About
Hi. I’m Coleman McCormick, a product founder, builder, and writer living on the Florida suncoast with my wife and two kids. I’ve spent my career in technology, starting out as a geographer, and evolving into product management, founding companies, and writing on the internet. I recently finished 15 years launching and building Fulcrum, a low-code platform for field services. Now I run Liminal Lab, a product strategy studio that helps companies launch and grow products.
colemanm.org is my personal blog which I first started back in 2010. I post about anything that interests me, including product development, tech, economics, philosophy, writing, books, and plenty more. I’m an avid runner and sports fan, so sometimes there’s a sprinkling of athletics.
From October 2018-2020 I wrote a post every day here, but put that on hiatus to do more longform writing in my newsletter Res Extensa.
I’m a supporter of RSS and the open web, so the best way to follow what I’m writing about is to subscribe to the feed. If you want to get in touch, I’m easily accessible on Twitter or email @ coleman at mcco dot me. You’ll also find me in a few other places on the internet like GitHub, LinkedIn, and a few talks on YouTube.
“Best Of” Department
Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite posts from over the years, in no particular order.
- Entering Product Development — Historical background on a precursor to what became Fulcrum.
- Modes of Control — Discussing Andy Grove’s concepts of motivations vs. complexity in teams.
- Jekyll Collections to Build a Library — Technical post on how I created a reading library.
- Flexible Education — Thinking about how to make formal education more flexible for kids.
- 2019 — The first annual tradition of posting publicly my goals to track for the year. An ongoing experiment in “garage door up” habit-forming.
- An In-Depth History of Maps — A review of Lloyd Brown’s rich history of cartography and map-making.
- Right-sizing and Scoping — Thoughts on the product manager’s favorite topic, scoping work.
- On Retention — Retention and expansion are the two key forces in SaaS. You have to solve retention before you invest big in acquisition to scale.
- A Product Origin Story — Background history in how we got started on Fulcrum.
- The Power of SaaS Models — Some thoughts on B2B SaaS after almost ten years building a SaaS product.
- Addresses and Geocoding — Comparing coordinate and addressing systems for mapping.
- William Noel McCormick, Jr. — A memorial to my grandfather.
- An Open Database of Addresses — An overview of the OpenAddresses project.
- Annals of the Former World — A review of John McPhee’s excellent book on geology.
Series
I have a few recurring series posts that I return to on occasion.
- Weekend Reading — A weekly digest posted on Saturdays with 3 links of recent interest. Sometimes news, sometimes apps, anything I found interesting in #InternetExploration.
- Best Songs — A while ago my dad and I were talking about collecting playlists of our all-time favorite songs. The main criteria is “songs personally meaningful to you.” There are many in my personal archive, so I post one every now and then.
- Places — where I snapshot and write short posts about interesting places on the globe.