Daniel Thomason's Essays
I write about anything that interests me, for two purposes:
1. To help myself understand the topic more deeply
2. To spread knowledge and ideas
I've highlighted some of my favourites just below, plus at the bottom you can find a list of my categories and tags.
My Favourite Essays
Product managers should straddle utopia and reality
Product management is a hard job. Some of the reasons for this are mundane: long hours, lots of responsibility, isolation. But one big reason for why the job is difficult is not related to the execution factors (i.e. what you might call work/life balance), but rather the fundamental nature of the job itself: the need to live in two worlds simultaneously.
How should a Product Manager spend their time?
For Product Managers, the core dilemma – one I see many fresh PMs struggle with – is how to allocate your time. You only have 40 (ha!) hours in a working week, so what should you do with them?
Hiring is a matching problem
Hiring is a matching problem: finding the right fit (the right employee + the right company) is hard but vital. Investing more effort into this search will pay big dividends.
All Essays
Don't play 3D chess, play fractal chess
3D chess is a tired metaphor that will lead you in the wrong direction. Instead, you want to play fractal chess: increase the layers of game that you're playing, not simply the complexity.
Product managers should straddle utopia and reality
Product management is a hard job. Some of the reasons for this are mundane: long hours, lots of responsibility, isolation. But one big reason for why the job is difficult is not related to the execution factors (i.e. what you might call work/life balance), but rather the fundamental nature of the job itself: the need to live in two worlds simultaneously.
How should a Product Manager spend their time?
For Product Managers, the core dilemma – one I see many fresh PMs struggle with – is how to allocate your time. You only have 40 (ha!) hours in a working week, so what should you do with them?
How fintech companies should think about financial crime risk
Sometimes when we talk about risk within fintech companies, we lose track of the core concept. Since risk is such a central aspect of what we do, this can harm our ability to make good decisions. ‘Risk’ does not stand alone as a concept – it requires additional information to be meaningful.
Fables and Fortune Hunters, the lost second half
In The Four-Hour Work Week Tim Ferriss tells a story about a Mexican fisherman and an American businessman. Not many people know that there is actually a second half to this fable. I was lucky enough to hear it from a wandering shaman in a Berlin nightclub, and with his permission I have reproduced it here.
How to prioritise Fincrime features
Prioritisation frameworks run into some difficulties when thinking about features targeting Fincrime. Defining Reach and Impact is challenging in the area of fincrime product areas, since there are components that don't convert easily to a common denominator. Here's my suggestion for how to deal with that.
Hiring is a matching problem
Hiring is a matching problem: finding the right fit (the right employee + the right company) is hard but vital. Investing more effort into this search will pay big dividends.
A better vocational curriculum for university
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? Here’s mine – or at least a first draft.
Scales for Product Managers
Like most knowledge work jobs, product management isn’t a profession that has success metrics nearly as clear as sports. This makes it more challenging to find a smart practice regimen, but far from impossible. Before we can figure that out, though, we need to zoom out a little: what does success look like for a product manager?