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Tom Fishburne on Muck Rack

Tom Fishburne

San Francisco
As seen in: Marketoonist, LinkedIn, Medium, TED, The Next Web, Content Marketing Institute, EIN News, Marketing Week, RetailWit
Marketoonist & insightfully funny keynote speaker. Laughing at what gets in the way of doing our best work since 2002 marketoonist.com/newsletter
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Articles

Product Design and Conway’s Law

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By Tom Fishburne
| RetailWit
I heard somewhere years ago that the reason the classic TV remote control is so ridiculously complicated is that each button has its own product manager, lobbying hard for the features of that button. I think of that every time I stay in an Airbnb and can’t figure out how to turn on the TV. It inspired this cartoon. In 1967, a computer scientist named Melvin Conway introduced an idea that explains this phenomenon and system design in general. It eventually became known as Conway’s Law.
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AI Overviews Changing the Game

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By Tom Fishburne
| RetailWit
There’s an old joke that the best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google search results. For years, the name of the game was to rank as highly as possible in the top 10 blue links. Some of the game resulted in mindless keyword stuffing and other SEO hacks. But it also created a value exchange: make useful content and receive traffic in return.
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Optimizing for the Wrong Metrics

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By Tom Fishburne
| RetailWit
I recently stumbled across Goodhart’s Law: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” The British economist Charles Goodhart originally framed this in a 1975 article on monetary policy, but it’s an important watch-out for business today. When we optimize for a number instead of our true goal, we risk whatever we were trying to improve in the first place. Chasing metrics can bring unintended consequences or steer businesses in the wrong direction altogether.
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