Daniel Thomason essays

I just watched Whiplash last night (writing this in October 2026).

A short economic fable, in the style of Aesop, about a grasshopper who discovers that the value of his work depends on countless hands he never sees.

Daniel's opinionated list of children's shows: what I'm going to let my daughter watch, and why.

We insure our cars against crashes, our homes against fires, and our bodies against illness.

The question I’m pondering is: can we truly get to a better world by all of us tending to our tiny corner of it?

Product management is a complex discipline, with a lot of moving parts and no shortage of things to think about.

My thoughts on educating children and teenagers; an evolving document as I think more.

3D chess is a tired metaphor that will lead you in the wrong direction.

Product management is a hard job.

For Product Managers, the core dilemma – one I see many fresh PMs struggle with – is how to allocate your time.

Sometimes when we talk about risk within fintech companies, we lose track of the core concept.

In The Four-Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss tells a story about a Mexican fisherman and an American businessman.

Hiring is a matching problem: finding the right fit (the right employee + the right company) is hard but vital.

It just struck me the other day: our main units of time are a hodgepodge of those determined by an external reality and those that are completely arbitrary.

The sad/rain fallacy: situations in which you’ve have the causal relationship backwards, in a way that denies your own agency.

Games are products too.

This card game was taught to me by an excellent designer from my former country, who is a proud Georgian citizen and game aficionado.

Don’t choose something (a class, a book, a job, a partner) based on its headline – choose it based on what you want to get out of it, then engage in a way that makes this happen.

How does a company know that it’s the right time to hire a product manager?

Like most knowledge work jobs, product management isn’t a profession that has success metrics nearly as clear as sports.

There have been a few good posts on Twitter and the blog sphere recently on the question: how would you redesign a university curriculum to optimise for success in the job market?

Prioritisation frameworks run into some difficulties when thinking about features targeting Fincrime.

Traditional gyms are never going to provide an amazing customer experience.

Lots of household objects don’t get constant use.

The most compelling proponents of reform are those who are successful members of the system.

If you’ve worked as a product manager in the last few years, I bet you’ve seen the diagram above.