fabiochiu/medium-articles huggingface dataset:
Balance of Power
By: Jane Woodman
Tags: Resistance Poetry, Women, Voices, Power, Aging

Balance of Power

The Invisible Woman (author’s photo)

“Truth fails not,” a man once said

(Though honors soon went to his head).

As men grow older, truth grows hard,

Replaced by money and regard

Till, petrified with work long past,

Each falls to mumbling at the last,

While still believing that his voice

Is clear and strong. What is his choice?

A woman, now, as she finds age

Is freer than her early stage

Of loving man and bearing much

Of love’s hard labor, care and such–

She finds at last her mind’s own strength

And turns it to her art at length:

Invisible, she earned her hour

To strengthen her creative power.
Hold On
By: Jane Woodman
Tags: Meditation, Aging, Contentment, Peace, Joy

Hold On

Photo by Cristian Newman on Unsplash

Hold on now.

Slide low and slow,

Still as winter draperies

Into the quiet years,

Where meditation

Heals it all.

Not for us

Now we’ve learned

The running after cures

That cure nothing

Leaves no breath

For singing.

Simple songs,

The ones that rise

Carrying our heart’s breath

Into waves of light,

Join the glimmering

Ancient stars.
Retreat
By: Nathan Barrett
Tags: Yin Yang, Neverland, Work, Retirement, Aging

they congratulated her,

they made cakes and hung a banner in the front corridor.

they were clapping when she dropped her keys in her purse.

she looked up:

smiled, beaming.

they made glib jokes:

“it’s all margaritas and sandy toes from here.”

they laughed and

she laughed.

at night, Lira waited at the door with a few remaining cupcakes on a tray.

she tapped her toe: a sardonic woman, but well-humored.

ten years earlier, the humor had confused her at first.

she shooed Lira to leave:

“oh, you go home. I want to check out a book. last one as a professional library scientist.”

Lira came over. they hugged, then Lira left.

She walked through the aisles, pulled one book, replaced it, pulled another, shuffled the pages, replaced it, pulled another.

65,000 books.

Tennyson, no Dickinson…no, no. No Collins. Billy Collins:

a poet with a name that doesn’t sound like a poet.

he did laugh at the reading, at your joke. 25 years ago.

beaming.

she went to her desk, wrote out a return stub, dropped the book in her purse, shut off the lights, closed and locked the door.

she was weeping

before she made it halfway through the parking lot.

she went to her car and sat there with her purse in her lap and wept.

for 33 years she wept;

the parking lot quiet and empty. she beat her fist on

the steering wheel. she stopped when

the third one left a bruise

and it hurt to make a fist anymore.

you can see it in their eye when they speak; they look

just over your head to one side, looking at

a world they imagine right then and there:

right then and there,

a perfect world is in the balance.

they hand you books, records, end tables,

almost never groceries, sometimes drinks, and sometimes news you’d hoped would be different.

there are perks to hating your job.
High School Reunion
By: Terry Trueman
Tags: Vulgarity, Sex, Aging, Humor, Poetry

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33 Years
By: Eileen Cowen
Tags: Death, Grief, Survivor, Womanhood, Aging

Today’s the 33rd anniversary of my mum’s death. I have now lived longer than she did, and boy does it seem weird.

photo: Eileen Cowen

When you are a kid, the age of 40 seems so… old. Impossible that people can still do the things they want to do. Forty seems blandly middle aged. My mum was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer at age 39, and it is a miracle she lived to 40. I don’t remember much of her illness because childhood trauma has a way of blocking out details. Hell, I don’t remember much of her life, to be honest. I remember her being ill, being in the hospital, and not seeing her again. For the last 33 years, I have been remembering not so much the woman she was, but aching in the void her illness and death created.

It is hard.

Here I sit, at age 42, having outlived the woman who gave me life, and I have a smattering of recollections of her. She was a somewhat emotionally reserved person, much like my own daughter. She had a shy smile, brown hair, gray eyes, and I distinctly remember that my sister had a pair of her shoes. They were light brown with a low heel. My mum was size 7 ½. I would try them on often during the Early Death Years. Then, one day my feet grew larger than hers were. Nothing fit anymore.

Things I inherited from my mother:

Love of reading

Unquenchable curiosity

A thistle necklace, relic of her pre-parent life

Depression

Life is hard, you know? I raise my own children while trying not to fall into the voids left by those who died. I think we all do this. My brother’s void. My daughter’s void. My mother’s void, all ever-flowing rivers of grief. They scour raw ravines. Most days I take successful leaps across the ravines, though I often stumble and trip, ending with wet feet or worse, get carried away with the current of despair. That pesky depression gift I received from 50% of my DNA can be a beautiful liar sometimes.

Was my mum blandly 40? Probably. Maybe The Cancer gave her a false exceptionalism. Maybe it still does. I am solidly middle aged, and glad to have made it thus far. Aged forty two!

Each year she is gone, her void ravine becomes a narrower but deeper gorge.

It is 33 million years deep today.
God Time
By: Dave Johnson
Tags: Poem, Death And Dying, Aging

A raindrop on still water.

Yesterday, today, tomorrow

Causal.

Now time is fluid.

Sometimes stopped.

Friends, family visit.

From now, from then,

All the same.

An instant and a lifetime.

Here, gone.

A quick hello, a welcome.

Inward

A movie in reverse.
Just A Few More
By: Alexander Hirka
Tags: Birthday, Aging

Just A Few More

At this point of the journey

just a few more is the practical approach.

PS. And see how it goes.

You’d hardly have thought that at 20 30 40

even at 50

you’d be planning a lifetime.

But now maybe 2 3 4

5 or more would be great

—springs summers winters autumns.

And maybe a few more trips across the sea

or to the desert.

Sinatra never sang about the November Of My Years.

Celebrities

those with accomplishments,

the recognized!

(even if just for knowing how to stand in front of a camera)

they make the news.

And when they show up at the front desk to check out

—they always announce of how many spins

around the sun they made.

Guess I won’t be included in the list

of creative spirits who died at 68.

Josephine Baker, Dmitri Shostakovich

Rita Hayworth, Kōbō Abe, Shel Silverstein

Rene Magritte, Paul Hindemith

Miguel de Cervantes

and millions of others.

In the next 365 days I could join

Louis Armstrong, Pablo Neruda, Richard Wagner

William Blake, Aldous Huxley, Richard Feynman,

David Bowie, Saddam Hussein,

and millions of others

who left at 69.

The body

this leased transporter of “I”

—like all vehicles

wears down with every mile.

Maude’s suggestion to Harold

to round it out at 80

rings true.

Maude: “I mean, 75 is too early, but at 85 you’re just marking time.”

Objects in rear-view mirror are in fact

farther than they appear

and disappearing as we go over hills.

What did I dismiss?

Did I seek bliss?

How many did I kiss?

How many will read this?

Nobody knows what it is, but there is a number.

“My Parents and Life” — digital collage by AleXander Hirka

My parents

live in a few photographs and fading bureaucratic records.

And in my mind

(perhaps no other any longer)

— whose shelf life

suggests expanding mold and diffusion.

At some point I’ll get on line

with all the others at the last front desk

and return the keys

to this surreal circus.

My accomplishments

my contributions

—will crawl around some computers

and on the Internet for a while

and then these words will be become nothing.

I’ll be heading out for a long vacation

a trip to deliver some nutrients

back to the trees that have sustained me.

And give some dust back to the stars.
How Negativity Makes Your Life Suck
By: Guillermo Vidal
Tags: Life Lessons, Aging, Self Improvement, Life, Spirituality

by Guillermo Vidal | Dec 14, 2020 | Becoming Your Best Self

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

One of my all-time favorite characters on Saturday Night Live was Debbie Downer. Comedian Rachel Dratch played this fictional character in several SNL skits, and she was hilarious.

The formula for these spoofs was always the same, Debbie would interrupt a cheerful social gathering conversation with her negative opinion. She would then turn to the camera with a familiar frown as a muted trombone made a “wah-wah” sound.

This character turned out to be popular enough to become part of modern slang. Today people use the phrase Debbie Downer to describe someone who damps the cheerfulness of a gathering with their negative news or opinions.

Debbie Downer begets more negativity

If you understand anything about the Law of Attraction, then you know of this Quantum Physics based theory that contends emitted energy will attract the same energy in return. Therefore, Debbie Downer’s negativity will attract more things for her to feel negative about. Similarly, repetitive complaining will attract things for you to complain about.

It is hard to explain why so many like to complain about things. I understand why I do it, complaining allows me to make myself the victim. It is my way of telling others that someone has wronged me so I can motivate them to give me their sympathy or help. Pissing and moaning about things keeps me from learning the lesson contained in the experience and allows me to designate responsibility to someone else.

Changing life’s course

I am not saying that all complaining is unnecessary. For example, it is important to expose the abusive behavior of others. However, it is healthy for us to check and see if complaining is our standard operating procedure about life. One clue might be that you don’t have many friends, no one likes Debbie Downer except other Debbie Downers. Together, we Debbie Downers can find an endless list of things to complain about, but we drive many people away.

Remember this about the Law of Attraction. If you want to feel better about life, learn to be grateful. This happens when you accept things as they are and stop judging them as good and bad. You become grateful when you see every experience is helping to form a better you, they all have value, so you have no reason to feel sorry for yourself.

If constant complaining brings you more things to gripe about, then imagine what repetitive gratitude will do for you. It will attract more things for you to be thankful about. Living in a state of gratitude works well for me. I can look at my life in its entirety and be grateful for it. Admittedly, I don’t do this 100% of the time, but anymore it doesn’t take me long to turn to gratitude to help me feel calm, even blissful. This is a habit worth forming.

You have a choice about the kind of life you have. Make it a good one.
Diabetic Cyborg Life 12/20: Progress, Learn, Rebuild & Move on
By: Adam, Diabetic Cyborg
Tags: Growing Up, Life Lessons, Optimism, Life, Aging

This protocol of learning and evolving was something I have had to do since day one in my life. Growing up as the youngest of 3 siblings gave me little room to not progress and grow. Staying on the same wrong ideas and saying untruths would result in ridicule and brow beatings like no other.

I don’t regret that. I embrace it and love that fact that peer pressure from my older siblings was a positive influence in my life. Only in school with complete strangers did peer pressure take a toxic tone with complete strangers picking on me with relentless force.

I can reflect now and think, what the heck was I thinking by taking their taunts to heart. Yet, I did as I was a kid and knew no better. They called me fat, and sadly I believed it. Though, I was rail thin, I ate to fill the unhappy void their taunts opened up.

Yes, their words basically drove me to eat and actually made me fat, as they taunted me into eating. A self-fulfilling prophecy, I see in hindsight. But my foresight failed me and that was what happened.

Sadly, things like this are all too common. I see other people’s stories of growing up.
CONVENIENCE STORES REGISTER LOW FOOTFALLS DUE TO AGING POPULATION AND REDUCED WORKFORCE
By: Purvesh Jain
Tags: Footfall, News, Market, Store, Aging

· Convenience store sales numbers for the first two quarters of 2020 were not a much of a shock, given the economic downturn of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they were still very unnerving to see.

· As compared to the same period the year before, each of the big three operators saw profound drops: Seven-Eleven was down 3.4%, FamilyMart 10.5%, and Lawson 9.2% In reality, the overall combined operating income of the three companies fell 25% from last year, to ¥153.2 billion.

As stand-alone companies, there is no refuting that all three companies are still quite large in their own right. Seven-Eleven had total branch sales equalling ¥2.45 trillion, FamilyMart ¥1.35 trillion, and Lawson ¥1.09 trillion. All three companies have seen a spurt in income per customer from the pandemic-driven increase with focus on home-centric consumption. However, overall customer numbers are low, more than the increased income can cover. Convenience stores have been hit particularly hard because a large part of their business has been instrumental because of being connected to office consumption.

These problems reached the zenith due to the pandemic, but they can be manifested as existing problems the companies have already been facing. These problems are now bringing the convenience store market to a volte-face.

Future Bottlenecks: Reduced Workforce and Decreasing Income

There are now three basic problems facing the convenience store industry. First is a perpetual labor shortage, which is cause for the second issue, the increasing difficulty they have in operating 24 hours a day — a practice also facing opposition from the Japan Fair Trade Commission and overall sentiment. Third and biggest problem is market saturation instigated by Japan’s aging and shrinking population.

The first issue, the labor shortage, is seeing some relief albeit in patches, with the rush of job seekers due to COVID-19’s economic fallout. Stores are also more enthusiastically seeking university students and elderly workers. However, regarding the second issue, 24/7 operations,, the JFTC has stated that forcing franchise holders to operate 24 hours a day is a violation of antitrust laws. This means that change is almost inevitable. Of course, this second issue is not just a reduced workforce issue; it is also connected to the third problem, the overwhelming market saturation. Summing up, from the owners’ perspectives, convenience stores are not as worthy of a decent run as they once were, with the stores being part and parcel of our lives once upon a time.

https://myanmarnews.jp/%e3%82%b3%e3%83%b3%e3%83%93%e3%83%8b%e3%82%a8%e3%83%b3%e3%82%b9%e3%82%b9%e3%83%88%e3%82%a2%e3%81%af%e3%80%81%e4%ba%ba%e5%8f%a3%e3%81%ae%e9%ab%98%e9%bd%a2%e5%8c%96%e3%81%a8%e5%8a%b4%e5%83%8d%e5%8a%9b/
Stroke of Midnight
By: Roy Reichle
Tags: Stroke, Poetry Sunday, Poetry, Mothers, Aging

Before, we would sit side by side,

drinking cups of steaming tea,

watching jays and finches flit

about the feeder dad built,

and you’d tell me how the drab

muddy days of spring could be rescued

by one red robin’s return.

And this morning, I found myself praying

for one bright breast on the lawn,

but your face remains still,

untouched by the bird’s bright antics

that had once lit your smile.
Alzheimer’s archives — 2/10/2018. Part 1.
By: Euri Giles
Tags: Caregivers, Growing Old, Alzheimers, Dads, Aging

Alzheimer’s archives — 2/10/2018

Photo by Robina Weermeijer on Unsplash

It’s tough to share but;

Dad’s a fighter.

2/10/2018

This week we told Dad that he wasn’t able to drive anymore.

When Mom called at 12:38 AM I was already asleep. She called Diana — Dad was trying to leave and she needed help.

He was in the backyard trying to open a broken gate. He gave up and was going to jump the rock wall. I know that I should not have tried to restrain him but I did.

Every time he would start to go over the wall I would pull him down by his belt.

He became so agitated and told me that I should be minding my own business. He didn’t want to have to knock me out — but he would if I didn’t leave him alone.

I remember it like a dream (it feels as if I had blinders on). Everything went dark — I can just see his face, his scowl- his fighting stance — his arms waving — his fist clutching… I don’t know how many times he swung at me, I was able to keep backpedaling and avoid him connecting with my face. He caught my left arm with a solid right hook for an 👴🏽 old man!

I want it to not be real… but it was.

Mom had to call the police. Dad ended up walking off (twice). The police gave him a ride back the first time and when he saw the house he asked the officers if he was free to go and when they said yes, but we recommend you go in your house, he left again right in front of them.

It was a long night…

Once we finally got Dad back home I spent the night on the couch to make sure that Mom wasn’t alone in case he tried to walk off again.

#inthebook
In the Wake of Christmas
By: Jan M Flynn
Tags: Aging, Christmas, Relationships, Love, Poetry

In the Wake of Christmas

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

In time gone, when the big house filled

With children and food and the breath of relatives

Marking together the sparkling zenith of

Days and weeks set apart

All for the purpose of coiling a sense

Of urgency, of expectation,

Limned with brightness glowing or garish,

The annual yearning toward magic

And belief that it could be. So much to

Be done, I would start months ahead

Hoping to manage the spiraling build

Toward that one day

Gifts purchased and hidden, cards

Addressed and stamped, dates held

In reserve for parties and visits, school programs,

The ritual drive to witness the lights

Displayed to render sacred the ordinary.

The stakes were once so high

And inescapable, insistent music everywhere

A goad toward action

All effort mounting to the singularity

That swept each of us into our ordained spaces,

Hosts or guests, keepers of the feast,

Children with fevered eyes whirling in the midst.

Years remake us, advancing us to the spaces

Once taken by those we lose. Sons grown

To manhood, parents and lovers vanishing behind

Us, ourselves continually surprised

At what we’re becoming. Meanwhile, things

Calm down. We are satisfied with tokens, quiet days,

And the memory of breathless uproar, noting

How so much becomes simpler as mystery approaches.
Found
By: Sydney J. Shipp
Tags: Free Verse, Memories, Life, Poetry, Aging

Found

by Jeremy Goldberg on Unsplash

With the forgetting,

you lose a little

bit of yourself

and it rises up to wait

for you to remember it

so you can

recall your way

back home to

how you were

when you were whole

for the only time

in your life

Most moments after

birth are misplaced,

and with each

passing day you grow

more lost

until the last few

memories that make

you up fly into the sky

to join all of the forgotten,

and you find yourself

complete again
White Walls
By: Lexus Ndiwe
Tags: Short Story, Creative Writing, Old Age, Prose, Aging

White Walls

Photo Credit: Paula Schmidt for Pexels.

It’s funny to think that I was once a spacesuit-skinned alien. The same as the ones wrapped in pink and blue blankets. It is insane to me how often I used to dream. Not of the sleeping kind, but ones that plague the mind with hope and ambition.

In my younger years, growing old was incomprehensible. I looked at the raisins as something other. To me they were closer to the grave, so how could we be the same? Now a fellow raisin, it is clear that I was ignorant. I still possess an imagination. I still have goals. I still have life left in me. When the nurse turns my door’s knob, I prepare myself for the syringe wrapped in airtight plastic. Physically, I am numbed. The pain in my body diminishes, and I am free to escape and reminisce.
How Do You Steer Your Life?
By: Andria Anderson
Tags: Self Improvement, Psychology, Aging

DECADES by the Sevens

There is a contemplative exercise, sometimes labeled DECADES. In it, you give each decade of your life a short title, only one to three words long. The titles match what you were like during that decade or what you expect you will be like. The result points out the difference between what you’ve subconsciously expected for the future and what you could intend for your future.

I’ve done the exercise. It was, indeed, instructive. But it has niggled at the back of my mind for months. Somehow, the list did not fit me.

Finally, it clicked. I was using “decades” in its traditional form — my teens, my twenties, my thirties, etc. However, I’ve long noted that that changes in my being occur on my SEVENS — twenty-SEVEN, thirty-SEVEN, forty-SEVEN.

Ah, now I can make an accurate list.

· Childhood (0–7) — Bewildered

· School (8–17) — Discovery

· Young Adult (18–27) — Competence

· Adult (28–37) — Motherhood

· Full Adult (38–47) — Overwhelmed

· Mid-Adult 2 (48–57) — Exploration

· Older Adult (58–67) — Healing

· Senior Adult (68–77) — Wonder

· Elderly Adult (78–87) — Visionary

· Venerable Adult (88–97) — Radiant

· Ancient Adult (98–107) — Encompassing

· Ground-Breaking Adult — (108–117) — Eloquent

Am I being too limited in my thinking to stop at 117?

What are your labels?
Product + Creative Questions
By: Laurinda Shaver
Tags: Scrumfall, Product, Preschool App

As I’m in lockdown this holiday, I’m indulging in my obsessive reading and lately, the theme is Product Management.

I have just been promoted at Secret Location and now I’m overseeing a group of Products instead of just “Producing” World of Peppa Pig App (targeted at 2–5 year olds). I’m now looking at a portfolio of digital preschool mobile apps.

Trailer for World of Peppa Pig.

Yeah… Producing. It's a weird world I live in making product with traditional entertainment titles. The app has 3 categories, each with activities that our young audience can play with. So… am I solving a user’s problems OR am I creating entertaining experiences for young users OR both? I mean, what problems can an app solve for a 2 year old?

I was just reading about Scrumfall and I really identify this. Our activity pipeline functions more like an entertainment pipeline. Pitch, story, design, production, then user testing, then more production… etc. Therefore, elements of waterfall. But we do have iterative parts that are scrum. Our own version of what works for us.

What I’m struggling with is where is the line between the traditional gaming and product processes? How does one create an entertaining product that doesn’t solve problems, but makes your toddler giggle and still follow best practices from both worlds?

This is going to be a fun adventure.
Summary: Good Product Manager — Bad Product Manager
By: Laurens Lang
Tags: Startup, Product, Product Development, Product Management, Product Owner

Good Teams: Compelling Product Vision with a missionary-like passion.

Bad Teams: mercenaries.

Good Teams: Scorecard KPIs, observing customers’ struggle, analyzing data

Bad Teams: Seek requirements from stakeholders

Good Teams: skilled in many techniques to rapidly try out product ideas,

Bad Teams: Hold meetings to generate prioritized roadmaps.

Good Teams: brainstorming discussions with thought leaders from other departments

Bad Teams: get offended from outstanding people who suggest new ideas.

Good Teams: Interdisciplinary team

Bad Teams: Functional teams.

Good Teams: Constantly trying out new ideas. Considering

Bad Teams: Waiting for permissions to run a test.

Good Teams: ensure that engineers have to try out the discovery of prototypes on a daily basis,

Bad Teams: Show engineers prototypes during sprint planning and let them estimate

Good Teams: engage with real users every week to better understand their customers and get feedback to latest ideas.

Bad Teams: think they are the customer

Good Teams: Know, that their favorite ideas won’t end up working for customers, and even the ones that could will need enough iterations to bring value

Bad Teams: build what’s on the roadmap and are contented when they meet dates and quality of the features.

Good Teams: Deeply understand the need of speed and realize that rapid iterations are the key to innovate. Speed is the outcome of good techniques

Bad Teams: complain about slow collegues.

Good Teams: customer-driven

Bad Teams: sales-driven

Good Teams: use as much data as possible

Bad Teams: analytics are a nice-to-have.

Good Teams: CI/CD

Bad Teams: test manually at the end of a painful integration phase

Good Teams: Obsessed with their customers.

Bad Teams: Obsessed with their competitors.

Good Teams: celebrate impacts.

Bad Teams: celebrate releases.
UX Design Review — Sribu Website Landing Page
Tags: Revamp, Product, UX, UI, Sribu

Revamp is a process of changing content, user interface design as well as information on a site. The purpose of revamp is to increase user accessibility when opening the site and searching for the information needed by him without difficulty

Existing Landing Page

Section A

In the first part of the landing page there are several component elements to show header, hero content, features of clients who have worked together, list categories and showcase designs, branding costs and testimonials

Section B

In the second part of the landing page there are several component elements to show community video features, customer service, design request procedures and design consultations, achievements of sribu, list of coverage of sribu by media and footers.

Revamping Landing Page

There are several changes to the revamped landing page such as :

Result

Make the navigation list on the header bigger and cleaner and add to the list of categories that makes it easier for users when they want to quickly find the type of design they want

Adding designer illustrations to hero content to give a clear impression that Sribu is a marketplace for designers

There is an achievement of the Sribu website by showing the number of designers who have joined and the number of projects that have been successfully completed

In the browse designs section, it is made in the form of a card component with the contents of 3x3 columns, the content of which is the type of design category in Sribu

Then there are three illustrations with three procedures when the designer in Sribu will accept and start the project

The portfolio section is used to showcase the latest ongoing design contests and the number of participating designers

Testimonial sections and email newsletters are used to show the opinions of business owners after using Sribu’s design services and for business owners who want to get regular information from Sribu, they can join as an email subscriber

This is the result of the Revamp Sribu.com Website Landing Page. Thank you for reading this article and feel free to give me feedback.

Thanks !
INTRODUCING GROUP ORDERS IN SWIGGY
By: Naren Parashar
Tags: UX Design, Product Design, Swiggy, Product, Dunzo

How do you share the cart?

Initially I thought of just having the invite link to be shared but it had an inherent assumption that the user has everybody’s WhatsApp/Messenger contact as link sharing will need any of those mediums. But what if friends of friends have also come to the party? Then it might become a hassle to first save the number on WhatsApp and then send the invite link and hence I came up with Sharing the Invite code like Among us ( APopular game ) which could also be made by the host. For example, “Naren’s Party” would be an easy Invite code to circulate in a party.

Types of Roles in the App:

Host: The person who started sharing the Invite link/code. He will take care of the bill atleast initially. Participants: People who get added using the Invite link/code.

Note: This might sound a bit complex but in the actual implementation I wont be using any of these terms in the actual implementation.

Why did I do this ( Simplifying payments )?

Parties go for long and people are going to place orders at different different times. Consider a room full of 20 people and everybody is paying for their own in the middle of a party. Dont you think the payment hassle will spoil the party vibes for them? So for those 20 people,our host ( the one who started the party ) will pay for it initially so that a large section of people have a good time.

Rejecting Identity Tokens for Now:

During this sprint alot of questions arised for me, some of which were:

Should the user know what others have order by their name.

How should individual invoices be sent and should they be included in the first version?

And many more

My Design Decision for Version 1:

Considering this to be a party scenario, let’s just consider that I care for my Pizza i.e. whatever I have ordered and what else is being ordered as whole for the party as the food is going to be shared.

Note: If the research and further feedback from this version suggests that we should go for person wise bifurcation in terms of what they have ordered, I will surely give it a shot but for now I have kept it simple: “My Order and what others have ordered.”

Before the Order is Placed:

Things I should solve in this section:

Bringing people at one platform so that they can order together:

People can be invited in two ways what I could think of:
The Only 2 Things Product Managers Must Do
By: Paul Stavropoulos
Tags: Startup, Product, Product Manager, Product Development, Product Management

Product Management is like porn. You know it when you see it. You can tell when it’s good or bad. But what is it? I’ve recently been asked several times about the goal of a product organization and traits of good PMs.

There’s a ton of material that’s just filled with buzz words and cliche advice — communicate well, run a team, iterate, be agile, data-driven, scrum, synergy CEO of a product, buzz, buzz buzz, etc etc.

It’s boring. Uninspiring. And it’s missing the mark.

The 2 Key Parts to the PM Job

Really, product management boils down to just two things.

1. Defining the “Why’s”

The first goal of a PM or product team is to be a champion for the onslaught of ‘why’ questions that relate to strategy and feature roadmap:

Why are we doing this? Why are we not doing that?

Why are we building it this way? Why are we building that first? Why are we building this feature and not that feature?

Why is a given date our deadline?

Why are we partnering with that company?

Why is our data telling us that it is/isn’t working?

There are a million “why” questions that investors, management, teammates, and you personally will have. Answering them is crucial:

It establishes shared team conviction and surfaces the key debates that teams should be aware of and gain signal towards.

It helps you clarify team strategy and priorities and helps towards establishing team buy-in (without pushing for team-wide consensus)

People want to give their best efforts when they believe the underlying reason of the work at hand. That is, it is much more important that teams understand why they’re working on something rather than just dwelling on the what and the how — it multiplies your effectiveness. Most product managers miss this key point.

Conveying “why” is much more important than just sharing the “what and “how” — it multiples team effectiveness.

2. Define and Minimize Scope

Product organizations should bias towards getting products to market as quickly as possible that have value for a user. Only then can teams really start learning, use data to make decisions, see the fruits of their labor (which becomes a strong motivator for teams!), and iterate towards the right product.

You’re the scope police, always scoping work down.

If you can’t compromise on engineering quality and speed of getting to market, the variable you can change is the scope of the initial work. Start with a small scope to iterate more quickly towards making something people love.

Technically, the scope of the work or feature is a why question that should be answered, but it’s important enough to call it out as the second part of the focus of product managers. Time and again, the assumptions people make about of a product’s codebase, the way systems should work together, and user desires leads to decisions and processes that bloat the time it takes for features to get to market. A good product manager asks the right why questions to find which assumptions can be broken and find what a user really wants to minimize scope.
Evolving E-commerce — A Global Era of Online Shopping
Tags: Ecommerce, Product, Online Business, Web Development, Online Shopping

Today consumer has a choice to buy from thousands of available online options with a convenience to get it delivered next day at their doorstep in a more cost-effective manner. It has made challenging and competitive for retailers to sustain the clients and influence their shopping choices when they are shopping anytime in any part of the online world. However, advancement of technology, increased usage of apps and smart phones have been re-shaping the clients’ needs and experiences. Clients are more informed and knowledgeable today; client is a king is not a theory of the past anymore.

Online retailers like Amazon, Costco, and Alibaba with advanced chatbots and AI have ability to influence the client needs by suggesting products based on their shopping and spending habits, giving them 24 x 7 customer service and providing lucrative reward programs to sustain the clients. It is creating a fierce competition among online retailers who have to compete with the technology advantaged retailers. But the good news is due to accelerated growth in innovation around the world, it will not be as expensive as capital borrowing is; to open a retail store in the centre of a big city.
el producto #207
By: Angel Jaime
Tags: Startup, Product, UX, Product Management, Tech

🎰 The week in figures

$100B: Xiaomi’s market cap passes $100B; the company first targeted a $100B valuation when it went public in mid-2018, but it debuted at ~$50B; Xiaomi’s share price has more than doubled since it listed on Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index this year

$420M: New York City-based Peloton ($42B market cap) acquires WA-based fitness equipment manufacturer Precor in deal worth $420M; Precor serves consumer and commercial markets, providing strength-training gear, stationary cycles, treadmills, and more; the deal gives Peloton an additional 625k square feet of manufacturing space in the US and new opportunities with gym chains, hotels, and other businesses Precor serves

$400M: Mobile ad-tech company Liftoff raises ~$400M; uses AI to develop, target, and track ads for mobile apps; the company raised $12M to date

$225M: São Paulo-based fintech company Creditas, which offers secured consumer loans, raises $225M Series E; the company now claims a ~$200M credit portfolio; raised $569M to date

$200M: China-based autonomous driving firm WeRide raises $200M Series B from vehicle-maker Yutong; as part of the deal, WeRide will work with Yutong to develop driverless buses

$150M: New York City-based Lifetime Value, which operates multiple data-centric brands, raises $150M; owns home-valuation brand Ownerly, background check company BeenVerified, more; collectively, Lifetime Value brand sites see 30M visitors per month

$145M: India-based smartphone content firm Glance raises $145M on a ~$1B post-money valuation with participation from Google; Glance, which is part of adtech company InMobi, displays news, games, and more via smartphone lock screens

$130M: Berlin-based e-commerce tools company Spryker raises $130M Series C at a $550M-plus valuation; provides a platform enabling retailers to bring their inventory online, tools for voice commerce, analytics, more; raised $152M to date

$100M: VerSe Innovation, and Indian company that owns several news and social apps, raises ~$100M on a ~$1B post-money valuation led by AlphaWave with participation from Google, Microsoft, and others; VerSe Innovation’s offerings include news aggregation service Dailyhunt and short video app Josh

$100M: Ironclad (YC S15), which offers digital contract tools, has raised at least $100M Series D on a ~$950M valuation; Ironclad offers a no-code platform for managing agreements; previously raised $84M

£70M: UK-based fintech firm Liberis raises £70M; the company offers financial services to SMEs across Europe and the US; has raised ~$267M to date

$75M: Bolt, which provides a single-click checkout system for online shops, raises $75M Series C (second tranche), bringing the round total to $135M; Bolt handles all back-end functions, including fraud mitigation and payment processing; processed $1B-plus in payments this year; raised $215M to date
What 2020 taught this 23-year-old entrepreneur
By: Sourab Kumar
Tags: Money, Product, Entrepreneurship, Relationships, Life

You are really very lucky if…

I want to wrap it up by this one last point. You’re really very lucky if you have supportive family and friends around you. Who really wants you to be happy doing whatever you like and they have got your back when you fail. I truly understood this in 2020. I have failed more than succeeded, in all honesty, I really don’t know what success feels like. Because if present Sourav could go back in time and tell I would be so and so and would be doing so and so 5 years from now. I would have called it a success. But today while typing this it doesn’t feel like one. I still feel there is a lot I can do, learn and contribute to society than I have. And trust me, it’s your support system which gives you the freedom of thought that you can dream big and achieve it. A lot of them aren’t that lucky.

(Just a small story, I had planned an event in 2019 which failed miserably and I was in debt of close 1-1.5L (INR) which I needed to pay off in next 30–45 days. My mom was willing to give her gold jewellery to take a gold loan from the bank to clear the debt because she believed I could pay that off. And till date, she or anyone from my family hasn’t stopped me from venturing into such ideas. Luckily, I got a well paid consulting gig to pay off that debt.)
TODAY’S BEST DEAL AT AMAZON!
Tags: Product, Mobile, Sales, Review, Amazon

Don't worry you are the future millionaire. Just listen to your mind, not to your heart.
Launching beta version of Vapour app
By: Project Hydro
Tags: Carbon Emissions, Product, Hydro, Development, Blockchain

We already introduced our new app called Vapour to the community in our recent article, and gave insights about this Carbon Footprint Accounting System.

Vapour app built to fight for a cleaner environment and help to ensure a greener future by reducing the carbon dioxide emissions into the air.

What is the meaning of ‘Vapour’?

When a substance turns from a solid or liquid into a gas, the process is called vaporization. Vapour or Vapor is a mass of very small drops of liquid in the air or refers to a gas-phase material that normally exists as a liquid or solid under a given set of conditions. A good synonym for vapour is gas.

Anyone can use this Vapour app by creating an account on it, and this account’s identity is integrated with Hydro ID.

[Note: This app is still in beta stage, so everything included in the app is not complete, some features are still in development. Application not available yet on Play Store, we applied for Play Store listing, so it will be live for the general public in 2 weeks. In the meantime the testers chosen by the community will be using the app.]

Start Screen:

There are 4 options displayed on the start screen of the Vapour app:

Create a Vapour Account Connect from another device Connect from Backup Connect to management server

Using these options you can create a new Vapour account, connect from another device, connect from backup or restore the account. All of these operations are performed using your username, so this username will be a key to access your account on Vapour app.

In this app, there are a total of 5 tabs available such as, Budget, Emissions, Live Feed, News, and Settings.

Budget:

Using this tab, you can set monthly budget for your emissions. Also contains beautiful circular graphs to get an idea of your emissions details. This graph shows the data of the current month as well as for the current whole year.

Emissions:

You can add emission(s) details from this tab. Needed to add details like emission name, type, quantity, and a date when it occurred. There are mainly four types of emission to choose from like Transport, Food, Streaming, Electricity, and also a Custom for the custom details.

There is a parameter that will be used for calculation of emission like kilometer distance for transport, grams quantity for food, hours of duration for streaming, and kWh for electricity.

Live Feed:

This tab allows you to post messages and upload media related to carbon footprint, and can comment on other’s posts too. There’s also options available such as Copy Link, Reply, Share, and Report.

News:

This tab gives all the latest news feed on the climate change and carbon footprint. Also allows you to read whole news directly within the app.

Settings:

All of the user’s and application’s settings are available under this tab. Options available such as,
Stay Agile: How to Stop Perfection from Getting In The Way of Progress
By: Arjun Arun
Tags: Product, Product Management, Tech, Agile, Mindset

Mid Sprint Standup| Friday of The First Week

Bill calls Aarti 30 minutes before standup occurs. His client would like the new feature to be built out within 4 weeks. The client states that the extension of their contract is heavily based on the presence of the new feature.

Bill asks Aarti “I would love to see a working demo of the new feature by the end of next week, is that possible?”. Bill also states that his goal is to take screenshots from the demo and share it with the client to keep their interest high.

Aarti feels as if the timeline is rushed but doesn’t want to disappoint Bill or the client, so she obliges.

Without a ton of information to run off of, she creates two new tickets for Stacy, “Sales Analytics-KPI Calculation” and “Sales Analytics-UI Development”. She adds them to the sprint.

Feeling the heat, Aarti lets Stacy know during standup that these new tickets are “extremely important and must be done sooner rather than later.” The 15-minute standup ends and the team moves on.

Let’s pause.

As you’re reading this you might find Aarti & Bill’s behavior frustrating. How can they not see that adding large buckets of work to the sprint in the middle of it doesn’t make sense?

How can this outcome be the result of a 30-minute call?

“Perfectionism” takes on many forms. In this case, it is “wanting to appear perfect to a client”. Rather than pausing, taking a breath, and having a working session to truly scope out what a reasonable MVP would be, Bill & Aarti give in to the pressure they feel from a client call and behave reactively. They add work mid-sprint. They don’t appropriately scope things out. They commit to an unrealistic deadline. Pressure and anxiety create mistakes.

Bill & Aarti could have avoided their mistakes if they were willing to appear “imperfect” in front of the client. Rather than committing to having “screenshots from a demo” for the client within a week (a cool but completely unrealistic goal), Aarti & Bill could have committed to:

Weekly updates to the client on feature progress Being able to share a timeline on a demo/feature availability after they sit down to work out the details. Joint working sessions with the client to iron out business logic and receive feedback.

You’ll notice that none of the 3 commitments above need to involve Stacy initially. Leave the sprint alone!

Let’s see how Aarti & Bill’s reactive behavior impacts the sprint through Stacy’s lens.
Productivity: Three common mistakes when doing AB Testing
By: Lazaro Ibanez
Tags: Management, Product Design, Product, Product Management, Productivity

AB Testing is the act of running a simultaneous experiment between two or more variants of the same product to see which one performs the best.

Imagine, for instance, that you are working on a web page and you want to test your hypothesis that the new banner will generate more leads than the old one. You could just make the change and cross your fingers. But what if you’re wrong? Mistakes can get costly. By sending half of your traffic to one version of the page and half to another, you can first gather evidence about which one works best before you commit to the change.

Essentially, AB testing lets you play scientist and make decisions based on data about how people actually behave when they see your product.

If this is a new topic for you, the following articles can help you understand a little bit more about it:

You can definitely run AB tests on your own and get great results. However, you need to make sure that you set up your test correctly and that you know how to interpret the results.

What are the three most common mistakes do people make when doing A/B tests?

The first mistake is that the responsible of running the tests, don’t let them run their course. One of the characteristics of the software for running these tests is that lets you watch the results in real time, which is an advantage, the problem is when the decisions are make too quickly. It’s possible that if you let the test run to its natural end, you might get a different result.

The second mistake is to consider too many metrics. If you’re looking at large number of metrics at the same time, you’re at risk of making what statisticians call “spurious correlations”, it refers to a connection between two variables that appears causal but is not. The recommendation is to decide, before you execute the testing, select the few metrics you’re going to look at. The more you’re measuring, the more likely that you’re going to see random fluctuations. The question you should be always asking to yourself is, “What’s happening with this variable?” instead of, “What interesting (and potentially insignificant) changes am I seeing?”

The third mistake is to not do retesting. We usually test it once and then we believe it. The reality is that even with a statistically significant result, there’s a quite large probability of false positive error. Unless you retest once in a while, you don’t rule out the possibility of being wrong. In general, it is difficult to be very vigilant about the practical value of the findings. We want to believe that every little amount of improvement is valuable even when the test results are not fully reliable.

It’s clear that AB Testing is not a panacea, but it is a great way to gain a quick understanding of the question you have.

Via:
MAYA principle, the secret behind many FANG companies
By: Akshit Ostwal
Tags: Product, Entrepreneurship, Design, Fang, Spotify Story

Apple and the MAYA Principle

Apple Newton Tablet

Apple’s first tablet platform Newton Tablet was launched in 1993 and cancelled in 1998 as it was a financial disaster for Apple. The Newton tablet did not become a hit for many reasons, but one of the key reasons may well be that the Newton tablet was launched without a digital personal assistant being familiar to consumers.

As in 1990s everyone would carry a 5$ notebook than 700$ tablet, it was way ahead of its time and people are not ready to use that complex technology at that time.

But Apple was no fool and it learned from it.

Apple iPod transition

The early iPod is a good example of how Apple applied the MAYA principle. The iPod’s designers gradually pushed the product design further and further as the iPod gradually lost the extra buttons and got a more streamlined interface. It is very likely that this gradual development from the first iPod in 2001 was what made the iPhone acceptable to users when it was launched in 2007. By applying the MAYA principle, the designers at Apple provided the users with the most advanced design within the boundaries of their acceptance.