Coined by sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1940, "goal displacement" describes when an organization's means (maintaining structure, securing funding, self-preservation) become its ends, overshadowing or displacing its original vision or purpose.

Austin city council when confronted with studies showing density bonus programs constrain housing production. #atxcouncil

“I find the typical inclusionary zoning ordinance reduces annual new residential construction by nearly a third (31.8%).” drive.google.com/file/d/1tUuL...

We seem to be experiencing a Google Fiber outage in downtown Austin.

DANA recently provided feedback on the city's proposed updates to the Downtown Density Bonus Program (DDBP). We urge city officials to consider our recommendations, and we reiterate our call for restructuring the program to address its fundamental flaws. www.downtownaustin.org/dana-letter-...

DANA Letter – C20-2024-018 DDBP Updates (2026-05-14)

May 14, 2026 Honorable City Council, Commissioners, and Staff: The Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association (DANA) recommends several improvements to the C20-2024-018 phase 1 Downtown Density Bonus…

downtownaustin.org

"When a team says a problem is urgent, ask what work customers are abandoning today because of it. Real urgency shows up in behavior, not adjectives." - @trikro.bsky.social #prodmgmt

A simple framework for advocacy: 1. Say what you ideally believe and want. 2. Suggest improvements over the status quo given current political realities. 3. Define the conditions under which what you ideally believe and want would be politically realistic. 4. Make those conditions a reality.

I signed up against item 39 on the agenda for the upcoming #atxcouncil meeting. Soft parking caps applied selectively near transit might result in greater sprawl development and work against the very goals (transit-supportive density) they are intended to achieve.

Join us at our 2026 Annual Meeting at the Hanover Brazos rooftop on Sun, 3/1 from 6-7:30p! Enjoy BBQ and sunset views while discussing the future of downtown with special guest @zoforaustin.bsky.social and local advocates. Free for members/their guests & $10 for others. RSVP: luma.com/pxra3qio

DANA 2026 Annual Meeting · Luma

Elevate Your Perspective at DANA's 2026 Annual Meeting On Sunday, March 1st, the Downtown Austin Neighborhood Association (DANA) invites you to a bird's-eye…

luma.com

Successful startups often don't play in the same field as the competition. They reframe the landscape as something different. open.substack.com/pub/patternb... by @m2jr.bsky.social #prodmgmt #startups

The Reframe is the Startup

Startups are supposed to be about building. But the ones that break through don't just build. They shift how we see.

open.substack.com

Beyond surveys and role-based personas: A single true story about a real user's or prospect's experience is arguably worth more than a dozen survey responses. articles.centercentre.com/its-time-we-... by @jmspool.bsky.social

It’s Time We Seriously Talk About Users and Experiences - UX Articles by Center Centre

For some reason, UX people never speak about users or experiences. And that hurts our work. “But I talk about my users all the time.” Sure, we often say things like “Our users deserve the best user ex...

articles.centercentre.com

Data scientists and engineers sometimes just want to view Jupyter notebooks without editing or executing them. Check out this simple but handy ipynb viewer by Jakub Jirutka. ipynb.js.org #AI #ML

Reminds me of why spreadsheets are often better solutions than specialized apps. medium.com/design-bootc... by Joe McLean #prodmgmt

Overfitting and the problem with use cases

As a Miro PM with lots of collaborators, I sit in a lot of early-stage product and design reviews (including my own). I hear a question…

medium.com

"[T]he teams that thrive are the ones who use disruption as an opportunity to build the solutions they’ve been thinking about anyway." www.mindtheproduct.com/our-biggest-... by Asher Atlas #prodmgmt

Our biggest crisis was a product strategy blessing in disguise

How a staffing crisis paved the path to a better business model

mindtheproduct.com

"Validation" continues to lead #prodmgmt astray. Good piece from Todd Gagne despite his use of the term. open.substack.com/pub/wildfire...

Why Pain Points Fail: The "Cannot Not Use" Framework for Startup Validation

From "Interesting" to "Essential": Transforming Your Product Into a Necessity

open.substack.com

"If cities deregulate off-street parking and charge the right price for curb parking, market forces will improve transportation, land use, the environment, and urban life." - Donald Shoup, quoting himself in reply to an accusation that he favored parking maximums.

"Despite their ambivalence on whether to require or restrict parking, planners always regulate it. This behavior recalls a Soviet maxim: 'What is not required must be prohibited.'" - Donald Shoup

Strategy is a set of hypotheses. Build adaptive strategy into your process. kromatic.com/blog/adaptiv... by @trikro.bsky.social and Susie Braam #prodmgmt

Adaptive Strategy – Kromatic Blog

Even the best-laid plans need to adapt and evolve to developing circumstances, by building agility into how we conceive and implement adaptive strategy in the first place.

kromatic.com

Seems like contradictory advice. #prodmgmt

"The solution is simple: breathe life into the vision. Take it off the slides and embed it into everyday product work." www.mindtheproduct.com/vision-isnt-... by @martarolak.bsky.social #prodmgmt

Vision isn't a statement. It's a guide.

Discover why a great product vision means nothing if it stays on a slide. This article unpacks how Microsoft Teams lost sight of its vision—and how your product team can avoid the same trap by turning...

mindtheproduct.com

In many AI scenarios, traditional and deep learning are still the best methods for the job. towardsdatascience.com/the-three-ag...

The Three Ages of Data Science: When to Use Traditional Machine Learning, Deep Learning, or an LLM (Explained with One Example) | Towards Data Science

A practical use case to describe how the data scientist job changed across three generations of machine learning

towardsdatascience.com

Business goals are inward focused, and defining them has limited value. The real magic is in defining and measuring customer outcomes, and then showing how improving customer outcomes will lead to better business outcomes. articles.centercentre.com/why-ux-outco...

Why UX Outcomes Make Better Goals Than Business Outcomes - UX Articles by Center Centre

Increase subscription retention by 15% this quarter. Increase new policy subscriptions by 20% this year. These are common business outcomes, results the organization’s leadership wants to attain to ke...

articles.centercentre.com

When someone asks for a report, don't ask, "What do you want in the report?" Instead, ask what decisions it will help them make. "Nobody wakes up in the morning and says today's going to be a great day, I'm going to produce 15 reports." - @jmspool.bsky.social

Today's #AI and #ML models rely on memorization and "local generalization". Massive scaling has led to smarter models. But getting models to adapt to novel situations, where there is little or no data, will require more than just memorizing more data. deeplearningwithpython.io/chapters/cha...

Deep Learning with Python, Third Edition

Deep Learning with Python is written for anyone who wishes to explore deep learning from scratch. This new edition adds comprehensive coverage of generative AI and modern deep learning frameworks. It ...

deeplearningwithpython.io

To honorable City Council, Commissioners, & Staff: DANA opposes height limits and other exclusionary zoning downtown, and we specifically oppose the base height limit proposed in the C20-2025-010 Central Business District (CBD) amendments. 🧵

The task of coming up with a long-term vision can feel daunting. However, if you break it into bite-sized pieces or visionettes, it makes it doable. Here’s how you do it: https://articles.centercentre.com/building-an-experience-vision-from-a-journey-map/

Building an Experience Vision From a Journey Map - UX Articles by Center Centre

The task of coming up with a long-term vision of your design can be a daunting one. It’s a lot of responsibility to imagine what an ideal experience can be, then render a possible design to achieve that experience. However, there’s a way to...

articles.centercentre.com

Wilson scoring is a simple way to score the popularity of items (such as comments on a Reddit post) based on up-votes and down-votes. As far back as 2009, Evan Miller pointed out the flaws in other methods (e.g. average rating). www.evanmiller.org/how-not-to-s... H/T @kennyd.bsky.social

How Not To Sort By Average Rating

Users are rating items on your website. How do you know what the highest-rated items are?

evanmiller.org

Join in for September's volunteer Shoal Creek clean-up session! WHEN: Saturday, Sep 13 (8:45-9a) WHERE: outside The Independent (301 West Ave) The monthly collaboration continues with APD, DAA, & the Downtown Austin Community Court. www.downtownaustin.org/september-20...

September Shoal Creek Clean-Up

WHAT: September Shoal Creek Clean-Up WHEN: Saturday, Sept. 13, 8:45 am WHERE: The Independent @ 301 West Ave. Volunteers will meet Saturday, September 13, 2025 outside The Independen…

downtownaustin.org

"But strategy suffocates when everything gets reduced to a list. Lists coordinate. Loops adapt. You need both." - @paulisthrivving.xyz medium.com/thrivve-part... #prodmgmt

Loop vs List: Why Most Strategies Die in Delivery

Why most strategies suffocate in delivery, and how to keep them alive

medium.com

Words-based methods can sometimes find relevance where semantic-based retrieval and modeling fails. I've developed ensemble models to address these limitations. www.alphaxiv.org/pdf/2508.21038 #ML #MLSky #AI

On the Theoretical Limitations of Embedding-Based Retrieval | alphaXiv

View recent discussion. Abstract: Vector embeddings have been tasked with an ever-increasing set of retrieval tasks over the years, with a nascent rise in using them for reasoning, instruction-followi...

alphaxiv.org