Blog

Monitoring competitors can be more distracting than useful. Just like vanity metrics in the broader sense of business growth, watching competitors without intent can just be another “good” thing that can distract you from the “right” thing. However, done right, developing competitive intelligence can be hugely valuable. It can notify… Read more: 3 rules for building competitive intelligence practices that are actually helpful

Since Sketch arrived on the scene (and Figma moved in and ate its lunch) there has been a glorious movement towards designers working with tooling that aligns with what is actually deployed. The design assets that are exported from these tools are actually close to workable code. Close-ish… This trend… Read more: Deployable Design

I’ve been working to write this post for a while now. I don’t know yet if I’ve got it quite right, but it’s a story I want to tell. About 2 months ago, I noticed a change down there. Bit embarrassing, right?! Despite this embarrassment, I eventually did what I… Read more: Cancer

I can’t count the number of tech product ideas I’ve had over the years. Many were terrible. Most were not worth the focus. Some have proved to be absolutely worthwhile. 🙂 Now I’m a very visual person and there is nothing like translating an idea to a clickable and good-looking… Read more: How to prototype with Tailwind and Vue in a single HTML file

For about a year I’ve had an account on codepen.io where I occasionally spin up a pen and play around with fun and interesting frontend ideas. This last year has seen me playing a lot with Vue JS and Tailwind, so most of my pens are artifacts of my learning… Read more: My 4 most popular pens on Codepen

Building a product is easy. Getting people to use or buy it is the hard part. We product marketers often turn to pay-per-click ad platforms (Google, Facebook, etc) to build out lead generation. This works and is great if you can get it to work for you. If you can… Read more: Our defintion of “ads” has become too narrow.

I’ve been around the web agency space long enough to see a few patterns emerge. One of them is the “let’s get out of service and build product” pattern. Building something once and selling it X times is a bloody nice-sounding idea. Yes and no. I’ve done it a couple… Read more: Build a process before you build the product

There are actually 2. One is more obvious, and that is the opportunity to build and distribute libraries of block patterns. The second opportunity is less obvious and is the really interesting one IMHO. A new experience WordPress is 18 years old and for the first 16 of those years,… Read more: The biggest product opportunity in WordPress right now

In short, your components can be explicitly sized with their contents dynamically placed. Slow down there son! What? Let’s make a button. Just a simple one using some simple CSS. Not very pretty, but just enough to get the idea of a button on the page. Question: What’s the height… Read more: Why you should use flexbox for more maintainable buttons (and other components).

So you need/want to acquire more users for your product. Ask yourself … What does our audience do right before they need the solution our product delivers? With an answer to that question, ask yourself : Can we solve a problem for that “thing before our thing” in a way… Read more: The thing before your thing