24 Jul 2025 2 min read

Weeknote, July 19: On international English, informational interviews, and a classroom-ful of death a day

Featured image is from a new experience this week: I accidentally touched a crack pipe on the bus. I dropped my pen next to it...and thought it was the pen :) If someone can tell me what is the proper thing to do (e.g. Should I have picked it up, and thrown it somewhere safe?), I'd appreciate the guidance :)

Work tings

On not listening to users

There is a somewhat funny transition that a person goes through when learning "product thinking" or "product insights".

From "Listen to users." to "But, don't just listen to users."

The most critical thinking is understanding the why?, what for? and what happens then?

Global English

I thought I did the smart thing and used transcripts and live customer input to inform the IA (labels, drop-down content)/ UX writing of an interface.
A userbase can shift over two years -- from predominantly North American, to increasingly global / European.
Two takeaways:
- a) Highly diverse audiences for Saas products would mean the need for broadly understood, but clear language.
- b) Being data-driven is great, but for technical Saas in a highly non-standardized industry, it's impossible to expect 100% intuition, for copy. What you can hope for is some form of Pareto (20% that has 80% impact) + the need for clear affordances and onboarding.

Personal tings

My life

Informational interviews are pretty awesome. Such a great way to learn about people, and how they got to where they are. Such as: what people value (e.g. team + manager, financial growth), and having the confidence to learn new skills, and shape their role. Thank you so much, A., L., A., and R.
Started reading Vaclav Havel's The Power of the Powerless. Timothy Snyder's intro (for this 2020 version) already stopped me in my tracks, and made me reflect on...how eerily aligned 1970's Czechoslovakia is to the present-day (half a century later).

It was such an information-filled week, I almost forgot to write about one of the highlights:

Vancouver Hour held its first event, where I got to learn about how BIA's (Business Improvement Associations) work, which I really wanted to see because I love how active BIAs are (at least the ones I've seen), and it's not something I've seen in the Philippines/ before.
And, more specifically, I wanted to see Landon Hoyt speak about the Hastings Crossing BIA again. Because I saw him at a previous event (more community research-focused), and I loved how he answered this one Q&A question, where you could see how much he cares about growing and managing businesses while caring for people's welfare in the area.
I may need to write about what I learned from the Vancouver Hour event separately, because I learned so much from this event alone.

World life

Families (thousands of babies, children, women, men) are being systematically starved. The numbers now show that a classroom-worth of kids is killed by an invading government every day, for the past 600+ days (in the land area the size of Washington DC). 27 kids every day. For 600 days.