ramblings about entrepreneurship, life and product management



Posted by Mike Mason on

How to deal with conflict

Conflict is an unavoidable consequence of large collaborative effort toward a common set of goals. We can do a lot to organize teams in a way to avoid too much conflict and we can create a culture that doesn’t break down when conflict arrises but it will occur nonetheless. Conflict occurs when two or more people are in disagreement or experience a clash of interests. It’s normal, and should [...]

Read Article 6 Min Read Behavior

Posted by Mike Mason on

Building Trust with your team

Throughout your career you will undoubtedly find yourself in many situations where you will be joining a new team or gaining new team members. A make or break factor in your ability to collaborate effectively with said team and with those new team members is the level of trust you have between one another. Trust is crucially important for product managers, since the members of your team you need to [...]

Read Article 2 Min Read Behavior

Posted by Mike Mason on

Ten things they didn’t teach you in school

If you’re like me, you spent more than 3000 days going to school. You spent 24,000 hours in and out of classes and countless more on homework assignments and test preparation. You were subjected to standardized “tests” that normalized your responses to questions and hypothetical problems relative to the performance of your peers. Forced to consume and memorize second-hand facts and frameworks, [...]

Read Article 23 Min Read Change

Posted by Mike Mason on

Three mental tools used by the Stoics to practice Joy

Alternative title: We’ve been setting goals all wrong. I recently purchased a few extra credits on Audible and was looking for books to listen to as I ride my bike when I found: A Guide to a Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy. My initial thoughts were that the book might have a 50/50 chance of being a self-help book that I would drop after chapter 2. Those thoughts might have been justified [...]

Read Article 8 Min Read Behavior

Posted by Mike Mason on

Me, Myself, Mike & Nothing (or Everything)

Note. this post comes from a place of introspection that I sometimes find difficult to find the proper wording for. It’s abstract in nature but still paints a picture that is worth not only discovering, but remembering too. This is why I’ve put it in writing. A lot of my recent posts have been about the automatic; decision making that is sometimes out of our control. Instinctual quirks that create [...]

Read Article 7 Min Read Behavior

Posted by Mike Mason on

The world has a shortage of people with character, here is how to get more of it

Alternative Title: Chase nuance, not novelty. A lot of what influences most of the content in these posts has to do with increasing rate of change. We live in a world vastly different than what came before it, and the gap between decades is getting wider. This stretching of the modern condition means the world you live in now will be drastically different than the one your grandchildren will grow [...]

Read Article 3 Min Read Change