(I know this email is 2 days date! I forgot to publish the email!!! :(
Hi All,
Hope you all had a great Halloween with lots of tricks and treats. Mark Zuck got quite the “trick” just in time for Halloween when Dorsey announced, well tweeted that Twitter would stop accepting political ads and in a tweetstorm also tweeted the below. While I truly do support this, I wonder if this is a cool ploy. Twitter doesn’t really make much money for political ad’s. It's kind of like a person who has been a vegetarian all their lives saying “I’ll never buy meat again!” The lesson here is that one needs to dig a little deeper into the details in order to understand the motivations. Don’t look at what a company says, look at what they do and WHY they do it.
In continuing with the same topic these excerpts from a talk by Alex Stamos on amplification is interesting
Facebook, Inc., a Delaware corporation, operates a product called Facebook along with WhatsApp and Instagram. If you dive into the product called "Facebook", you will find that it is actually something like a dozen different products strung together. Those products share the same backend and code base, but they are designed and developed by different teams and, more importantly, have very different safety, security and trust models.
On startup founders and lessons here are some interesting reflections from a failed startup. Point 1 of this article reflects exactly my own experience. People are so connected to the solution that they forget everything else. You look for patterns that FIT your world view. You hear what you want to hear and ignore the rest. We are all prone to this and it is important to step back
And …
Statisticians call this “overfitting to the data”. If you have the world’s worst product idea and talk to 100 potential customers, 10 of them will be nice enough to tell you they’re interested. With so much data, I semi-subconsciously parsed it selectively to convince myself and others of the story we wanted to hear.
Back to the world’s favorite-but-never-happened IPO guess a lot of VC’s are probably pissed. Wonder what Masa Son has up his sleeve. Oh wait, he just lost his sleeves ;)
One person whose reading I have come to respect and enjoy is Alex Danco. This week he writes about how Yahoo! Is shutting down Yahoo Groups and how all that data is lost (who said the internet lives forever?). There are interesting topics to think about here. Who owns or has the right to remove your data. Can you recover it? I’m sure companies’ TOS’s cover all this but does a user really know? Imagine you spend years curating Spotify playlists and they are gone one day?
CMO’s now know that marketing is no longer wishy washy and measurement is ALSO an important part. Founders know that too and here is an interesting set of thoughts on Martech as well and how deep the landscape really has become. You likely need a Martech CTO to connect all the dots!
How much data do you really need to collect in order to make a decision? Intuition comes from lots and lots of experiences and being able to recognize patterns. Read on ...
In the same vein as Marketing becoming data driven, here are some recommendations on how a Sales Manager should be data driven as well
On Great planning processes this article from Lenny Rachitsky (formerly Airbnb) speaks about the planning process. As I was reading this what hit me was that so many companies don't really do this. Topline goals are confusing, OKRs are sketchy, management does not have the right intent or are just building political muscle or more accurately are building political muscle primarily because they do not want to be held to metrics.
This is a great article from Iliyana Stareva on problem solving. Problem solving is all not data. Its people, too!
Are you prone to interrupting? As someone who does have a bad habit of interrupting (hey admitting is the first step in fixing a problem), I never realized that it was considered a “power play”. After I read this article I sat back and paid attention to the number of times I interrupted and why. You should do this, you will learn a lot about yourself!
Thoughts on product leadership from Andy Rachleff. Don’t worry about competition, worry about customers
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In general, I post articles that I think would provide evergreen learning. In other words, the focus is on learning rather than "keeping up" with every possible news source
I love talking about technology, product, growth, technology trends, and strategy. I read a lot of stuff from a variety of places every week and these are the 12 most interesting things I’ve read or learned about this week. I aim to publish every Wednesday. If you’d like to connect in person send me a note via LinkedIn