Notes from 4/8–16/8

Hum Qing Ze

12 min readAug 16, 2020

AI

Machine Learning For Managers — What You Need To Know

Super high level overview

GPT3 crush curated list

there’s some seriously god-tier stuff happening here

Leveraging Machine Learning to Fuel New Discoveries with the arXiv Dataset

To help make the arXiv more accessible, we present a free, open pipeline on Kaggle to the machine-readable arXiv dataset: a repository of 1.7 million articles, with relevant features such as article titles, authors, categories, abstracts, full text PDFs, and more.

PyCaret is an open source, low-code machine learning library in Python that automates machine learning workflow. It is an end-to-end machine learning and model management tool that speeds up machine learning experiment cycle and makes you more productive.

Amazon Wants to Make You an ML Practitioner — For Free

Academic institutions will largely lean towards proven classical techniques for education, and that is the correct move. To help the last-mile OJT problem even more than post-hire education, Amazon is now making available course materials from their internal “ML University”.

AutoML Faceoff: 15 Humans VS 2 Machines. Who won?

Blockchain

Clean Contracts — a guide on smart contract patterns & practices

Clean code but for smart contracts — there’s more to come i think

Inspecting Tezos decentralization: 200+ public nodes, 1000+ in total

Not very decentralized at all actually

Career

Why does DARPA work

Need to scrutinise this deeply, it’s an incredible model

How to Take Personal Development Off the Backburner — Tactical Frameworks for Leveling Up

The It: Did you execute your work that you had on your to-do list — the emails you wanted to write, that strategy document you owed your boss? Then, establish the tasks you intend to accomplish the next day and an agenda for reaching those goals.
The We: Did you add value to the lives of the people you interacted with? Did they walk away with more knowledge, energy, goodwill, or a better understanding? Holmberg is quick to clarify one point here: “It’s not asking whether you made people happy. That’s not always the goal. You want to make sure you communicated clearly in a way that added value for them and met goals for you,” he says. Anticipate any upcoming challenging interactions and think about how you want to show up to that conversation. Set an intention for how you’d like to respond to possible triggers.
The I: How did you manage your own energy and mood? “Self-care practices like working out, eating well and sleeping enough are just as important as anything you do in the office. However, those are often the things most leaders drop first, yet the “I” pillar is the foundation of leadership. You can’t help others if you deplete yourself,” says Holmberg. Consider how you can set yourself up to make good choices throughout the day and establish what might cause you to step off track.

The 10 books every leader should read

Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek

Inspire action
Create a circle of safety
Tell the truth
Lead people instead of numbers
Choose to eat last

Principles, Ray Dalio

Principles are fundamentals for us to have a better life. Without them, we may end up running in circles. Principles can guide us through awkward moments. If we step back and give us the chance to analyze the situation and compare it to our principles, the critical choices to make will become clear. However, until we define our principles, we will struggle to identify what works best for us.

Coaching Agile Teams, Lyssa Adkins

Shu — “Follow the Rule”: learning how to play the game.
Ha — “Break the Rule”: make the game better for the team.
Ri — “Be the Rule”: evolve the game to reach the best of the team.

The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni

Good to Great, Jim Collins

Made to Stick, Chip Heath & Dan Heath

Until people care about the message, nothing will happen. But once they connect to the message, changes can occur.

Measure What Matters, John Doerr

Meaningful OKRs show the following characteristics:

Relate to goals to achieve instead of features to develop.
Challenging to achieve while extremely motivating.
Put the teams in a single direction.

The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle

Strong cultures have the following traits:

Safety: encourage people to take risks and learn from failures. Open discussions are welcome. Credit is always shared.
Vulnerability: embrace discomfort. People know they can be vulnerable because there’s mutual support.
Purpose: people share something in common. They know the why behind their activities.

The Trillion Dollar Coach, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle

He believed in striving for the best idea, not consensus (“I hate consensus!” he would growl), intuitively understanding what numerous academic studies have shown: that the goal of consensus leads to “groupthink” and inferior decisions.

Give and Take, Adam Grant

Givers: help the other whenever they can without expecting anything in exchange.
Matchers: give back precisely what received or only help if get something in exchange.
Takers: do everything to make advantages on the others. Focus on self-progress.

A User Guide To Working With You

Introduction

Why are you writing this user guide? What do you hope will be the result of writing and sharing this?

How I view success

What does being good at your job mean to you? What are your values that underpin your understanding of success?

How I communicate

How have other people described your communication style? What have you gotten feedback about in the past? How should others interpret what you do or say? What do you struggle to express? How do you like to stay in sync with others (email, chat, in-person)? What’s your availability outside of work hours?

Things I do that may annoy you

What’s the cause of misunderstandings that you’ve had in the past? What are some things about your style that other people have given you critical feedback on? What quirks or mannerisms might unintentionally annoy a different personality type?

What gains and loses my trust

What actions can a person take to gain your trust? Conversely, what triggers you?

My strengths

What do you love to do and are good at? What can you help others with?

My growth areas

What are your blind spots? What are you working on? What can others help you with?

Additional Optional Sections:

What I expect from people I manage

What do you consider a stellar job for someone who reports to you? What do you consider a mediocre or bad job? What’s unique about your expectations that may differ from other managers?

How I give and receive feedback

What is your philosophy around feedback? What can others expect in receiving feedback from you? How would you prefer to receive feedback from others?

Cybersecurity

IBM Report: Compromised Employee Accounts Led to Most Expensive Data Breaches Over Past Year

revealing that these incidents cost companies studied $3.86 million per breach on average, and that compromised employee accounts were the most expensive root cause. Based on in-depth analysis of data breaches experienced by over 500 organizations worldwide, 80% of these incidents resulted in the exposure of customers’ personally identifiable information

Data

The Data Science Interview Blueprint

Definitely could be made into a literal simple checklist right there

Development

Best Website Builder for Designers: 5 Code-Free Tools in 2020

Came across all of them before, and as usual all are paid

Product

Interview tactics to find worthwhile customer problems

Typically, I like to start very high-level and use some combination of the following questions:

When working as a realtor, at the end of the day, what are you trying to get done?
What is that you have to do in order to feel accomplished?
What progress are you trying to make?

Then

Who else is involved in the process of closing on a house? “There are many people involved: Me, the buyer’s agent, the buyer, the seller, the lender, the appraiser, the home inspector, and eventually the escrow officer.”
Where do you physically have to be in order to sell or pick up new clients? “For selling, I do most of my business from my car — on my phone. I’m typically rushing around to different open houses and staging or showing them, meeting my clients in person for updates, dropping off purchase contracts to the title company. To get new clients, I find myself creating flyers, blogging, posting on social media, taking referrals from previous clients — that’s the best way.”
How do you get paid? “I get paid at the closing. Either by a wire out of the escrow account or by being mailed a check.”

Pain points

What are the biggest things that prevent you from closing deals more often? “Oh, lots of things! Getting a buyer and seller to come to an agreement can take a long time. After that, inspections, appraisals, and title can all also drag on and extend the closing cycle.”
What prevents you from taking on more listings in parallel? “The time investment for an individual home sale can be huge. Stagings and showings take a long time, but we need to do them because they have a big impact on the sale. Some realtors have a big enough client pipeline that they can afford to hire assistants to do all that stuff, but I don’t have a big enough portfolio to do that.”
What obstacles do you face in acquiring new clients? “Marketing. It’s very hard to become known. Most successful realtors have been in the game for a long time. They have a long history of sales and happy clients. A large proportion of their new clients come from their previous ones.”

Current attempts

The closing process takes a long time even after the buyer and seller agree to a purchase.
Repeated tasks, such as showings, consume the time of the realtor and prevent them from onboarding more clients in parallel.
Self-promotion for new business is very difficult because it relies on reputation, which takes a lot of time and energy to build.
How do you currently handle these repeated tasks like home staging and showing? “I just do it all myself. I’ll hang out for a couple hours at a time to show and meet potential buyers. With staging, there are companies around who will do it for you (people who bring furniture and spruce up the home you’re selling), but they tend to be pricey.”

What would solution look like

Say there was a way to make it so you didn’t have to personally do home stagings or be present to conduct showings. What characteristics would this solution have to have in order for you to use it? “Well, it’d have to be cheap. I don’t normally spend more than $500 on staging a house. It would also have to give me comfort about the security of the house and my seller’s belongings. I’d worry that if I wasn’t there, people might steal stuff. I’d also want to know how each showing went. Did we have good prospects? How would we engage with the potential buyers?”

My favorite product management templates — Issue 37

gold mine of product templates

Design System Talks

Resource to learn about design systems

The Architecture of Information

Good resource

Outcomes as Enablers of Business Impact

Chris gives calls out multiple warning signs of too much organizational focus on outputs. For example:

Devoting a great deal of time and energy to balancing the sides of the iron triangle, aka the “triple constraints” — time, scope, and cost (it’s certainly desirable to finish on time, for instance, but an on-time delivery that the customer hates is a classic example of focusing on outputs, such as a date, at the expense of achieving meaningful outcomes, like solving a customer problem)
Endless debates over small details, like whether a particular user story is 5 story points or 8 story points, or excessive focus on vanity metrics
Heavy emphasis on optimization of one part of the value stream, which can certainly make a difference, and yet, if nobody is paying attention to what customers actually care about, we can end up delivering more of what the customer doesn’t want, faster

John writes about:

No measurement. Teams do not measure the impact of their work. Or, if measurement happens, it is done in isolation by the product management team and selectively shared. You have no idea if your work worked
Rapid shuffling of teams and projects (aka Team Tetris). Instead of compelling missions or initiatives, teams deal in feature and project assignments. Chronic multitasking and over-utilization
Success theater around “shipping” with little discussion about impact. You can tell a great deal about an organization by what it celebrates
Infrequent (acknowledged) failures and scrapped work. No removed features. Primary measure of success is delivered features, not delivered outcomes. Work is rarely discarded in light of data and learning. Often the team lacks the prerequisite safety to admit misfires

Josh goes on to point out that in the social impact sector, one model that is popular is called the Program Logic Model, which looks like this:

Resources > Activities > Outputs > Outcomes > Impact

Using that model for the well project, it might look something like this:

Plan the resources (people, materials, money) we need
Undertake a set of activities (travel to village, acquire materials, build well)
Create the output (the finished well)
(Assuming the well works as planned) Achieve the desired outcome (people in the village spend less time carrying water)
(Assuming the outcome is achieved) The well is an important factor in the desired impact — higher standard of living in the village

Product Manager Toolkit: 2. Why you need to deliberately manage change

A visionary plan,

2. Executed by an inspired & up-skilled organization,

3. Galvanized through purposeful change management and leadership.

Stay focused. Act decisively — Managing ambiguity means acting despite never having perfect information. Pick a path and show conviction — Both a) avoiding decisions or b) choosing “all paths” are surefire ways to slow your team down. Effective decision making culture and processes are necessary to ensure that all levels of your organization autonomously make good decisions aligned with your change direction, so that you don’t waste precious resources on nice-to-have initiatives or on constantly sitting and waiting for direction or approval.
Empower through principles — As you navigate this change, your ability to expand from micro-management to large team empowerment hinges on developing a consistent and predictable way of making decisions that you can teach and delegate to your organization as you scale. It is therefore worth investing time in sharing and collaborating on strong shared principles that become the pillars of why and how you lead: from driving the thinking, to communicating in all directions, to dealing with adversity.
Reassess & adapt — Be upfront about what you don’t know for certain, since best-guess assumptions likely underpin many of your decisions. Be flexible in reassessing all information along the way and altering the strategy when material new facts come to light. The worst place you can find yourself is being “the Emperor with no clothes” — clinging to a narrative and plan that is objectively wrong given updated information or events. On the flip side, changing plans every week will cause the team to rebel out of confusion or despair. Only a few key assumptions really change the answer — focus on those and ensure that you spend time communicating widely and honestly with the team why a change is warranted and why you didn’t get it right the first time. Leaders are allowed to make mistakes if they earnestly own them, and if they don’t kick the same rock twice. Remember that nobody on your team wants to fail — if they believe that new information invalidates your previous direction then they will likely feel frustrated at the wasted time, but will support you if they believe the new course is both better informed and achievable.

Velocity: The Often-Overlooked Secret to Product Manager Success

Increasing velocity does not mean just producing more stuff, more features, more whatever. It does not mean more hours. It means finding ways to do the right things in the right order, removing obstacles, and supporting teams in a way that leads to more and more value being produced.

Are they empowered to deliver in their swim lane?
Do they have an understanding of why their work matters?
Are they operating in a psychologically safe environment?
Do they have a structured process for continuous improvement?

The Ultimate Guide to the Founding Designer Role

You’re comfortable with — not just tolerant of — change and uncertainty

You operate with transparency

You think with scale in mind

You’re a jack of most trades

You work quickly