Welcome to the 2025-Q2 Quarterly Quality Contributions topic to the Commonplace forum. This is part of our goal to make Commonplace the best location on the web for business discussions.
You can find all historical quality contribution threads below:
- October 2024 Quality Contributions
- November 2024 Quality Contributions
- 2025-Q1 Quality Contributions
Commonplace High Quality Contributions - 2025 Q1
- @eric gave some timeless advice on how to manage your time to ensure you get the most out of your week.
I started this weekly habit when I was Chief of Staff, and it was tremendously valuable to organize my time. Just setting my priorities for the week and communicating them to my VP meant we could have quick conversations when new tasks popped up to decide if they would displace the current priorities.
- @michaeljon kickstarted a great thread on Airbnb, and Chesky jumping the shark with the launch of its new experiences feature.
Personally, I think it comes across as an ego trip, and as an Airbnb customer I am in no-way motivated to take a look and see what experiences or new services they have. And I’m not sure that will change much when I get around to booking our next new holiday.
The meta lesson here is: this is what good AI experimentation and application looks like. And also, look at how she’s zero-ing in on leaning into what the AI is good at, and not assuming that the hallucinations are going away, and also using it to augment what the humans are good at.
- @Rachel_Ng shed light on what was actually driving layoffs at Microsoft, centralisation of tech stacks and unproductive employees.
We have an internal structural unemployment situation in the company
hypothetically if these people have the right skills we would keep all of them but right now all of the work is done by 3% of the people. it used to be 80-20 split but now that has been compressed to just.. 3%.
- @roman shared an insight on how to increase your likelihood of landing at a good Product company when interviewing for roles.
As a corollary to “How to know if you’re interviewing at a strong product company,” you should consider the company’s business model and if a strong product culture is necessary or detrimental to that business model.
Telling it that it was for someone learning the language also produced poor results. The AI seemed to immediately flip into a sort of middle-of-the-road traditional language learning mode, using vocabulary lists that are relevant to language exams, and explaining things about the language, rather than just explaining the meaning and usage of the word.
- @eric had some great advice on the underrated role of perseverance and “will” in finding your “superpower” at work
That’s why I think the key component in the framework Cedric mentions is will. If you want to get good at something, and can stick with it and keep trying, you will get better. If you love it so much that you’re willing to get punched in the face and keep going, you will outlast most others. Natural talent matters, but not as much as people think. I’ve had areas where I was exceedingly good at something to start but quickly got passed by those that did the work (this happened to me in both physics and coding).
- @ellen expanded on the Heart of Innovation (HOI) topic, emphasising the situational nature of consumer buying decisions at the heart of HOI’s framing
The obvious catch with a situational model of demand is that it is much harder to work with. If we don’t have one static model of what our customer’s pain or desire is, it is much more challenging to plan marketing campaigns, product features etc. But I guess that is still better than working off a simple but faulty model of demand.
- @cedric used one of my favourite Toyota books to highlight the mistake of conflating supply and demand strategies
I thought this example was a perfect illustration of Roger Martin’s legendary essay The Big Lie of Strategic Planning. The essay argues that execs and boards conflate strategy for strategic cost-based planning, because costs are 100% controllable and predictable, whereas strategy has to do with customer demand, which is unpredictable.
- @nate used some nice economic theory to push back on the idea that AI companies are underpricing their products, with the hope of winning market share
I don’t think this is right, and I think it’s an error in basic economics. George Stigler (who won the Nobel in economics in 1982) wrote in the 1960s about how even markets with a “small” (4-6) number of firms are actually pretty competitive and — although they may try to collude re: prices and market share — all of them face individual incentives to cheat.
If you have any others you want to signal boost post them below in thread.