Your product is context

Yesterday we gathered at Instituto Tramontana for the last meetup before the summer. We hold them every two months, and they're a wonderful opportunity to get a glimpse of the content I teach in the product program at Instituto Tramontana.

The next edition, already the sixth, will start in October. Over the course of nearly 7 months we'll be discussing, building, putting our prejudices and myths to the test, and developing ideas from concepts and fundamentals.

Yesterday's meetup was centered on context. Among the many virtues of LLMs is that they've given more relevance to context. It's a concept we've always worked with in the program's philosophy, and now it's further validated.

We went through some exercises typical of the program that allowed us to begin filling in the concept of "singularity" that runs through all the content. From there I proposed three quotes to connect with three senses of "context" that have been very present in the recent history of digital products: contextual design, dogfooding, and circumstance as the basis for a task. We finished by doing an exercise on the fly, collectively, which ended up teaching us a lot about how poorly we usually invent in digital product.

I was lucky to meet Pablo Grueso, whom I usually read on X/Twitter; also to run into people I hadn't seen in a while, like Mario Pérez Pereira, Cristina Montes Ortiz, Eusebio Graciani Higuero, Javier García Hernández, Salvador Alfocea; and also to meet new faces like Paloma Barreiro González, Sergio Calderón Pérez-Lozao and Jesús Alberto Polo.

There was debate and laughter, which are the only indispensable ingredients for interesting ideas to flourish. ;)