BostonMeme

Ok... I'll admit it. I'm a sucker for things that make me nostalgic about Detroit. While I didn't grow up in Detroit proper (17 mile ftw!), it very much becomes part of your identity to grow up next to such a complex city. For as long as I can remember there have been vast abandon buildings with broken windows downtown, and I have to take my dad's word for it that it once was a vibrant cultural center that provided the figurative heartbeat for the country.

So there was a big debate today here at work about whether or not we should have a company subsidized beer fridge at work. While I'm still relatively new, I know that it has long been part of the culture and routine here to go grab a beer with co-workers after a long day, or at our weekly web TV show on Fridays, and talk through issues, laugh about earlier disagreements, and generally relax a little after putting in some long, intense hours building a great software product. But as the company grows, the question arose as to what the beer fridge money is really buying, and whether or not those funds were better used elsewhere. Are we squandering company funds, or is this (as one red-blooded capitalist coworder put it) an expense that has a solid ROI on productivity, morale, and cross-fertilization of ideas.

So I'm finally catching up on my game backlog (which keeps getting delayed by my newly found Mad Men addiction, but that's a different post) and am about finished with the Half Life 2 portion of the Orange Box. Per usual, I can't help but find parallels between the game and the Product Management work I do on a daily basis. Now, some of this might be stretching, but if I were a video game character, I think I would probably choose Gordon Freeman as my incarnation. 

Last week I had the pleasure of attending the 2011 UPA Boston Annual Conference in Cambridge, MA with a handful of my HubSpot colleagues. Overall, I'd say the event was moderately informative, but my favorite session of the day was given by Colleen Roller, a Decision Architect and writer for UXMatters.com. She had been researching the effect of number format in interface design on user behavior. Her results showed that users behaved incredibly irrationally when faced with simple number comparisons, depending on their format.

Well, you can't really escape it this time of year. With the dual playoffs in full effect and the baseball season kicking off, there's so much sports happening that you can't step into a Dunkin' Donuts or XYZ's Famous Roast Beef without hearing some talk about how the Sox will overcome their stumble early on, or whether or not this is "the year" for the Bruins. Or, in the case of tonight, why there are people in hazmat suits hanging out in front of TD Garden.