Category: Books

Book :: The Making Of A Manager

~ michael_seedplus ~ Leave a comment

Finally finished this one off this weekend :: https://amzn.to/2LSnC8M

Really good read. I took 7 pages of notes and will keep the book around for reference.

As with any book there was a few chapters I found less relevant to me but most of it was great information.

There were many a framework that I found useful like how to run a meeting, how to do 1-1, team stuff and long-range planning.

If you happen to manage people and want to get better at it or aspire to be a better manager – this book is worth a read.

Enjoy!

Book report :: How to Raise Successful People: Simple Lessons for Radical Results

~ michael_seedplus ~ Leave a comment

https://amzn.to/2Z3T4UU

It’s a good read but I lost interest towards the end but that happens in a lot of books. Most are always a chapter or two, too long.

I also felt by the 3/4 mark I had gotten the gist and was more interested in putting some of it in action.

The gist is try to raise nice kids who are independent. Worthy goal but look around and most kids miss the mark. Mine included but there was some good advice for how to fix it.

Singapore is a weird place for this since one would think given the safety of the country that this would be a perfect place to raise independent kids but yet the country and the system tends to coddle kids way too much.

Small story. I had to go to the public primary school and argue a bit to allow my 6 year old, primary one daughter, to go home on public transit alone. So many kids are picked up by parents, helpers or put on expensive private buses that they seem to find allowing a kid to go home by herself to be a strange concept. I get the whole safety thing but this is Singapore and kids should know how to get themselves home. It is funny to me when my kids argue with a fellow student over tuition or test scores but yet these same kids can’t tell you how to use the public transit system to get to their own home. My kids don’t have smart phones either so they know how to from reading the maps and figuring it out.

My point is that this is a country that we can take advantage of to build more independent kids.

I learned a lot from the book and I have more work to do at home.

If anyone wants a refreshing take on it then this book is for you.

(LINK) “Prefer” Postmortem: 6 Lessons Learned From A Network Of Independent Professionals

~ michael_seedplus ~ Leave a comment

“Prefer” Postmortem: 6 Lessons Learned From A Network Of Independent Professionals

Great post about a product that didn’t make it. Lots to grok in here.

Love this part:

You can’t obsess enough about the top-of-the-funnel.

The more time the Prefer team spent with different Soloists and Clients, the more we realized how many different value propositions there were for first-time users. We learned that some clients just wanted the ability to discover services, some Soloists only cared about referrals while others only sought a better way to serve existing clients, while other pairs of Soloists and Clients just valued things like easy billing and automatic notifications for appointments. With such variance of preferences, the “first mile” of the customer experience either didn’t evolve fast enough or failed to serve a broad enough set of users. This experience emboldened my observation that most product teams only spend the final mile of their experience building the product thinking about (and testing) the first mile of the customer’s experience using the product. It should often be the opposite.

Speaking of Scott – his book is a great read!