@rcauvin.bsky.social
♟️ #prodmgmt | Positioning | Strategy 👨🔬 Consumer Science | ML | AI 🏢 Downtown Austin dweller 🏘️ Advocate for inclusive neighborhoods
Business goals are inward focused, and defining them has limited value. The real magic is in defining and measuring customer outcomes, and then showing how improving customer outcomes will lead to better business outcomes.
articles.centercentre.com/why-ux-outco...
When someone asks for a report, don't ask, "What do you want in the report?" Instead, ask what decisions it will help them make.
"Nobody wakes up in the morning and says today's going to be a great day, I'm going to produce 15 reports." - @jmspool.bsky.social
Today's #AI and #ML models rely on memorization and "local generalization". Massive scaling has led to smarter models. But getting models to adapt to novel situations, where there is little or no data, will require more than just memorizing more data.
deeplearningwithpython.io/chapters/cha...
To honorable City Council, Commissioners, & Staff:
DANA opposes height limits and other exclusionary zoning downtown, and we specifically oppose the base height limit proposed in the C20-2025-010 Central Business District (CBD) amendments. 🧵
Sometimes we need to fundamentally rethink the existing journey instead of selectively fixing points of frustration within it. Either way, breaking down the larger aspirational vision into visionettes makes a lot of sense.
29.09.2025 13:25 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
The task of coming up with a long-term vision can feel daunting. However, if you break it into bite-sized pieces or visionettes, it makes it doable.
Here’s how you do it: https://articles.centercentre.com/building-an-experience-vision-from-a-journey-map/
Me: "I start walking north at constant forward pace of 2 mph. I continue walking at the same pace, but each minute, I turn 1 degree clockwise. After 360 minutes, where do I end up relative to my starting point?"
Gemini: "After 360 minutes, you will end up at your starting point."
Wilson scoring is a simple way to score the popularity of items (such as comments on a Reddit post) based on up-votes and down-votes. As far back as 2009, Evan Miller pointed out the flaws in other methods (e.g. average rating).
www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-s...
H/T @kennyd.bsky.social
Join in for September's volunteer Shoal Creek clean-up session!
WHEN: Saturday, Sep 13 (8:45-9a)
WHERE: outside The Independent (301 West Ave)
The monthly collaboration continues with APD, DAA, & the Downtown Austin Community Court.
www.downtownaustin.org/september-20...
"But strategy suffocates when everything gets reduced to a list. Lists coordinate. Loops adapt. You need both." - @paulisthrivving.xyz
medium.com/thrivve-part...
#prodmgmt
Words-based methods can sometimes find relevance where semantic-based retrieval and modeling fails. I've developed ensemble models to address these limitations.
www.alphaxiv.org/pdf/2508.21038
#ML #MLSky #AI
Concerns about "timing" are also frustrating. I remember a time when, in a meeting, everyone supported a position, but a few people said it was "too early" to publicly express our support. Then, at the next meeting, the same people said it was "too late" to express our support.
29.08.2025 14:33 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0One of the most frustrating situations in civic advocacy is when potential allies think the cause has merit but is not "politically viable". Yet the reason it's not viable is that they, themselves, haven't publicly voiced their support.
29.08.2025 14:26 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Also, strategy is largely about aligning current and future decisions with deliberate choices you've already made. #prodmgmt
24.08.2025 17:15 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0I hope pro-housing advocates will embrace and apply this mindset to density bonus programs. Inclusionary zoning and density bonus programs are part of a scarcity mindset, not an abundance agenda. We should advocate for better alternatives.
19.08.2025 23:31 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
Come out to DANA's End of Summer Urban Core Happy Hour this Sun, Aug 24 at The Stay Put (73 Rainey St.) from 4-7pm!
Our guest speaker will be Davon Barbour, CEO of @DowntownATXInfo! Entry comes with 2 free drink tickets & appetizers.
More info and RSVP here:
www.eventbrite.com/e/dana-end-o...
"It combines the deep language understanding capabilities of a large language model with the speed and reliability of a dedicated classification head. This leads to a more accurate, consistent, and cost-effective solution."
10.08.2025 16:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0I asked Gemini (in the context of classification problems), and it agrees:
"For most practical classification problems, the embedding-based approach is unequivocally better."
An approach that leverages the LLM's first three layers to extract the meaning of the input, bypasses the final output layer, and instead applies task-specific machine learning layers to make the final predictions, is likely to perform better.
10.08.2025 16:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0The fourth "layer" merely outputs ("predicts") a likely "next token". It doesn't directly predict an outcome. You can certainly ask the LLM to output "next tokens" that effectively predict or classify, but it's not what the output layer is designed to do.
10.08.2025 16:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0A typical LLM (1) tokenizes the input, (2) encodes the tokens into "embeddings" (semantic representations), (3) transforms the tokens and encodings to further capture the meaning of the input, and (4) outputs the most relevant and likely "next token".
10.08.2025 16:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Increasingly, I've noticed vibe coders and product people suggesting that prompts and LLMs can replace specialized machine learning models for making predictions. We only have to look at how LLMs work to recognize the flaw in this belief. #AI #ML 🧵
10.08.2025 16:59 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 1 📌 0
"Google seems to be working on bringing NotebookLM to Gemini, combining two of its most powerful AI apps.
The option to import notebooks will reportedly appear in the same menu where you currently add images, files, or Google Drive documents to Gemini."
www.androidpolice.com/googles-best...
Without much fanfare, @divyasreepat.bsky.social and her team have released Keras 3.11. It includes support for Grain, a declarative data processing solution similar to TensorFlow datasets, yet not dependent on TensorFlow or any particular backend.
github.com/google/grain
#MachineLearning #ML #AI
Great to see @lauraries.bsky.social on Substack, and I'm looking forward to reading her new book on defining an "enemy" to build and position a brand.
riespositioning.substack.com
#positioning #prodmgmt #prodmktg #strategy
"A very thin line separates the 'good' kind of personalization from the creepy kind."
thedecisionlab.com/insights/tec...
by Preeti Kotamarthi
#ML #MachineLearning
A compelling vision also requires hard trade-offs. By defining an end state, a vision implies that activities not in pursuit of that end state are distractions.
Here is an old thread on why vision is a part of strategy: bsky.app/profile/rcau...
No matter how good the play-calling, no matter how good the quarterback, no matter how good the running backs, a football team won't be successful if team members don't do the fundamentals of blocking and tackling.
16.07.2025 20:12 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
Instead of story points, use Roman Estimation to "right-size" work.
mdalmijn.com/p/roman-esti...
by Maarten Dalmijn
#prodmgmt #agile
Aside from the artificial distinction between vision and strategy, this Roman Pichler piece rightly describes some common mistakes in attempting to define a product vision.
romanpichler.medium.com/5-product-vi...
#prodmgmt
