The title characters of The Jills are members of the cheer squad supporting the Buffalo Bills football team, and what happens when trouble envelops several of them. It is loosely based on the reality and challenges faced by these women — low pay, ridiculous work requirements that dictate every moment of their lives: how they look, what they eat, and so forth. One of the Jills is missing, and foul play is suspected. Two sisters are at the heart of the plot: one a Jill, and one who is in and out of various addiction 12-step programs. Lurking on the sidelines is a Buffalo crime family that who is dating the missing Jill. The novel’s verisimilitude is spot-on, and the scrapes that the two sisters get into drives the plot forward and provides for a fast-paced read. Highly recommended.

This book takes on several tough subjects as part of its winding plot involving two terrible accidents on Valentine’s Day: one twin sister and one child are killed in two separate auto accidents. The surviving twin and the boy’s mother are brought together in grief, as their worlds fall apart. The twin runs her own event management business, and her husband has his own business too. The psycho drama of these three adults is woven expertly by the author as we watch their conflicts over loss and adjusting to various circumstances that I don’t want to reveal to spoil the plot. As someone who has lost an adult child, their grief journeys aren’t sugar-coated and seem very realistic and raw. And the strong ending is somewhat surprising but brings the novel to an appropriate close. Highly recommended.

For a book that is more than 100 years old, it is surprisingly modern and relevant. The story is universal — a woman breaks up a marriage with an affair, and the subsequent couple is run out of a small town in Iowa. The reaction to the town might be old-fashioned, but the raw human emotions, and the inner conflict of the characters is thoroughly modern. The couple can’t get married because the ex-wife doesn’t want to divorce her husband. “Some people, could go on with the life love had made after the love has gone,” says Ruth, the character at the center of this novel, which explores what happens when someone gets stuck emotionally, and how things might have turned out differently if Ruth had just fallen in love with someone else “like other girls in her crowd.” I think my only quibble is that the title of the book might be better with “resentment” because a lot of the emotional content which is brilliantly written is about what one character feels towards others.

I read the Belt Publishing version which has a wonderful introduction that ties its narrative to contemporary times.

I have known Rich Mironov for more than two decades through numerous product management positions across the tech universe. His new book is “Money Stories: Communicating the Value of Product Work” and it is a great guidebook to what he calls members of the maker set and how they can talk to the other part of the company that doesn’t make anything but money (whom he collectively calls go-to-market execs), and hopefully profits to pay for all the fancy product stuff.

Money stories are good for providing the basis of why a company should build a product, creating a shared vocabulary that both makers and marketing execs can understand each other, and help rank development priorities and set strategies. And that is a good name for them, because making money is fundamental to a business (sometimes makers forget this), and decisions on knowing what to do something and when are often based on magical thinking, or emotions, or anything but money. These stories fall into six general patterns, such as upselling, boosting volume, reducing churn, acquiring new customers, entering a new market, or saving operational costs. For each pattern, he provides sample narratives, walks the reader through the underlying math, and calls out mistakes to avoid.

Mironov has seen it all, having been part of six Silicon Valley startups and consulted for hundreds of private clients. He now lives in Portugal, which I documented in that post. Money Stories is a fast read, but filled with lots of his wisdom. While the book is less than 90 pages, it is chock full of useful and actionable information. For example, “It’s much more productive to have a strategic portfolio-level argument about R&D resources and focus, rather than dragging executives through a 900-row spreadsheet.” And, “It is more important to agree on one simple calculation than throw punches,” presumably at the non-makers in the room.

One metric worth repeating is that “products need to earn six times their direct maker-team costs to fund the rest of the company.” That is the ultimate money story. “Either a product is earning its keep, or it is subject to summary execution.” Plain and simple. This is because the maker group has a heavy lift, and needs to support a constellation of services and specialities such as sales, marketing, finance, HR and so forth.

Much of his full-time experience has been with tech companies in the B2B space, where he is familiar with lengthy sales cycles, multiple people involved in purchase decisions, inability to quickly adapt pricing to market changes, or other sins. You would think this would harden a weaker person, but Mironov goes about his day with plenty of ironic humor (such as this post he wrote more than 20 years ago) and a can-do attitude that shows how he has survived and thrived in the product space.

Throughout the book are very handy “generic money story” diagrams that use simple math to calculate from three factors whether a new feature or product is going to worth the effort. It is important that this calculation is expressed as a range, to emphasize that we can’t accurately forecast the future (absent a working time machine, he hastens to add). “Money stories are communication tools, so should help drive a lot of conversations and raise interesting issues.” His last chapter reviews how to put these stories into practice, and some words on how AI fits into his worldview.