Live design review at Basecamp
3 best links on product, design and solopreneurship.
Yo! Happy New Year, everyone ⭐️
And welcome to the 22 new subscribers.
You can explore the curated top 1% reads on product, design and solopreneurship here.
And long-form essays here.
This week, I’m covering:
Design: Live design review for "Basecamp project stacks"
Product: How to Write a Product Strategy in a 1 Day / 1 Week / 1 Month
Solopreneurship: Commit to competence in this coming year
37signals: Live design review for "Basecamp project stacks"
I love what Basecamp does and how it executes. Below is the live walk-through of their design team, which Jason Fried is reviewing. Tons of real-world learning
How to Write a Product Strategy in a 1 Day / 1 Week / 1 Month
A product strategy is your plan for creating the most value possible for your users and your company. And you do this by focusing your time on a small set of really high impact work, rather than diluting your efforts across all the different things you could potentially do.
Good product strategies therefore have two core features that allow you to create amazing value for your users:
They are composed of high impact work
They are mutually reinforcing
That is to say, of all the pieces of work that you could do, product strategies choose ones that create more value in a shorter amount of time. But not only that, they also choose pieces of work that when combined create more value than the sum of their parts by
Commit to competence in this coming year
“But I don’t have time!”, is what I often hear. Or, even worse, “it doesn’t matter, just ship it!”. But it does matter. Because your career, and even your business, is not a single sprint. It’s an intellectual iron man repeated until you’re in the ground. Whatever time you take to refine your technique now will be paid back to you for the next 20-40-60 years of your career. Getting your posture right early is how you reap those dividends of good form.
It’s the same thing with writing. Not just for public consumption, like this, but for internal communication as well. Every comment, every proposal, every bug report is an opportunity to become a little better, a little clearer, and a little more persuasive. But you have to work on it, it doesn’t just happen.
Tools and resources
AI chatbots and their Cringe problem →
What makes us feel “off” about responses we get from LLMs.Is technology harming our brains? →
How tech is limiting our critical thinking capabilities.Designer layoff stories →
Retaliation, targeted eliminations, and other horror stories.