Debranding; Subscription overload; Facebook's deviance
Milk, No Sugar #278
💡Think
Something I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about is how to prevent the same mistakes happening over and over.
I came across a great technique for dealing with that this week called the “pre-mortum”. A pre-what? You read it right, a pre-mortum.
It’s where you start every project by working backwards from the launch, and anticipating what could go wrong, then creating solutions at every step to ensure you don’t trip yourselves up.
It’s a nifty trick, and something I’m excited to try myself.
Have a great week folks 🚀
📷 Look
📖 Read
❶ Facebook, and the normalisation of deviance
This might be my new phrase. It explains how people in an organisation can become so accustomed to a systemic issue that they don’t see it anymore. There’s probably no better tech example than Facebook’s approach to political and scientific non-truths being spread on the platform. This (short) article takes a look under the hood.
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❷ How subscriptions took over our lives
I‘m a simple man, with Netflix and Spotify being my only two subscriptions. Oh, and a handful of newsletters. Oh, and vitamin supplements. Oh, and…you get the idea. Everything we do now seems to be packaged up in a handy subscription, costing vastly more than what we used to do pre everything-as-a-monthly-service. How are we going to get out of this?
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❸ Debranding is the new branding
You’ve probably noticed over the past couple of years that your favourite brands have trimmed down (understatement) their visual identities to be flatter, with less personality, and less detail. This trend is a firm washing away of traditional “fun” in identity design, but also a shift to our digital-first (and small) approach to everything. Take a walk through the history of branding details in this lovely little article.
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Bonus round
🎧 Listen
Four female founders on what it’s like in the startup hot seat
This is a recording from a panel where the host interviews four CEOs about how they traversed the first first months of last year when the world was shutting down. Traverse is useful, here, because a few of the CEOs actually run travel companies. What did they learn? What was the hardest part of flipping your business plans overnight?
Listen to this podcast (45 minutes)
🙌 Share
I’d really appreciate it if you would share my tweet, or forward this to a friend.
If you’re really enjoying it, purchasing a subscription would let me know I’m producing quality.
🙏 Thanks
Have a great week,
Luis Ouriach
@disco_lu