I frame this differently - it’s about getting out of your own head and think about what’s useful to the other person. And making this a habit so it’s easy.
Providing feedback on the meal is useful for their next guest, if they are interested in improving. If they aren’t, just say it’s fine and move on.
Shifting focus outside of yourself is covered in a lot of areas but Never Split The Difference stuck with me, written by a hostage negotiator.
Aside: I used to love reading qz. Anyone remember when it was a chat/imessage style mobile app? The news was super short and quirky.
Then they sold out and most recently literally sold out to this software company from my neck of the woods. Every single article now feels like it's written by an LLM optimized to write like a crypto/AI bro.
Yeah, sounds a bit like a selection bias, i.e. the people who managed to survive the firings by DOGE and the current admin are the kind of people who might prefer Grok.
There's also a new player called diversion (diversion.dev) which I think may be a YC startup? Anyway it takes a different approach of being more like Google drive but bringing in VCS behavior making it more indie and designer friendly.
At my previous game-dev-company job we ended up splitting things up into:
1. Code - Git
2. WIP art, shared assets (logos, marketing materials, etc) - Google Drive (because things are often changing, getting passed around, etc)
3. Finished assets (PSD files you're done with, or you think you're done with) - SVN (because we wanted a log of who contributed to what, wanted artists to be able to pick up where someone else left off; having a log of who made changes to a given PSD)
4. Assets rendered out to PNG to include in the app bundle/publish to the static file servers - Git (because those files never changed after being published so the git history wasn't polluted with unneeded files)
I've also used LFS, which is... a fine workaround, but still not great. Users who don't have it configured can still commit binary blobs; users who don't have it configured will clone files incorrectly; if the LFS server is slow, unavailable, unreliable, then the system starts to behave oddly; you need a Git server that supports it.
It was a huge hassle to manage; having a system like this would have been a godsend at that company, and if I still worked there I would be spending all day importing our codebase and assets into it to see how well it works.
what happens if WIP stuff has rapid shifts or changes? art direction changes on the product level, etc? or even something as simple as an asset designer quits or get sick for a while
SVN makes sense cuz it's done and dusted, but I could see the Drive gettin real messy real fast if things change a lot
Today your statement is a little too ambitious but I agree with the overall point that the inherent effort based moat in SaaS is mostly gone and now it is really about personalizing your own.
The most common counter-argument that I've seen here is " Yes, but no organization wants to manage all of their different operational tools. They would rather just outsource that responsibility to third-party entities".
I'm not sure I fully agree with that counter. Because agents can be viewed as third party entities in some sense. If not today then maybe soon.
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