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Heard from product leaders

  • “So this week we deferred about half the work we had planned for the next six months.”
    CPO, on Reddit
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    Head of Product, on Reddit
  • “There's a difference between being in the room and running the room, and I'm feeling that gap right now.”
    New Head of Product, on Reddit

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A woman in orange fishing bibs mends the heavy zipper of a canvas boat cover on a harbour dock, lobster traps stacked behind her Teardown4 min readWhat it takes to make a zipperAnd the make-or-buy line: why the part you can buy, your rivals can buy too.

Coming up

An ambulance waits at a ferry terminal in thick fog before dawn, a paramedic beside the open door as the ferry comes in TeardownComing upWhat it takes to run an emergency roomAnd Little's law: more work in progress means everything takes longer. A man solders a small circuit board under a magnifier lamp in a workshop on the water, a wooden boat on trestles behind him TeardownComing upWhat it takes to make an AI chipAnd the Theory of Constraints: improving anything but the constraint is an illusion. A woman picks metal type from a drawer in a barn print shop, a cast-iron press by the window and a stone wall in the snow outside TeardownComing upWhat it takes to make a fontAnd the Law of the Minimum: not the letters, the space between them.
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