Writing

22 July 2026

Welcome to Jekyll!

You’ll find this post in your _posts directory. Go ahead and edit it and re-build the site to see your changes. You can rebuild the site in many different ways,...

8 September 2019

Onboarding for Product teams

There is a lot of material online about how to adequately onboard new employees. There are even some good posts on how to onboard new Product Managers. However, they don’t...

9 July 2018

The remote handicap

Remote work is all the rage these days. Its adoption is growing across both small startups and large enterprises, despite some very public setbacks. If you read the news, it...

2 July 2018

Selling your life by the hour

What happens when you put a price on your time?

29 May 2017

So long, and thanks for all the woofs

I am taking my dog to be euthanized tomorrow. This is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I am crying as I write this. This is also supposed to...

3 April 2017

Skills of Successful Remote Workers

Remote work is becoming mainstream. A recent study by Stack Overflow showed that a remote arrangement is the second most sought-after characteristic in a job, beating things like health insurance...

20 January 2017

If I Were on Friends I Would be Chandler Bing

If I was a character from Friends†, I would be Chandler Bing – the guy who nobody knows what he does at work. It’s easy if you’re a doctor, a...

4 June 2016

Fast vs. Slow Decision-Making

Common business lore has it that businesses that make decisions fast are at an advantage over those that are slower at decision making. Is that always the case? Are there...

7 April 2016

Want to build killer products?

Then you have to keep learning

29 February 2016

Want to reach all of your goals? Track your time.

We all have lots of goals, both short-term and long-term, and usually not enough time to pursue them all. So, the only way to reach at least some of those...

28 February 2016

Five tips to better teams

There are tons of advice available for people who want to build high-performance teams, some of it provided by well-researched scholars and experts. This post is none of that. These...

11 February 2016

My broken phone and a lesson on focus

It was the first day of my summer vacation with the family. As we arrived, my youngest daughter was terribly excited to get into the large swimming pool. Off I...

10 January 2016

Four things I learned by failing at building a product

This is the story of how I failed to build a product. I believe to this date that we had a great idea (and the current market proves that), and...

4 January 2016

Agile planning and the law of diminishing returns

The post that follows is the translation of a post I originally wrote in Portuguese back in June 2010. I found that these issues are still very much current, even...

30 December 2015

Playing conkers and building products

An eleven years old boy sits patiently in the school’s secretary waiting for his form tutor to come to pick him up. It is his first day of school, after...

22 December 2015

Different approaches to time management

As the year draws to an end, many of us are reviewing things that went well and making plans to improve in the coming year. For me, as is often...

12 December 2015

Opinion or data?

When making product decisions, should you rely on your intuition or on data? I have previously written about how to become more data-driven, and I have also written about the...

26 September 2015

On why you want to make mistakes

In order to grow, an organisation must learn. In order to learn, an organisation must make mistakes. If you don’t let people make their own mistakes, they will not learn...

6 August 2015

Why I play the guitar

At age 36, I have recently taken up playing the guitar again. Am I going through some kind of mid-life existential crisis, going back to teenage habits? Perhaps, though I...

6 August 2015

whoami

I am Fernando Garrido Vaz, professional geek. As a former colleague once said to me, a specialist at being a generalist. I am a Product Manager who loves to figure...

18 March 2015

GNU Terry Pratchett

This blog now proudly features the GNU Terry Pratchett headers on every page:

5 March 2015

How to get “remote” right

“Remote” can be tricky to get right, even if only because we’ve done it the other way for a long time and that’s how our companies, and minds, are used...

21 February 2015

The uneven future of work

The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.

6 September 2014

The old horse that drives change

One way to get people to change a habit is to make it so annoying for them to keep the current behavior that they will change just to get rid...

14 July 2014

Here’s how you become data-driven (in six easy steps)

A quick browse around any sample of startup or product management-related blogs will quickly convince you of the need to become “data driven”. Lots of people are now aware of...

12 June 2014

The perils of becoming data-driven

The tech world is second only to the fashion world in the speed at which new trends are adopted. At early-stage startups then, the pace is staggering. A couple of...

5 May 2014

Why privacy matters, but not how you think

There are a few aspects that make up a product that everyone has strong opinions about. Privacy is one of them, and one that has received a lot of attention...

14 April 2014

How much UI?

Earlier this week I took part in an interesting conversation about how much UI design should a requirement document (to use the generic term) contain. I’ve seen this same discussion...

27 March 2014

Got content? Get paid.

Do you create some form of digital content that you’re looking to monetize? There are all sorts of different content being produced, and there are different ways to get paid...

22 March 2014

To plan or not to plan

So there you are, getting started building an MVP for your new product. You have a pretty good shared vision of what you’re trying to accomplish, and a rough outline...

12 March 2014

In defense of the to-do list

As you may know, I have embarked on my very own personal crusade to recover my time management chops, and I have been dilligently following my plan which focuses on...

10 March 2014

How I have lost my edge, and how I will get it back

I have lost my edge. Now that I’ve realized that, I need to figure out how to get it back. I used to be really great at time management, but...

31 December 2013

Thoughts On Online Education in 2013

2013 saw a lot happening in the online education space. In no particular chronological order, I offer some of the trends I took away from following this space along the...

6 December 2013

The benefits of being allergic

How do you figure out if someone will be a good fit for your team? A few months back I had the opportunity to interview some candidates for open positions,...

3 December 2013

The Ultimate Time-Management Challenge

Building a product as a side project, while keeping up with your day job and caring for your family, is the ultimate time-management challenge. That much I have already learned...

15 September 2013

On Saying No To New Friends

When is the right time to start forging partnerships when building a new product? I’ve been asking myself this question since a former colleague of one of our team suggests...

7 September 2013

Experiments With A Standing Desk

I’ve been wanting to experiment with a standing desk for a long time. So, when the Design Thinking online course I was taking emphasized the importance of your environment on...

23 August 2013

5 Graphite Tips I Wish I Had Found Earlier

Graphite is a charting application for real-time data that has become really popular for tracking application metrics. Graphite’s documentation is not that great, so when you start using it it’s...

7 April 2013

Kill Your To-Do List | Zen Habits

The One Thing System Here’s what I do, and highly recommend to anyone willing to break free of the to-do list: I wake up in the morning, and decide what...

7 April 2013

Kill Your To-Do List | Zen Habits

20 January 2012

SOPA brasileira, quem quer?

Prometi pra mim mesmo que não publicaria mais “peças de opinião” no blog, pois tenho uma forte suspeita de que ninguém quer saber a minha opinião sobre muita coisa (e...

31 October 2011

Estatuto dos Funcionários, artigo 240: “O dia 28 de outubro será consagrado ao Servidor Público” (com maiúsculas). Então é feriado, raciocina o escriturário, que, justamente, tem um “problema” na pauta para...

29 March 2011

Segunda semana de mudança – inspeção e adaptação

Depois do post da semana passada sobre as

21 March 2011

O desafio da mudança de rotina na administração do tempo

Recentemente passei (ou estou passando, na verdade) por uma grande alteração na minha rotina. Mudei de cidade, emprego, modo de trabalho, enfim, tudo! Com uma mudança tão radical, tenho sentido...

22 December 2010

O meio é a mensagem

Essa semana me deparei com um exemplo de como a forma correta de comunicar uma mensagem ruim pode acabar por transformá-la em algo positivo. A alguns meses ganhei de aniversário...

12 November 2010

Como criar produtos que seus usuários odeiam – por Roman Pichler

8 November 2010

Mas afinal, o que é essa tal de Pomodoro Technique?

25 October 2010

Seja mais produtivo no Twitter

Se você é usuário do Twitter, deve ter dificuldades para encontrar informações relevantes dentro do mar de ruído que caracteriza a ferramenta. Acabamos perdendo muito tempo navegando por um mar...

8 October 2010