Simon Ouderkirk

As we wrap up Half Year Professional Development Conversation Season, it occurs to me that I have a small number of consistently useful heuristics I use to drive these chats – and maybe they’d be useful for you, too.

I’ve been working on something – and in the course of working on it, I realized that it was part of a bigger thing for me and the way I think about the Internet.

There’s a lot of content out there about metrics – OKRs, KPIs, AARRR, LTV, ARPU etc etc.

(if you’re just looking for a link to the QP template, here it is!)

I’ve been in the workforce for a while now.

I’ve had the good fortune of getting a lot of advice from folks who are farther along in their careers – either greater velocity, higher heights, more reps on the work, really a diverse crew of mentors and advisors.

Did you know I had a whole career in specialty coffee before I became part of the tech industry?

“Oh, that project is behind because Platform Widgets doesn’t talk to us.”

There are these three ideas that are coming together for me right now.

When I first heard that the CEO of AirBNB, Brian Chesky, had eliminated the Product Management role, and transitioned that department whole cloth into Product Marketers, I was surprised – and skeptical.

Immediately following grad school (I studied Philosophy at SUNY Binghamton), I spent a year in the City of Binghamton, working as an AmeriCorps community organizer.