It’s funny that the first design critique that many Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) courses do together is to critique a weather app. Weather apps are so utilitarian and have been around for decades yet still are far from perfect.

I’m tired of the harsh, absolute minimalism of phone applications that came of age in the 2010s. There are good reasons to choose minimalism, especially when an application focuses on user-generated content (UGC) like Instagram. Minimalism has started to appear dated and I no longer like the look of brandless, boring apps.

This past week in one of our Accounting classes, we went through a ‘profit wheel’ for a coffee company. This is part of our SMB internal accounting management module, which has proved slightly more interesting than our accounting principles and rules module. A profit wheel is a tool managers use to either motivate teams to hit certain targets, or work with their internal teams to understand the state of the business and what targets to hit. Although we did not explicitly use a profit wheel in Dropbox planning, Dropbox really transformed as a company when we went from only sprintly/quarterly planning to company-wide annual planning.

A key hypothesis of my founding team at Vsho was that we would be able to grow our social media startup leanly. We found that not to be the case, and I wonder if we’re entering a new era of needing a lot of capital to grow and scale social media companies. Engineering costs, AWS costs, and content creator costs were three reasons why we needed to take on more cash.

I was recently reflecting with a good friend on a skillset that is just as valuable for me in industry as it is just as valuable in her work in academia. Our ability to iterate quickly has allowed us to leapfrog problems and make the most of our time, both when developing products and developing theses. Being able to iterate quickly is a skill that is best learned as quickly as possible, and something worth working on with new and relatively-inexperienced hires.