Sea squirts and waterfalls
There’s a strange little underwater invertebrate called a sea squirt. If you saw attached to a rock, you might confuse it with coral, but they’re actually the closest evolutionary relatives we humans have among underwater invertebrates.
When they’re young, they look like a tadpole, swimming around looking for a suitable place to live. But once they find an ideal spot, something unusual happens: they start digesting their own brain.
They just don’t need it anymore.
I’m still thinking a lot about the idea that waterfall methodology amounts to a “pledge not to learn anything,” … and sea squirts seemed like a rather dramatic and humorous example of that.
…
I get it. There’s a certain appeal to a “set it and forget it” mindset of work, but if you’re going to do any kind of product work — and design systems are products — you have to be always learning, always growing.
In other words, sea squirts make terrible product managers.
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Cheers,
Up Next: A Lesson in Naming from Minecraft
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