How to make it to the NHL: Be born in January If you haven't read the original Outliers work by Malcolm Gladwell, it's interesting. Professional hockey players are overwhelmingly born in January, February, and March. How come? Most NHL players are originally from Canada. Canadian youth hockey leagues use a January 1 birth-date cutoff. A child born in January is nearly a full year older than a teammate born in December of the same calendar year. At age 8 or 9, a 10-to-11-month age gap means...
7 days ago • 3 min read
Good news, sexism is solved! If you didn't see the tech news last week, the annual Grace Hopper conference was cancelled this year. Last year for its 25th anniversary, over 25,000 people attended, mostly women early in their tech careers looking to build community. This year, it was cancelled with just a few weeks of notice. Of course, the cancellation makes total sense, because obviously the tech industry is at total gender parity now. Every engineering group is filled with women! Female...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Where are they now? One of my great joys is serving as a job reference for people who did awesome work at Textio over a long period of time. Jobs are temporary, but the relationships you build on the job can last your entire career. As a leader, there are few rewards like seeing your former team go on to accomplish amazing things after working with you. Even better if they're accomplishing those amazing things together with people they met on your team. Some companies have especially strong...
21 days ago • 3 min read
Operator mode Back when I was raising money for my company, I grouped investors into two groups: realists and dreamers. Realists made our idea smaller by finding all the reasons it would fail. Dreamers made our idea bigger by imagining category-bending ways to apply it. In time, I grew to appreciate both personas. But as a dreamer myself, I'll admit that I was more drawn to the dreamers. Especially early on when our ideas were new and fragile. I've spent the last few years working as an...
28 days ago • 3 min read
3-2-1 vote A few weeks back, I wrote about why deciding team values is not a democracy. This week, I want to talk about something else that is often treated as a democracy, but shouldn't be: marketing. No one thinks you should decide your data architecture, your security posture, or your pricing model by employee vote. But when it comes to messaging, brand, and storytelling, suddenly everyone's an expert. Curiouser and curiouser Early on at Textio, I worked with an engineer who had...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
"AI like a girl" Sometime over the last 20 years, The Industry Decided that digital assistants were girls. Siri, Alexa, and oodles more from startups, typically with few human women involved in their development. Digital assistants, female; the developers and marketers of digital assistants, not so much. I won't rehash the internet's worth of content that has already been written about this. These days, more companies offer configurable names, personas, and voices for their personified AI...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Solve it with a sticky note Many years ago, I went to an offsite where the executive in charge had planned a values exercise. We all had to write down our top values on sticky notes. Then we pasted everything on the whiteboard, organized the notes into similar clusters, and voila! The top vote-getters became our official team values. Leaving the exercise, our three team values were: Win no matter what People come first The customer is always right Read those again slowly. When the values came...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Other people's meetings I've published a lot of data about meetings. A couple of years back, I collected a corpus of 1,100+ hours of recorded meetings and found that more people participate when meetings are in-person, particularly women. I also found that in person, people are more likely to have conversations where they disagree. At the time I was doing this analysis, I had very few meetings myself. My calendar had gone from CEO chaos to just a couple of hours of meetings a day. In other...
about 2 months ago • 3 min read
Garden variety Every spring, I plant tomatoes and whatever else looks good at the plant nursery. I do not have a green thumb, so I am inordinately proud when I harvest food that my family is able to eat. We also have a farm box delivered to our house weekly all summer. It is highly convenient, and the produce is better than anything I grow myself. The other day my daughter asked me why I plant my own garden when the veggie box is delicious and comes every week. It's a good question. Why do I...
2 months ago • 3 min read