Narrative

Writing that gives experience a voice and a throughline.

Selected writings, books, essays, and featured articles.

essay

The Names I Made, Found, and Couldn't Shake

I have answered to more names than I can reasonably explain. Some I abandoned. Some I adopted. Others seem to have stuck to me regardless of what I tried.

medium

@jessevanhiller on Medium

Read my writing about life, science, product, music, and more on Medium.

book

The Underachiever - Part 1: Anticipation

Jooles Mueller (AKA 'The Underachiever') is a dot-com burnout and is tired of his blind commitment to productivity. He’s on a collision course with his heart, pushing him towards adventure, while his mind restrains him towards responsibility. But both are telling him to go to Paris. They just may not be one and the same destination.

essay

I Am Cyborg

As a product manager, I think a lot about systems. Not just what they are supposed to do, but what happens when they fail. What signals they depend on. What inputs they can interpret. What outputs they produce. What work happens invisibly in the background until something breaks badly enough that everyone suddenly understands how much the system was doing all along. That is how I have come to understand my body. You see, I have Type 1 diabetes, as do millions of other people.

essay

Is Product Management Becoming a Distributed Skillset?

As I witness the swift change AI brings, I keep coming back to a question that I don’t think product managers can avoid anymore: Is product management still mostly a role, or is it becoming a skillset that many roles need to carry?

essay

A Room Has No Memory

A personal essay about some of the venues that shaped my musicianship, from glamorous residencies and cramped restaurant stages to blues jams, milestone gigs, and hard-earned load-ins. The room remembers none of it, but I do.

essay

Coherence is the integration of diverse elements, relationships, or values

The same instincts show up in different rooms. The same questions follow me into different work. The same habits of attention keep returning, whether I am behind a drum kit, inside a roadmap conversation, writing an essay, or organizing people around a cause. I think in terms of universally applied methods: many lenses for the same work, and different work with the same lens.

essay

Disrupt yourself

The NYT went from editorial titan to digital dwarf even after a massive effort to digitize their presence. Realizing the miss they attacked the problem as any reporting organization would: they talked to people like crazy. What they came up with was a two-pronged approach: disruptively grow their audience and digitally fortify their newsroom.