Day 275: The relationship between cooking skills to free food (In da eatclub edition)

“You can find me in the eatclub, with enough food to fill a tub” –  inspired by 50cent

I was speaking to my colleagues and other people at big tech co’s (total sample of size of 8) and the consensus was that like me, they don’t cook much either. If at all. For myself, I can get breakfast and lunch at work. In addition, if there’s left over food from lunch, I can get a free dinner too.

We have this system called Eatclub where you pre-order your lunch for the week. So I get my own meal from a daily selection. Its like a corporate Grubhub/Deliveroo / Delivery Hero. Your employer pays for it. Its usually 80% the same stuff with some new varieties each week. Its not bad. I’d give most of them a 7/10. In fact, i’ve rated a bunch of them 3 or 4 out of 5. These are some of my meal adventures that I had this week:

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Day 274: Layer Management

The keys to success for living in the Bay Area is layer management. The Bay Area has a lot of microclimates. So when I travel from the city (San Francisco) to South Bay, the climate is very different. It could go from windy to sunny. Or very cold to cold. Also when I get on the Caltrain, it’s much warmer inside. I need to be able to remove layer of clothing easily in a confined space.

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Day 269: How I passed the behind the wheel driving test on my first attempt in California!

I wanted to write this as a record for myself and also to help out other people that are going for their test. I actually passed my test the day before, however the previous day’s blog post was all about the ‘shake’. There was an earthquake the morning of the exam! It was crazy. I woke up at 2.30am and couldn’t go to sleep for about two hours. I had my driving exam at 10am. This is definitely not ideal exam prep! Here’s a summary of what I did to pass the California DMV behind the driving wheel test. Its about my experience.

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How to update internal stakeholders on a weekly basis

Its a typical hot, dry Christmas weekend in Sydney, Australia. What better time to write a blog post about product management? 🙂 This topic has been bugging me for a while. So thought I’d write this to you whilst in my too cold air-conditioned living room.

A common question I get asked is how do I update people in my organisation on a product I’m working on. I’ve been asked 3 times in the past 3 weeks, so obviously there’s something here that others want to know. I get asked by:

* Founders / CXO’s wanting to know how to get their teams to report to them
* Product managers on how to report up to management or other stakeholders in their org.

I’ll discuss why we provide updates, principles, cadence and a template that you can use. This is a format I’ve been using in the the past 5 months for my team at Atlassian. I would like to detail how I do it and hopefully it can provide you some insights that can help you!

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Prioritization for product managers

Deciding on what to do and when is a critical part of the role of product management. There are a million opportunities out there so how do you know that you are pursuing the right one? Life has many trade offs as does building products. Such is life 🙂

Here are some lessons that I have learned when deciding what to prioritize and why. This is a blog post I have been meaning to write for a long time. But alas it also got de-prioritized. This is what I believe in when prioritizing.

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Why time to celebration lunch matters

Its the festive season, so my stomach is feeling bloated already from Halloween parties, Thanksgiving feasts and the upcoming Christmas period. Shoutout to 7 slices of sweet potato/pumpkin/apple/cherry pie I’ve eaten in the last 3 days.

Today my readers I write to you about my latest product management thoughts on “time to celebration lunch” (TTCL). Its about prioritising based on the shortest path to a celebration lunch.

Lets discuss this from first principles. First principles are fundamental assumptions that a theory are based from.

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