Aerial view of Barcelona blocks by Logan Armstrong

A Guide to Our Favourite Spots in Barcelona

This is a list of special places to visit that we’ve discovered during our time in Barcelona. I’ve excluded any obvious touristic spots, since you will read about those in every guidebook and blog post. I try to keep this as up-to-date as possible, however, make sure to double-check that the place is still open. Enjoy your trip and drop me a line if you want to meet! Eating Bar Mut Beautiful little tapas place on Diagonal, near Passeig de Gràcia. Great sample of both meat and seafood dishes, and good service. ...

June 19, 2023 · 4 min · Taylan Pince
Mount Fuji in Japan Photo by JJ Ying

Japanese Work Philosophy in Product Management

There are many approaches to product management, and every organization tends to breed its flavour of leading product. For many years, I have been thinking deeply about my core values and which ones withstood the test of time as I worked on different teams and businesses. During our recent trip to Japan, I was dumbfounded by the amount of respect every single person seems to have towards their craft. Whether it’s a shopkeeper, artisanal craftsperson or a barista, everyone seemed to take their role in society extremely seriously. Not only that, but there was also a sense of progression, of continuous improvement at what they did. I came back from that trip with a deep respect for a culture that could breed such professionalism. ...

May 13, 2023 · 3 min · Taylan Pince
Team photo from Hipocation 2022

On Remote Teams

It was 2015 when I first encountered the idea of a remote-first team culture. Before that, I had been working with clients at Hipo remotely for many years. However, I mostly worked from the same office with our internal team. We had a very flexible culture, and we were used to working online from different locations. So, we thought it would be easy to have some remote team members. Spoiler alert: It was not. ...

April 15, 2023 · 4 min · Taylan Pince
Satisfactory Early Access

A Love Letter to Satisfactory

Over the last couple of months, I became completely obsessed with a first-person factory simulation game called Satisfactory. As a product builder, I frequently draw inspiration from game design, and I think Satisfactory is a masterpiece in that regard. While it’s still fresh in my mind, I wanted to capture some well-crafted game design elements in this successful game. Factory Simulations First off, the relatively new genre of factory simulation games is worth noting. These are essentially puzzle games with some elements of real-time strategy mixed in. More than 20 years ago, I remember playing a game called “Factory: The Industrial Devolution” on my Mac. As far as I know, this was one of the first creations within the factory simulation genre. It had completely captured me back then, and now I understand why. ...

March 14, 2023 · 5 min · Taylan Pince
High speed train illustrating how effective impactful teams can be - Photo by Fikri Rasyid

How to Build High-Impact Product Teams

The term “high-impact” gets thrown around a lot lately, and it got me thinking about what that exactly means and why it’s important. And if it’s essential, how do we achieve it as product leaders? When we talk about impact in the product world, we usually mean a few different things: Impact on end-user experience Impact on business goals of the organization Impact on internal processes All of these are worthy goals to have for any product team. Of course, any PM would want to have a positive impact on both the customer experience and revenue, as well as making their peer’s jobs easier with better processes and internal tooling. ...

February 10, 2023 · 3 min · Taylan Pince