly helpful pointer. If it doesn’t resonate, that’s totally fine. But if it does resonate, you might over the long-term see yourself becoming a more competent, a more effective, and possibly even a more happy product person.

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Someone recently asked me how I make impact on an established design system. Here's a before and after of how I updated one of the most common atoms in the Trellis Design System at Lacework. 💔 BEFORE 1️⃣ Didn’t account for all use cases. • Lack of focus state and destructive button variant • The opacity of button fills for disabled state pushed it out of compliance with WCAG standards when used on different backgrounds • Missing documentation for block button • Designers had to detach the button to include right icon variant • Need for a smaller button size 2️⃣ Included unnecessary or unrelated use cases. • Large button size (40px) was never used • Other components were buried inside button (link, icon button) making it difficult for designers to easily locate them in the library 3️⃣ The existing version made more work for teams to identify variant and type. • While looking at the component set, it’s not immediately apparent what each interactive state is or variant type at a glance. Designers have to either select each button and review the menu or go back and forth between the guideline and the component set sheet. 💜 AFTER 1️⃣ Updated component to cover more use cases. • I added the destructive variant and ability to set left or right icon placement. • Introduction of focus state in the button component (and across the rest of the library) served as specs for implementing keyboard navigation across ~70% of prod. • New color tokens were based on solid color values which improved accessibility of disabled button states. 2️⃣ Removed or relocated unrelated components. • I relocated link and icon button to separate pages and created specs and docs specifically for those use cases. • The old large size was deprecated and an additional small size was introduced. 3️⃣ Optimized component documentation. • I established a new component documentation template that standardized guideline docs across the library. • Included labels for the component set sheet to ease identification of variant/type, link to react component library, status label, etc. 4️⃣ Incorporated rebrand styles along the way. • New pill shaped buttons per rebrand. • Adopted color and text Figma variables (tokens) to replace styles for more consistency and future scalability. This is just one example of the many ways I made our system a more accessible, reliable and efficient resource for our team. #DesignSystems #ProductDesigner #Components #DesignDocumentation #DesignSystemDesigner #OpenToWork

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Claude Artifacts are an incredible tool to prototype anything, even if you're not technical. I created a step-by-step guide with detailed prompts to create all six types of Artifacts below. 📌 Get it in your inbox tmr: https://creatoreconomy.so/

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Let me tell you about the one time I paired a design team with their product folks to work with a group of customers who had recently lost a loved one. It was an incredible project that led to a huge simplification of old, well-intentioned processes to help people. Together, we radically improved the experience by reducing the time it takes to report the Loss of a Loved One from 30 minutes down to 45 seconds. The outcomes were beyond expectations. By creating a process that spoke directly to the awful pain and needs of survivors, customer retention shot straight up and their assets remained under management in the amount of hundreds of millions of dollars. That type of “innovation” is easy to come by when you genuinely exercise empathy, listen, and co-create a way to pair their needs with those of the business. If you invest in providing time and empathy to earn trust and loyalty, the money and assets will follow. Designers can help make this happen. We can’t and shouldn’t own the work (that’s your role President Business), but dammit, we can put one hell of a huge dent in the problems and challenges people have daily. My name is Greg Storey and I love working with your designers who do not have a dedicated design leader or a design ops role. We can do good things together to improve your team’s skills, processes, maturity, and cross-functional relationships. I have done this work many times at all sizes and scales, from small teams of ten to global enterprise programs of thousands. I'm looking to work with a team or two fractionally on a quarterly basis. Act now, right now! Supplies are limited. If that's not you, then take two seconds and share this story with your network! Tell your Uber driver about it. Use this tale to break the ice whit the poor person who has to sit in the middle seat on the flight home. Jump in front of a live news broadcast and say my name. Whatever it takes to help me find teams that need the kind of vision, guidance, and growth I provide in spades. #design #fractionalleadership #designervsgoliath

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Having worked on several hardware products in my day, it pains me to read the deluge of negative Humane Ai Pin reviews. This stuff is hard. A few unsolicited reflections: 1. Whatever hardware form factor comes next needs to bridge today’s technology. The iPod only really took off once Steve Jobs (begrudgingly) green-lit Windows support. And as Apple Retail specialists circa 2010, we were there to port the masses over from BlackBerry (anyone else remember the Cellebrite? 😅). And...in 2024? Well, having no smartphone integration — or at least app — is just a nonstarter. 2. Whatever succeeds our phones needs to do the things our phones do, but 10x better. Or if it's going to live alongside our phone, at least *one* thing 10x better. It surprises me how much the Humane Ai Pin's flaws and prospects “rhyme” with those we grappled with working on Google Glass ten years ago. I believe successors will come in time, but the use case, price, and/or interface for a voice-enabled camera peripheral still need to evolve. 3. Always undersell and overdeliver. Why did Humane hype this thing for years, rather than quietly toiling and eventually releasing something nobody was expecting that surprised and delighted? Perhaps for recruiting, but I'd argue they've done irreparable damage to their brand. All that being said, I remain more excited about new hardware devices than I have been in...well, ever? AI is sparking an explosion in new device and interface experimentation, and it would be galvanizing for the whole industry to see the next big thing come from a new entrant the next time around.

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I feel conflicted after receiving an arguably awful AI Support Assistant response from one of my favorite apps. I love the Day One Journaling app, and don’t say that about many technology solutions. If they’re tracking NPS, I’m definitely a Promoter. As a longtime, daily, paid user, I’ve come to enjoy two key features: the streak tracker and the On This Day function (past entries review). A recent iOS update moved these two items off the “home” screen. Dumb. In the spirit of don’t-ask-don’t-get, I used the in-app support/feedback function to ask if there was a way to get back to the previous view. I immediately received an email response, which I assumed was a typical “message received” confirmation. It wasn’t. The Day One AI Assistant resolved my support ticket and gleefully increased the resolved-without-human KPI. While it was noted that the response was from an AI Assistant, here’s what made it feel off. ❌ Using first-person humanized language, stating, ”I understand that you miss having...” No, you don’t. Empathy from an AI model can only be read as fake. ❌ The provided context was disregarded. Although I had clearly indicated that I knew how the new features worked, I was given detailed steps to access each. ❌ A CYA note that “they still provide a comprehensive way to” do these things. Technically correct, but utility [for me] was diminished. ❌ Reassurance that “I hope that helps!” No, you don’t. Well, somebody cares about the support KPIs. I fully acknowledge that I may uniquely use the app and that Day One needs to optimize the user experience based on usage trends. However, being instantaneously dismissed by an AI bot half-pretending to be a human feels icky. Ok, mister Product and UX guy, how would you improve it? I’m glad you asked. ✅ First, I would decide whether to model a human response or create a more intelligent robot, tailoring the responses accordingly. ✅ If modeling a human, I would delay the response to give the impression of human review and consideration. The speed of the attempted human-like response made me value it less. ✅ The AI agent should know that I’ve been a daily user for years, with thousands of journal entries, who’s accessed the new navigation paths and taken this into account with the response or chosen to hand it off to a human. I have issues with the feature changes that started this whole thing, but I’ll leave that for another day. DayOne Product Managers and other AI support agent creators, I’d love to hear your perspective.

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Every day we hear about AI making rapid advances, and coming up with creative solutions which were unimaginable barely two year ago. My fellow (ex) Planning Comissioner, R "Ray" Wang is moderating a panel on how AI will impact the job market. ============================================== What does AI mean for parents and students in the college and job market? Join our own AI experts from Cupertino for a special community educational event and forum: Liangfang Chao, Ph.D. -Senior Software Engineer -Cupertino City Council Gopal Kumarappan - Head of Engineering at JP Morgan Chase Peter Chu (https://lnkd.in/gM9kQZJQ) - Managing Partner - AsiaTech Ventures Seema Swamy, Ph.D. - Executive Leader of Insights in Fortune 100 Company Moderated by R “Ray” Wang - CEO of Constellation Research - An Expert on AI, Web3, and software - An Author of Best-Selling Books Location: Community Hall, 10350 Torre Ave, Cupertino Time: 6/30, Sunday, 2-4 pm We'll ask questions such as: - Where are we in AI today? - What are the latest AI trends? - How will AI impact future career opportunities? - What should parents know about AI? - How will AI impact students? Must register here -

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Strategic Storytelling for product leaders was a fab session yesterday with TopProds community led by Ross Webb, MBA I love the takeaways below. I’m always intrigued and impressed with what people learn from my talks… helps me refine the message also. An amazing feedback loop. Thanks again for inviting me 💪🏻 —— My focus is on bridging worlds within organisations and sectors with a focus on creating amazing customer & product experiences. I’m passionate about bringing an element of creativity back into to the product conversation. 📞 DM me if you want to know more. Available for consulting gigs (short term / long term / fractional engagements) #productstrategy #productmanagement #digitalproduct #storytelling #leadership

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👀 Hidden jobs! 👀 (Sorry/NotSorry for the clickbait title) 😎 I recently learned that there are many VC (Venture Capital) firms out there that maintain their own job boards for open positions at the companies that they invest in. This is a great resource to find openings at startups (and some pretty well established companies, too) that may not be listed here on LinkedIn or other boards. I thought it would be useful to put together a list of the ones I have found so far. If you are looking for work, check out my list! (A work in progress, but please repost and share). https://lnkd.in/gnQsb3H8 Oh and did I mention that I am #opentowork and looking for a new role in Engineering Management? Check out my profile and HMU if you've got something interesting! 🙏 Thanks!

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Setting a vision is just the start. Think about the bold moves needed to make it happen. Sundar, Google's CEO, set a daring vision to tackle climate change. That's where the real work begins. Executing a vision requires bold and tough decisions. Google is buying nuclear energy to feed its AI data centers. Other big tech companies are following this lead. This is a big kudos to Sundar and his leadership team. They are executing on a sustainability vision. Leadership is about taking action. And Sundar is showing the way.

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Closing slide from my presentation yesterday on design quality. This is the standard I hold for our industry: Every company large enough to have a CPO or CTO should also have a CDO. The Chief Design Officer (CDO) is most responsible for elevating the quality of the customer experience, with special attention to craft. No other individual should care more about craft and quality, with the exception of the CEO in some cases. If you're actively interviewing for your next role, when you're asked “what questions do you have for me" ask who Design reports into. Follow up by asking how this impacts design quality and craft, and how your role can also impact these. #design #quality #craft

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Listen to this podcast snippet on using a question-clustering approach to RAG applications design from a real-world practitioner/consultant. https://lnkd.in/gepyHEBr

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