Mostafa Nageeb

A friend was surprised with my writing pace. She asked how do you write daily? Where do you get ideas?

I said I just write as I speak. If I am speaking with you right now I can write about our conversation and frame it in the reader’s mind as if I am talking to them.

This is not a novel idea. I first read about it from Paul Graham and since then it stuck with me.

You can also do it. It just needs a bit of practice and the thick skin to not care if nobody reads or compliments it.

I hate it. I think its opposite is not perfection, it is rather excellence. There is a difference between excellence and perfection. It is a subtle intangible difference. I can’t explain it, but I can sense it.

I had an interesting discussion today that reminded me of this great “Can Do Vs Must Do” post by Fred Wilson. 

My partner Albert told me that he thinks doing a startup is like playing a video game. Each level requires you to master one thing and once you do that, you level up and then there is a new thing to master.

……

Executing well on all of the “must do” things is the hallmark of a well run company. And that usually means that there aren’t many “can do” things on the roadmap at the same time.

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I am a strong believer in focus and mastery. I call the opposite of this “spray and pray”. I recommend reading Fred’s post. It is great if you understand its core essence.

While the brain is impacted like all other parts of your body by the food you eat, it is also impacted by the information you feed it.

I consider there are two types of brain food: nutrition, and junk. Nutrition is anything that opens my mind and makes me think. Junk is anything that consumes my mental cycles, feel good, but has no value. I try to consume more of the former, less of the later.

My diet is simple. I don’t have Facebook nor Instagram. Those consume a lot of brain activity for no added benefit. They clog the mind with unavoidable thoughts about others which cause anxiety that lead to other addictions and lack of focus.

I also don’t read news. News outlets are motivated by inciting fear. My algorithm is simple: if it is important enough, I will know about it. I was recently telling a friend this is one of the blesses of not understanding German. I don’t get caught in the news cycle.

Apart from this, my brain diet is comprised of few components: information about the world and humans, tech related nutrition, and discussions with smart people (you can think of this as cuisines).

Those components are served through multiple channels like books, podcasts, newsletters, and twitter (you can think of those as restaurants serving one or more of the cuisines).

I don’t read as much as I like to do, but in general my approach is reading multiple books at the same time. I only read Kindle books and no hard copies. I read one hour before I sleep. I also resubscribed to audible since we moved to an office almost one hour away from where I live. My books selection is broad and can be about any topic, although there is some gravity towards tech, psychology, and economics/statistics.

I used to follow a long list of podcasts until it became overwhelming, so I cleaned it up and now follow a handful: a16z, Invest Like the Best, Kalam Falsafa (the only Arabic one), The Joe Rogan Experience, The knowledge project (the only one I don’t miss a single episode or newsletter), Tim Ferris, This week in startups, and Y Combinator. I also follow Dave Rubin on YouTube.

Now let’s talk about twitter, my guilty pleasure. One underappreciated element of twitter is its openness. I get to find and follow many smart people who I wouldn’t have access to if it weren’t for twitter. It takes a lot of effort to have a good timeline though.

I don’t follow brands, I follow people. I’m interested in tech, but I don’t follow news outlets, I follow journalists instead. Journalists don’t have a social media strategy and they don’t post everything twice to cover the timeline at different times. They also act as a filter for what’s newsworthy. Same applies to VCs, I don’t follow the accounts of the company, I follow the partners themselves. I don’t follow celebrities or people that professionally manage their accounts like CEOs of big companies.

The people I am following are within few clusters: VC, Tech Journalism, Product Management, Cloud Infrastructure (due to my current job), and other intellectuals (yet not idiots) that tweet things I am interested in. You can see who I am following, and you can check the product management list I have.

One good thing I starting doing is following someone for few days after I see an interesting tweet from them to see what they are talking about, if they start sharing things I am not interested in I unfollow immediately. That’s why my following count goes up and down quickly because I always try to discover new interesting people, and most times don’t succeed.

On top of twitter I use Nuzzel. It is an application that groups links by the number of people I am following who shared it. This helps me stay on top of what my network is talking about without having to open twitter itself. The only downside of Nuzzel is it doesn’t keep me on top of interesting tweetstorms like those by Andrew Chen or Sinofsky. I also don’t get to see interesting debates like those Keith Rabois engages in.

This brings me to the last and most important component of my brain diet: The people I talk to. I am vigilant about who I spend my time with. I don’t spend long times with negative people or those who don’t add to me intellectually. As a friend recently described it “I feel my IQ drops when I sit with those people”. Same here.

As with any diet, it is not all healthy. I also watch a lot of junk. I waste a lot of time filtering between things. And I spend a lot of time entertaining myself. Entertainment is crucial to keep you going, unless you are a cyborg.

I started listening to the Audible book. It is similar to the Phoenix project except that it is non-fiction. I am half way through and so far it is a good book that doesn’t need focus to listen to. The only boring thing so far is lack of failure stories. All of the stories I listened to are hard successes. Let’s see if it changes in the second half.

Since I embarked on my journey with Zalando, I am often asked what product managers of infrastructure products do?

Infrastructure Product Managers manage mainly two things: Products and Processes. Products are things like Kubernettes on AWS, CI/CD, or Documentation Publishing Platform. Processes are thing like Support, Cluster Update Process, or Incident Management. Those products and processes have to be managed within a set of constraints such as budgets, compliance rules, reliability targets, security goals…etc.

The way I think about it is that it is similar to any other product management job with a few differences.

One difference is domain knowledge. Before starting my job I studied the material of the AWS certification to understand what is this, then my manager and team gave me crash courses to help me understand how our tools work together. I tried the products myself, but because I am not a developer I don’t have the same deep understanding someone with developer experience might have. Someone with no technical background might be struggling to work on these products.

Another difference is instant feedback. Because customers are internal, the product feedback loop is faster, and can be daunting if you don’t have the right processes in place. This means when you screw up, someone will email you about it. When you don’t want to satisfy that stubborn user, they will escalate you to get their things done. This doesn’t happen with consumer products where the development team is isolated from the customer and they are only connected through the data.

There is also a difference in the mode of working. In a consumer product you move fast and break things. In infrastructure it is completely the opposite, move cautiously and don’t break anything. Reliability trumps new features. Big part of the teams capacity will be consumed by maintenance and user support. It something you have to accept.

It is also not as glamorous as consumer products. You are mostly working on internal tools that don’t generate revenue. The truth always lies in someone’s opinion, as there isn’t much data to inform your decisions.

I personally enjoy it because I get to build relationships with my users, and because it involves a lot of persuasion which is a skill I am always trying to improve. I also like the domain knowledge I am getting and the many lessons I am learning, that’s something for another post.

I got accepted with Henning to give a talk at DevOpsCon Berlin. This is my first public speaking engagement in a long time and I am excited to be doing this. 

Our talk title will be “Why we don’t use the term DevOps: The journey to a product mindset“. In the link you will find the talk description and what we will be talking about. I believe we are doing many great things on both tech and product sides and this is one way we contribute this knowledge to the broader community. I hope it adds value to someone.

I highly recommend watching this video if you are interested in startups and creating multi-billion dollar businesses. So much contrarianism of the type I like.

Two weeks ago I went to watch Aquaman. I wanted to book online but I know that the theatre in Sony center has wrong seat maps when it comes to which rows are the wheelchair accessible ones. I know that all the seat maps are wrong except for one or two halls.

I searched which hall the movie will be playing in, and I emailed customer service describing exactly the problem that the seat maps are wrong and I want to know which row is the correct one. Someone responded with a recommendation for which seats to book. For some reason it didn’t make sense to me and I ended up booking my initial guess which turned to be right. I was furious at the employee who literally had one job and didn’t do it properly.

That’s the problem when we put too much trust in the system. We become blind.

In the world we live in, going slow is underappreciated. Some things really need to be done slowly to maximize their outcome.

Skill learning is one of them. The slower one works on learning the better their mastery of the skill. I can argue speed is one of the top reasons people give up.

Being slow is also worth it when there is a high cost for error correction. This is one of the reasons moving fast is celebrated in the software industry as the cost of error correction is not high relative to other fields such as medicine.

Slow is not always bad.