Essays on the science (and art)
of product management

"When you stop feeling like a startup, you should start to worry."

"We should take refuge in the fact that very crude systems can accomplish an awful lot. Elegant capabilities are nice, but often unnecessary."

"If you're doing something 'clever,' you're probably doing it wrong."

"The teams at Bell Labs that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding. Yet in the process they created not only new products but entirely new—and lucrative—industries."

"There is definitely a split between people who design primarily from horse sense, from instinct, and then let the spreadsheets fill in the blanks. And then there are the people who start with the spreadsheets."

"When judging the relative merits of programming languages, some still seem to equate 'the ease of programming' with the ease of making undetected mistakes."

"The computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention—with the possible exception of handguns and tequila."

"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter."

"A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do."

"Profanity is the one language understood by all programmers."