So this is What I Can’t Unsee.

Every week, I’ll share a few things that made me stop and think. Not necessarily the biggest or newest things. Just the ones I think are worth putting in your head.

THE UNSEE

When everyone can build, building stops being the advantage.

Our engineers are shipping faster than they were a year ago. But the mistakes haven’t gotten smaller. They’ve gotten faster too.

I used to see that as a rollout problem. I don’t anymore. Effort used to be a natural filter. A bad idea took long enough to build that you had time to realise it was bad.

Take that friction away, and the filter moves upstream: someone has to decide what’s worth building before anyone builds it. AI isn’t just making builders more productive. It’s making building less scarce.

And when something becomes abundant, the bottleneck moves. Maybe the hardest part of building was never building. It was choosing what to build.

THE FIVE

1. The Boring Work Wasn’t Useless

• What: AI is increasingly capable of doing the repetitive work junior employees traditionally did.

• Why I noticed it: great for efficiency, but some of that “low-value” work was also how people learned how companies actually function.

• What I think: we may be automating the apprenticeship before figuring out how anyone learns the job without it - a problem most companies haven’t noticed they now have.
  

2. Permission Is Becoming Delegation

• What: AI assistants are moving from accessing information to taking actions on your behalf.

• Why I noticed it: most products treat this as a permissions problem - what can it see, what can it touch.

• What I think: the real question is smaller and harder - what decisions are you comfortable letting something else make? The products that win here won’t have the most permissions. They’ll be the ones that make you feel exactly how much you just handed over.

3. The Internet Has a New User

• What: AI agents are moving from answering questions to browsing, operating software and eventually making transactions on someone’s behalf.

• Why I noticed it: we’ve spent thirty years designing software for a human clicking buttons.

• What I think: most products haven’t caught up - they’re bolting an agent onto an interface built for a person. The redesign matters more than the chatbot.

4. Memes Are Becoming a Language

• What: internet-native formats are increasingly carrying political and cultural arguments.

• Why I noticed it: easy to dismiss as noise - every generation turns the medium it understands best into a language of influence.

• What I think: for a lot of younger audiences, the meme isn’t decoration on the argument. It is the argument. Miss that, and you’ll miss where real persuasion is actually happening.

5. The Latecomer Can Still Win

• What: Flipkart Minutes entered quick commerce two years after Instamart, Zepto and Blinkit had already built the category - and is now doing roughly 1.1–1.2M orders a day, closing in on Instamart’s ~1.4M, though Blinkit and Zepto are still well ahead.

• Why I noticed it: the interesting part isn’t the growth number. It’s what a well-resourced incumbent can do once someone else has already paid to educate the market and train the customer habit.

• What I think: arriving late isn’t automatically a disadvantage if you show up with distribution, capital and an existing customer base already in place. Sometimes the advantage isn’t being first - it’s entering after the category has explained itself to everyone else.

THE FIND

Airbound - an Indian company building autonomous cargo drones for logistics.

The interesting part isn’t the drone. It’s the attempt to make delivery economics work in places traditional logistics never could. Worth watching.

STILL ON MY MIND

If execution becomes dramatically cheaper, what becomes the real bottleneck?

My first instinct is judgment. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s attention. Maybe distribution. Maybe trust.

I’m curious which one becomes scarce first.

The past week has been filled with drama, especially with the notable events surrounding OpenAI's hirings and firings. We trust this edition finds you well and engaged amidst the dynamic developments in the product world. In this week's newsletter, we present a blend of insightful content and captivating news that has been making waves in the industry.

Each week, I curate the most noteworthy product and growth reads from over 100+ articles to help you enhance skills with minimal effort. Subscribe!

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Learning vs. Impact

You typically have the greatest impact on your career when you are in a phase of reduced learning, and conversely, you tend to acquire the most knowledge when you are less effective.

Key Takeaways:

• Similar to relationships, discovering novelty in your job prevents stagnation, enabling growth within your current role.

• Allocating just 10% of your time to activities that energize you can sustain excitement and engagement over a more extended period.

• The accumulation of small victories can pave the way for more significant opportunities and heightened impact over time.

How to write a product status report (with template and examples)

Product Status Reports (PSRs) keep stakeholders informed about project progress and facilitate data-driven decisions. Without a product status report, team members may not be adequately informed to support project activities.

Key Takeaways:

• Benefits of PSRs: Facilitate collaboration, identify issues and risks, reduce manual workload, track action items.

• Components of a PSR: Overview, progress update, risks and issues, action items, and next steps are essential components.

• Actionability is also crucial. Keep reports focused on activities, both in progress and upcoming.

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Planning With Outcome Roadmaps

Yearly planning often involves debates about the effectiveness of roadmaps. Traditional roadmaps showing releases on a timeline can lead to high planning overhead and waste.

Key Takeaways:

• An outcomes roadmap that illustrates the actual work required to achieve the goals, on a timeline, can effectively communicate aspects that most roadmaps omit.

• Elements of an Outcome Roadmap: Goals, Research (optional), Product Discovery, Product Delivery, Effect Delay.

• Effect Delay: Factor in delays between product launches and desired outcomes; continue tracking results post-launch.

Too many iterations are a huge problem

With rising market competition and evolving consumer demands, iterating has become a go-to strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• The concept of “The Sunk Cost of Iterations” is deeply rooted in today’s product development sphere, where iterative processes are not just encouraged but often deemed essential.

• Meticulously refining a product can lead to psychological sunk costs, as seen in cases like Google Glass

• The allure of eventual success can lead to justifying excessive iterations, as seen with the Concorde jet.

How to Use the Product Discovery Loop to Find Product-Market Fit

Product-market fit isn’t a 'big bang' event. It’s a series of events that happen as you grow the number of market segments, the number of problems addressed, and the value of outcomes reached as your product develops over time.

Key Takeaways:

• You want to find a hair-on-fire problem that people are willing to change their behavior to solve.

• The Product Discovery Loop is a tool used to break down the components of product-market fit, including market segment, customer pains, desired outcomes, and solutions.

• Each successful pass through the Product Discovery Loop increases customer love for your product, growing the addressable market by covering additional customers, pains, or use cases

Interesting around the web:

• Five Days of Chaos at OpenAI: and What Started It

• Google will make fake AI products to help you find real gifts

• Apple Could Use Generative AI to Visualize Your Feelings

• Tinder introduces dating beyond photos with a new suite of features

• Microsoft Teams gets an AI-powered home decorator, voice isolation at Ignite 2023

• Discord is shutting down its AI chatbot Clyde

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Product of the week: rewind.ai

Secret Sauce to Supercharged Productivity! Unleash an AI that remembers it all—every detail, every conversation. Stay ahead effortlessly!

After a brief hiatus filled with significant life events like changing jobs, settling into a new house, and trying out product consulting. I'm thrilled to announce my return to writing. I've missed this, and I'm excited to get back into the swing of things. Starting now, you can expect a fresh edition of this newsletter every week. Stay tuned for more exciting content!

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3 excuses enterprise sales-led companies make when their self-serve motion fails...

When companies that are knee-deep in an enterprise sales-led model start to chase these self-serve aspirations, they trip and tumble 100% of the time. And then… the blame game starts.

Key Takeaways:

• Three common excuses: Self-serve cannibalises sales revenue, Self-serve deals are not worth the time, and Product teams should focus on customers, not revenue.

• Overcome challenges by investing in data analytics, defining growth metrics, understanding the customer journey, and prioritising monetization awareness

• Start with interactive self-serve demos, Escalate with trials, Arrive at freemium

What the Heck Are Value Metrics? Here's How to Find Yours

A value metric is a way to measure the value exchange in your product, and it is crucial for pricing, product metrics, and team building. A good value metric should be easy for the customer to understand, aligned with the value they receive, and should grow with the customer's usage of that value.

Key Takeaway:

• Value metrics are useful in answering two key questions: What does our ideal customer want in a product or service like ours? How much is the ideal customer willing and able to pay?

• Subjective analysis and a data-driven approach can help you define your value metric. Test different hypotheses and make sure your chosen metric meets the three key characteristics of a good value metric.

• To validate your value metric, use methods like the value metric scratchpad and relative preference analysis to ensure it aligns with customer preferences and expectations.

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Assumption Testing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started

Assumptions can fall into different categories, including desirability (customer interest and willingness), feasibility (technical and logistical aspects), usability (ease of use for customers), viability (business benefits), and ethical considerations.

Key Takeaway:

• The advantage of running assumption tests instead of whole idea tests is that when an assumption test fails, we now know exactly what needs to change.

• It's crucial to start small and gradually incorporate testing into the development process. Starting with the smallest, simplest test is a practical way to begin.

• We only need to test the riskiest assumptions that could torpedo our ideas or cause harm to our customers or company.

Polling: A Comprehensive Guide for Product Managers

Polling is a communication mechanism where a client system periodically checks with a server system for new data or updates. The client initiates the process by sending a request to the server at regular intervals, and the server responds with the requested data or an indication of no new data. Practical examples include e-commerce inventory updates, social media feed refresh, and monitoring system health.

Key Takeaway:

• Polling offers advantages such as simplicity, control over request timing, and compatibility with standard HTTP requests.

• It has disadvantages like overhead due to continuous requests, potential latency between data availability and retrieval, and scalability issues with a growing number of clients.

• Alternatives to polling, such as webhooks, long polling, WebSockets, and Server-Sent Events (SSE), offer different communication mechanisms based on specific use cases.

Are OKRs improving or inhibiting decision-making?

OKRs should be applied with care, considering potential side effects on focus, risk-taking, and motivation. The effectiveness of OKRs in decision-making depends on the context, with different challenges arising in uncertain and exploratory environments.

• OKRs are not a one-size-fits-all solution, and their impact on decision-making can vary based on the problem space.

• In inherently exploratory contexts, emphasizing learning and curiosity over specific goals may be more suitable.

• In some cases, high-level goals should be approached indirectly through the means, focusing on problem-solving rather than the validation of specific outcomes.

Product of the week: GenVid

Create stunning product launch AI videos that look like they were created by a studio.

Interesting around the web:

• ChatGPT Plus members can upload and analyze files in the lates

As the world obsesses over AI, businesses are either creating something with it or using it. I'm curious about the interesting future that can emerge in the next two years, with some big companies failing and new ones emerging.

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How to effectively deal with and leverage ambiguity as product managers

Product managers often have to deal with ambiguity, whether it's unclear customer requirements, conflicting priorities, or day-to-day challenges. As a result, they must overcome obscure or cryptic challenges.

Key Takeaways:

• It's important to be comfortable with ambiguity and making decisions based on incomplete information.

• Communication is key to managing ambiguity in product management.

• Frameworks and methodologies can help product managers navigate ambiguity and make informed decisions.

How sales-led B2B SaaS can become more product led without freemium or a free trial

As customer acquisition costs (CAC) skyrocketing, It is becoming increasingly difficult to capture the attention of your prospects every day.

Key takeaways:

• The outcome you are striving for is to connect the best fit prospects, who realize they need you and the value of your main product, to sales. Thus, getting as close as possible to PQL (product-qualified lead).

• Product-led growth is not just about acquisition, but also about retention and expansion.

• The product must be able to stand on its own and deliver value to customers without a sales team.

Building a Culture of Accountability for Empowered Product Teams

Empowering product teams is critical to building a culture of accountability. This means giving teams the autonomy to make decisions and the resources they need to deliver value.

Key Takeaways:

• Product leaders need to set clear goals and communicate them effectively, while also providing feedback and support to help teams achieve those goals.

• Creating a culture of accountability requires transparency, where teams can openly discuss challenges and work collaboratively to find solutions.

• Product leaders must continuously evaluate and adjust their processes and strategies to ensure that they are supporting a culture of accountability and enabling their teams to achieve their goals.

What Taylor Swift Can Teach Us About Business

Taylor Swift is a fascinating business case study. She’s one of the savviest businesswomen of her generation, and she’s unique in how deftly she’s leveraged the internet from the very beginning.

Key Takeaways:

• Authenticity is key to building trust with fans and creating a lasting connection.

• The most successful artists are those who are willing to adapt to changes in the industry and embrace new technologies.

• Continuous improvement and evolution is essential for maintaining a dedicated fanbase.

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What You Do Is Who You Are: The Four Types of Product Managers

There are four types of product managers: Visionary, Analyst, Hustler, and Guardian, each having different skills and strengths.

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding your strengths and weaknesses as a product manager can help you identify which type you are and how you can improve your skills.

• Visionary product managers focus on creating new products, while Analyst product managers rely on data-driven decision-making. Hustler product managers prioritize execution, and Guardian product managers focus on risk management.

• All types of product managers need to communicate effectively, collaborate with others, and balance short-term and long-term goals.

Product of the week: walkme

Great user experiences result in great business outcomes

Interesting around the web:

• Google opens massive PaLM model for developers, brings AI to Workspace

• OpenAI releases GPT-4, a multimodal AI that it claims is state-of-the-art

As I delved into the realm of product careers this week, I realized that while there is an abundance of data on how to break into product management, there is insufficient material available to help product managers advance up the hierarchy. Here is a piece on advancing from a product manager to a product leader.

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The Pitfalls of Continuous Discovery Research (and How to Avoid Them)

Continuous discovery is a powerful component of a comprehensive research operation that provides real-time value. However, if not conducted properly, it can have pitfalls.

Key Takeaways:

• To ensure accurate results and informed decision-making, it is crucial to implement a rigorous analysis methodology in continuous discovery research. 

• Analyzing data in the context of product updates is essential to gaining a comprehensive understanding of user feedback and behavior.

• Establishing a clear timeline and expectations through continuous research sprints ensures that the team remains aligned and focused.

Product-Led Growth: The Key to Dominating in a Crowded SaaS Market

In a red ocean market, there’s a clear need for a solution, and so you don’t need to spend time and money educating the market about the solution. The competition is brutal, but choosing the right market to serve can make all the difference.

Key Takeaways:

• Make it easy for users to bring their data from other apps with 1-click migrations, invest in the product: make it easy to discover, simple to use, deliver quick value, and offer contextual help.

• Get to know your users better with a simple onboarding quiz based on user data (team size, integrations, etc.) and identify the most relevant path for them.

• Funnels are linear and focus on moving users from one step to the next. Instead, think about creating loops that encourage compounding growth and repeatable user habits.

The power of defaults

Network effects are extremely hyped and have become a bit of a meme in recent years among tech entrepreneurs, investors and policy makers.

Key Takeaways:

• Network effects can be broadly divided into three different categories: direct, indirect and data network effects

• Multi-homing costs explain how easy or likely it is to use multiple competing networks simultaneously.

• Software doesn’t have marginal costs. The fact that you can copy and paste software at virtually zero cost has led us to a world of abundance where many things are free and infinitely available.

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How Duolingo reignited user growth

Duolingo is a growth story with 4.5x growth for a mature product, driven by a handful of product changes, rooted in an innovative growth model, and explained in such actionable detail.

Key Takeaways:

• Borrowing successful features from other products, but the wrong way. Once can fail to account for how a change in context can affect the success of a feature.

• To improve your product, it’s important to conduct user research and experiment with incremental changes, understanding how each change impacts user behavior and outcomes.

• Duolingo’s success shows the potential of edtech platforms to disrupt traditional educational models and make learning more accessible and engaging for a wider audience.

Make it easier is not a product strategy

Without understanding specifically how a product is hard to use, teams will always fail to provide real value to the customer.

Key Takeaways:

• “Would this make it easier” is especially unreliable because it commits the two cardinal sins of user research: asking participants to imagine a hypothetical future behavior  and asking them to choose between improving a product they use and…nothing.

• Borrowing successful features from other products is a good idea, but only if you can execute them in a way that fits the context of your own product.

• It’s important to test new features in a controlled and iterative way, so you can understand the impact they’re having on user behavior and outcomes.

Product of the week: june

A new way to do product analytics. June is the only product analytics tool that gives you auto-generated reports focused on companies.

Interesting around the web:

• Uber’s redesigned app puts all its services in one place

• Reddit Comments Now Have a Search Function

• Amazon just added 3 of the Kindle Scribe’s biggest missing features

• Introducing DJ | Spotify

This week, I came across an interesting concept called the “Apple Pie Position” from Shreyas. It’s a simple yet smart idea that highlights how we sometimes align ourselves with something foolish just because it’s widely accepted or for other reasons. Check it out!

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LTV:CAC is a misleading metric to measure performance — here’s what to track instead

LTV:CAC is calculated using three variables (Average Rev Per Customer, Churn, and CAC) based on a point in time, which doesn’t factor in customer behavior that changes over time and which variable drives that change.

Key Takeaways:

• At the early-stage, almost nothing is fixed and so quantifying “lifetime value of a customer” at a single point in time just makes little sense and can overestimate or underestimate what happens at scale.

• By simplifying these three variables into a single number, you lose visibility into which variable drives changes over time and, therefore, how to pinpoint which specific actions to take.

• Use Cohort Customer Acquisition Cost Payback (CCAC Payback) and Customer Value Analysis (CVA) to measure customer acquisition and revenue contribution.

Which Retail Websites Have the Most Dark Patterns?

Dark pattern — a tactic used by retailers to trick online shoppers into completing an action that benefits the brand more than the customer.

Key Takeaways:

• The best way to defend yourself against dark patterns is by getting to know them

• A subscription that’s easy to get into but difficult to get out of is an example of a dark pattern known as a roach motel.

• Bad user experiences, including problems with unsubscribing, can drive away customers and negatively impact a brand’s reputation.

Product Team / Enabling Team Collaboration

As a general observation, product teams and enabling teams both have trouble accepting that their discipline can’t solve every problem.

Key Takeaways:

• Prioritise long-term gains over superficial metrics and invest in training, education, and onboarding for engineers and designers.

• Balance meticulous process and documentation with a focus on the end-to-end experience.

• Collaborate closely with enabling teams from the outset of new project

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Your guide to product-led sales

The data is increasingly clear: it’s not PLG versus sales, it’s PLG AND sales.

Key Takeaways:

• Product-led sales involve users finding value in the product first, followed by sales reaching out to the right accounts.

• Data analysis is critical in a product-led sales approach to identify growth opportunities and optimize the user experience.

• The product and sales approach should be constantly evolving in a product-led sales strategy, with ongoing experimentation and iteration.

The first 90 day plan for new product leaders

Product managers ask ‘why’ within a limited scope, while product leaders consider it broadly for the company’s long-term success.

Key Takeaways:

• Build trust in the first 30 days by asking great questions, conducting formal/informal 1-1s, defining your management style, and gaining sound knowledge.

• Drive output in the next 30 days by road mapping, prioritising, planning, and delivering.

• Demonstrate leadership in the last 30 days by embodying a growth mindset, promoting inclusivity, and cultivating awareness.

Product of the week: magician

Every little thing it does is magic. A magical design tool for Figma powered by AI.

Interesting around the web:

• What you need to know about Temu

• Chrome 110 will automatically discard background tabs. Here’s how to stop it.

• Meta introduces subscription service, Meta Verified, for Facebook and Instagram

With PLG taking the centre ground quickly, Appcues has launched a new report for benchmarks, derived from the survey they took 7 major growth metrics. Interesting to have a look.

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Growth inflections

Everyone talks about how growth looks like, how to see if demand is greater than supply. Lenny goes a little back step to understand what precedes an inflection in growth.

Key Takeaways:

• One additional feature can indeed lead to a massive inflection in growth (though it usually won’t)

• While you’re working on improving the product, it’s worth attempting to engineer an “event” that gets your product in front of many people, even before you think your product is ready

• Long-term, the most lasting growth inflections happen when you lean into the primary growth engine

How we made the turnaround in Product Management

Everything we do and claim and everything we decide is primarily hypotheses that we either have to falsify or verify.

Key Takeaways:

• When testing your assumptions, ask Users, not about the solution, ask them about their problems and needs.

• When we test our hypotheses, we must aim for a goal. This goal should be defined in a product strategy in which we differentiate ourselves from our competitors.

• We differentiate between qualitative and quantitative tests on the one hand, and between marketing tests (or MVP tests) and product tests (or MVP prototype tests) on the other.

Minecraft, Dropbox, and Amazon Prime Use the Same Strategy to Keep You Hooked

To hold on to customers, businesses and to keep the competition away from their customers, most businesses build moats by erecting barriers to entry against competitors

Key Takeaways:

• Exit cost is the real or perceived or emotional cost faced by a user while leaving a product or switching over to another product.

• In games where users invest their time, energy, and creativity (and money) and use the game as a form of self-expression

• Getting the user to commit to a recurring payment is a massive barrier. But once the user subscribes to a recurring fee, cancelling a subscription is rare.

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Defensibility & Competition

Most SaaS software starts off default non-defensible and tends to build a moat over time.

Key Takeaways:

• Many SaaS or enterprise companies eventually develop sales driven moats. Moats may include: Multi year contracts, Sales process.

• As a proto-founder, it is worth thinking through how aggressive the incumbents are for your potential product area, how clear they are on the opportunity you are going after, and how likely they are to act.

• There are roughly three forms of focus for a company. Navel-Gazing-Centric vs Competition-Centric vs User-Centric

What Could You Do to Untrap Your Team?

The reality for product teams is complicated. And most teams are trapped in different mindsets.

Key Takeaways:

• You need to learn how to walk people out of output thinking and move them toward outcome orientation.

• Great product teams continuously create opportunities to uncover unknowns instead of falling victim to their opinions.

• When your focus is on goals, results can surprise you positively. But when your attention goes to meeting deadlines, mediocrity is the result.

Product of the week: Paywallscreens

Inspiration from 7,000+ startup paywall screens on both what to paywall and how to “message” it

Interesting on the web:

• Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weird

• ByteDance’s Slack-like tool generated $100M in 2022

• Salesforce yields to activist pressure with harsh new policies for engineers, salespeople

Last week was interesting. As I was involved in so many things, I almost lost track of time. However, on the product side, I have been getting so many reads on Product led growth with so many examples. Looks like it’s going to change how industry works on a larger scale.

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If growth is not marketing, then what is growth marketing?

Growth marketing is simply a method applied to startup growth KPIs via marketing channels.

Key Takeaways:

• It’s really about finding the right match for different teams. But you’re finding that mix with the purpose of bringing your CAC as close to zero as possible.

• Acquiring the right users is critical, as acquiring sign ups is not enough. The focus should be on acquiring users who will stay, use the product, and have the potential to expand.

• Growth marketing is a crucial aspect of PLG-led companies, where the focus is on bringing more users to experience the product’s value.

What every PM should be scared of not knowing about engineering

Many PMs and marketers have found themselves stuck in tech meetings, not able to get what the hell is being said between those jargons.

Key Takeaways:

• Product managers and engineers must sometimes agree to make tradeoffs with limitations. It will require additional work, tech debt or refactoring.

• “Unit testing is the testing of code to ensure that it performs the task that it performs. It tests code at the very lowest level possible — the individual methods of your classes.”

• Components are individual pieces of functionality. Checkboxes, sliders, dropdowns, date input fields are all examples of components.

How Canva Grows

There are 4 main forces behind Canva’s growth: Product-led growth (PLG), Later adding on a sales-led motion to move upstream (SLG), Using content and winning SEO via backlinks, and Localizing and partnering to expand geographically

Key Takeaways:

• Identify the problem, break it down into more tangible goals. Listen to and work closely with the community to build a product they wanted, felt empowered by, and loved using to reach their goals.

• The key to crossing the chasm is positioning and securing a “beachhead” in a mainstream market.

• You want to get a sustainable engine of growth working before leaning into paid advertising. Not only because it’s “free” growth that compounds on itself, but because it’s a signal that you have PMF.

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9 best-in-class examples of product personalization

What exactly does exceptional in-app personalization look like? Let’s look at how apps inspire long-term retention and revenue through personalized in-app experiences.

Key Takeaways:

• Because through A/B testing, Pinterest discovered that identifying local interests and combining it with a user’s location data (specifically, country) made for much more relevant

• Netflix uses a percentage score to give users a sense of how likely a program is to match interests. The match score is determined by an individual’s viewing history and thumbs up/thumbs down ratings.

• Mastering app personalization takes time. Lay the foundation through capturing the right insights and experiment with A/B testing to understand what’s working and what’s not.

Inside Retool’s new free plan

Introducing a free plan comes at considerable time, expense, and risk. There are many potential failure modes that could cause it to backfire.

Key Takeaways:

• design smart experiment to test different paywalls and features

• Give users enough time to experience the value

• track # of active customers as a leading success metric

Product of the week: AppSumo

Never pay full price for software again

Interesting on the web:

• India to block over 230 betting and loan apps, many with China ties

• Tinder’s incognito mode hides your profile from people you don’t like

• Bard is Google’s ChatGPT rival, powered by LaMDA

• YouTube releases ‘Go Live Together’ for creators to co-stream on phone

One of the most interesting things I came across this week is Lenny’s podcast with Ravi Mehta. This 1 hour of discussion is so powerfully packed with insights that I would recommend everyone to watch it at least once.

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The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok, Or how, exactly, platforms die.

First, they are good for their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then they die.

Key Takeaways:

• This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit.

• Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves.

• Now that TikTok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to YouTube and Insta.

How Netflix, Airbnb design for psychology-led growth?

Some companies have worked deeply to understand the users and pain points. Analysing what goes into developing a design for growth is always interesting.

Key Takeaways:

• Airbnb uses the reciprocity principle by educating hosts on how to treat their guests well, and guests to follow the house rules.

• “Idleness Aversion” states that people are happier when they are busier, even if they’re forced to be busy.

• Designing for visceral reactions is essentially designing to create a positive aesthetic impression. It takes just knowing what looks pleasing to people and what doesn’t.

Product Enablement Principles

John Cutler shares his list of principles for operations, enablement, and helping others. Principles, because any process will eventually break (especially if you are successful). Any tactic will change.

Key Takeaways:

• Whenever possible, co-design change experiments with others. They may have better ideas and will be more vested in their ideas.

• Remember the trust formula. Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Empathy)/Apparent self-interest.

• Working small without thinking big sends you on a wild goose chase. Thinking big without working small gets you nowhere, and you chase big plans forever. Find the right balance—a bias for action and systems thinking.

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Your guide to product-led onboarding

Most SaaS pre-and post-sales onboarding occurs via human interaction. But this kind of onboarding adds friction and can be expensive to scale.

Key Takeaways:

• The most important thing from an onboarding perspective is to ensure your marketing messaging aligns with what users will experience on your website

• A great PLG website has the following four components: Clearly explains the problem being solved, shows the product, transparent pricing, free trial/freemium as primary call-to-action (CTA).

• The goal of PLG and product-led onboarding is not to have zero support tickets

WTF is Strategy?

There are a lot of strategy definitions. One is, strategy is your plan to win. The two keywords here are “plan” and “win.”

Key Takeaways:

• One of the most important aspects of strategy: explicitly laying out what you won’t do

• Strategy is not: detailed list of tactics, not rigid; not a hiring plan, not your OKRs; not an exact timeline, not vision, not complicated

• A good articulation of the strategy in my mind is Memorable, Specific, Measurable.

Product of the week: Ignition

The go-to-market platform. Launch without Chaos.

Interesting on the web:

• Netflix lists rules and exemptions to prevent account sharing outside household

• Meta is killing Move, another experimental social app from its in-house incubator NPE Team

• Spotify founder Daniel Ek officially launches new startup — and this time, he’s taking on healthcare

As I work in F&B, this week was great to have a lot of insightful discussions. I learned a lot about how data points are important in an industry to increase the adoption of tech. Also, I have been reading into GTMs for SaaS and how PLG and SLG both work together to bring efficiency.

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How OpenAI Grows

OpenAI as a whole has run a bunch of experiments, launched GPT-3, and has three core products out there; Codex, DALL-E, and ChatGPT. Also, ChatGPT, at an unprecedented rate, in just 5 days reaches 1 million users.

Key Takeaways:

• AI is categorised by what it’s capable of - Reactive Machines, Limited Memory, Narrow AI, Artificial General Intelligence, Theory of Mind, Self-Aware, Strong AI, Super AI.

• The AI industry is structured in three layers: L1 is core platforms and infrastructure for AI, L2 is specialised AI models, L3 is the application layer.

• Like Epic Games’ strategy of growing their business by focusing on game creators and growing the entire gaming ecosystem — this is what OpenAI is doing. They are opening up AI to entrepreneurs and builders.

Customer Love: A Deep Dive.

To create an emotional connection, businesses must go beyond showing care and passion for their products and customers. To understand customer love, there must be consistency. Like a romantic relationship, love is not a one-off event.

Key Takeaways:

• Four characteristics are bound to appear in most definitions of love: feelings or sentiments, loyalty, satisfaction, and delight.

• Spotify’s success can be attributed to its focus on delight and personalisation, which has helped it build a product that customers love and capture the hearts and pockets.

• While B2B products may not be as flashy or exciting as B2C products, they can still be designed with user-centred and delightful elements to build a strong and profitable business.

Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy

Products are built to fit channels, not the other way around. The reason for this is that you do not define the rules of the channel. The channel defines the rule of the channel.

Key Takeaways:

• “Distribution follows the power law.” At a moment in time, a company that has product channel fit will get 70%+ of their growth from one channel.

• Don’t have team members focused on user acquisition and team members focused on product in silos from each other.

• Product Channel Fit is always evolving and can break as a new channel emerges or an old channel gets killed off. 

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The most important soft skills for product managers

Product managers are always building products, managing products, and leading the teams and organisations who make them. And all of this requires a lot of skills. While managers have hard skill, soft skill is still work in progress for many.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn the difference between Urgent and Important. Learn to identify which activities have a high leverage (high impact to effort ratio).

• Focus on information, on actionable intelligence, rather than noisy raw data or prescriptive catalogues, and ensure this gets disseminated.

• If you demonstrate both passion and compromise, and just get shit done, then people can trust you.

The Top 1-5% PM Growth Equation

The right mindset is to optimize for: (Scope x Complexity)^(Influence). Assuming you would perform as per the owned goals, and culturally you’re a company fit.

Key Takeaways:

• Take on challenging projects: Once high-impact areas of work have been identified, product managers should aim to take on projects that are challenging and complex.

• To increase the visibility of their work, product managers should communicate effectively with stakeholders.

• Product managers should also look for opportunities to drive metrics for other teams within the organization.

Product of the week: Glean

Know what your company knows, instantly.

Interesting on the web:

• Giving People Control Over Their Time and What They See on Instagram

• Development on Augmented Reality ‘Apple Glasses’ Postponed Indefinitely

• HubSpot co-founder Shah backs Peerlist for a new take on professional networking

• OpenAI: Transforming the World Through Artificial Intelligence

Apologies for being absent for 7 odd weeks. Well, I got enrolled in GrowthX and Man!! It has been an engrossing journey. Good news is I am back, and also, I led the winning team for GrowthX demo day

On News side, we all know the economy is bad and a lot of layoffs are on. If you or anyone nearby is impacted, please reach out. I will try to do my best to help in resume building, prep. and forward details to HRs and founders in industry.

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User onboarding: best practices

Often, onboarding is confused with the series of beautifully designed intro screens. Whereas, a great user onboarding experience shortens the time to value, and gets users to their first “Aha” or “Wow” moment.

Key Takeaways:

• Onboarding needs depend on the product: No onboarding, Quick onboarding or complex product training.

• Avoid lengthy upfront or application tours, provide brief in-context, actionable tips or nudges that users can disable with a good reason for each question or data point required.

• Incremental onboarding is a great way to increase the success rates for the long onboarding process by breaking it up into several stages.

Gamification gone wrong: stop the streaks

This was in the days before you could pay to repair a streak, and since then, there are streaks everywhere, and it’s starting to feel a little too cheap as a way of getting users to engage.

Key Takeaways:

• What are the essential ingredients for a streak? Behavior to count, tying count to JTBD, and reward.

• There are many reasons that streaks are effective: The Goal Gradient Effect, Positive Reinforcement, Sunk-Cost Fallacy, building social status, habit formation,

• The perceived value of losing the streak increases as time goes on, increasing the likelihood that you’ll do whatever is necessary to maintain your streak.

Navigating the Discovery Phase

Discovery typically refers to the initial period of a product/feature when teams focus most on defining user needs and desired outcomes for a project.

Key Takeaways:

• Connecting with your cross-functional product team is often the fastest way to gain context for a new product/feature and understand user needs.

• During every product discovery, there comes a point where you learn from competitor products. What solutions are out there that currently solve your problem? What features are working for these solutions? Where do they fall short?

• Workshops are one of the fastest ways to bring a group of stakeholders together, identify open questions and answer them.

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Four growth lessons I’ve learned from the best product managers

Most of us become PMs as we love to solve hard problems lying at the intersection of multiple subject areas. And one thing that distinguished the best from the rest was knowing how to learn quickly.

Key Takeaways:

• Surround yourself with people you trust. People who have done it before can see problems brewing before you can.

• It’s impossible to learn or come up with good ideas without space. You need two types of space: space to wander, space to think.

• Keep a decision journal. It is a way to dig deeper into your instincts, dissect them, and learn how you decide.

Alternative Product Business Models

The world, as always, is changing–and keeping on top of trends that matter to product teams is an essential part of building winning products.

Key Takeaways:

• Micro subscription and Maxi subscriptions: When the budget is a problem, think micro subscriptions like $1.99 for iCloud storage. If you flip the equation on its head, you may discover opportunities for maxi subscriptions, too.

• API product management is still in its relative infancy, however, companies like Zapier, Lattice use API as a source of primary or secondary revenue.

• With a little creativity, you could craft an alternative business model. For example, Deel chargers customers upon completion of contracts.

Product of the week: Linear

Meet the new standard for modern software development. Streamline issues, sprints, and product roadmaps.

Interesting on the web:

• OpenAI begins piloting ChatGPT Professional, a premium version of its viral chatbot

• Google reportedly working on AirTag-like location trackers

• Hinge is testing a subscription for ‘highly motivated daters’ that costs up to $720 a year

In personal space, I have joined GrowthX today with an intention of expanding my horizon on knowledge and developing some interesting proof of work. Do check it out if growth interests you as a topic. It is going to be immersive for the next 2 months, but I will get the newsletter out without fail.

On the news side, my feed was covered with all the drama happening around twitter, with Elon being the new boss, and bankruptcy at FTX has caused a significant loss for crypto players.

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Why Everything Looks the Same

If you have stayed back and looked around, you will notice so many things look the same today from cars to websites to doors.. everything is looking more similar day by day

Key Takeaways:

• Chasing the same valuable millennial demo, many direct-to-consumer brands followed a turnkey pattern

• Algorithms haven’t just reshaped the way we consume content. They’ve insidiously restrained us to want the same things and flattening taste

• With few measurable criteria upon which to judge a startup, VCs instead look for familiar patterns from the market or their own experiences as indicators of potential success.

Google & Apple—A Tale of Two Product Cultures

Google and Apple are two of the most successful and admired technology companies, yet their approach to product development differs in some fundamental aspects. Google’s is based heavily on data and Apple’s relies more on vision and intuition.

Key Takeaways:

• Google might be the tech company that has launched and killed the highest number of products. Part of Google’s approach is to launch quickly and kill quickly (presumably, based on usage data)

• Google can’t possibly “design” the search results for every search query, but it can design a machine learning algorithm that gets better with every user interaction

• Like Google, Apple also uses an iterative, evolutionary approach to product development. The evolution is internal, through a process of demo sessions with leadership, which provides both feedback and the vision for where the product should eventually end up.

Designing The Perfect Mobile Navigation UX

Designing navigations reflects how your content is divided on the website. Designing navigations for a complex product that does not confuse users is rare.

Key Takeaways:

• Rather than overloading the navigation bar with separators and separate actions, we can help users move forward confidently and comfortably and prevent mistakes altogether.

• Not every navigation item is equally important. Some items are more frequently used, and they might deserve a little more spotlight in your navigation.

• Nested accordions can work with enough contrast between each level. However, if you have more than three levels of navigation, it will become quite difficult.

When Do We Need Product Managers?

Role of a product manager changes based on organisation size and stage. Though basic product management is about problem solving, but org stage tells you which problem.

Key Takeaways:

• The key challenge for a product manager in an early stage startup is to achieve product/market fit before the cash runs out.

• The major obstacle for a product manager in an emerging company is to continuously and aggressively contribute to the growth of the company, while not losing the big picture of the company’s overall direction.

• The main challenge for a product manager in an enterprise company is to continue disruptive innovation while convincing stakeholders to trust them when doing new and big changes.

Keep an eye 👀 on Heap

Heap’s rise to a $960M valuation, 8k customers, and becoming the James Webb Space Telescope of digital insights

Key Takeaways:

• Heap gives you two weeks to fall in love–and they wine and dine you through it too.

• Heap has always prioritised their self-serve PLG strategy, and it’s worked well for customer success so far!

• Heap’s excellent content strategy has them ranking for over 12K top organic keywords and in the 1st position for over 300 branded and non-branded keywords.

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Product of the week: arcade

Create interactive product demos in minutes and turn all users into power users.

Interesting on the web:

• Cruel Changes at Twitter

• Crypto markets in turmoil over FTX bankruptcy

• WhatsApp today is officially launching Communities

• YouTube’s Primetime Channels bring streaming movies and TV into the YouTube app

I hope the week was interesting enough in between all the dramas around Twitter. The memes and long LinkedIn posts around Parag Agarwal must have kept you hooked. If you have missed, I have added a link in the end.

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Understanding User Pathways in Analytics

A Sankey diagram comprises nodes connected through links that show how people move from one node to the next. The width of the link shows the amount of traffic that moves between those nodes.

Key Takeaways:

• Is the dropoff rate from any of these landing pages higher than from others? That’s an indication that there may be issues with the content of that page.

• Hub pages are nodes with a lot of traffic coming into and out of them; they are typically routing pages that function like a form of navigation

• Another technique for investigating pathways is to begin your analysis by looking at the end of the flow. This approach can reveal how discoverable advanced features are and how persuasive conversion-supportive content is.

CAC & LTV are confusing! So I have simplified them to get you up to speed

CAC (customer acquisition cost) and LTV(Lifetime Value) are common terms today. But apart from the definitions, common knowledge extends only a little more.

Key Takeaways:

• Fast CAC payback means a start-up can recycle its cash quicker and raise less capital (and lower dilution)

• To become profitable, your LTV to CAC ratio should be higher than 3.

• Spending lots of money to acquire unprofitable customers is a recipe for disaster

Applying the 8 Golden Rules of User-Interface Design

A good interface is one that helps all users navigate through the app easily and helps them do what they came to do with minimal effort. Shneiderman’s eight golden rules cover similar important rules.

Key Takeaways:

• The best way to keep your user-interface designs consistent is to create a design system that collects all the graphic user-interface and design guidelines for a brand, ensuring their consistent use

• If the user must complete a specific task—especially one that consists of several steps—make sure that the user sees an appropriate message giving them a sense of satisfaction in completing the task.

• Actions that users can’t undo are very frustrating to them—sometimes to the point that they’ll simply stop using your application or site.

Bottleneck #03: Product v Engineering

Both groups may have conflicting goals and different definitions of success that have to be reconciled. Engineering might want to build a product that is perfectly scalable for the future with the best developer experience. Product might want to quickly validate their ideas, and put features out that will entice customers to pay for the product.

Key Takeaways:

• Cross-functional product team should become a team member’s “first team”.

• To avoid this source of friction, executives must clearly articulate and disseminate the overall value their organisation provides to its customers, investors, and society.

• Once startup grows, it needs to break apart its products and services into multiple value streams so that individual teams can assume full ownership of various products or pieces of products

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When life gives you lemons, write better error messages

There is nothing called 100% uptime or zero error rate in the real world. There will always be errors and error states, lot of people take an approach that they believe is okay, but aligning with few professionalism is important.

Key Takeaways:

• What makes a bad error message?: Inappropriate tone, Technical jargon, Passing the blame, Generic for no reason.

• What makes a good error message?: Say what happened and why, provide reassurance, Be empathetic, Help them fix it, always give a way out.

• Everyone is responsible for making sure we’re handling errors properly.

Product of the week: chromatic

Ship UIs faster with automated workflows for Storybook

Interesting on the web:

• Elon Musk owns Twitter: The story so far

• Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot AI is making rapid progress

There have been many articles around what it takes to be a good product manager. However, here is a little different take on things and I came across this blog on 10 things that scare Product Managers. An interesting and very relatable read.

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Problem Discovery Leads to Product Discovery

Product discovery has become very popular in Product Circles. People talk about it almost everywhere now. What’s important is to realise the difference in problem and product discovery.

Key Takeaways:

• Product management lives in the Problem space — who has the problem, what is the problem, and why would they want to solve that problem.

• A product manager who hasn’t had a 1-on-1 customer conversation this week—without a sales objective—isn’t qualified to be a product manager.

• The last step of Problem Discovery is to validate your findings.

Product Roadmap: Definition, Types, and Examples

Though I try to avoid product roadmap articles as they have become omnipresent. However, this one does an excellent summary of roadmaps in general.

Key Takeaways:

• You should keep your roadmap short and simple to avoid too many changes, which can be entered in the specific backlogs.

• Roadmap types: Strategy Roadmap, Market Roadmap, Visionary Roadmap, Technology Roadmap, External Roadmap, Internal Roadmap.

• Roadmap examples: Release Plan, Sprint Plan, Now-next-later roadmap, Kanban roadmap

Case study: How Intercom Grows

Intercom has been growing and growing good. One of the things I know they have been doing well is content. I love their content. But that isn’t enough. There is more to their strategy.

Key Takeaways:

• Use the JTBD framework to not only build better products, but to market to people based on fundamental, shared jobs they are hiring your product to achieve.

• Determine your value metric — and priced dynamically

• Use popular content from relevant communities to drive ideas

AI UX Design: A New Way Of Designing

The future of AI isn’t dependent on a select few AI-powered projects. Instead, this technology will become a supporting layer for all apps. And directly and indirectly it builds a lot around UX.

Key Takeaways:

• AI UX design enables highly personalised user experiences. This enhances the value of your product to a wider audience of users.

• UX design involves a plethora of repetitive tasks. AI-infused design automates many of these tasks, speeding up projects and freeing time for more innovative, big-picture tasks.

• Trust is an integral factor in designing AI products. This trust can be built through proper user education, clear communication, flexibility, and integrity.

Copywriting Mistakes That are Hurting Your Product Experience and Conversion

Copywriting is still a debated task. I have in the past passed it over to marketing and design, but soon realized that the justice was not delivered. Now, I do it myself.

Key Takeaways:

• Write it and then rewrite it. Re-write 10-20 versions of the headline.

• No one cares what you can do. Everyone cares what you can do for them.

• Conflict creates interest. Create tension in the headline if possible.

Share A Curious PM

Product of the week: Contentful

Launch faster with a modern content platform

Interesting on the web:

• BeReal Exceeds 50 Million Installs WorldwIde but only 9% open rate

• Flipkart Launches ‘Flipverse’ Virtual Shopping Experience

Everyone talks about Finding PMF and lays down a plan / framework that will make you succeed. However, let me tell you I have been trying to find PMF for a quite good amount of time now at Voosh. It’s nowhere that simple. 

The only thing that keeps one going is that every failure, every interaction, every push back teaches you something new. And as the famous saying goes, ‘what doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’. Same thought goes for everyone PMing with other business problems, Keep Learning!!

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How to Create Effective Product Tours That Users Will Love

If you want to keep new users as customers, your product has to work seamlessly from the start, and there’s no better retention mechanism than a stellar product tour

Key Takeaways:

• Make sure you’re only highlighting the features users need to experience your product’s core value to keep them truckin’ along to their aha moment.

• Respect users’ time by making sure your tour isn’t too long.

• Tooltips come in two varieties: action-driven or non-action-driven. Then there are Modals and hotspots in different ways to showcase.

14 lessons after 5 years at Miro as a Growth Product Manager

Everyone acknowledges the growth and the successful product Miro has delivered. I am a fan. How can I miss lessons from Miro’s growth Product Manager?

Key Takeaways:

• You should have a good proportion of optimization, innovation, and tech in your roadmap. Which should be about 40/40/20 and can change depending on the product growth stage.

• A business model should be experimented regularly because the market is changing as well as your users and their behaviour.

• And finally, in order to grow, your growth teams have to work as a system. Acquisition, Activation, Retention, and Monetization should be aligned in terms of metrics and drive the same goal.

Understand why it’s okay to be output oriented...in many cases

‘Outcome over output’ trend that has been going round and round in theories. But for practicality, everything goes for a toss.

Key Takeaways:

• It’s more likely a combination of different outputs with different coefficients, when working together, may generate that desired outcome.

• When you can’t control the outcome, you control what you can, which is the quality and quantity of outputs.

• It’s easy to measure, control, instruct, and reward how many holes in what time period you’ve dug. Measuring, controlling, and rewarding outcomes takes a lot more time and consistent effort.

Case Study: If in doubt, Paddle out.

Instead of several vendors for different finance-related use-case, Paddle does it all for you.

Key Takeaways:

• With this crucial insight that software businesses only cared about one feature, they threw 90% of their ‘marketplace’ out and focussed on building only one thing right.

• With no-BS case studies, Paddle showcases the value it drives for its customers in a super-simple and easily understandable way.

• With their ICP etched in their GTM strategy, Paddle has broken down the complicated software buying process into specific use cases, for SaaS companies of all sizes and stages.

6 Inspiring Product Marketing Examples You Can Copy

The value of Product Marketing comes from its deep understanding of markets, customers and their needs. Then making a unique value proposition that sets apart your product.

Key Takeaways:

• ASOS builds credibility because potential customers can see that others have bought their products and are using them.

• Poo Pourri uses visuals such as images and videos to illustrate different common scenarios in which their product is used.

• Oreo evokes curiosity in their audience by asking: Wonder if we gave an Oreo to you. Where would your imagination go?

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Product of the week: Microsoft Designer

Stunning designs in a flash

I came across Microsoft designer, when I was reading a tweet about how Microsoft like to bring competitive products, may it be with MS teams, OneNote, etc. But this is not just an alternative to Canva, it looks like a different ballgame. Though I am not in yet, I have only heard good things.

Interesting read on web:

• Twitter Finally Gets an Edit Button

• Bumble is testing a speed-dating feature where users chat before matching

Apologies for missing the Sunday. I finally took my longest (5 days) vacation. A suggestion, if you are anywhere near Vellore-India, do definitely visit the golden temple. It’s pure beauty.

Back to business. We all saw a great example of unshipping this week, with Instagram removing the shopping page. Unshipping is something most product managers do not care about and thus making a bulky tool with distractions.

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Product Discovery ≠ Ideation

If I pick 10 PMs and ask to define discovery, half of them will respond by saying, brainstorming to ideate the best possible solution. And sticking to it leads to a world where most solutions are constantly rejected after building.

Key Takeaways:

• There are multiple parts to product discovery: business strategy, customer understanding, solutions, and testing

• The time invested in aligning and communicating your business strategy pays for itself many times over

• The goal during testing is to test your high potential solutions with the smallest possible investment.

How PMs Should Build a Great Product Notification Experience

Everyone fears the notifications. As a PM, you are scared to not overdo or underdo it and as a user you are afraid of your phones constantly beeping because some PMs think notifications are free, send as many as they can.

Key Takeaways:

• You could use any notification channel for both transactional and marketing purposes, but some are more suited to one or the other

• The key aspects that contribute to a good notification experience: Right channels, Right timing, Right customizations and preferences, Following platform best practices.

• Test your notifications the same way as you test the rest of your product, to ensure that they are functional and look good.

How Facebook does Product Management

Every company has a different JD for a PM. Some PMs are doing strategy, some are project managers,and some are just lost. A deeper look at Facebook can be an example of what works.

Key Takeaways:

• Facebook observed from their data that users who added 7 friends in 10 days were more engaged with the product than those who did not.

• Value and Viability is with PMs, Feasibility is with Engineers, Usability is with Designers

• Engineers @ Facebook do execution management towards milestones once the roadmap has been prioritised together with PMs. Therefore, PMs @ Facebook rarely end up creating stories/tasks:

Presentation skills for Product Managers

Presentations may look like an affair of big meetings. However, if we look a little closer, a PM frequently presents his ideas, solutions, prioritizations.

Key Takeaways:

• You’ll need to balance being unpredictable and messy. If people can always predict what’s coming up next, think about how you might make your presentation more unpredictable.

• People like hearing things in threes. Start by listing 3 key takeaways you’d like your audience to take from the presentation and structure your presentation around those key takeaways.

• One way to keep your audience engaged is to plant seeds of curiosity at the start of your presentation by opening a loop and not closing it.

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Problem Discovery for Calm SaaS Businesses

Calm businesses are the ones that are not mission critical, though they solve an important and urgent problem, still they are not do-or-die problems.

Key Takeaways:

• If you tackle a do-or-die problem for your customers, their stress levels in ensuring things keep working become your stress levels.

• There are four distinct kinds of problem indicators that you can find in communities: complaints, cries for help, requests for recommendations, and requests for alternatives.

• Every single instance of a problem, there is a pain. And those pains look a lot alike. Here are three types of pain to look out for: time pain, resource pain, and pain of the self.

Product of the week: Smartcue

Close more sales with faster, personalized demos

Around the web:

• 16 cool AI websites you might not have known about

Share A Curious PM

Out of many things that happened this week, two things have taken my attention: the launch of ONDC beta and Cred launched scan and pay. Though both incidents look very different, there is a common thread, both launches of products are trying to change the experience for the users. ONDC is trying to revolutionise E-commerce in India, CRED pay is bringing a new and fun experience for scan and pay. What will work and what will not is still a question, but it’s fun to keep track of these 2 launches.

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How Notion Grows

Notion grow horizontally by marketing to a large base of people, segmenting their audiences, and leaning heavily into their flexibility and the power of community

Key Takeaways:

• Find a wedge — a specific problem and use case that is real and relatable to the people you want using your product, one that is stupid simple to explain.

• The beauty of Notion’s template strategy is that they have also open-sourced templates, leading to the growth loop.

• To build a community, you help people help each other.

Accidental Dismissal of Overlays: A Common Mobile Usability Problem

Overlays have become a ubiquitous UI element on mobile: beyond the annoying pop-ups, you will also find them used for navigation menus, bottom sheets, product-detail pages, or in-app browsers.

Key Takeaways:

• Depending on whether the user can interact with the background, overlays can be modal or non-modal.

• Major problems commonly associated with overlays: Users pick the wrong overlay-dismissal method, Users’ work is lost, Stacked overlays amplify confusion.

• How to Prevent Overlay-Dismissal Problems: Use an Alternative Pattern, Prefer Partial to Full-Page Overlays, Do Not Use Stacks of Overlays, Include a Close Button for Dismissing the Overlay.

Why product managers should not be data driven

Considering Goodhart’s Law, you need to always be careful and qualitatively reason whether the changes you are observing are real and sustainable changes, not lost in the long run. Idea is to be data informed, and not always data driven.

Key Takeaways:

• Being data-driven can lead to prioritising thinking opportunistically rather than strategically.

• An issue with the data-driven approach is that it favours incremental improvements. Reason: you can test slight changes much more quickly and these small incremental wins often lead to the current solution approaching a local maximum.

• Data -driven can lead to slowing down the organisation. If decisions aren’t made until sufficient data is available, then decisions will be made later than they should be.

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How to Identify Your Product’s Aha Moment

Aha moment is the moment where users see the value of the product. This becomes the hook, which leads to activation, engagement, and retention.

Key Takeaways:

• There are three stages you must go through that will help you identify it: Talk to actual users, look for patterns, shortlist and test potential behaviours

• The goal of a free trial is not to have engaged users, you need users that consistently get value from your product.

• Organise your potential experiments to test in an Experiment Log.

Product GTM Fitness

In many orgs, it is a pendulum. Product drives and pushes the debt to GTM. And then, the pendulum swings, and GTM drives and pushes the burden to the product.

Key Takeaways:

• Even if you have PMF, you still need to be working towards a future state where the market has evolved, and your product has kept up.

• There are four ways to “manage” increased operational complexity. Offload, Tame, Absorb and Avoid.

• When GTM leaders experience the pressure of increased operational complexity, they push back for product(s) that are easier to sell.

Product of the week: Marqly

Manage your bookmarks like a pro

Easy-to-use, Marqly lets you save, customise and manage all your bookmarks and texts online like a breeze

I am planning to invest more time in strengthening this newsletter, to create more value for you, but, I need your valuable feedback. I know feedback are shit boring, but it is the only thing that will help me improve. So please, take 30 seconds and fill this up.

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The Value of Inconvenient Design

Humans are friction-obsessed, believing it to be the ultimate foe in a constant crusade for efficiency and optimization. Resulting in endless products aimed at smoothing increasingly insignificant inconveniences.

Key Takeaways:

• Despite the endless slate of A/B tests over billions at scale, in nature, fiction and inconvenience have stood the test of time. Not only do they remain in abundance, but they’ve proven themselves critical.

• Both too much friction and too little friction reduce value, but just the right amount of friction maximises it.

• Over time, we’ve increasingly tied the value of technology to the revenue it can generate as opposed to the benefit it can deliver to the humans who use it.

Revisiting Lifetime Value and Customer Acquisition

Isn’t business all about getting new customers, showing them value created, and capture value from them? CAC is the cost of acquiring the customer and LTV is the value captured.

Key Takeaways:

• A mistake that many companies make: they use revenue as a proxy for LTV, which is a cardinal sin

• A rule of thumb that applies to both LTV and CAC: it’s important to segment users by organic vs. paid

• The best consumer internet companies can pay back CAC immediately, often by motivating an annual subscription plan rather than a monthly plan

Why is Customer Feedback so Important for the FinTech Industry?

Customer feedback is important in almost all the industries, but for FinTech, dynamics are changing fast and feedback is becoming more important.

Key Takeaways:

• New and disruptive technologies have emerged so fast that there was no rule book or benchmark to understand the end-user sentiment over the usage or performance of these products.

• New users everywhere started relying on FinTech products, even without fully understanding how to use them or how they operated, thus creating trust issues.

• Given the speed at which the industry grows and its reliance on mobile devices, customer feedback needs to be a top priority because bad reviews — or a bad rep, in general — will make a big dent in brand perception.

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Setup automated User Onboarding Journey for your Product’s Growth

Engaging users with an effective onboarding journey can solve many problems, biggest obviously is retention.

Key Takeaways:

• Your product might include features that offer a lot of value. But if they stay hidden in some dark corner or are hard to discover, most users may never know they exist.

• Taking a deeper look at the Day 0 flow, it should include a Welcome message to the user , making the user a part of your family, so to speak

• An automated user journey will help you in mapping customer responses in real-time to decide the next best action towards nurturing your user in achieving the desired goal

Research Twice, Build Once: How to Know Your Users as You Grow

Far too many products still fail because there’s simply no demand for them. How does that happen? Or, how do so many startups launch entire businesses without realizing users didn’t need their products? By overlooking user research.

Key Takeaways:

• There are multiple types of research that suit different situations: Strategic vs. tactical, Moderated vs. unmoderated, Quantitative vs. qualitative

• In the early stage, the goal is to prioritise those decisions that users actually want — both pre- and post-launch. Research at this stage doesn’t need to be perfect, but it needs to provide a general signal on which direction to go.

• Scaling up the company needs to put into place more rigorous research practices, enabling teams to ask the right questions of the right users at the right time.

Product of the week: beautiful.ai

Presentation software that designs for you

If you are using PPTs, this is what you should have. It is going to make your life way easier and your presentations way more fun.

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Thanks to amazing people who connected last week. Happy to get access to a lot of amazing insights coming from you guys. Let’s move on to this week’s release.

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A beginner’s guide to the product stack

Product stack is simply a collection of tools that allow you to collect, analyse, and act on data that is created by users in your application

Key Takeaways:

• The typical modern tech stack is a complex web of integrations and pipelines.

• Most companies are not mature enough in their approach towards data, leaving opportunities on the table.

• The product stack has many components, and has been evolving quickly over the years, but can be broken down into three key buckets: collection, analysis, action.

Pledge To Customers

Interactions between sales and customers can cause promises of deliverables that might not get prioritised and users lose confidence in the brand

Key Takeaways:

• The only people that can make a promise for a product deliverable is the product team that will deliver on this promise.

• The product team will make a promise only after understanding what is truly required, and whether that solution provided will be effective for the customer.

• Our product team pledges to constantly strive to discover solutions that our customers love, yet work for our business.

Infinite Scrolling: When to Use It, When to Avoid It

Infinite scrolling minimizes interaction cost and increases user engagement, but it isn’t a good fit for every website.

Key Takeaways:

• Benefits of Classic Infinite Scrolling: Reducing interruptions, lowering interaction cost, well-suited for mobile devices.

• Usability Issues Caused by Infinite Scrolling: Difficulty re-finding content, illusion of completeness, inability to access the end of the page, accessibility problems, increased page load, poor SEO performance.

• Variations to classic infinite scrolling: User explicitly presses a Load More or See More button. Another variant breaks down the infinite scroll into pages that serve as valuable landmarks.

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The worst-rated streaming service

Although HBO has a catalogue of content that people love—like Game of Thrones—their app is the worst-rated across both the Apple and Google app stores.

Key Takeaways:

• Doherty Threshold states users enjoy experiences with less than a 400ms latency.

• Rarely is a distinction made through the absence of evidence suitable for anything that requires an action. Rather, it’s the default for when nothing is of note.

• The key is to understand what the user is trying to achieve and then choose a journey type to complement business objective.

Grow or Die: A Framework for Turning Your Company Around Fast

Focusing on different metrics is an excellent strategy for the long term. But in order to achieve something super fast, SuperGoals can come in handy.

Key Takeaways:

• A SuperGoal is a high stakes, focusing goal for a team. It has a clear and urgent timeframe, an open-ended method of achievement, and a single measure of success that everyone can understand.

• When using SuperGoals, nothing else matters: they temporarily transcend all other goals by instilling a sense of urgency that reinforces clarity and inspires creativity.

• Since SuperGoals have an open-ended delivery mechanism, the ideas for hitting them can come from anywhere.

Product of the week: UXPin Merge

Solve DesignOps challenges with Merge

An interesting tool to look at, if this works out for a team. The CSS issues of getting pixel perfect design are just gone.

On a personal note, I have been involved with growing my reach. I started exploring twitter and LinkedIn for the same. If you would like to mentor, connect or just talk about social media, I would love to connect and exchange some notes.

Every week, I summarise the best reads from 100+ articles with the sole purpose of helping you become better at product with minimal effort. Subscribe!!

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Always solve your customer’s core problems

Customers can have many problems that are small and big. However, we should not be working on just any problem, we need to figure out the core problem to work on and provide a creative solution.

Key Takeaways:

• Two things that force someone to change their preferred method: a problem with the current method, the benefits associated with trying something new.

• Take a peek at the valuable data around your customers—questions they ask, products and services they buy, contacts to customer service. Predictable trends show up again and again

• While operation excellence usually entails using sound business practices known to be effective ; exploration uses sound principles but may need modifications depending on what works best for situation

How to Build Powerful Referral Loops

There are 4 stages of a referral loop: Exposure (cognitive stage), Experience (affective stage), Take action (behavior stage), Distribution or expansion (propagation stage)

Key Takeaways:

• The basic requirements of a referral loop involves: Value, experience, and large enough base.

• There are many referral programs possible, customers prefer one of the three major categories or a combination of: Personal gain, Social gain, Altruistic.

• These are the 3 KPIs you need to check: viral coefficient, conversion rate of referral customers, retention rate of referral customers.

The 5 Phases of Figma’s Community-Led Growth: From Stealth to Enterprise

Founded in 2012, Figma didn’t actually start shipping software to beta users until 2015. After launch, it took another two years to add paid pricing tiers — and a couple more to bring on a sales team.

Key Takeaways:

• Taking a longer, winding path to launch a product doesn’t mean that you keep customers at arm’s length along the way. Figma team started planting seeds for the community early on that would sprout later.

• The Figma team focused on two barometers to assess their launch readiness: Generating buzz and Quality, not quantity

• Focus on getting the end user excited and helping them remove roadblocks, rather than trying to sell from the top down.

Technology Skills for Product Managers

How technical should product managers be? ‘it depends’: on the type of product you’re working on, on your product lifecycle, on where you’re at in your product career.

Key Takeaways:

• The most important takeaway here is to understand that some technologies will run on the client side and some will run on the server side

• With APIs, there is no user interface, instead two systems talk to each other using programming interfaces.

• SQL and Python are some of the most popular ways of getting data out of databases. Learn the most efficient way to get data out of your database, depending on the type of database you use.

Spotify: Music-as-an-algorithm

Given the times of high piracy in music, Spotify founders realised that there was a need to solve the problem for listeners (Access to music with a better experience than pirated websites) and for musicians (to compensate them for their hard work)

Key Takeaways:

• You cannot expect users to search and discover the music they like on their own - Spotify had to step in with a strong recommendation system that works.

• Bandits for Recommendations as Treatments and has two elements to it: Exploitation and Exploration.

• The BaRT algo classifies a recommendation as a good recommendation if the listener doesn’t stop the song before 30 seconds, else the algo will not recommend similar or same songs next time.

Product of the week: Eesel

The new tab for work

A new and interesting browser extension for you, if you write a lot of docs. It helps to quickly locate, create and organise your docs across the web.