Several months ago, I was drafting an internal job description for a new position on our Product team. Among the many qualities I thought this person should have, I listed Passionate about product. It seemed like an obvious thing to include. Of course someone who wanted to work in product would love product and immediately know what it meant to be passionate about product. But my manager at the time, who

Great packaging is what pulls people in, but a superior core product is what will make them stay. In the physical world, it’s pretty clear what is packaging and what is the actual product. Take soap: the packaging is the plastic, and the core product is the soap itself. The packaging may influence your decision to buy the product — it may market the product to you — but ultimately

You can’t be a parent and an entrepreneur — right? In the tech community, there’s a stereotype — unfairly magnified by the media — that the ideal entrepreneur is young, unattached, and capable of working 20-hour days for months or years on end without letting anything get in the way of their product. It’s true that creating and running a company requires unrelenting devotion and long, difficult hours of work,

Okay, I’m going to come out and just say it. I’m not a real entrepreneur. (It’s true.) Sure, I have a successful side project that’s a SaaS. And I’ve started a few revenue-generating projects before this too — hey, something that generates revenue is a business, right? I like to think I’m an entrepreneurially-minded person who has ideas and makes them happen. But I’m not a Real Entrepreneur, and here’s why:

A thread on Reddit last week titled “Does web development at an agency always have to suck?” ignited a lot of conversation about the difficulties of agency life for many developers and designers. The poster cited how their agency seems to have a complete disregard for process, management, or good development practices. Their project manager just forwards email from the client, doesn’t properly scope out projects, and has a complete lack

Note: I wrote this in 2014, six months after launching Geocodio. Side projects are an alluring prospect for many developers: you can have total control over a project, try new things, and reap all of the profits. No pesky product managers or dealing with other people’s code. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Here are a few of the lessons we’ve learned since launching Geocodio in January: Take care of the the