Show Notes:
(2:35) Why Ben says he studied “Semiotics” at university

(6:01) Avoiding broken telephone at work

(6:45) How this comes to life when communicating your brand to the public

(9:13) Hydrogen’s “brand” story and why it matters to Shopify and to developers

(12:40) The pros and cons of headless development

(13:54) Ben’s thoughts on product management frameworks - how to say a few things many different ways

(16:15) How improving your craft allows you to see more of the world

(19:13) Why Ben hates the term swag

(21:45) How particular words bring with them a world of meaning for good and ill

(22:31) Why it all comes back to semiotics in the end

References made in this episode:

- Ben Sehl’s Personal Website

- Kotn

- Hydrogen, Shopify’s stack for headless commerce

- Vannevar Bush, the head of the Office of Scientific Research and Development during WWII which directed all military R&D. Stripe Press recently republished one of his works detailing that experience.

- Simon Sinek, Start With Why, identifying a key purpose for your work.

- Undifferentiated Heavy Lifting, Amazon’s terms for how AWS tries to get rid of all the schleps the average developer normally would have to do to get their app working. [Note: The link is to a newsletter called Fact of the Day it is awesome - strongly recommend checking it out]

- Conceptual Compression, idea expressed by DHH, that for developers (or really anyone building anything) they have to keep a bunch of different ideas in their head at once if these ideas can be compressed it allows for the building of much more complex things by bringing more ideas together.

- Shape Up, by Ryan Singer, one of the best books I’ve ever read on product management

- Everything is Deeply Intertwingled, for a wikipedia article you may never have expected to read check out intertingularity

- The Lean Startup, a canonical text of startups and fast growing tech companies

- The Secret to Our Success, the apex predator surfing a wave of meaning (not yet a personal read but looks excellent)