Mike Mason
on
Conflict is an unavoidable consequence of large collaborative effort toward a common set of goals. We can do a lot to organize teams in a way to avoid too much conflict and we can create a culture that doesn’t break down when conflict arrises but it will occur nonetheless. Conflict occurs when two or more people are in disagreement or experience a clash of interests. It’s normal, and should [...]
Mike Mason
on
Throughout your career you will undoubtedly find yourself in many situations where you will be joining a new team or gaining new team members. A make or break factor in your ability to collaborate effectively with said team and with those new team members is the level of trust you have between one another. Trust is crucially important for product managers, since the members of your team you need to [...]
Mike Mason
on
If you’re like me, you spent more than 3000 days going to school. You spent 24,000 hours in and out of classes and countless more on homework assignments and test preparation. You were subjected to standardized “tests” that normalized your responses to questions and hypothetical problems relative to the performance of your peers. Forced to consume and memorize second-hand facts and frameworks, [...]
Mike Mason
on
We are “meaning machines,” we are continually trying to make sense of the world around us by looking for symmetry, and if we can’t find it, we force a square peg into a round hole to make our meaning fit the circumstances of the situation. We crave meaning as much as eating, sleeping, and reproducing. Giving something meaning is controlling for it in our internal calculations of how [...]
Mike Mason
on
Note. this post comes from a place of introspection that I sometimes find difficult to find the proper wording for. It’s abstract in nature but still paints a picture that is worth not only discovering, but remembering too. This is why I’ve put it in writing. A lot of my recent posts have been about the automatic; decision making that is sometimes out of our control. Instinctual quirks that create [...]
Mike Mason
on
Alternative Title: Chase nuance, not novelty. A lot of what influences most of the content in these posts has to do with increasing rate of change. We live in a world vastly different than what came before it, and the gap between decades is getting wider. This stretching of the modern condition means the world you live in now will be drastically different than the one your grandchildren will grow [...]
Mike Mason
on
When I graduated from university I thought I was destined to work at an advertising agency. I reached out to former alumni from my school on LinkedIn, and wrote tons of custom cover letters telling my story. This went on for months until an entrepreneur starting a technology company took a chance on me and put me in charge of marketing his app. It’s worth mentioning that the job wouldn’t [...]