Learning from Caitlin Clark

Posted on by Brendan

I watched the first half of the Iowa vs UConn Women’s Final Four last night. I had to watch these highlights to know more about how the game ended. Worth a watch if you like tight basketball thrillers. I tuned in because a co-worker told me about the game and how good it was going to be. She was right.

I wanted to check out Caitlin Clark. I love watching how the best athletes approach their craft. She taught me two things watching her compete  in the first half and these highlights.

She was focused last night. She showed some frustration in the first half cause they were losing and she didn’t have a great start but through the whole game you could see it on her face and with the plays she was making. She was locked in. There’s a lot of value in bringing focus to your craft.

The second thing I learned is confidence through the highs and lows, especially when things aren’t going your way. She had a pretty rough first half. Something like 0/5 from three pointer or maybe she made one. Also a few turnovers. She could have lost confidence and stopped shooting the ball. She kept shooting. Eventually her shots dropped. She didn’t let the cold start rock her confidence. I love that.

Slide Decks

Posted on by Brendan

I really despise slide decks. I recently dug into this thought more and learned something about myself that makes PowerPoint much less painful.

By asking myself why, I learned I don’t like decks because I don’t like creating slides (shout out to the pretty slide building crew…I had a boss once who made it look like magic). I also don’t like decks because I don’t like presenter mode in meetings. If a presenter is giving a talk to an audience, it’s fine but for a 3 to 8 person meeting presenter mode creates a boring one way conversation whether I’m leading or participating. This is partly why the Amazon memo has an appeal: to create two way conversations on a business topic.

I am a writer at heart and enjoy writing over decks but the reality is I need to use decks at times.

Becoming aware of these two reasons has given me some freedom when I need to make decks. I avoid striving for perfection and just try to get my points across in slide format. I do some tweaking to titles but avoid perfecting the aesthetic of them. I haven’t played around with any AI tools for decks building yet.

I also never user presenter mode. I believe this creates the two way conversation a memo does since we can jump around to slides from the deck that fit discussion points.

If you have tips for creating and using decks effectively for pizza team size meetings, I’d love to hear them.

Jimmy V’s Espy Speech

Posted on by Brendan

With NC State playing in the final four this weekend, I heard the name Jimmy V a few times. That prompted me to watch his 1993 Espy speech. He had cancer at the time of this and passed away shortly after. He shared some powerful lessons and stories in this speech that I always find heartfelt and uplifting. 

You can tell he loved coaching. He also loved experiencing life for all it had to offer. He’s got a funny story about his first team speech. He also has a famous reminder that a full day means you’ve laughed, you’ve cried, and you’ve thought. 

What a profound statement.

Describing Company Culture

Posted on by Brendan

I am not the first person to say this: culture is both hard to describe and influence. But I believe I have an interesting way to go about trying. I was recently asked about cultural differences between the companies I have worked for which is making me rethink how to answer that question by answering this question. 

How do ideas move through the company? 

If you objectively think and write down an answer, you can begin to describe the culture of a company. 

The most recent idea started from the executive team. The CEO asked for this so we went and executed the idea. The idea did not produce the results we expected. This would be a culture that is authoritarian and submissive. 

Another way an idea moves through the organization. Let’s keep it with the idea coming from the CEO. But now someone takes the idea and converses with three peers, stakeholders, or team members about it. Then throws it outside the company walls to a few users or industry experts. Using these discussions and data research, the person comes back with a recommendation and proposal on if and how to execute this idea. Some themes that emerge are teamwork, curiosity, conviction, thoughtfulness, and focus. 

Rooted in these quick examples are decisions and behaviors by people within the company that ultimately make up the culture.

Search Market Predictions

Posted on by Brendan

Coming off OpenAI’s announcement last week about adding more links out within its answers, I am going to spend the blog post trying to predict what the search market will look like in 5 years which will take us to the year 2029. At the end, I’ll give my thoughts on how to think about building skills now to be relevant in this potential world I am predicting. 

I am trying to remember to take a step back more often and think about what this means for the businesses I help and the career trajectory I am on. Here’s the predictions I have: 

LLM powered AI assistants become used for deep researching or more intimate feedback or help (e.g. writing essay, memo, or idea generation). 

Traditional search like Google has LLM technology embedded into it basically becoming another SERP feature. 

The lines between AI assistants and traditional search get blurred. You may use traditional search then move into the AI assistant experience. Rand Fishkin touched on this in a post. He was torn on categorizing OpenAI as productivity or search. 

I predict these blurred lines will result in search becoming more fragmented over the next 5 years. Google keeps the majority share but loses the 90% share it has today. Imagine something like 60 to 70% and the other 30 to 40% is spread across search engines and AI assistants. 

To date, search has been a winner-take-all market but I don’t see it staying that way with the rise of LLM technology and the momentum of others in the space. 

At the end of the day, this is all about consumer behavior and if people have incentives to make the switch. I remember when my ridesharing behavior changed in 2017. Prior to that, I stuck with Uber to avoid more apps on my phone. I favored simplicity. But in 2017, I started using ridesharing a lot more than usual while doing my part-time MBA. When class finished at 9PM, a rideshare was much easier than public transit. I downloaded Lift and was committed to finding the cheaper option for each ride so I would switch between apps and order the ride that had the lower price.

My incentive was a lower price. What may be the incentive for consumers to switch their search engine preferences? I think the incentive will be that the alternative options could be that much more helpful to have in your phone and at your fingertips.

An iPhone user would need to download a second app and not use the Safari browser. An Android user would do the same and avoid the Google search bar likely prominent right on their home screen. 

What this means for businesses with target customers using search is that I predict organic search traffic becomes more fragmented. It will come from more sources. Google still has majority share in your organic search but not the 90%+share it has today – something a bit lower than that and you see organic traffic coming in from AI assistants that begin to get more usage.  

For people building careers in search today, I recommend leaning into these changes by leveraging the skills you’ve built to date and following the users. Specifically, the way you’ve understood customer behavior and then figured out how to act on it in accordance with what Google rewards. You can apply that to other platforms as well. Build strategies and business cases that provide a compelling reason to invest and go execute. 

In a fragmented search world, managing the strategies and performance on more platforms will be challenging but also will mix things up in fun and interesting ways.

No matter the platform, I believe sending traffic out for users searching is fundamental to helping users finish the task. OpenAI’s announcement supports it. We’ve learned a while ago from answer boxes that it might not always be needed but it will continue to be a big part of search. 

Do you think this might happen or something else? Hit me up. I’d love to hear your thoughts and why.