Acceptance Criteria

We answer some more Reddit questions this week, from helping a junior Product Manager find ways of telling people “no” without making them feel like they were told “no” to suggesting ways to help a startup PM get past the Shiny Object Syndrome of their CEO and making sure clients will actually pay for the […] The post E046: The art of saying “no” and battling Shiny Ob...

We dive back into Reddit this week to answer some questions and hopefully help some folks out. From a team where product managers are rewarded for sneaking features into releases, to a VP who is obsessed with RACI charts, a theme emerged this week of "everything in moderation" as our overarching recommendation. There's also a question of what to say when your boss asks you "to be more strategic" a...

This week we take a look at some recent news stories, from Meta's new Orion AR glasses to a Noble-prize-winning machine learning model and Google's disastrous attempt to replace perfectly good tech with an LLM chat bot in its Android phones. To read about John Mulaney's roast at the Salesforce conference, check out the article from Tech Crunch: https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/19/john-mulaney-skewer...

Continuing on from our last episode digging in to how self-driving cars work, this week we're taking a look at the state of the industry with some news stories about Tesla, Apple, GM, and Google's Waymo. From poor safety records to massive companies pulling out of the market, the current state of the industry doesn't look great for consumers. It also gives Kevin a chance to return to his favorite...

This week we look at the tech behind self-driving cars and debate whether today's GPUs are able to make decisions faster than the human brain and the ethics of whether your self-driving car should kill you to save the lives of the drivers around you. Good luck to the software engineers who need to sleep at night after trying to solve the trolley problem. Join the discussion on Reddit: https://www....

It's another news round-up as we look at the legal consequences facing Pavel Durov, the founder of Telegram, for enabling some pretty dark stuff on his end-to-end encryption chat app. Meanwhile, Boeing's woes continue as the Starliner has completely failed and stranded two astronauts on the ISS until February. We also dig into the latest in the epidemic of security breaches that have almost certai...

Unsurprisingly, we get a little heated this week as we return to everyone's favorite Kevin-vs-Andrew debate: AI We look at a few recent news stories where AI is the focus, including Microsoft's CEO for AI claiming that all content on the internet is free for them to steal to train the LLM models, a new app called Showrunner that wants to replace writers, directors, actors, and everyone involved in...

This week we dig into some recent news about Elon Musk's companies, from Twitter's terrible idea to roll out a Dislike button to its inability to comply with Brazilian law, as well as troubles with Tesla quarterly performance and the EU seeking to punish Twitter for ruining the Verified badge. It's not a good time to be Elon Musk, and while Andrew does his best to find the silver lining, Kevin's j...

It’s another episode of our segment User Stories, where we (hopefully) help some folks on Reddit. This week we’re looking at how to do customer interviews in a way that doesn't bias the interviewee but still provides helpful feedback, how to deal with a VP of Sales who goes running to the CEO to disagree with you about your roadmap, how transparent your start-up leadership should be on key busines...

It’s another episode of our segment User Stories, where we (hopefully) help some folks on Reddit. This week we're looking at whether Product folks should care how Engineering breaks out the items on their backlogs, how panicking in an emergency can lead to worse outcomes, whether anyone ever gets "good" at making roadmaps, and the struggles of an IT director with overbearing colleagues. Join the d...

This week we discuss the various types of online scams that are ruining people's lives as they attack them financially and emotionally. And we talk through ways to protect yourself and ensure the software you work on doesn't enable those vectors for your own users. Join the discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcceptanceCriteria/ And on the Discord: https://discord.gg/2Tyj8H9MFF The post...

It's another episode of our segment User Stories, where we (hopefully) help some folks on Reddit. This week, we look at whether you need to love the product you work on, whether there's a magic skill to keeping your energy up in meetings, and how to measure success for your software teams. Join the discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcceptanceCriteria/ And on the Discord: https://disco...

On Friday, July 19th, at 4:09AM UTC, a small update from cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike caused a cascading series of failures in critical Windows systems around the world. And while the bad update was halted by 5:27AM, the damage was already done. Over 8.5 million Windows machines triggered the dreaded Blue Screen of Death and key pieces of global infrastructure were knocked offline. In this emerg...

We do our best to present just the facts, ma'am, at the start of this week's episode looking at blockchain technologies and how they work. And then we spend 30 minutes complaining about just how stupid this whole thing is. From Bitcoin using more energy than entire countries to the NFT pump-and-dump scandal, it's a harsh look at a technology we can't really find a good use case for. Join the discu...

It's Part 2 of our conversation with our Pradeep Ittycheria, the President of the company we both work for, as we pick his brain on a number of topics both personal and professional. From making sure Product is helping provide clarity on the business value of Engineering's work, to understanding how to manage tech debt, we do our best to learn from his years of experience. Then we have some person...

This week we didn't have time to record a new episode, so we dug into the vault of old clips that had been cut for time - we can get onto some tangents that really diverge from the original point of the episode :) First up is whether AI will ever be able to learn enough to help recognize content that isn't appropriate in certain contexts, and then we dig into whether the metaverse will trap you in...

It's another long episode this week as we simply had too much to discuss! We dig into the concept of "Digital Friction": the overload of apps, information, and noise that plague our daily lives at work (and at home). From discussing what it is to trying to identify some solutions, it's a wide-ranging episode exploring technology and the dark side of our digital ecosystem. Join the discussion on Re...

In Part 1 of a two-part episode, we talk with Pradeep Ittycheria, the President of the company we both work for, and pick his brain about some articles he wrote on LinkedIn and lessons from his career and life. From the distinction between recognizing vs rewarding effort, to making sure your teams are fundamentally organized to deliver the most value, we talk through his thoughts on Value and Effo...

It's the another batch of User Stories, where we help some Redditors try and solve their problems. From a truly toxic environment where a Product Manager has been pitted against their Engineering Manager by bad leadership, to dealing with engineers being pulled off your team because they are the Subject Matter Experts and need to help other teams, we mostly try and tell people how to avoid getting...

This week is our longest episode yet as we try our best to explain one of the key skills we both think make us pretty good at our jobs (he said humbly): Pattern Matching. For anyone who needs to solve problems, it's a core skillset that we highly recommend folks develop and work at improving. We talk through high-level concepts, specific examples, and discuss the types of roles where this is most...

It's another episode of User Stories and Market Factors as we try to help some Redditors with their questions and look at recent news. Whether it's what to do when you get vague incomplete user stories from a business analyst, prioritizing bugs and tech debt with or with out a product manager's help, or figuring out how to map the architecture of your company's software platforms, we've got some (...

This week we dive back into some more Reddit user questions and help a UX person understand how they can work with Agile engineering teams, as well as discuss the myriad benefits of Product Managers learning to turn data into information with SQL. Also, some news items, including a global internet disaster averted at the last minute, Tesla's Cybertruck getting recalled, and the stock market reacts...

On this weeks' show we talk about the future of the data science role as low-code/no-code and other AI tools enable more people to work with machine learning models and generate business results. Also, we dig into the importance of partnering closely with Product Management and Engineering, and Andrew waxes poetic about his future AI post-scarcity utopia. Join the discussion on Reddit: https://www...

In Part 1 of a two-part episode, we talk with David Scripka about all things Data Science and Machine Learning. From what data scientists do to how machine learning models work, as well as the scary-fast evolution of the Large Language Models like ChatGPT, we cover some basics to help people understand what goes into making these AI models work. In Part 2 next week, we'll cover the rapidly changin...

This week we take a look at the Normalization of Deviance, a term coined by Diane Vaughan as she researched what really happened to the Challenger space shuttle in 1986. We talk about ways, big and small, that this anti-pattern can affect everything from massive enterprises like Boeing to startup software companies. Join the discussion on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AcceptanceCriteria/ And on...