The online whiteboard of Kristofer Palmvik
Turns out, there are no ethical AI companies. What I found instead was a hierarchy of harm where the question isn’t who’s good — it’s who sucks least. And honestly? It was ridiculously easy to uncover all their transgressions.
The good thing about intrinsic motivation is that you can design the workplace for that. With simple actions, you can get outstanding results.
What are we going to do when everyone that cares about the craft of software ages out, burns out, or escapes the industry because of the ownership class setting unrealistic expectations on people? Are the burnt out developers just going to stop teaching people the right ways to make software? Is society as a whole going to be right when they look back on the good old days and think that software used to be more reliable?
To get things done, breaking through silos is rewarded. "We are one team here! Pull in who you need, cut across silos, take initiative!" But when it comes to feedback, concerns, "pulling the andon cord", or questioning the current strategy, front-line team members are expected to route everything up the official chain. Boundary-spanning is great for delivery, but not for dissent.
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Enshittification isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice. A thousand tiny choices made every day. As product people, we have more power than we think to slow it down, call it out, and maybe, just maybe, stop it in its tracks. But it means being loud. Being annoying. Asking the uncomfortable questions. (“What problem are we really solving?”) It means being okay with leaving some money on the table if it means keeping the trust of your users.
A pricing page reveals far more than how much a product costs. It’s a strategic document that shows who a company wants as customers, how they plan to grow, and where they see their future. Here’s the framework I use to decode strategy from pricing.
My key critique is that the article follows a classic rhetorical move. It begins with the language of empathy and belief, such as "I want to believe" and "it pains me," but it ends with a moral judgment. What starts as a reflection on the challenges of building empowered teams becomes a statement about individual character, framed as a lack of ambition.
What I believe is really going on, even though I hate to admit this may be the case for some in the product community, is that they do not desire to improve themselves. Some people lack ambition. For these people, comparisons with the best are uncomfortable, and they gravitate towards anyone that tells them that they are just fine the way they are, and that being better is overrated anyway.
Having been a shadow product ops person myself, I can tell you it isn’t sustainable. I was trying to figure out ways to improve our roadmapping process and selling the other PMs on the new process. Meanwhile, I had the rest of my job to do: loop in stakeholders, build out my own roadmap, make sure my engineering partners had everything they needed, and manage my direct reports. The process work needed to happen, but it felt squeezed in and I was constantly teetering on the edge of burnout.
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