Content as Culture

Control Your Narrative

An old colleague of mine, Anil Podduturi, used to exhort everyone that worked for him to “control your narrative.” My…

The product and design team at Axial is only 6 people (3 in each discipline, excluding me) so we run as a very flat group, working in cross-functional teams. But the flatness of an organization doesn’t mean that everyone in the team can’t try to improve their…

A few months ago, Brad Feld wrote about a cultural exercise that I just tried with my team to very good effect (Brad in turn had referenced this post from David Politis). Instead of taking pysch tests and then trying to make sense of the results, the…

Last week we wrote about how a team’s shared understanding — that vital ingredient for productive collaboration — goes beyond the work itself and extends to the very fabric of the team and company.

We first heard the expression “shared understanding” from Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, the authors of the bestseller Lean UX. Their book positioned shared understanding as the collective knowledge of research, goals and results that allows a team to focus more on…