The Formula That Changed How I Think About Design
A few years ago, I stumbled across a formula from Kurt Lewin, a psychologist working in the 1930s and 40s:...
The Three Most Powerful Words in User Research
Last quarter I watched a Stanford student conduct her first user interview. She had a beautiful script—twelve questions, carefully worded,...
Your Resolution Isn’t the Problem. Your Measurement Is.
It’s January, and millions of people have made the same resolution: “Eat better.” By February, most will have abandoned it....
Before You Cite That Study
Last week Anthropic released findings from their new AI Interviewer tool. Among the headlines: people are optimistic about AI in...
What Sam Altman Just Taught Us About OKRs (Without Meaning To)
Yesterday, Sam Altman declared a “code red” at OpenAI. According to leaked memos, he’s pausing advertising experiments, AI shopping agents,...
UX Is Your Moat (And You’re Ignoring It)
Last week, Google released Nano Banana Pro, their latest image generator. The demos looked impressive. I opened Gemini to try...
The Dancing Bear Problem
There’s an old circus act where a bear shuffles around on its hind legs. The audience goes wild—not because it...
KPIs Are Your Dashboard. OKRs Are Your GPS to Somewhere New.
I got asked again last week: “What’s the difference between KPIs and OKRs?” The person asking was a PM at...
The Premortem: Your Product’s Autopsy Before Launch
Most product teams plan for success, which makes sense until you realize that planning only for success is how companies...
Context Engineering for Non Engineers
Context Engineering for Non Engineers “Prompt engineering is dead,” the podcast guest said. “Context engineering is everything now.” I was...
Christina Wodtke
Christina trains companies to move from insight to execution as principal of her firm, Wodtke Consulting, and teaches the next generation of entrepreneurs at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Education.
Christina has led redesigns and initial product offerings for such companies as LinkedIn, Myspace, Zynga, Yahoo!, Hot Studio, and eGreetings. She has founded two consulting startups, a product startup, and Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design; and she co‐founded the Information Architecture Institute. She’s the author of 101 Theses on Design, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web and her new book about OKRs, Radical Focus.
Currently she teaches at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Education. She speaks everywhere from conferences to universities to boardrooms, and opines across the internet, but most often on eleganthack.com.