Camiel Schoonens

Product and Technology enthusiast

52 Weeks – Week 22

52 Weeks – Week 22

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I’m collecting 52 songs in 52 weeks. Every Friday, I add a song to my playlist. With the chosen music, I try to capture my energy and feelings of that particular Friday.

Week 22/52: Helene Fischer – Atemlos durch die Nacht

After 52 weeks, I will have recorded all the seasons, holidays, and high and low weeks of the year in this playlist on Apple Music. Don’t use Apple Music? Subscribe to weekly updates via RSS.

Progression is always there, as long as you look for it

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This morning, I completed my third run of the week and my last run of the month due to our annual skiing holiday starting tomorrow. I was disappointed with myself for not being able to run farther or faster this month than I had to date. Then I thought, why don’t I compare my 2025 January and February running results with last year’s? And so I did.

Jan ’24 Jan ’25 Feb ’24 Feb ’25
Runs 12 18 4 13
Avg. Pace 6:08 5:52 6:25 6:11
Time 8:09:25 9:43:58 3:55:45 8:26:16

My log showed me that I am progressing and will come out better this winter season than ever before.

AI assisted interviewing

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AI will not replace you, but people who use AI will.

I captured this quote from one of the speakers at our annual ReThink conference in Zürich last week. While it’s short and simple, I believe it holds a lot of truth. AI assistants will increase productivity massively, and because of this, the people who know best how to use such assistance and agents will have a considerable advantage over others.

I recently had a virtual interview with a candidate who captured my audio and passed my questions on to an agent who helped him answer them better. While I was initially amazed and somewhat opinionated, it also made me think positively about the candidate and how future-ready he was by applying new technology as it became available.

Books for Product Managers

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I get asked regularly for advice on product and technology books worth reading. While this is all quite personal, there are a few books that I would advise any Product Manager or Product leader to read. Here are six of them in random order:

  1. Talk Like TED, through which you gain insights on selling your ideas persuasively to your internal and external stakeholders.
  2. Blue Ocean Strategy teaches you about finding or creating an uncontested market space that will make competition irrelevant.
  3. Our Iceberg Is Melting is all about change management. Any leader must understand what it takes to generate momentum in their organization.
  4. The Pyramid Principle teaches you to bring logic to your writing and presentation skills. This is essential when your role asks you to present to C-level executives regularly.
  5. Transformed helps you understand what it takes to become a product-led organization to deliver game-changing tech products.
  6. Six Simple Rules is all about managing complexity without making things complicated. Reducing complexity is today’s management challenge, as corporations have been adding complexity through business processes, organizational models, and software products for the past two decades.

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”