Do we actually have a problem with declining babies in the US? Feels like I am always seeing stuff on X about this, so I dug into it more. While on a snapshot of any given year, babies born are declining, final family sizes for women in their mid 40s hasn't moved much. Final family size is a lagging indicator, of course, but a lot of the story here is actually women having babies later.

Everyone is trying AI analysis with agents. No one has gotten it to be trustworthy enough to open widely to all business users. Dozens of companies I've spoken to in the past few weeks have told me this. Why is that? It turns out, the last 15-30% of quality and trust in analysis is really really hard to get right. This is what your best analysts know that AI doesn't yet: 1. Which metrics to trust, out of the mess of metrics and contradicting dashboards 2. What's changed in the business behind the numbers, including strategy, roadmaps, or just one-off edge cases. 3. How to actually think about the problem, including what its downstream implications and decisions are and how it should be scoped 4. What happened last time, and what feedback signals should alter our future judgements AI can sound smart while being wrong in exactly the ways that waste the most time. Wrote an article explaining this, and what we can do about it, in the latest in Opinionated Intelligence.

The Making of a Manager is launching a revised edition! After 6 years and 5K+ ratings, the Making of a Manager is stepping into big-kid clothes (aka paperback edition) with a refresh + 2 brand new chapters (on managing remotely and managing down times). I wrote The Making of a Manager because I saw the task of getting the best out of a team as its own kind of craft. To this day I am obsessed with this job and feel grateful I get to practice it daily with my phenomenal @TeamSundial. Like a slow climb, I've come to savor the satisfaction of company building even more than that of building product. It's more dynamic and enduring. If designing experiences is about stepping into user empathy, then managing is that, but ten times more visceral. In the era of AI, good management matters more than ever, for two key reasons: The first, a pragmatic one, is that the principles of managing AI agents well are not so different from managing humans well. You need to develop an intuition for this black box and its quirks. Get to know it deeply. Express your expectations clearly. Give feedback prodigiously. The second reason, a human one, is that AI is disrupting life as we know it. The pace of change has never been swifter. And while many changes will be for our benefit, any upheaval of "how things were done" breeds uncertainty and fear. The ground trembles beneath our feet. Jobs will be lost; power dynamics rearranged; unspoken rules rewritten. During these daily booms and busts, sturdy leadership matters more than ever. I care about this immensely. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who has given this book a chance, and passed it on to their teams or managers or siblings or friends. It feels like getting postcards of your traveling gnome to see it make its way from Silicon Valley start-ups to dentist offices to government agencies across the world. The greatest compliment is hearing: "this book helped me become a better manager." Thanks for having that coffee chat with me. My belief in you is as deep as the Mariana Trench. The revised paperback edition with two new chapters has a gradient cover and a lower list price. It launches in September but you can preorder it today on Amazon. (Please note: the hardcover will get updated later this year; ordering a hardcover now does not guarantee getting the newly revised edition!)