Consulting Is a Bet; Everyone’s Gambling
I was walking Nina home from a friend’s house, thinking about Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets, when it hit me:...
Disappointed Optimists
Every time I give a talk on design, someone finds me afterward. They wait out the handshakes and the business...
The Validation Gap
Years ago I was at a Web 2.0 conference in New York, sitting next to a young guy with the...
“Business as Usual” Is a Terrible Name for Vital Work
Often when I help a company roll out OKRs, the same thing happens. We set the company objective, we craft...
Scale Is a Tactic, Not a Virtue
I’ve been thinking about scale the same way I’ve been thinking about speed: as something Silicon Valley treats like a...
Speed Is a Tactic, Not a Virtue
I was reading a post on Anthropic’s blog about AI product management, and the author talked about speed as if...
Everyone on Your Team Is Right (And That’s the Problem)
There’s a Cold War that runs through almost every product team. The frontline folks—designers, PMs, engineers—are quietly frustrated. “Management is...
My Information Diet (And What You Should Actually Read)
People find out I read twenty-three AI newsletters (and unsubscribed from as many more) and immediately ask the same question:...
Vibe-Coding Is Not Need-Finding
Last month a product designer showed me her new prototype. She’d spent two weeks vibe-coding a tool for tracking “gratitude...
In Praise of Guessing
Last night at the Lean Product Meetup someone asked me, “How do you set Key Results when you don’t have...
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.