ayemoah

We're the Boomerang Team, and This Is How We Work lifehacker.com/were-the-boome… via @lifehacker

@awmoore wait. did yours work? Mine missed like 3 out of 5.

I keep finding uses for Google Workspace Flows. I set one up yesterday that runs every time I get a new email and asks Gemini "was this likely sent by a sales development representative" and if so, moves it to a folder. 5-7 times a day I don't have to do this now!

@awmoore that cat is so happy cause it knows the flight will be so much safer with a checklist!

Checklists give you superpowers! But because they're so darn simple, we underestimate them. We skip them for 5-10 step processes (and then forget steps) and we seek out more complicated workflow tools for longer processes (and then don't use the tools) More in link below 👇

@mateosfo I don’t want old unqualified drivers driving either. But telling them they can’t have any access to public buses because of the zip codes they chose to live is pretty unfair.

@ayemoah And an inseperable component of choosing to have suburban land use is, older, unqualified drivers killing people in the streets. This will get steadily worse all over Berkeley -- all over the US -- because our cities prioritize suburban values over human lives.

If you’re older and have chosen a car-dependent lifestyle, this is your future: Either driving dangerously and maiming/killing someone, or walking normally, and being maimed/killed. This is a growing epidemic. And we’re doing nothing about it. berkeleyside.org/2025/01/26/wom…

@mateosfo But Berkeley keeps reducing bus services and trying to add more bike lanes. How is an 87 year old who’s supposedly not fit to drive a car supposed to bike? North Berkeley is apparently too rich to deserve bus services according to our outgoing AC transit director

why is an 87-year-old driving themselves anywhere, ever

Hey @TheBouqsCo this bouquet is a disgrace. I can’t believe you all think this is good enough for sending it out to customers.

Check out #MyYearInBooks @goodreads to discover the 50 books I read in 2023! goodreads.com/user/year_in_b…

@dtran320 @waitbutwhy Congrats!

Not only got to marry my best friend in our favorite place, but she quoted the @waitbutwhy article I sent to her after our third date: 1) An epic friendship 2) A feeling of home 3) A determination to be good at marriage Thank you Tim Urban for writing the 2-part blog post that gave these nerds shared language. Thanks to my co-founder and brother-from-another-mother @rickyyean for officiating and our friends and family for sharing the day with us. And thanks @aeables for this milestone on our epic adventure.

@ManuKumar @LinkedIn wow. this is wild. I feel like they need verification from the companies for people to list. Maybe verified marks on the ones that the company verified.

I requested our recruiting team to look for fake profiles on @LinkedIn for people who claim to have worked at HiHello but never did. We found 22 of them (have only been able to report 5 to LinkedIn as we can't access the remaining 17).

@Austen @tylertringas Agreed. The problem is getting into the weeds is labeled “micromanaging”. The right kind of getting into the weeds is really digging deeply into the strategy and goals and priorities together. The red flag is when they don’t “like to get into the weeds and stay high level”

@tylertringas You don’t need to get out of the way. You need to get in the weeds with them. The number of times I’ve assumed something is handled and it turns out completely broken is far too high. Good people don’t want you to ignore them entirely.

"just hire people smarter than you & get out of their way" 🤔 I'm not so sure. To the extent I have regrets around this, 100% of the time its that I overestimated the domain expertise of someone and was too hands-off, assuming they had it handled. By contrast I've seen huge dividends from spending the time to learn "enough to be dangerous" about subject matter and collaborating in a much more hands-on way.

If you find yourself thinking "hmm, that doesn't seem quite right but I guess they're the expert and that's what we pay them for" 🚩🚩🚩

@ManuKumar @K9Ventures Haha of course you got in a canine metaphor

I am sharing a few slides from the @K9Ventures annual meeting earlier this week that present *my view* of the startup/venture ecosystem at the current time in this thread.

@brushingboots @hwallop Hi Harry, we currently have deliver emails only a few times a day functionality in Boomerang. We actually have something fancier for this use case in private beta. Please DM me if you'd like access.

@hwallop The Boomerang gmail plugin allows you to 'pause inbox' – I installed it before gmail allowed you to schedule emails directly, as it had that function, and it also does a 'pause', which I am fairly sure does what you're after

📩💻Some people schedule when they send emails. But can you schedule when you *receive* emails. So that you only get them in blocks, two or three times a day?

“Do want to build a brand?  Go sell some software.  Want to improve your brand perception?  Go sell some software.  Want to have a distinctive brand visual territory?  Go sell some software.  You see the pattern.”

💔 for Lahaina.

@alphacolin @AcquiredFM @Nike Did you watch the movie Air on Amazon Prime? It’s a great movie and especially relatable to a startup founder

After listening to the @AcquiredFM episode on @Nike last week, I bought my first pair of Jordans since I was a kid. Loving all the colors you can get and I better understand the whole sneaker head thing now.

@yimbyaction @ramit @Julio_Buendia_ @SFyimby This is the best connection I have witnessed on Twitter. Would love to see a NIMBY roasting TV show.

@ramit @Julio_Buendia_ @SFyimby Perfect, just responded! Thanks for connecting!

Your friend is a millionaire

You can be the smartest person in the room, and if you're a subpar listener you will be a terrible PM. Conversely, if you're amazing at listening – and *remembering* – you're likely to have a strong product career. Here's why, and what to do. First, a story from Slack's early days: I joined Slack when it was ~250 people. We were growing insanely quickly and struggling in all the ways hypergrowth companies struggle: feature requests, infrastructure scalability challenges, client performance, bugs, you name it – not to mention our own aggressive internal roadmap. We knew *what* we needed to achieve. It was the prospect of *doing* so much that was overwhelming. It all seemed critical. Stewart knew this more than anyone, and was doing everything he could to motivate folks to work hard, tighten scope, and ship quickly without compromising quality. Somehow, though, projects still often got stuck near the finish line: details weren't right, an error state wasn't thought through, some bits didn't feel right in internal testing. Whatever the reason, too often work was getting turned around in launch reviews. It was a vicious cycle: caught between pressure to ship and pressure to meet Slack's notoriously high quality bar, PMs came into review meetings fearful of rejection, and met with feedback they would often struggle to *listen* – grasping at rationale for design decisions and tradeoffs in order to survive. Here's where problems multiply: when you defend a decision in an exec meeting, the main signal you send is, "I'm not listening." Picture the job of the CEO. On either side of the product review meeting, they might be interviewing a leadership candidate, reviewing a deal for office space, doing a press interview, or talking to a prospective investor. There is a crazy amount of context switching (and stress!). When a PM shows up defensive in a review, it puts busy leaders into a panic. They can seem angry, but they're actually fearful: they worry you won't register and address their concerns. And they need to context switch and do something else, and a week (or more!) will pass before their next chance to talk to you. Acknowledge and accept! Here's the trick: when you're met with criticism or feedback, instead of explaining why, just say "got it." Then, ask questions. This doesn't mean taking blame or accepting bad feedback. What you are doing is establishing a crucial baseline: "I hear what you are saying." Clarify. We all feel defensive when we receive feedback in high pressure situations. Channel your defensive energy toward questions that will clarify things for you and your team, and improve your alignment with the stakeholder. Things like: * "Last time, you mentioned the importance of X. Does that still rank for you? Did we over-focus on it?" * "When we did X, our concern was Y. Should we be worried about that?" (And if so, "Is there a better way to mitigate it?") * "We've been really pushing to ship by X, we considered Y but the team thinks it is going to be expensive – is it worth slipping the date if necessary to get it in?" (This one can be a particular 💎, sometimes stakeholders just want to hear it's on your radar and you won't forget, and aren't going to block your launch if they know you are listening!) Open a line of communication. Great PMs flag projects when they experience the first of signs of these speedbumps, and do whatever they can to increase the communication cadence. When I was at Slack, if I got a signal that Stewart cared about specific details of a project, or if it started to feel like the scope he wanted wasn't going to fit into the timeline we'd promised, I would start sending him notes and questions directly. My goal was never to force him to make decisions, but just to keep him informed, give him a chance to weigh in, and send a clear signal: we are doing our best, we hear you, and if you want to weigh in, we're eager for your thoughts. Bonus: ✏️ Write things down. This one is so simple I almost left it out, but it's super, suuuper important. The best way to send an unambiguous message that you are listening is to write down feedback. Bring a notebook, do it on paper. No one expects you to hold 30 minutes of feedback in your head. In fact, when you try to do that, they think they are going to have to tell you again. Write it down! You'd be amazed how rarely people do this! Final thought: Yes, you need to be smart to be a PM. But I have seen more PMs struggle, burn out, and lose out on promotions and chances to work on exciting projects due to *lack of trust* than lack of intelligence. Software is a team sport. Show that you listen and care and you are way ahead of the pack.

@TrungTPhan Except Burma where tea grows natively. It’s called “let phat” in Burmese. The map is wrong. One of the most popular Burmese dishes is pickled tea leaf salad (let phat thoke)

“Cha" and "te" are both Chinese words for tea. If a territory came into contact with the drink by: • The Silk Road = "cha" • Sea shipping routes (starting with Dutch traders) = "tea"

4 Myths and 1 Truth About Scheduling Meetings NEW BLOG: We analyzed 3.5 million proposed meeting times, putting the conventional wisdom about the best ways to schedule meetings to the test. The results busted some myths in surprising ways... 🧵 1/x