Hey
Reader —
This week, my team helped me flip a switch I've been working toward for months. Experience Helpdesk rolled from soft launch into full availability — courses live, support flow active, doors open.
Maybe you have been here a while. Or this might be the first time you've seen me post back-to-back since I went quiet around 2022. Either way: thanks for sticking around. The next 35 years of posting things online won't look anything like the first 35.
3 Things I'm Thinking About
One Thing I Learned This Week
Role-playing a launch catches problems no checklist will. I used to think it was a waste of time. Then I worked at Apple, where we did it constantly — someone playing the deliberately difficult customer or the skeptical board member — and I was always surprised by what surfaced. We role-played the Experience Helpdesk launch about a month ago. Three of those scenarios are now FAQs on the site.
Links That Made Me Stop Scrolling
On the Podcast
This week's episode goes back to 1924 — when executives from GE, Philips, and Osram signed a contract in Geneva to deliberately make their lightbulbs worse. That's where planned obsolescence comes from: a signed agreement to compound mediocrity. A hundred years later, regulators in Oregon and Europe are quietly tearing it up, and a couple of small companies — Framework Computer in Silicon Valley, Lodge Cast Iron in Tennessee — are showing what gets built on the other side. The thread: customers who fix things they own become advocates no marketing budget can match.
Listen here →New on My Blog
Billy Bragg introduced me to Cindy Sherman in 1991. A few weeks later, I was directing my friends Kara and Mike through a fake-public-breakup for a college film class — because back then, you couldn't Cindy-Sherman yourself into your own video. The tools weren't ready. Three decades on, the tools caught up. Everyone with a phone is running a small studio. Some thoughts on what that means for those of us trained to stay behind the camera.
Read more →This Week's Big Push: Full Launch of the Experience Helpdesk
My team and I have spent months building toward this. The Helpdesk gives organizations direct access to our team for weekly strategy sessions, design reviews, and a growing library of mini courses — without a six-figure retainer. If you know someone running a team that's been operating threadbare, this is their door.
Visit the Helpdesk