Tim Farrell

Book Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity Author Peter Attia Published March 28, 2023 Healthspan is the new metric for health/ longevity in the 21st century and the future.

This post is an attempt to synthesize my current thinking about product development.

Being Data-Pilled Andrej Karpathy was pretty data-pilled in his podcast with Dwarkesh last year.

Book 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy Author Hamilton Helmer Published October 27, 2016 Elegant = “simple but not simplistic”.

Bio/ healthtech is notoriously a volatile and uncertain industry.

Title Lean Analytics Author Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz Published April 16, 2013 Lean startup methodology is a way to mitigate/ reduce risk by prioritizing learning.

Title Blue Ocean Strategy Author W.

Book Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption Author Thales S.

Ever thought you needed another framework for “doing product”?

Book Thinking In Systems Author Donella H.

Book Elon Musk Author Walter Issacson Published September 12, 2023 Like him or hate him, Elon Musk is one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history.

Book The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done Author Peter Drucker Published 1966 Effectiveness of Knowledge Work Two hundred people, of course, can do a great deal more work than one man.

There are good reasons for the recent critiques of the product management function in tech.

Book Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value Author Teresa Torres Published May 19, 2021 The essense of capitalism: “Managers must convert society’s needs into opportunities for profitable business.” —…

Data is footage.

Strategy Often Seems Complicated Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting article exploring how business strategy principles can be used to enhance personal life.

Book The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide Author Leah Buley Published July 9, 2013 User research vs user experience (UX) User research is about understanding users and their needs, and user experience design is about desig…

Book The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed and happiness Author Morgan Housel Published September 8, 2020 Happiness = results - expectation Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy.

Book How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms Author Chris Wiggins, Matthew L.

Project management is often wrongly confused with product management.

Book Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy Author Parth Detroja, Aditya Agashe, Neel Mehta Published September 19, 2017 Great quote on agency When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is…

Book The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed Author Alberto Savoia Published February 26, 2019 The Law of Market Failure Here are the main takeaways from Part I, worth repeating, memorizing, and perhaps tattooing somewhere…

Becoming Data-driven Being a data-driven product team is critical to being competitive in the modern digital product marketplace.[1][2] However, many teams tend to overweight the importance of technology adoption, relative to culture and process change, in

Book Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future Author Jer Thorp Published May 4, 2021 Data: a new era for the computer “Data” has always been a restless word.

Book First Things First Author Stephen R.

Product Operations Product operations is a relatively recent term (probably invented by marketers) which refers to a subfunction of product management that integrates and manages feedback collected from analytics and customer success to inform product dev…

Book Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger Author Peter Bevelin Published January 1, 2007 This book was dense with rational and highly useful frameworks for thinking.

Book The Personal MBA Author Josh Kaufman Published December 30, 2010 This is the best, most practical Business 101 book I’ve ever read.

Book User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product Author Jeff Patton, Peter Economy Published October 21, 2014 Importance of product ownership and decision-making.

The AI Cold Start Problem Here’s the scenario.

Objectives This should be done at the beginning of a product management/ development lifecycle: Describe 3-5 high-level objectives that your business wants to achieve with their product(s) For each of those objectives, list 3-5 quantifiable key results th…

Ever get frustrated by to keep your resume up-to-date on your Github Pages website?

Book High Output Management Author Andrew Grove Published 1983 Teams and Leverage High output work fundamentally depends on teams.

It’s pretty incredible how little leaders in civilian organization delegate.

Much ink has been spilled over the relationship or dichotomy between management and leadership.

No News is Good News Ever hear this quote?

Competence vs.

Vagueness and Philosophy vs.

A Race To Somewhere Starting Nowhere Working at a startup is like you’re in a rally car trying to win a race where the finish line is unknown, the route is unclear and your speed virtually limitless.

Generalists > Specialists in Data Science I recently read an HBR article by Stitch Fix’s CIO Eric Colson, where he argues that generalist—or “full-stack”—data scientists are much more desirable than specialists for effective data science teams.1 According…

Ne te quaesiveris extra.

Hardware Is Harder Than Software This seems like a pretty obvious point, but in a world where Big Data, AI and Software are King it bears repeating.

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel’s manifest on startups and the future, he argues that innovation—doing/ creating something new—is fundamentally more important than globalization—implementing/ copying in other places what has been shown to work in innovation c…

Understanding a scientific talk or paper is difficult business.

Specificity and Biology Generality has never been medicine or biology’s forte.

First, if you haven’t already heard Guy Raz’s “How I Built This”, definitely give it listen.

Recently read this piece on Elon Musk’s most recent venture, Neuralink.

Book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Author Yuval Noah Harari Published 2011 This is undoubtedly the most elegant/ clear/ succinct, comprehensive and scientifically accurate account of the history of humanity ever written.

Recognition And Compensation Most of the time I’m against all professional recognition and large amounts of compensation (i.e. awards and money).

Wrong Is More Likely The state of “being right”, in the most general sense (i.e. for any statement of fact, solution to problem) can be described as: \[\prod_{i=1}^{N} b_i = 1 \hspace{2.5mm} \mid \hspace{2.5mm} b_i \in \{0, 1\}\] Where \(N\) is the number…