My second annual edition of yearly takeaways — Sometime this morning, I turned 24 years old and casually entered my mid-twenties. This one feels a little bigger than the last few. Maybe it has to do with everything that’s taken place this year offering some new perspective. Maybe it’s all in my head. …

My favorite takeaways from Dave Gerhardt’s course — It’s taken time for me to identify as a marketer. It’s always been a less-than-appealing word to me and definitely wasn’t something that I wanted to do or be. I’m not sure where the turning point was, but sometime over the past few months, that changed. One of the more…

How to acquire and activate new users — The way you welcome people into your product will make or break the experience for them. It doesn’t matter if you have the best offering ever — If your onboarding falls short, everything else will as well. In this post, I’ll lay out what I’ve picked up while working on…

How Edelman, the world’s largest public relations and marketing consultancy firm, quickly stands up teams to handle crises — You don’t need a pandemic or natural disaster to face a crisis as an organization. Unexpected events happen, and sometimes you need a rapid response. In fact, the skills needed for rapid response translate well to a lot of projects. Even in “normal” times, every industry is bombarded by rapid…

If there was one thing you could improve on your team, what would it be? — If there was one thing you could improve on your team, what would it be? Most common answers to this question aren’t around ability or leadership. Instead, they tend to focus on a lack of alignment and information. …

Takeaways from the most notoriously successful video game franchise in history — Masters of Doom is the story of John Carmack and John Romero, the forces behind some of the most notoriously successful video game franchises in history. The duo played a large role in shaping the modern-day gaming landscape. …

I used to think I understood value chains, now I actually do — It’s generally a good idea to understand how things work together. It doesn’t matter if you’re programming, practicing martial arts, or baking delicious bread. Frameworks are useful tools. In the case of business strategy, value chains are the poster child of frameworks. I recently read some material from Nathan Baschez…

Here’s my process for going from idea to blog post — Ideas are at the root of everything we do. They form our view of the world, who we are, and the actions we take. Some say that ideas don’t matter and that only execution does. I disagree. You can only get so good at execution. …

Your statistics textbooks didn’t prepare you — I spent a lot of time on A/B testing during my time as a data scientist at Squarespace. A lot of people shrug off experimentation as “analyst-work” and don’t get super excited about it. For me, A/B testing was a way to be more involved in product development and have…