Philosophy

In Use friction to your advantage, I talked about ways to nudge users toward desired—or away from undesired—behaviours. Take this idea too far, however, and you end up with Dark Patterns: UI tricks that deliberately deceive users. E-commerce is full of bad examples: – The “Only 3 Left In Stock!” badges that try to rush you into a purchase – The awkward games and bonus points on the Temu app – Cookie consent banners where the “Accept all” button looks like the only real option ...

Amazon in general, and Jeff Bezos in particular, are famous for “reducing friction.” Case in point: One-click checkout. Allegedly, it was Bezos himself who obsessed over removing as many steps as possible from the customer’s path to purchase. Enter your shipping address? Confirm your credit card number? Validate the details? Gone. Just “Buy now,” and the goods will be in your mailbox tomorrow. For poketto.me, I applied this principle to the signup process. What’s the simplest way to enroll for a new product or service? Do you really want to enter your name (first and last), email address (twice), a password (with arbitrary security criteria), then get a confirmation mail, click the link, and finally find yourself in another browser tab (or window)? By that time, many users would surely have given up. ...

This is a roundabout way of saying: make “good” behavior the easy choice. But there’s an interesting backstory to the saying. I come from a family of manual laborers. My dad, all of my uncles, and most of my many cousins work in trades ranging from carpentry to plumbing to house painting. And one of the first things any good craftsman does when setting up at a new site? Installing a dustbin. ...

Working solo on poketto.me — without the built-in “pressure to deliver” that comes with a corporate environment — comes with an interesting challenge: actually shipping stuff. Here’s an example. When I started building the “Share…” feature, I had something super simple in mind: users should be able to create shareable links to their content, which others could view on poketto.me without logging in. I figured this would create a self-reinforcing loop: existing users share content → new people enjoy the clean, distraction-free reading experience → they sign up → save their own content → share it → and the cycle continues. ...

I promise I won’t turn into my Strava feed. But there’s something to be said about the similarities between running long distances and building products. You’ve probably heard the “it’s a marathon, not a sprint” metaphor before — but I want to add one more twist. You can approach running a marathon in very different ways. Some people go from zero-to-marathon in 12 weeks of intense training. It’s doable, but those gut-wrenching training plans… you really don’t want to go through that. And often, this results in a once-in-a-lifetime, superhuman effort. It looks hard. It feels hard. Sure, you can pat yourself on the back afterwards if you make it — but the risk of injury is high, the odds of repeating the feat are low, and the long-term benefits are minimal. ...

I physically winced when a beta tester of the poketto.me Android app reported this bug: “Sometimes, adding new tags to a Save doesn’t work. I open the tagging dialog, type a new tag, click ‘save’ — the input field clears, but the new tag is nowhere to be seen.” I was able to reproduce the issue on my phone and in an Android emulator. Gut reaction: “Ah, must be the WebView. WebViews always behave differently than a normal browser. This will be a mess.” ...

It’s generally good practice among developers to break things down into small, independent, reusable components. But, like all good things, it can become problematic when taken too far too soon. Here’s an example from poketto.me: A few weeks ago, I introduced colored tags. Users can choose one of eight colors for each tag to help them quickly find what they’re looking for and organize their tags visually. (Personally, I use one color for all location-related tags, another for tech topics, etc.) ...

The other week, a post by someone at Google went viral. The gist: PMs should focus on building prototypes that show what the product is supposed to do, rather than merely telling through written PRDs. That resonated with me. As a developer-turned-PM, I always found it limiting that “building” was considered out of my scope. I got to write specs, user stories, and requirement docs — but those often failed to capture the intent behind an idea, leading to botched execution of a feature. A lot got lost in translation. ...

You’ve heard it before: It’s a marathon, not a sprint. That’s true for almost everything worthwhile—learning a new skill, building healthy habits, nurturing relationships… and yes, building, maintaining, and growing something like poketto.me, even if it's “just” a side project. Psychologist Angela Duckworth frames this through the lens of grit—not sheer willpower (which is fleeting and highly dependent on external factors), but the combination of passion (what gets you started) and perseverance (what keeps you going). ...

I don’t remember where I first came across this metaphor, but I still love it: Suppose your task is to train a costumed monkey to recite a Shakespeare sonnet while standing on an elaborately carved wooden pedestal. Where do you start? Do you begin by picking out the wood for the pedestal? Designing the decorative motifs? Choosing which hat the monkey should wear? Or—more obviously—do you first figure out whether you can actually get a monkey to recite poetry in the first place? ...