A few months ago, a lovely chap called Kavi Guptta asked me how I stay informed. I wrote way too much and he had to edit it down aggressively. For anyone who is interested, here are my full, unedited responses…

Describe your daily reading habit:

My reading habits have changed a lot over the years. I did postgrad work in the humanities, so I read a huge amount of academic literature in my mid-twenties — to the extent that it almost started to feel like I was bombarded by words everywhere I went. And yet I liked writing and reading — they feel like scaffolds for thinking about things—so I kept up that tradition of over-consumption when I abandoned academia and ran away to join the Internet.

This was sort of the mid-nineties, and I was still doing it by the earliest days of weblogs in 1999 to 2005-ish. I had a ritual of waking up around 8am, spending about an hour on the web reading and writing on plasticbag.org before heading into work—which thankfully was a pretty short trip—and then keeping up with various discussions and news sites throughout the day. This escalated even more when RSS readers started to become popular. I’d be trying to keep up with several hundred sites — mostly interesting individuals talking about technology and the web—but I’d also be a member of several online communities where I could stretch my legs in various other areas.

Probably three things changed my reading practices. Firstly, my work got much more involving and creative. By the time I was running a little R&D team at the BBC I found myself attacking increasingly meaty and interesting problems on a daily basis, and that pushed me into a very different mode. General reading started to fade away and started to be replaced with much more directed exploration around the things that we were building. That’s stayed with me. A lot of the time I stumble upon really odd new areas simply because one of the projects I’m working on involves me knowing about it. And because I really like the transition point where new technology starts to pushes into the mainstream, I’ve followed all kinds of areas from social software, media distribution, the web of data, location services through to today the Internet of Things.

Secondly, I started to realize that the conversations moving around the internet on a daily basis were starting to repeat themselves. My first exposure to the ‘are bloggers journalists’ discussion is now twelve years old — but it would reappear every three or four years as a topic of discussion again. For the people involved in them, they’re no doubt interesting and new but I started to realize that the larger trends in technology don’t actually change on a daily basis and that once you’re up to speed with the area you’re currently focused on, you barely need to keep half an eye on the daily chatter.

Finally, the ways that I could engage in conversations with my friends or follow complete strangers changed a lot. I pick up a lot from just being in a room with interesting people and letting that inspire me to wander off in strange directions. Today, things like Twitter mean that I can pretty easily absorb the general zeitgeist by dipping in and out of what interesting people are discovering or pointing at in the background of my day.

Now, a normal day for me probably starts with checking Twitter to see what my friends are up to, and then I’ll probably have it on in the background pretty much all day. I dip in and out when I’m bored or when something interesting appears to be happening and I probably stumble on most of my news that way. On my way to work I listen to podcasts from the UK like In Our Time. I glance at The Guardian every day, read MacRumours compulsively because I find Apple fascinating, and spend a lot of time on iO9 to satisfy my nerd needs.

Beyond that I’m now subscribed to a few RSS feeds again, but they’re very different from ten years ago — they’re either weird fragments of the future, like BLDG BLOG or Future Drama or they’re deep design blogs where I can get exposed to beautiful things and extreme craftsmanship of various kinds. As I get older, I get more and more interested in the complexities and depths of craft — ink traps in typography, printing methods, modernist design and stuff like that. I love that dedication to detail and the way that your appreciation of something deepens when you understand why it is the way that it is. Otherwise I mostly focus on reading and research for particular weird product problems I’m having when I’m trying to assemble things in my head, although I do read a fair number of non-fiction books on my iPad and a lot of shiny, ostentatious, brightly-coloured comic books full of big weird ideas.

How do you learn?

The short answer is I learn too slowly. The longer answer is that it’s mostly pretty directed — I like collecting new skills, but I mostly collect them because I have something I want to do with them. As I said, I started off planning to be a humanities academic before I discovered the web and when I had discovered it—like many people of my generation—I sort of had to do everything. I had to get my head around the code side, the design side and what would now be called the ‘product’ side. I spent a lot of time writing for the web, designing sites, building them, and while I’ve had to specialize a lot over the years, I try really hard to be able to talk intelligently to designers, engineers, business people and product people as well as critics and thinkers outside my specific area.

At this moment in history it feels to me like a lot of things that were separate and silo’d have been put in the same territory (the internet) sometimes for the first time ever. And so it feels like the greatest creative potential can come from trying to see how those things or ideas can connect to each other to make something new. That’s sort of how I understand things right now — that the more things you know, the more connections between them you can generate and the more amazing stuff happens.

By way of an example, a while ago when I was first getting into thinking about the Internet of Things I had to recognize that I didn’t really know how to manufacture physical products. My business partner is good with electronics and soldering irons and stuff like that, but that seemed like a mountain of work for me to get into at this stage. So I followed the lead of a few of my friends and started exploring how you could mock-up videos of objects apparently in people’s homes using 3D software and After Effects. To give myself a goal, I decided I’d try and do three or four very short videos that I could use in a talk I was going to give. It was enormously painful and the videos are not very good, but they communicated the idea.

But interestingly, we also started working on a different project around that time focused on interactive graphics for TV. My week of fiddling with After Effects was enormously helpful in thinking about what the possibilities might be for a live 3D graphics compositing + a TV programme and we explored all kinds of fun ways of integrating live data into TV shows using the right color palettes, vanishing points, while being sensitive to edits and all kinds of other stuff. That little bit of exploration in one area just triggered all kinds of fun ideas (plus we got to work with Greg Borenstein who wrote the book on hacking the Kinect, which helped). Short directed forays with specific goals into weird areas end up being really really useful.

Where do you go for inspiration outside
of your day-to-day expertise?

One thing that has been very clear to me throughout my years in tech has been how useful my abortive PhD was. It had absolutely nothing to do with tech in any way whatsoever — I was writing about identity politics, film theory and Ancient Greek tragedy. But it gave me a whole range of mental tools and ways of looking at the world — new ways of understanding that things haven’t always been the way they are today. I genuinely believe that you pick up weird mental or creative strategies throughout your life and that a widely read person who is keen to employ some of what they learn will always do more interesting (if not always more valuable) work than someone who is super deep in only one or two areas.

So I guess if I had to point to non-tech specific areas that give me some perspective or inspiration, they’d probably include history or literature or graphic design a lot, as well as fantastic TV shows, books and comics. I mentioned In Our Time earlier, but I can’t recommend it enough — forty five minutes each week of a completely different subject, from the arrival of trains into Britain, or Ancient Alexandrian Librarians all the way through to Dark Matter. Matt Webb introduced me to it years and years ago. I suppose the truth is that you never really know what might trigger an idea for you, so exposing yourself to a lot of different things is probably the best strategy.

One particular thing that I do find very good for inspiration though is Pinterest. I know that for many people Pinterest is all about collecting hairstyles or recipes, but there are millions of people on it, each of whom cares about something different. I follow people interested in typography, visual design, illustration, information visualization, maps, network-connected devices and many other things. It’s such a great way to trigger bits of your brain into doing something useful but unexpected. I use it every day…

What’s one piece of advice for
someone who wants to do what you do?

I’m not entirely sure I know precisely what it is that I do, but I think more generally my advice would be to play a lot, explore lots of things, sketch lots of ideas, learn weird bits of software that interest you and do something with them — to fundamentally try and work out what it is that you actually enjoy doing and then to do more of it. For me it gradually became clear to me that what I liked more than anything else was making things that I could show to other people or that other people could play with or use. The internet taught me how much fun that could be, and since then that element of my daily work has stuck with me as the fundamental goal — at times I’ve gone astray from it (taking the money instead of doing work I can be proud of) and all that did is make me hate my job and start to hate my discipline. But when I get back to making something that I actually care about with people that I like, there’s genuinely nothing better, occasionally harder but definitely more rewarding.

Other than that, I’d say that if you can find a passion that’s fulfills you that actually pays the bills then you’re incredibly lucky. Not everyone gets to find that in their lives. Don’t hold back, jump right in and do it as much as you can.

If you’d like to see what effect a good editor can have on my writing, the original article is here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kaviguppta/2014/04/25/how-im-informed-with-tom-coates-of-product-club/

How I stay informed… was originally published in Product Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A quick write-up of a session at the 2014 #foocamp hosted by O’Reilly Media

For those of you who don’t know, ‘Foo Camp’ is a yearly event that O’Reilly Media does for friends of the company. We all decamp to Sebastopol and do a sort of unconference with drinking and talk a bit about what things are interesting us, the problems we’re having and ways in which we think technology might evolve in the near future. I’m lucky enough to have been invited a few times over the last decade and l look forward to it enormously.

The last couple of years, it was a little difficult for me to completely connect with the event because the little company I’ve formed with Matt Biddulph was very much in progress and I didn’t feel like I had an enormous amount I could talk about freely. To some extent that was still true this year, but one question has definitely been rattling around in my mind that is related to what we’re currently working on but not a giveaway, so I decided to do a session on it. And because Matt Jones decided to write up his session, I’ve now been guilted into writing this one up too.

First a little background. The last few years have seen an explosion of Internet of Things discussion and a lot of new ideas pushing into the world. It’s been (as I’ve said in a previous piece) an exciting time to be involved in the space. But it definitely feels like it’s still the earliest days and that the discussions are mostly incremental.

Just for one moment, I wanted to push out a little further and see if we could make a little bit more of a goal for us to work towards. So the session basically had this as its premise:

Specifically I wanted people to imagine a world (let’s say) twenty years from now in which every piece of infrastructure, every new device we buy—everything that uses electricity essentially—can belch out information into the ether. Some of those objects would also be able to take commands of one form or another. And the core question — how the hell do we (or will we) make sense of it all?

Quick aside: I’ve been thinking about some of the questions about what future objects should be pushing out into the world for a while, and in a few of my talks over the last two or three years have basically been arguing that we should put the core intelligence into the cloud, and leave the objects as a set of switches and sensors that can pump out or react to these basic things:

I think my thinking has evolved a bit further since then, but basically that core point still stands — it’s possible for us to write a core list of things that every object in the world should do upon which we can build interesting services. And—back to the subject of the session—if every object in the world is doing those things, how the hell do we make sense of it all.

Anyway, to give some extra context to people in the session (who were numerous and very clever) I’d asked a few people I knew who had interesting positions on this stuff to give a couple of minutes of initial commentary — in particular Matt Jones, my co-founder Matt Biddulph and Kati London.

Mr Jones has been thinking in interesting areas like this for years with BERG (among other places) and started us off thinking about a few angles focused around objects with personalities. I think he and the BERG crew were among the first of our current era of designers to think about how objects that did things of their own accord might start to feel like creatures or things with intent and they’ve explored that in a number of ways. Hence projects like Little Printer and Schooloscope which used a form of Chernoff Faces to express the different personalities of different schools.

In fact some of you might remember the first round of conversation about intelligent agents on the internet. The idea clearly registered with Matt because I remember him talking about them when we worked adjacent to one another at the BBC at thousand years ago. At that time, he was very interested in agents that would go and gather news articles or information for you. He talked about them then in a sort of Philip Pullman style (best picture I could get was from the movie — sorry):

More recently he did a talk at Webstock which is well worth reading in which he talks about agents and their place in a new world of animistic technologies. It’s very cool stuff and (with entities like Siri) feels like it’s getting ever closer to manifesting in the world…

Another aside: This all reminds me of a sort of argument that I think I saw Adam Greenfield and Mike Kuniavsky have in parallel talks at ETech a thousand years ago about whether magic and animism was a useful metaphor for thinking about ubiquitous computing. God knows how many years on, this feels like a discussion whose time has finally come.

Mr Biddulph came next and talked about a few things that he and I have been playing with as well as some of his higher order thoughts. He fleshed out one of Mr Jones’ core issues mentioned earlier — that of objects that act without human intervention feeling ‘spooky’ and how that manifested in human perceptions of objects’ different personalities. You might have the computer that you think is out to get you, or the car that just seems to read your mind when you’re driving so you love it and pet it and treasure it. I don’t remember if he mentioned it explicitly in the session but he also brings up Genuine People Personalities a lot (post-Douglas Adams) both in terms of making sense of explaining why objects do what they do, but also—I hope—to point out some of the grotesqueness of every object in the world talking to you incessantly about their opinions.

“All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.”

Yet another aside: For me the idea of objects with personalities has an interesting series of debates around it. At one end you get the ‘joy’ of Beauty and the Beast where all the objects are dancing around and cheering and chatting to one another and some of them are French.

At the other end there’s a sort of austerity that views this stuff all as terribly kitsch, overwhelming and unpleasant, where the objects around us should disappear into zen-like polished white environments and barely surface at all. It’s probably unfair of me to associate this with Adam Greenfield, but I think it’s fair to say he’d hate the world to be like Beauty and the Beast.

Back to the session — Matt also brought up another concept that he and I had been thinking about a bit which is the idea of a chat-room for a home. Essentially that one way to handle this disparity between endlessly chatty places and invisible seamlessness might be to create a parallel space in which objects could speak in human-readable language. Much like a conference might have a chatroom, so might a home. And it might be a space that you could duck into as you pleased to see what was going on. By turning the responses into human language you could make the actions of the objects less inscrutable and difficult to understand.

Finally Kati would have talked, but was actually caught up with something else and arrived late so instead I summarised a little bit of the work that I’d seen her present at O’Reilly’s Solid Conference a few weeks earlier. She’s currently working at Microsoft Research and had been talking about a project to take urban data and make it comprehensible by giving it a personality and even digesting it down into little cartoon fragments that could be grokked in moments. Her talk (again) was called Humanizing Data: Implementing a Genuine People Personality Server. I can’t find video online for it in an open place unfortunately, but if you get a chance to see her speak you should. She also talked about a lot of other personality-based technologies she’s worked on including the amazing Botanicalls. Her talk was awesome. Here are a few screencaps from a non-open source:

With the intros out of the way and a few of the core issues surfaced we went into a larger brainstorm structure, with a goal of fielding people’s comments into two main sections — problems that we could imagine being generated by this world of connected objects (or that already existed) and UI metaphors that we might be able to use to understand this world. I can’t possibly recount all the brilliant comments and thoughts and people who contributed, particularly as I didn’t know many people’s names, but I think I should make a nod to Kathy Sierra, Linda Stone, Dan Saffer and Scott Jenson who were all gracious enough to contribute. Everyone else, thanks so much for your participation.

At around the 45 minute mark we’d constructed this list which I found really interesting and has triggered a lot of ideas for me:

A few interesting things emerged for me — how much of organising your smart objects feels like a chore for people. There was lots of discussion about having to become a software engineer to understand the rule-making systems, and some conversation about how you should be able to buy some off the shelf structures like “Crate and Barrel’s Smart Home Ruleset” (I believe that was a Sierra-ism). There were another set of conversations about how hard these things were to set up and how much data and noise people might be expected to deal with. I don’t think I was particularly surprised by any of the particular issues people had with connected objects, but I was definitely surprised by how strongly people felt them. It hadn’t really occurred to me that people might actually feel in conflict with their environments — the benefit/cost of being deeply immersed in technology on a daily basis, I suppose…

Another issue that came up was about how some of this technology assumed people lived very organised and structured lives with little variety and no messy events or actors within them. Houseguests, less-technical partners, pets and children all came up as wonderful elements of everyday life that technologists just seemed to have forgotten existed. While I think a bit of that feeling is about pushing blame for feeling confused about new tech onto the old stereotype of the slightly autistic, technical white male (I mean all technology starts in a non-perfectly thought-through form) there’s no denying that most contemporary systems deal with these situations very poorly indeed.

I think it was in the section on metaphors that the session really came alive though. Matt Jones talked about BERG’s work and how they’d started to think of objects as fitting into categories from the inert to the actively participating — ‘saucepans, houseplants, puppies and people’ were I think the categories he suggested. If you’re putting out a smart fridge, where does that fit? It’s probably closer to a houseplant than a person, and has equivalently limited needs to communicate…

And of course the personality element was very present again — to what extent the future was instruction-based remote controls (physical, app based or voice-controlled with the object merely taking instruction) or verbose and acting in the world, like JARVIS from the Iron Man movies, or HAL from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Or was the ‘voice’ of the future more a hundred billion voices, with every object expressing itself separately and collaborating behind your back…

Super quick aside this time — this conversation reminded me that I’d sketched out a tiny picture of a toaster thinking about its life that I don’t think I’d ever really put online. So here it is:

The end of the session was probably the most revealing part of the whole enterprise. I’d decided to do a quick pop-quiz about how we thought the future would unfold, and very quickly people agreed that there was a significant difference between what they wanted to happen and what they thought would happen. And when we did a quick hand-raising exercise at the end of the session, the results really surprised me. Again this is a highly technical audience but the general consensus was that some kind of concierge experience combined with a lot of physical interfaces roughly like we operate with today was what people wanted. But the general fear was that we’d end up with a bunch of dashboards and silo’d apps in perpetuity and ad infinitum.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who participated in the session. I learned a lot and really enjoyed it. I hope you guys did too. And to anyone who has managed to read this thing to the end, well done! Now let’s see if we can collectively create a world of smart objects that makes sense to everyone...

Tom Coates is the co-founder with Matt Biddulph of Product Club — a new product development and invention company based in San Francisco. We’ve recently moved from doing consultancy to working on a really exciting start-up project that we’re not quite ready to tell you about yet!

Interacting with a World of Connected Objects was originally published in Product Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Or how the shape of the Internet of Things will be decided inside your toasters and washing machines…

Unlike the moral universe, the long arc of technology curves not towards justice, but boredom. And—at one level at least—it’s boredom that we aspire to. We might initially thrill at a world of new functionality, new abilities and new super-powers, but we also want and expect that initial strangeness and magic to be gradually digested down into the substrate of our lives — becoming a part of the infrastructure and background of our world, barely visible, unacknowledged, almost natural.

It only takes a moment to see how uncomfortable we are with the insane, sustained complexity of the world we inhabit. Simply look around and attempt to imagine the origins and histories—the family trees—of all the products, services and objects that you can see. When you do, the spiralling complexity of it all is enough to give you vertigo.

Each thing you glance towards started with the mining of minerals in far-off lands, the harvesting of crops, the breeding and culling of animals, the processing of materials, complex machinery that grids and boils and melts and refashions. In parallel, each object has an intellectual history - reaching back across the creative labour of two thousand years worth of thinkers whose work brought us to steam, electricity, resistors, computers. Material history and scientific progress are brought together in designs on computers or sketchpads, with human hands and minds stretched across the planet, co-ordinating a collision of components from which emerge functionality, form and colour. Still more diverse people across the planet are involved in the polishing, packaging and distribution of these things, before the great ships cross the seas or trace lines across the sky, carrying these objects and materials to new homes. Finally, these objects are arranged in all their staggering overlapping complexity on the street in front of you, or the office in which you work, or the home that you love — by thousands of interconnected yet independent individuals — each object bringing new abilities into the world and into your life, making things possible that were never possible before.

So why don’t we choose to live in this world of magic and wonder all the time? Why don’t we choose to be continually surprised and stimulated by the intricate patterns formed in every direction, stretching off into the distance? Why instead do we let that complexity disappear, dissolve into our daily experience? The answer is simple — because it would be overwhelming. There’s only so much space for magic and weirdness in our lives and we reserve that space for the immediately strange, or dangerous or novel.

The small amount of drama that we’re able to deal with each day is just a sliver, shiny brightly on the water. The great invisible iceberg under the ocean is the realm of the useful, of the everyday, of the objects that don’t continually push themselves front of mind, and that’s where products and services must eventually aim if they are to be fully integrated into our lives.

It’s an exciting time to be involved in the Internet of Things. It’s been almost thirty years since people started hypothesizing about a world of ubiquitous and pervasive computation, and twenty since the first toasters and coffee pots were connected to the internet. Over that time we’ve seen endless playful experiments and explorations of how objects might connect to each other and to us in thrilling new combinations of object + computation + network. But almost none of this work has reached the general public.

Only now is that starting to change, and fundamentally that’s because evolving technologies and interaction patterns have reached a sufficient level of maturity to finally let the potential unfold. You can see it everywhere — in the pervasive internet access that now spreads across the airwaves, in cheap networking components, in tiny computers stamped out by the millions and available for pennies, and in new interfaces in everyone’s pockets through which devices and appliances can be better controlled and understood. The world of the near future now looks like a place where every object can be connected to the network cheaply and easily. Finally it seems like the Internet of Things is ready to go mainstream.

More interestingly, this new generation of Internet of Things ideas seems qualitatively different from those that came before - they’re more in tune with the deeper affordances of the Internet. One very significant move has been the layering of the concept of multiple user accounts onto physical items — a now banal element of most web services is transformative when layered onto physical objects or spaces. Zipcar alone shows how some of the affordances of web services have the power to change how we interact with physical objects completely. A car is no longer an object that is owned, but a service that you can commission or spin up as needed.

And instead of adding great chunks of immediately out-of-date hardware into appliances with decade-long replacement cycles, much more of the intelligence is being abstracted out onto the network. To use a biological analogy, the objects themselves increasingly contain only eyeballs (sensors) and muscles (actuators). The nervous system and the brain are now elsewhere, abstracted out into the cloud, where they can be built upon and enhanced over the lifetime of a product. This service layer is becoming ever more as important as the physical object itself.

But for me the most important change is the move from IoT concept cars and interaction design experiments to a new world where the things we’re building are simply, cleanly useful. This latest generation of objects no longer ‘perform’ the internet—they’re not laden with touchscreens or web browsers or e-mail clients. They are instead just using the network to make better light switches, fridges and dishwashers — things that just make people’s lives a bit better.

Nest’s smoke alarms and thermostats are among the first of this new breed of products that are not simply concerned with showing off and instead are fundamentally concerned with making better objects using the network as a material. And other manufacturers are starting to follow in their wake, with large companies that produce every kind of appliance in the home, office or wider world starting to wake up to the possibilities. This is new, and as far as I’m concerned it constitutes the largest and most significant shift that we’ve seen in IoT for years.

These companies are looking for simple life-enhancing benefits from connected objects — whether it’s the tumble drier that turns on when you leave the house, the lights that turn down in any room you’re not occupying, or the fridge that informs you if it’s malfunctioning and schedules a service automatically. They’re looking at the clear value in the more effective management of energy across smart grids. They’re looking at ways to protect users from theft by making objects that simply stop working when they are stolen. And they’re looking at the new business models that become possible when you find new ways to share objects — whether it be the local home improvement tools that can be used by people only when they need them, through to appliances that you don’t buy but pay for by the use.

It’s everyday things like this that will get the Internet of Things out into the world. But it won’t happen by itself. Large appliance companies are no more able to turn their appliances into services than web technologists and service designers are able to assemble fridge-freezers out of JSON and iPhone apps. As never before, manufacturers and online service designers need to collaborate to build something collectively that is genuinely new — simple, useful, networked products that bring genuine value to people’s lives. And we need to help that collaboration happen, reaching out to each other as we do so, if we’re really going to make a world of useful, networked smart objects.

And that is the goal — a planet of objects writing and responding to the network, knitting themselves together in a new pervasive infrastructure that opens up endless new possibilities for all of us. That may sound like a leap for a discipline currently focused on super-evolved toasters and conversational light-switches, but think for a moment about where we go next.

The stage beyond this one is full of latent burgeoning potential that we cannot tap—or potentially even understand—until the network is pervasively woven into the world. Just as the social network couldn’t happen until enough people were online to make it interesting or useful, so new categories of services will start to appear as more and more objects come online.

In the near future, the world we’re building together is fundamentally about ovens and dishwashers, parking meters and water pumps. But the services we build today for our cars and phones and robot vacuum cleaners are together forming the bedrock for a tomorrow that (from here) seems much less predictable and far more exotic. The smart thermostat and the car-sharing services you use today are test-beds for the next fifty years, and the ideas we build into them now will unfold in fascinating ways that could have huge implications on everything from public space to the very concepts of ownership and sharing. Fundamentally, in our work today we’re starting the process of blending the physical territory of the world and the digital map of the world into something that becomes better than either could be by itself. Perhaps even one where the distinctions between the two no longer seem relevant or useful.

By the time we get there, it may all seem very obvious, prosaic and — grudgingly we can admit — probably profoundly useful. But for the moment this sliver of light on the water is unknown, untapped, unprocessed and fascinatingly weird and new. And we have time to appreciate that wonder, to taste it, to bring form and shape to it, to dream and argue about it, even as we day by day build towards it. The future, at its best, is a site of endless potential and change. And while in the end, technology might tend towards boredom, the creative joy is getting there.

This piece was originally written for a free publiction given out at the Things Conference hosted in Berlin in May 2014.

In praise of boring objects was originally published in Product Club on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.