Product design
As a product designer, one of my superpowers is a strong partnership with my product manager. There’s usually a lot of overlap in our relationship: I contribute to roadmaps and resourcing, and I invite my PM’s design input throughout the process.
With this in mind, I enjoyed Figma’s interview with several folks on what it means for designers to lead. Hint: it doesn’t have to do with drawing boxes or writing code. It’s more about working across teams and having good product sense. Being great at Figma doesn’t make one a leader.
Most of the time designers have to wear multiple hats to ensure the best possible thing ends up in the actual product.
Email Geeks
Ai has everyone thinking about automating mundane tasks. What email things take up a lot of our time that a computer could probably do? A few come to mind:
- Fix my accessibility issues (don’t just point them out)
- Tell me when my email is broken in an email client (don’t make me check email previews)
- Build an automation flow (don’t make me do it manually)
- Tell me how my emails are doing (don’t make me look at the numbers and figure it out)
- Fix deliverability issues (if I’m landing in spam or am blacklisted)
What else? Better yet, who’s working on things like this? I’m currently working on projects like this in the customer support space and would love to do it in email someday!
Climate
Climate’s being talked about in high places these days.
Last month the Biden administration announced a small but still real American Climate Corps, a plan to train 20,000 people to work on projects like restoring land, improving communities' resilience to natural disasters, and deploying clean energy.
Also last month, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) introduced a draft for the first ever Web Sustainability Guidelines. Now remember the W3C simply publish web standards and guidelines, it doesn’t enforce them. Still, they’ve been guiding the how we build the web for decades, nudging us in the right direction with one eye always on the future (whereas ours are only on our current bottom line).
Lastly, the EU is cracking down on greenwashing claims. Basically if companies want to use terms like “eco” or “climate neutral” in marketing, they’ll have to prove it or face a penalty. Hopefully it’ll cut down on the mentality that we can keep consuming more and more under the belief that it’s ok because 🌱 it’s green 🌱.
Lastly, the world’s most valuable company made a commercial where is gives a sustainability status report to mother nature. Ironically ads like this might violate laws like the one described above.
It’s nice to see climate being discussed in places where it’ll have a big impact.
Fun
The average person is so flaky you can literally just do the things you say you'll do & find yourself in the top 1% of reliability & thoughtfulness. - Orpheo
Is this really where we’re at? Damn the bar is low…
🎃 👻 🎃 👻 🎃 👻 🎃
I was pissed when Netflix first announced they’d be cracking down on shared logins, vowing I’d quit if it happened to us. That day is finally here: They shut out the family members who share our login.
And I’m a man of my word.
Truthfully it doesn’t feel that hard to cancel Netflix. Several price hikes for a service we barely use anymore. It’s time to replace it with something else. HBO? Paramount+? Any suggestions, dear reader?
Thanks for reading, see you in a fortnight ✌️
-Ted
@tedgoas
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