Roger L. Cauvin

DANA 2026 Annual Meeting · Luma Elevate Your Perspective at DANA's 2026 Annual Meeting On Sunday, March 1st, the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association (DANA) invites you to a bird's-eye…

Join us at our 2026 Annual Meeting at the Hanover Brazos rooftop on Sun, 3/1 from 6-7:30p!

Enjoy BBQ and sunset views while discussing the future of downtown with special guest @zoforaustin.bsky.social and local advocates.

Free for members/their guests & $10 for others.

RSVP: luma.com/pxra3qio

The Reframe is the Startup Startups are supposed to be about building. But the ones that break through don't just build. They shift how we see.

Successful startups often don't play in the same field as the competition. They reframe the landscape as something different.
open.substack.com/pub/patternb...
by @m2jr.bsky.social #prodmgmt #startups

It’s Time We Seriously Talk About Users and Experiences - UX Articles by Center Centre For some reason, UX people never speak about users or experiences. And that hurts our work. “But I talk about my users all the time.” Sure, we often say things like “Our users deserve the best user ex...

Beyond surveys and role-based personas: A single true story about a real user's or prospect's experience is arguably worth more than a dozen survey responses.

articles.centercentre.com/its-time-we-...

by @jmspool.bsky.social

clearsky.app/saeedwkhan/b...

Data scientists and engineers sometimes just want to view Jupyter notebooks without editing or executing them. Check out this simple but handy ipynb viewer by Jakub Jirutka.
ipynb.js.org
#AI #ML

Overfitting and the problem with use cases As a Miro PM with lots of collaborators, I sit in a lot of early-stage product and design reviews (including my own). I hear a question…

Reminds me of why spreadsheets are often better solutions than specialized apps.
medium.com/design-bootc...
by Joe McLean
#prodmgmt

Who Really Owns America? And Does It Matter?

The root cause of the lack of housing supply and affordability is exclusionary zoning. Corporate ownership of homes is a side show. open.substack.com/pub/cityofye...

Our biggest crisis was a product strategy blessing in disguise How a staffing crisis paved the path to a better business model

"[T]he teams that thrive are the ones who use disruption as an opportunity to build the solutions they’ve been thinking about anyway."
www.mindtheproduct.com/our-biggest-...
by Asher Atlas
#prodmgmt

Why Pain Points Fail: The "Cannot Not Use" Framework for Startup Validation From "Interesting" to "Essential": Transforming Your Product Into a Necessity

"Validation" continues to lead #prodmgmt astray. Good piece from Todd Gagne despite his use of the term.
open.substack.com/pub/wildfire...

"If cities deregulate off-street parking and charge the right price for curb parking, market forces will improve transportation, land use, the environment, and urban life." - Donald Shoup, quoting himself in reply to an accusation that he favored parking maximums.

"Despite their ambivalence on whether to require or restrict parking, planners always regulate it. This behavior recalls a Soviet maxim: 'What is not required must be prohibited.'" - Donald Shoup

Adaptive Strategy – Kromatic Blog Even the best-laid plans need to adapt and evolve to developing circumstances, by building agility into how we conceive and implement adaptive strategy in the first place.

Strategy is a set of hypotheses. Build adaptive strategy into your process.
kromatic.com/blog/adaptiv...
by @trikro.bsky.social and Susie Braam #prodmgmt

Seems like contradictory advice. #prodmgmt

Vision isn't a statement. It's a guide. Discover why a great product vision means nothing if it stays on a slide. This article unpacks how Microsoft Teams lost sight of its vision—and how your product team can avoid the same trap by turning...

"The solution is simple: breathe life into the vision. Take it off the slides and embed it into everyday product work."
www.mindtheproduct.com/vision-isnt-...
by @martarolak.bsky.social
#prodmgmt

The Three Ages of Data Science: When to Use Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or an LLM (Explained with One Example) | Towards Data Science A practical use case to describe how the data scientist job changed across three generations of machine learning

In many AI scenarios, traditional and deep learning are still the best methods for the job.
towardsdatascience.com/the-three-ag...

Why UX Outcomes Make Better Goals Than Business Outcomes - UX Articles by Center Centre Increase subscription retention by 15% this quarter. Increase new policy subscriptions by 20% this year. These are common business outcomes, results the organization’s leadership wants to attain to ke...

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

Deep Learning with Python, Third Edition Deep Learning with Python is written for anyone who wishes to explore deep learning from scratch. This new edition adds comprehensive coverage of generative AI and modern deep learning frameworks. It ...

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.

Building an Experience Vision From a Journey Map - UX Articles by Center Centre The task of coming up with a long-term vision of your design can be a daunting one. It’s a lot of responsibility to imagine what an ideal experience can be, then render a possible design to achieve that experience. However, there’s a way to...

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."

How Not To Sort By Average Rating Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?

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

September Shoal Creek Clean-Up WHAT: September Shoal Creek Clean-Up WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 13, 8:45 am WHERE: The Independent @ 301 West Ave. Volunteers will meet Saturday, September 13, 2025 outside The Independen…

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...

Loop vs List: Why Most Strategies Die in Delivery Why most strategies suffocate in delivery, and how to keep them alive

"But strategy suffocates when everything gets reduced to a list. Lists coordinate. Loops adapt. You need both." - @paulisthrivving.xyz
medium.com/thrivve-part...
#prodmgmt

On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval | alphaXiv View recent discussion. Abstract: Vector embeddings have been tasked with an ever-increasing set of retrieval tasks over the years, with a nascent rise in using them for reasoning, instruction-followi...

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.

One 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.

Also, strategy is largely about aligning current and future decisions with deliberate choices you've already made. #prodmgmt

I 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.