Good morning team,

Here's something I'm profoundly glad I do at work. Any time someone says (in writing) something good about something that my team or I have done, I save it to a notepad file called nice.txt. Then when I'm in need of a boost I will open nice.txt and read what people have said in descending date order until I feel happy again. If you think there is a possibility that this would work for you, I really encourage you to try it, it's been a tonic for me more than once and is so easy to do.

I also write Fem Fri in notepad so if ever instead of this email you get just a load of stuff that's super positive and nice but appears to be from the interior of a life sciences company… now you know. Anyway I'm too far down this path now to do anything other than a Fem Fri of work stuff, I hope you enjoy it and if you're currently on Thanksgiving maybe save this one to Monday. Hope you had a good Thanksgiving.

I really enjoyed this interview with Teresa Torres. A lot of product thinkers seem to be totally divorced from practical reality and it's so good when someone can see clearly that… innovation is hard, and lots of it is about the unglamorous work of talking to people more, listening to people more closely, showing your working more thoroughly:

"for the rest of our lives, we’re gonna be getting good at the existing stuff," she tells me. "And I don’t mean that the existing stuff is the endpoint and the be-all-end-all, but it’s going to take so long to get good at this stuff."

https://dovetailapp.com/outlier/continuous-discovery-teresa-torres/

It's always interesting to read about other people's jobs and the traditions and rituals in industries not your own, so please enjoy George Voss going to a concrete expo. If you already work in concrete, hope you enjoyed reading about digital product management at the last link. SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE, the Fem Friday promise:

In the convention center’s Central Hall, the 200-foot robotic arms of a gang of sugar-pink and lime-green concrete pumps are entwined in the rafters, like diplodocuses snuggling together. Squeezing them all into a photograph proves impossible, so I head to the booth for EarthCam, a company that specializes in image capture at a construction scale. EarthCam shoots time-lapse footage of building sites, filleting years of slow work into short balletic films where cranes and scaffolding delicately swoop around each other. Their videos of a clinic in Abu Dhabi took so long that they inadvertently captured the construction of the rest of the city behind it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/03/concrete-america/518502/

Alex xx.