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A few years ago, I discovered a tomato sauce recipe that was surprisingly simple: just canned tomatoes, butter, salt, and an onion. It inspired me to experiment, adding this and that each time to see how the flavor changed. Today, Id call myself an amateur sauce expert. I know exactly how long it needs to simmer, what shade of red signals its ready, and how to improvise with whatevers in the fridge. As my kitchen exploits remind me, experimentation is part of learning. It wouldnt be the same if Id just asked ChatGPT how to make sauce each time. Id be outsourcing my culinary creativity and losing the teachable moments that come from trial and error. As New Yorker writer Joshua Rothman observed, [I]ts becoming clear that artificial intelligence can relieve us of the burden of trying and trying again. A.I. systems make it trivially easy to take an existing thing and ask for a new iteration. AI can boost creative thinkingor eliminate it entirely. As the CEO of a company built on automation, Ive found that the key is to treat AI as a creative collaborator, not a replacement. Here are a few rules of thumb for striking the right balance. 1. Use AI for idea generationnot final decisions When generative AI became widely available, a lot of hype swirled around its implications. Professionals, from knowledge workers to authors and beyond, feared that AI would take their jobs. AI seemed destined to keep improving, outpacing the skills and intelligence of its human counterparts. More recently, the technologys limits have become more apparent. While AI tools remain powerful workplace tools, their progress is unlikely to be endlessly exponential. As Cal Newport notes, critics argue that the technology is important but not poised to radically transform our lives; it may not get dramatically better than it is today. AI wont write the next great novel or compose symphonies to rival Bach. But it is an excellent brainstorming partner. Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch, who tested ChatGPTs idea generation against college students, explained: Its cheap. Its fast. Its good. Whats not to be liked? Worst case is you reject all of the ideas and run with your own. But our research speaks strongly to the fact that your idea pool will get better. Let AI tools like ChatGPT help you generate more, better ideas. Start with your own thoughts, and use AI to generate alternatives. Then, apply your own human judgment to refine and select the best path forward. Treat prompts like a conversation, not a command One of the strengths of generative AI tools like ChatGPT is their conversational nature. Think of your first prompt as an icebreakerits just there to get the dialogue started. While I recommend being as specific as possible, that is, giving the tool enough context to generate strong, accurate replies, you can always refine as you go. To offer a visual, imagine your dialogue with AI as a funnel: wide at the top and narrowing as you move toward the bottom. You might start by asking ChatGPT to generate ideas for a marketing campaign. Once it produces a list, ask it to refine those ideas for a specific target audiencesay, tech entrepreneurs in their 20s to 40s, or suburban parents. Keep iterating until you land on the output that works best for you. Create space for experimentation Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it certainly wont kill your company. In fact, a healthy sense of curiosity among employees will strengthen it. Research-backed benefits include boosted innovation, reduced group conflict, fewer decision-making errors, and improved communication. While leaders often claim to value curiosity, they tend to stifle it, preferring that employees stay within the lines. Instead, leaders should give employees the freedom to explore. Build enough slack into their schedules so they can test and tinker with AI tools without the pressure to prove immediate ROI. Lead by example: Share your own experimentswhether its trying a new AI feature or recounting an automation gone awry. Getting it wrong can be valuable, too. Ask for employee feedback to uncover what theyre curious about: new systems or tools theyd like to try, or better ways the company could operate. It might feel inefficient, like a misuse of employee time and effort, but in the AI era, staying competitive depends on curiosity and experimentation. Like a chef giving their team full access to the kitchen, leaders must create workplaces where both creativity and experimentation can thrive.
Category:
E-Commerce
In a powerful speech before the Minneapolis City Council, a nurse broke down as she shed light on the fear so many in her profession are feeling as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have stormed the city. “In Minneapolis, I feel like I’m a sitting duck,” the speaker began in a January 15 address. “I don’t feel safe at home. I don’t feel safe at work. Kids aren’t safe at school,” she said through sobs. “I was born in Minneapolis and I am scared out of my mind because I have skin that is not white and that is not fair.” The speaker went on to contend that ICE’s presence and the aggressive tactics agents have increasingly been using has created a “public health emergency” in the city. She said nurses now fear for their own safety and the safety of their patients of color, many of whom may be too afraid to leave home and seek medical help when they need it, regardless of their immigration status. “What happens when ICE comes into our hospitals?” she said. “Where is our moral code?” The speech was delivered a week after Renee Nicole Good, an American citizen and mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in her own Minneapolis neighborhood. Since Good’s death, ICE’s actions have seemed to grow even more extreme. Just hours after the killing, reports of agents tear-gassing students outside a school began circulating. Following the incident, Minneapolis Public Schools canceled classes for the rest of the week, citing safety concerns. In another recent incident, ICE agents dragged multiple workers out of a Target store. Videos of the incident have been circulating online, prompting outrage. But even as workplaces are being disrupted by violent altercations at the hands of immigration enforcement agents and employees are left feeling unsafe at work (or are too afraid to go to work at all), major companies are remaining silent. Fast Company reached out to Target, General Mills, Best Buy, Carhartt, and others to find out their stance on ICE’s presence, yet not a single business responded. Fear is impacting a number of business sectors, particularly those that employ a large number of undocumented individuals, including restaurants, farming, and construction. On January 19, Minnesota state Senator Aric Putnam was joined by agriculture leaders at a press conference to discuss the growing fears. Putnam said both documented and undocumented people are staying home because they are too terrified to go to work. “People are genuinely experiencing this anxiety and this fear. This is about fear,” Putnam said. “Real cops don’t wear masks. That’s just the way it works.” Gary Wertish, president of the Minnesota Farmers Union, warned that deportation fears are bound to impact food deliveries. “We work with restaurants in the Minneapolis area and other parts of the state,” he said. “They’re closing because their workers, even though they’re legal, they’re afraid to go out of their house. They’re afraid to go to work.” While the economic toll on Minnesota isn’t yet known, when ICE showed up on farms in California, the impact was crushing. A 2025 case study looking at the economic impact of ICE on California’s agricultural industry estimated that it drove a crop loss of anywhere from $3 billion to $7 billion and a 5% to 12% increase in the price of produce. Likewise, according to recent reporting from The Minnesota Star Tribune, roughly 80% of immigrant-owned businesses along main drags in both Minneapolis and St. Paul had closed as of January 13 as employees stayed home in droves. GoFundMe pages are popping up to support employees and their families. Right before Christmas, a lot of businesses were telling us sales were down 50%, 70%, or 80%,” Allison Sharkey, president of Lake Street Council, told the outlet. “Now this week? For a lot of business, its down to zero.
Category:
E-Commerce
Spend an hour talking to 37signals CEO Jason Fried, and youll find yourself drawn into his fixation on three frustrating facts about productivity tools today: They’re boring. They’re complicated. They’re overpacked with overhyped AI features that fail to do what they promise and end up providing little in the way of practical value. Those same realities are the reason Fried decided to launch Fizzya new app that aims to reinvent organization software by undoing everything that’s happened to it over the past several years. Challenging current standards is nothing new to 37signals, of course. Fried and his fellow face-of-the-company David Heinemeier Hansson have made a name for themselves as gadflies who aren’t afraid to take on conventional wisdom and criticize both Big Tech tendencies and general workplace politics across any and all mediums. Their software, too, has often hinted at a decidedly rebellious streak that suggests the way we’ve been trained to do things is ripe for rethinkingsomething that’s apparent both with the company’s venerable project management product Basecamp and with its more recent email service Hey, which emphasizes privacy and control to give Gmail a run for its money. Take a peek at the Fizzy homepage, and you’ll instantly see a sense of that same sort of us-against-them mentality in this newest projectwith pointed jabs at the current states of Trello, Jira, Asana, and even GitHub Issues. On the surface, interestingly enough, Fizzy actually seems a lot like Trellothe kanban-style cards-and-boards app that’s been through pivot after pivot and, in many views beyond just 37signals’ own assertions, gotten so bogged down in superfluous features that it’s lost sight of why people once loved it. Fizzy, then, is “a return to the fundamentals,” Fried says”with some changes.” And, fitting with the at-times contrarian philosophy of 37signals, the entire project started on a whim. Fizzy’s bubbled-up beginnings Two years ago, Fried and his team were sitting around at a company meetup and talking about bugsthe buzzing, leg-biting variety, not the virtual ones we sometimes see in software. “Someone said something about bugs hitting a windshield,” Fried recalls. “And I said, ‘Waitthat’s interesting.'” Fried had been wanting to create a simple app for tracking software bugs for ages, but he’d never quite landed on the right approach or angle to make it unique. The visual of literal insects splatting onto a windshield struck him as the metaphor he’d been missing. “The [computer] screen would be a windshield, with the splatters all over itand the splatters would be like bugs,” he explains. “Bigger splats would be like bigger issues, and smaller splats would be smaller issues.” This led to the creation of an internal tool called, fittingly enough, Splat. Eventually, the bugs-on-a-windshield concept evolved into bubbles representing different bugsbubbles that, notably, looked fizzyand from there, the interface became a simpler and less cartoony series of boards and cards. And then, another light bulb went off in Fried’s busy brain. Basecamp has had a feature in it called Card Tables for a while nowessentially a form of Trello-like kanban boards for organizing info within the service. The same sort of setup exists as a feature or an optional view in lots of other productivity suites, too, ranging from Notion to ClickUp, Asana, Any.do, and beyond. But Fried suddenly realized that with Trello’s seemingly endless identity crisis, no simple, stand-alone option for easy kanban-style organization existed as a de facto default anymore. And while that sort of interface worked well as one feature within a broader service like Basecampas well as an element in Jira, Asana, and the other productivity tools Fizzys web marketing calls out as having grown stale and sluggishthere was also a demand for it to be its own isolated entity, without an entire ecosystem of features around it. “I’ve always been fanatically obsessed with ‘what’s the simplest good version of this idea,'” Fried says. “We didn’t build this to compete with anybody. . . . We build things that we want to exist.” And thus, Fizzy was borna freemium and open source app that’s “Kanban as it should be,” as its homepage declares, and not (ahem) “as it has been.” The Fizzy kanban experience When you first sign into Fizzy and start a new board, you’re greeted with three default columns: “Not Now,” “Maybe,” and “Done.” And, interestingly, only one of those columns is open and fully visible at a time. Every Fizzy board begins with the same three columns, two of which are collapsed at any given time. You can always add more columns beyond those, of course, but that opening trio is intended to serve as a simple starting point and way to remain focusedwith an approach that Fried believes will work for a surprising number of organizational needs. That’s the main Fizzy framework. Within any column in any board, then, you can create a card and fill it in with any manner of text, lists, or images. You might create cards to track bugs, for instance, following Fizzy’s original vision. Or you might use cards to represent work tasks, household chores, customer feedbackalmost anything imaginable. A Fizzy card is a flexible canvas for practically any kind of information. From there, you can easily move cards between columns or even to different boards to represent their status at any given moment. You can add steps, leave comments, and assign cards to collaborators as well as place tags on cards to group related items together. And you can pin cards, too, to put them in an easily visible stack in the lower-left corner of the screena possibility I’ve found myself especially enamored with as I’ve explored Fizzy and figured out how it might work for me. Another particularly fun and helpful touch is Fizzy’s feature for labeling a card as urgent: You just click a ticket icon in the card’s corner, and that turns it into a “Golden Ticket”which causes the card to both appear golden in color and move to the top of its column. One struggle I’ve absolutely experienced with Trello and other organizational apps is what I think of as “the graveyard problem,” or the tendency to start seeing these systems as dumping grounds for info that you never end up revisiting. Fizzy helps you avoid that dump-and-jump mentality by automatically moving any card you create into the “Not Now” column if there’s no activity on it after 30 daysthough you can opt to change that timing on an account-wide basis or specifically for any individual board. “The idea [is] that you cannot just keep adding things that you’re never going to do,” Fried says. “These things are ephemeral. You don’t get to just have something on a list forever.” Fizzy doesn’t want you to keep cards around forever, and it actively works to help you avoid it. That’s all well and good, and it helps Fizzy feel like a fresher version of a familiar environment. What’s most striking about using the app, though, is its simplicityfor better or, sometimes, for worseand, alongside that, its unabashed boldness in what it wants to be. The pros and cons of simplicity More than anything, what I noticed within seconds of trying Fizzy was the absence of overwhelming menus, buried options, and integrations I never asked for. At the same time, I was struck by the presence of a distinctive design and sense of whimsy that’s largely faded from the greater software universe. That feeling is palpable in everything from Fizzy’s large, playful fonts to the splashes of color throughout its interfaceall subtle-seeming touches on paper but noticeable contrasts in practice, coming from the largely gray-on-gray world that’s become commonplace in what Fried considers the “Notionization” of software design. “Software’s become boringcorporate,” he says. “It’s lost a lot of personality over the years. We wanted to bring some of that back in.” Design aside, the relatively small number of feature-oriented bells and whistles acts as both an asset and a liability for Fizzy, especially now in its early form. As someone who spends hours a week inside Trello, not having Fizzy feel slow and bloated and larded up with awkwardly tacked-on options really is refreshing. But at the same time, for me, there are certain elements missing that make Fizzy difficult to fully embrace. To wit: At this point, I use Trello primarly for organizing my writingand that means I’m constantly saving stuff I see on the web for later revisiting. I rely heavily on both an unofficial Trello browser extension and the official Trello mobile app for being able to beam anything I see on any device I’m using into a specific Trello spot with a single swift click on my computer or a couple quick taps on my phone. It’s integral to my workflow. Fizzy, as of this moment, exists only as a progressive web appsomething you install from your browser, without any platform-native form. And for the most part, that approach works admirably. But when it comes to a use case like mine, where I need a native presence that makes link-saving easy, it’s a limitation that would keep me from being able to leap to Fizzy today. Weighing out cases like that and deciding what’s worth adding versus when it’s more important to prioritize the product’s purity is high on Fried’s mind, particularly as someone who’s watched so many other apps get weighted down, overly complicated, and increasingly unpleasant to use over time. “Software slides downhillthat’s how it evolves, unfortunately,” he says. “What was once good is now complicated. It’s now harder than it used to be and unnecessarily so, for most cases.” Fried readily concedes that there are always instances where someone needs something more in a piece of software. For what it’s worth, he says his team would like to make mobile apps for Fizzy eventually. (37signals offers a full complement of native versions of Basecamp and Hey.) And he seemed intrigued by my browser extension use case as well. But by failing to maintain a strong vision for what a product should and shouldn’t beand what specific needs it should and, equally important, shouldn’t servean app can try to be everything for everyone and end up being nothing of consequence for anyone. “What ends up happening is . . . almost everyone lose[s] the charm in the beauty of the simple thing, argues Fried. AI, source code, and beyond One feature I’ve found myself pleased not to find in Fizzy is any manner of AIas in, the large-language-model-powered generative-AI fiddliness that’s being crammed into every nook and cranny of so many other services and serving as the entire raison d’tre for countless new tools. Fried says his team experimented with bringing AI into Fizzy in a few different forms but ultimately determined it wasn’t useful enoughand good enough, for nowto release. “When it exists, people tend to lean on it in a way where it’s considered to be the be-all, end-all truth,” he says. “In our testing, it was not that at all. It was a bit of a mirage.” One early experiment involved a system that’d let you ask your account questions in natural language and receive summarized info about your data. Given how new the product was, though, 37signals found it was often failing to provide any meaningful insightsand decided not to present an opportunity for users to ask questions that the service couldn’t effectively answer. Another AI experiment offered a weekly newsletter-style overview of all the activity across your Fizzy boards, with five headlines of things that happened in the previous week. Fried says it was fine, but he found that reading it didn’t make him feel any more informedso the feature didn’t really need to exist, unless it was there solely for buzzword bragging. “I don’t want to put software out in the world that’s checking a box if it’s not really doing its job,” he says. To be clear, Fried doesn’t see his present stance on AI within Fizzy to be any sort of dogma. If and when the technology serves a clear and effective goal with genuine practical benefit, he says, he’ll consider it. But until then, he sees no reason to indulge an industry obsession and add to the hype only to leave folks disappointed when they actually experience it. Another area where Fizzy is breaking the productivity app mold is in 37signals’ decision to share the softwares source code, with the option for anyone to host it themselves and use itheck, even customize and modify itfor free. The only limitation, according to 37signals, is not being able to run it as a hosted commercial service for other users, a right the company reserves for itself. If you use the app in its more standard 37signals-hosted setup, you can create up to 1,000 cards across 1GB of storage without having to paya threshold Fried expects will be more than enough for most people to embrace the service for years before having to shell out a dime. Once you cross the 1,000-card threshold, it costs $20 per month for unlimited cards and up to 5GB of storage, with additional space available for an extra fee. Fried says there’s no sweeping strategic vision behind this or any grand plan for Fizzy to act as a gateway toward Basecamp or other 37signals products. It’s just an app he and his team wanted to see exist and so decided to create, as its own stand-alone thing, for anyone else who might benefit from using it. “This is not going to be our breadwinner,” he says. “We’re at the point in our careers . . . [where] we can do stuff we just want to try to do because we think it’s the right thing.” Fried even goes as far as to say that if current 37signals customers find they can accomplish everything they need with Fizzy and no longer require the much more ambitious Basecamp subscription, he considers that a company win. In fact, he says that’s happened numerous times alreadyand in each instance, he’s done nothing but celebrate it. “If you don’t need [Basecamp], now we have something else for you,” he says. More than anything, Fried’s hope is that Fizzy can not only serve its direct users but also serve the tech industry by setting an example ofand maybe even creating expectations forhow satisfying software can be when it deliberately tries to be different and doesn’t just blindly mimic trends. “Our products don’t look like anybody else’s,” he says. “They don’t work like anybody else’s. And I’d like to see more companies do that versus just follow the established patterns.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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