Until now, I’ve tried to keep these blog posts focused on UX, product design, and startups.

I’ve kept them free from politics, from personal stories, and from anything overtly controversial, aside from a few arguments about various design minutiae.

But this article, written by a gay former student who attended the school Karen Pence now teaches at, reminded me so much of my own experiences attending various Catholic schools outside of Chicago that I felt compelled to speak out. For whatever it’s worth, I wanted to share some of those experiences, both for those who are pondering the fairness of various sides of this controversy, and for current students at these types of schools, who might feel, as I often did, that they’re alone in this experience.

Most bombshell reports lead to nothing happening in the real world. Some little-known stories lead to huge change.

It’s becoming increasingly hard to interpret what actually matters in the average news cycle. When everything is a big deal, nothing is a big deal.

When politicians lie overtly in prominent media outlets and get away with it, people lose trust in reporting. The media is deprecating itself, and nobody seems to know what to do about it.

The obvious solution is better, more in-depth reporting. But that doesn’t sell, and it sure as hell won’t outperform sensationalism. We need something better.

Recently, Jared Spool wrote a provocative article decrying the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework as an occasionally useful UX gimmick.

While JTBD does force a user-focused approach, he argued, it also has numerous pitfalls. Actually uncovering the core functional job that users of a product hire the product to do far harder than most pretend. More important, Spool argues that JTBD can become a crutch. Practitioners of JTBD often fail to learn other useful approaches that work better in situations where user motivations are less rational.

Fellow designer Coryndon Luxmore provided even more damning criticism on Twitter. JTBD, he argued, is intentionally dehumanizing:

“It appeals to executives because it forces human goals into simple rational transactional behavior allowing them to side step emotions and empathy.”

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Scott Belsky, co-founder of Behance and author of the Messy Middle, did a fantastic interview on 20VC the other day.

The whole thing is a great listen, but one of my favorite insights is how Scott values initiative over experience, particularly in the startup world.

Startups are inherently turbulent. Your idea about the market need might be wrong. Your strategy for reaching customers may not work. That killer operations tactic you used at your last stop may be outdated. What you don’t know almost always outweighs what you do.

This level of uncertainty means that, no matter how experienced you might be, you almost always have to invent new tactics to solve problems. What matters most in these situations is your ability to roll up your sleeves and get shit done.

Most startup leaders I know pay lip service to transparency.

“We tell our employees everything we reasonably can,” is an all too common refrain. Implicit in this sentiment is the idea that employees just couldn’t handle the full truth. If they knew about the VP of Product’s concerns about product-market fit, the CEO’s worries about running out of cash, or the Director of Marketing’s disagreement with the CTO, they’d be searching for another job immediately. After all, “we need to keep morale up.”

But I’ve never once seen a team that’s unaware of the cash flow problems, the market misalignment, or the healthy (and sometimes unhealthy) disagreements on the leadership team.

They may not say anything, but the team always knows. And little by little, as management pretends these issues don’t exist, the rank and file team members that actually make, market, and sell the product lose faith in the CEO and the leadership team.

The folks at VentureFizz did a great interview with Andy Cook, CEO of Tettra on some of the benefits of more transparency. Check it out.

The real problem with scope creep isn’t missed timelines.

It’s not that it takes too long, or costs too much, though these may be true. The real problem with scope creep is that you lose sight of why you were doing something in the first place.

An engineer adds a feature here, a designer makes some UX improvements there, a marketer requests a “simple” change, and suddenly your MVP has turned into something else entirely. Yes, the functionality is all there, but the analytics are incomplete, the test is muddied, and your team hasn’t validated or invalidated its hypothesis.

Product teams need to be careful to keep their eyes on the prize.

At Hipmatic, we solve this by doing a daily Product Standup. Unlike your typical engineering standup, our product standup focuses less on tickets and blockers and more on the big-picture strategy. Are the things we’re working on still moving us closer to our goals? What’s the best next action we can take to move us forward.

Sometimes these meetings take 5 minutes, and they assure everyone on the time that we’re doing the right things. Sometimes they take 45 minutes, but we course correct before wasting weeks on something we didn’t really need to do.

I don’t want a bendable phone. I don’t care about the next generation of wearables. And I definitely don’t need the vast majority of Internet of Things products.

The sad reality is that most products don’t solve a problem, even a tiny one for a small group. They’re just more landfill.

Even in the world of User Centered Design, Lean Product Thinking, and more user data than you can shake a stick at, most companies seem hell-bent on creating useless products nobody’s asking for.

If your job is focused on squeezing that last iota of value out of ambivalent customers, maybe it’s time to leave and tackle something bigger. People are begging for solutions to big problems like these:

• High-quality, aesthetic housing that everyone can afford
• Paradigm-shifting replacements for major utilities like fuel, food, water, and internet
• Transparent, affordable alternatives to traditional health-insurance
• High-quality replacements for Universities (yes, we can do better than bootcamps)
• High-trust solution to evaluating the quality/fit of existing products and services

Purveyors of conventional wisdom can’t seem to agree if we should say yes to more things, or say no to almost everything.

According to Warren Buffet, “Really successful people say no to almost everything.” According to some respected academics and plenty of self-help writers, there are numerous benefits to saying yes to nearly everything.

Instead of these black and white rules, I’d propose an alternative.

Say yes when you’re in a mode of exploration, and say no when you’re in a mode of execution.

Feel stuck? Not sure what your life’s purpose is? Say yes to any opportunity that could broaden your horizons or introduce you to new and potentially helpful people.

On a mission? Can’t find enough time in the day? Say no to anything that’s a distraction from your core values.

Knowing which mode your in is critical to making the right choice.