All too often I will get pulled into a meeting where I am told we need to (generically) report stats or need to write up an explanation. What is even scarier is that others in the meeting will proceed to do just that without once pausing and asking who the stats or explanation are for.

Say it is a website we are reporting stats about, so we choose to report stats around the number of users and some basic demographic information. This information is great and something we should have on hand for understanding our users, the marketing department or the our senior management would certainly love it. But, after building the report, you learn that it is for finance. Finance does not care about the number of users – unless you are telling them the variable cost per user maybe. What finance really wanted to know was how much the website was costing to operate and how the cost is trending in comparison to the yearly projection. These costs are not something the marketing department would care about; unless it came out of their budget.

This was written almost a year ago and was the intended first post to this journal.

It is a strange day that I sit here and write my first entry; something I had wanted to do for the past couple years but just had not found the time. But today is a strange day, it is the first time in a year that I have finished work and had nothing else to do.

Recently I listened into the planning meeting of one of my engineering teams in which they were talking about a solution to a problem which was of little value to our users and did not align with our current company’s strategy. This peaked my interest and after the meeting, I investigated to understand where the request came from. Quickly, I found that the product owner for the team had been asked by their boss to fix a problem that a C-Level brought to their attention, and was under the impression it was a critical bug.

Recently, I did a 360 review of myself where I got feedback from friends, family, peers, subordinates, and supervisors about my strengths and weakness. Several comments stood out about how I am a calming force and how I have a way of describing why something is done. Both have an underlying commonality: the “perception” of taking the longer view.

We commonly hear phrases like just look at the big picture, focus on the war; not the battle, or take a longer view. But how do you actually do this? As with many human things, it starts with understanding oneself and truly being honest with oneself.

I was in a speakeasy style bar in San Fransisco with some coworkers where a product had popped up on the television screen that caught my interest. Now the product itself was not the interesting part of this experience, but it was the fact that this was the third time I had seen this product.

The first time I saw this product was about three months before, when I had decided to try out TikTok and developed the addiction to scrolling endless videos. While scrolling I had come across this product, which had an account dedicated to it with several videos totaling over a million views. Each video had a link back to their website which if ordered from would dropship this product from China to you doorstep at more than a 50% markup. It was pretty easy to find the exact product they were selling on AliExpress and the single product layout Shopify site is pretty common in this area. The marketing at this stage is mostly just a numbers game, more people that see videos of the product equals more people that click the link and more people that buy the product.

In at least the United States school system, we spend so much time learning how to write. In K-12 we learn to structure our paragraphs, papers, and use citations in such a way to convey information that we have found from other sources and with that to write some of the least interesting papers. Then we move into undergraduate in college and we learn to take the works of others that we found in K-12 and build upon them with a couple original ideas and add conclusions based upon them. But in this process we learn how to report, not how to write our thoughts down and exam them.