Hi All,
Hope you all are having a great week! The WeWork saga culminated last week in a dramatic (albeit ridiculous) funding round from none other than our very own Softbank. This read from Matt Levine was brilliant as well as humorous. Hope you all have a great week!Ā
PS : This week, articles wise will be a product heavy week (I had a lot of product articles which Iāve been wanting to share. Think of it as tech debt or product spring cleaning :))Ā
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Cash is king. Sure. But cash is also a dead king. Here is Accentureās list of trends in favor of payments overall. Are completely cashless societies going to exist in future? I think soĀ
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This article talks about the recent lawsuit again Dominos. The case being do websites need to be designed with accessibility in mind in some ways contrary to the way product folks work. Every single product article talks about user personas and serving a specific audience of people. Iām not saying this ISNāT important. However we tend to forget.Ā
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PSA : Looking for a VC? Here is a handy list :)Ā
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We all face adversity, how we handle it makes us who we are; and also what matters. God bless Checkr (and the hiring manager) for giving someone a chance.
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The true purpose of business is to earn money. Companies leD by CEOāS who can withstand short term market pressures and do the right thing CAN win. And this in capitalist America. More sales is not necessarily good business. Companies can and should figure out not only what business they want to be in, but also clearly articulate what business they donāt want to be in
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We all know about the industrial revolution. This read from Luke Muehlhauser shows how large the impact really wasĀ Ā
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Too much evidence can be a bad thing. There is something such as ātooā perfect. The examples in this article are pretty crazy
Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.
Researchers demonstrated the paradox in the case of a modern-day police line-up, in which witnesses try to identify the suspect out of a line-up of several people. The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.
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LNKDās content strategy is pretty interesting. Create, curate, or cultivate. So who does LNKD compete with then for content considering they have all types of content (news, publisher blogs, other social media. Why would an individual content writer publish on this platform when you have substack and/or medium. LNKD publisher (create) is being offered as a way to āimprove your professional imageā and I think itās great. But, given the content Iāve seen lately this is becoming a disaster. Sure there are great articles but itās like finding a needle in a haystack. Curation is definitely a needed service, but today only news is being curated. Overall an interesting strategy but lotsĀ of gaps.Ā Ā
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A great read on onboarding customers. The care diagram is a great way to see where your gaps lie. I do think though retention funnels tell you the same thing. A retention funnel along with the CARE diagram can definitely make things more clear
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The impact of crowds. A great read for the kind of impact a crowd can have. You can think about this in the same way as a Product Manager would. How can you differentiate such that your product stands out. Think bottled water
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A great list of products (from product folks), I remember way back when interviewing for a job I used to download apps/look at a product and see how Iād improve it. Still do it onceĀ in a while, This is a good reminder!Ā
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Building MLPās. I actually think the MVP can work in markets where you are a pill (v/s a vitamin) and there is a desperate need for the product, Using the example in the article, serving burnt pizza to people who are starving. When your product is a vitamin this matters, but less. Of course products can be vitamins or pills to different personas (an Uber is a vitamin for me, but a pill to someone that can afford it or might not have a car) and this can change over time ...
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Good product does not stop at inputs ā outputs, but makes a PM think deeper about what are the impacts/outcomes of that product or feature. Being able to create outputs that have a large impact truly depends on how well you have researched the market, product, customer issues/problems and how much you actually LISTEN to your customers. Else you are nothing but a feature factory