The Great Divide

When I grew up in Michigan, The Great Divide was a college retail apparel store (I hear it's now called "The Split Mitt"?). One side was Blue and Gold (or Blue and Maize, depending on how much of a Michigan purist you are) and on the other was Green and White. One half for Michigan fans, one half for Michigan State (Sorry CMU!). The joke, of course, that many of us knew first hand was that even in families, there were clear delineations in support of your favorite Michigan college team, so much so that you needed to separate them out with a big dividing line that zigzagged through a store to keep your college team purchases from blending together.

Even the ceiling tiles are divided...

When I started this blog, I focused on what it was like to be a female entrepreneur. I wrote about learning and technology and games. Sometimes I wrote about personal stuff, but mainly I kept it professional. A few years ago, however, I started to shift. Work was becoming less of a driver of my personal growth, and my blog reflected how my life had moved from career-first to a big ol' mixtape of personal and professional. Sometimes even political. I started posting my reflections from the services I participated in at the Unitarian Society of Santa Barbara. I started posting about my kids more. About personal accomplishments. Suddenly, my blog was much more about me and not about my work.

I think that's ok. Blogs can be whatever we want them to be. For me, Learning In Tandem has become all of me, and it has been great to have an outlet to reflect and write about my life.

But the more I shared, the more I wondered if I was doing this right. I was no longer just an entrepreneur, but also a technology executive. I was no longer focused solely on games, but on building scalable technology. I was no longer just starting out, but now mentoring and coaching. I had moved in many ways from simply learner to learner and teacher. I find these days I have more to say about how to survive and thrive in the tech industry. Often, I keep these thoughts to myself, as I didn't know if they had a place anymore on this blog. In short, I felt like I was writing for everyone, which ended up with me writing for no one.

Today, I had an epiphany (which, besides wooly mammoth, is my favorite word). And so, I'm starting a new blog, just for my professional writing. It's roadmapher.com and starting this week I'll be posting about what it means to be a product manager, and product management strategies, and generally things that reflect what I do all day long in building products and businesses. Maybe there's even a book in there, somewhere. I'm anxious to see how it goes.

As for Learning in Tandem, I'll still be posting here. I'll cross-post things that I think are interesting, but I'm going to reserve this blog for focus on learning, whether personal or professional. This blog has grown up with me for the last 10 years and for those of you who have read along, I'm not going anywhere...just hopefully posting more, now that I have more clarity and focus.

Maybe it's more of a Venn diagram than a Great Divide? Either way, I hope you'll follow me to my new blog if you're interested in what I do, and stick around here at Learning in Tandem if you're interested in who I am.

(I'm totally a Spartan, btw. I can sing you the whole MSU fight song if you'd like. Don't even think of buying me U of M gear). 

The reminder that death gives

It's been a brutal start to the year with the news of several of my favorite musicians and actors passing away weighing heavily on my heart. It's tough to lose someone who has inspired you, entertained you, motivated you, validated you. It's tough to lose several of them within the span of a couple weeks.

It's funny what you think about when you're dealing with loss.

One of my overarching emotional responses has been what I like to think of as my death panic. As someone who likes to dig in and discover the root cause, solve problems and uncover unexpected issues that affect outcomes, death is really my nemesis. It is not a problem to be solved; it just is. And we don't know, no one does, what it really is. Is all of what I am here, right here, right now? All of these feelings and dreams and fears, are they just temporary, wiped out when I die? Or is there something beyond, and if there is, will I get to recognize and experience it?

A lot of questions with no answers + no way to really know = death panic.


But there ARE things you can control here and now. The death of my idols has been the catalyst to
reexamine my priorities. What is the life I really want to lead? Who am I, and who do I want to be for the people I care about? If today was my last day, what would be my regrets?

The big question: am I spending my most valuable resource, time, doing the things that are important to me?

As a product manager, one of the biggest factors in the day to day work that we do is time. Time is a known, limited resource. My whole job is to prioritize and make decisions around scope and urgency. I need to collect data and try to predict the future: what will have the biggest impact? what is the minimum amount of effort that will bring value? what should we do first?

When death affects me, I start applying those product management principles to my life. What is my minimum viable product? What bugs do I need to address? What enhancements do I need to tackle? What other resources do I need?

The world lost an immense amount of talent in a short amount of time; I lost some of my biggest sources of inspiration. As I'm mourning those losses, I'm also trying to appreciate the reminder that death gives. Thank you for one parting lesson, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Natalie Cole, Lemmy Kilmister and Dan Haggerty.

Product trumps marketing: Stop telling me Goldie Blox is revolutionary

As the only football lover in my house, I used all kinds of tactics to lure everyone in to watching the Super Bowl with me. Snacks work, and so does the promise of a showcase of some of the best commercials of the year. So together we sat yesterday, me watching/tweeting the abysmal game, John looking up how to build our new house (another blog post on this forthcoming) and the kids grazing on a buffet of snack foods and gathering for the commercial breaks to critique the ads.

When the commercial for Goldie Blox came on, I not only paid attention to the commercial, but also to my 7 year old daughter's reaction. She is the target audience for Goldie Blox, my princess who loves to read, create art, hike, cook and build things. She received Goldie Blox as a gift for Christmas, and she knows that it's supposed to inspire her to learn engineering and math and engage in problem solving. Except...it doesn't. And as we watched the ad together, Sallie simply said as the commercial ended, "I have that toy. It's not that fun."

Exactly. And that's the problem with Goldie Blox in general. It's a great story, and it's marketing is targeted at adults who want their daughters to know that they can do or build anything. It sells itself as the solution to parental guilt. It tells parents, "you don't want to discriminate against your daughters in the toys you buy them, do you? Buy this toy to teach your little princess that she can do anything that boys can do."

There are so many problems with this. For one, Goldie Blox are still overwhelmingly pink and feminine. So much for "disrupting the pink aisle." But if you look past the feminization of non-gender specific activities, if you accept that maybe the first step in getting girls interested in STEM education and careers is by making them pink, there is an even bigger issue, as my 7 year old so simply noted: Goldie Blox are "not that fun."

The commercials, both the Super Bowl spot and the Rube Goldberg machine video that went viral where the use of Beastie Boys' "Girls" was used and is now in a legal dispute over copyright infringement, show girls creating all of these elaborate contraptions to complete simple tasks (as a designer, I could also cast a mark against them for promoting "over-design," but there are bigger fish to fry). None of those things are actually possible using the Goldie Blox toy. As an instructional designer and a game designer, one of the things that I talk about a lot is replayability. A game isn't much fun if you play it once and win...what's your motivation to play it again? And that's basically what happens with Goldie Blox. A few simple pieces that can be put together to create a contraption, following the accompanying story about Goldie, and then the toy is done. Boring. Not obviously replayable. Not that fun.

My 7 year old daughter has the luxury of having older brothers, brothers who play Minecraft and have a bazillion LEGOs and who have Snap Circuits. We are also a "maker" family that builds robots and upcycles old cake pans into lights, who sews each other presents and that has a hot glue gun on the ready next to our spare circuit boards and googly eyes. We often discuss as a family what 3D printing projects we want to take on, and whether or not it's worth getting an Arduino kit (it is). She sees me building and making things right alongside "the guys" and coming up with my own solutions to science, math and engineering problems. She does enjoy the pink aisle when we visit a toy store, but she also enjoys figuring out how to solve a problem when we're building something.

I see a lot of people praising Goldie Blox as revolutionary. Ugh. Do these people have a 7 year old daughter? Have they tried to play with Goldie Blox with a little girl? More than once? Yeah...not that fun. Just because the marketing messages tell you that a toy is revolutionary doesn't mean it is. Just because you make engineering tools pink doesn't mean girls will want to use them. If you want to get girls into STEM, then don't make it about them being girls. Give them an interesting problem to solve and the tools and support to solve it. Inspire their creativity and their problem solving skills to address an issue that they are passionate about. Don't tell girls that they need different toys than boys, or reinforce for boys that LEGOs or circuitry is only for them because they aren't pink. Stop reinforcing gender bias through color and marketing. Girls don't need separate toys to learn science and engineering, they want and need role models.

You aren't supporting a revolution in girls' involvement in STEM by heaping praise on Goldie Blox. You are supporting gender differentiation in non-gender specific activities, and supporting a company that's making a pretty crappy toy. Just ask a 7 year old girl.



More articles on Goldie Blox:
Another girl's review
Another take on dumbing down engineering toys for girls