The thinking behind Competency Cafe
Built from years of shipping products for people who don't love software.
Where this comes from
Competency Cafe comes from years on the job, putting ideas and practices to the test — doing the work as a practitioner, carrying the risk as a founder, and owning the call as an executive. We've solved problems from the small and immediate to the ones that decided whether a business made it. A lot of product advice is sound in theory and thin on the nuance of real work. Plenty of what we tried didn't survive contact with that. What's here is what we found stood the test and drove real results.
How we think about building
Tidbits of their best wisdom, from the six teachers you’ll work with in the cafe.
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Elena Vasquez · Former design director
The distinction between problem space and solution space is a discipline that most teams naturally violate because humans are trained to solve problems on sight.
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James Okafor · Operations leader
When IDEO mapped the end-to-end train travel experience for Amtrak, they discovered that passengers did not take their seats until step 8 of approximately 12 stages — meaning most of the travel experience had nothing to do with the train.
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Mira Patel · Research lead
Quantitative customer satisfaction metrics like NPS reveal the magnitude and location of problems but not their causes or solutions.
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David Chen · Product manager
The people best positioned to improve an AI system are often the ones who know the least about AI.
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Anya Lindqvist · Journalist turned PM
People fabricate coherent reasons for their behavior even when they can’t know the real cause.
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Rohan Mehta · Director of Product
Prioritization without a framework defaults to political power: whoever shouts loudest or holds the highest title gets their pet features built, systematically misallocating engineering resources away from the highest-impact work.