Over the holidays, I came across an interesting blog post on HackerNews. The TL;DR is that the internet’s awesomeness stems from open standards, such as hyperlinks. The author points to an example of someone discovering the ‘App Defaults’ project organically by navigating various web links. It’s an enjoyable read on it’s own and I recommend checking it out. However, what really got me interested was my own discovery of the App Defaults project. The idea is simple: publish a blog post that lists your primary, or ‘default’, app for a number of different categories. The author linked a feed featuring over 300 bloggers who’ve participated in the exercise. Reviewing some of the posts, I noticed that Password Management was one of the categories many bloggers were listing and I thought I’d like to get that dataset. ...

Growing up, I had a strong interest in computers and software. I considered a career in software engineering before ultimately opting for electronics engineering, and to this day I’m not sure I made the right choice. Regardless, I gained enough exporsure to coding in school that I was able to continue learning new skills on a self-directed path. This was driven primarily by my interest in completing personal projects, like a personal dashboard app or a Raspberry-Pi based automatic cat feeder, and secondarily by professional needs like writing tests or scripts to accomplish repetitive tasks. These experiences helped shape my career in developer-facing roles, like API Support or Product Management, but also kept my interest in software development alive. ...

Over the last decade or so, the API landscape has evolved dramatically, something I discussed in my previous post The Rise of API Product Management. This growth in popularity created new business opportunities for both the API providers and the third-party developers building on top of them, driving growth and innovation. Companies like Shopify have leveraged robust app marketplaces to offer customizable user experiences that have come to define the modern ecommerce experience. ...

At the start of 2023, Shopify was in the headlines for a seemingly radical idea: cancelling all meetings with more than two people. Following its move to full remote work in 2020, this sudden shift towards an anti-meeting culture was an experiment intended to improve productivity and reduce time wasted. It was a bold, if not ham-fisted, approach to tackling a common problem faced by organizations. Meetings, though often shunned as time-consuming and unproductive, generally serve to consolidate ideas, generate feedback, and achieve alignment. However, as the culture now shifts towards asynchronous communication, we should consider the true costs and benefits of daily meetings. Can the value generated by a meeting be reproduced asynchronously? And can such a sweeping generalization be applied to all meetings involving multiple individuals? ...

The landscape of software development has experienced a significant shift in the last 10 to 15 years, from selling licenses for specific software versions to adoption the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. Midway through the shift to SaaS, the rise of what has been termed the ‘API economy’ began to take hold, with customers beginning to expect seamless integrations between the various systems they use. At the same time, there was an evolution in Product Management, with companies embracing a product-led approach, putting the Product Group at the forefront of the decision-making process. These converging ideas, along with the rise of APIs as products and the shift from monolithic applications to micro service architecture, have paved the way for a new role in the software industry: the API Product Manager. ...