The 10th Edition - On North Star Metrics, Systemantics & Architecture Astronauts

Hello,

Here’s what’s on my mind:

“When we decide to opt out of deciding in some area of life, we don’t have to think about opportunity costs.” - Barry Schwartz

I’m rewatching this video on the North Star Metrics & OKRs connection by John Cutler (40 min). One key mistake I made when probing into North Star Metrics was going in without a great clarity of the strategy, which the North Star Metric distills down & makes measurable. Strategy before Metrics. Market strategy before Product strategy.

You probably don’t have time for the whole video, so some good highlights are at 9:40 & 33:33.

Both are from an old book that blew me away, called “Systemantics”

Working on a design systems team, this makes my mind burst. 

And systems are everywhere - so it applies to us all.

The End of Software, Again - An interesting take on the death of the horizontal SaaS, and the new paradigm (maybe) coming (10 mins)

Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You - the founder of Trello & Stack Overflow wrote this brilliant essay 20 years ago, and it’s perfectly timely today, especially if you don’t get the hype around web3 & the Metaverse (10 mins)

On Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners and Theft - my favorite article I often go back to. It talks about the idea of products moving through stages, from Genesis to Commodity, with Commodity products becoming the platform for new Genesis products to emerge. Then, it talks about how companies can take advantage of that and bring in those products in Genesis under their wing. Innovation at scale. (10 mins)