@rianvdm.com
👋 Product person, curious learner, and music fanatic. 👨💻 Data and other platform things at @cloudflare.social ✍️ Blog → https://elezea.com 🎸 Music DB side project → https://listentomore.com 🤖 Music trivia bot → @listentomore.bsky.social
An engineer recently sent me some questions about the #productmanagement role. I took a long time to respond because I saw it as a great opportunity to reflect on the role and what it means to me. I decided to share my answers here, in case it’s useful for anyone else!
elezea.com/2025/06/prod...
“MCP Is RSS for AI” is a good analogy, but my analogy would be that MCP is like “Dynamic FAQs”, with the difference being that any question you ask could be considered “frequent” enough to be vetted and correct.
thenewstack.io/mcp-is-rss-f...
I’ve been completely nerdswiped by MCP servers... here’s one I made for Lastfm. Use Claude Desktop to ask questions about your personal listening data. Try it out, let me know what I should add!
github.com/rianvdm/last...
@richeholmes.bsky.social Hey, any chance you’ll ever move off Substack? I stopped giving them money, but will happily become a paid subscriber if you move to something like @ghost.org or @buttondown.com.
Love this take on the “10x engineer”. Ubuntu (the African principle, not the OS) strikes again… “I am because you are.”
“It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software. What matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, […] and revise the software that they own.”
Any celebration of Reid Miles gets an automatic boost from me. Legend.
“Miles fulfilled the Blue Note manifesto. His album covers pushed the envelope of graphic design just as the artists on the records inside continued to break new ground in jazz.”
This is a wonderful thread started by @ftrain.bsky.social, asking what makes your town special—but I’m obviously biased to @antichrista.bsky.social’s response.
Every once in a while a preorder shows up before release date and it’s always such a wonderful thing when that happens.
Mdou Moctar’s band made a 4-track EP. It comes out on Friday but it showed up today and this thing goes so hard. It’s like post-punk desert blues.
I love this essay so much. I want to be this dad for my kids.
“The single-most important thing he gave me, besides unconditional love, was modeling how to use music in my life.“
Interesting data on which movies aged poorly (and well), but it’s the genre data that stood out to me.
“According to our rating-change data, horror movies age notably well, while comedy and drama see a marked decline in appraisal over time.”
www.statsignificant.com/p/which-movi...
@taylorlorenz.bsky.social Hey there, just wanted to mention a data point that I would become a paid subscriber the moment you move off Substack, to something like Ghost or Buttondown.
Oh weird, that is Reeder as well (with Feedbin as backend).
@therealadam.com Hey there, I’m subscribed to your RSS feed and every article title shows up as “Adam Keys is Thinking”. If possible, it would be great to change that to a title That helps RSS readers like me quickly parse the topic. Thanks for considering!
I love this deep-dive on the little interjections we use in everyday speech. One example:
“Other interjections serve as ‘continuers,’ such as ‘mm-hmm’—signals that the speaker should keep going. Because ‘mm-hmm’ is made with a closed mouth, it’s clear that the signaler does not intend to speak.”
I wrote a bit about the importance of “Visibility of System Status” in #productmanagement. elezea.com/2025/03/ack-...
I’m going to assume the reason I don’t get it *this time* is Oscars related.
This is a good @harper.lol primer on how to “brainstorm a spec, then plan a plan, then execute using LLM codegen.” If you have an idea for a product this is such a great way to get a working prototype out there.
I mean this is a bot I made so it’s ChatGPT but it does say “one of the first”, not “the first.”
I still think almost daily about my favorite joke of hers: “I have a feeling that fulfilling my potential is *really* going to cut into my sitting around time.”
This tracks (lol) and seems obvious, but the data is fun.
“Younger listeners tend to exhibit a ‘discovery mindset,’ actively seeking novelty. Older listeners may approach streaming from a ‘maintenance mindset,’ knowing what they want and using a given platform to reinforce established preferences.”
Omg it’s a Gen X dream come true. The original “friend of the show” is back. Subscribed!
When @andrewliptak.com writes about Lord of the Rings, I pay attention. This is one if his best, y’all.
“A critical theme throughout Tolkien’s work is the decline of a once-great people, with weak men failing to live up to the lives and stories of their predecessors.”
Struggling on new ways to say “no”, #productmanagement? This site might help. https://letsnotdothat.com/
Hah! Too real. My wife and I always joke (?) that if we ever get divorced it would be over “irreconcilable differences about music.”
Anyway, I mostly ran it through my NAD M33, but also gave it a whirl through the office setup, which is the Simaudio Moon 240i. Both were amazing.
I ordered their CD player and it surprised me with how much better than streaming it sounded. Ultimately it had some mechanical issues so I had to send it back. But I do follow them closely, and I love their copy so much.
Oh, you’re right! Now that I think about it, they remind me of www.schiit.com
Ah that one is in my cart! Now that I’ve tasted this brand, I need more…
Went to the Post Office today and get this—thanks to modern technology I got to listen to music on the way there and back! This is a game changer. Imagine always having 12 songs in your pocket!
I finally had a chance to make my way through this well-researched Spotify exposé, and dang it’s infuriating.
“A model in which the imperative is simply to keep listeners around, whether they’re paying attention or not, distorts our very understanding of music’s purpose.”
