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Product Management
633 posts
Product Vs. Distribution: What’s Important?
And for many of these products, what will make companies successful is the customer acquisition process. Customer acquisition >> product. An example of this is Salesforce. As much as ppl…
Explained: The Need for Product Analysts in a Product Team
Analysts help teams better define the goals they should set, so it’s not just a shot in the dark but based on data. They also make it easy to track…
How to Hire Product Managers
No one is perfect, but hiring for the absence of weaknesses will lead you to hire average PMs who don’t stand out at all. Sérgio Schüler Hiring PMs is a…
The stage of design discourse [A wake-up call for designers?]
From the community of curious and capable builders, we’ve reduced ourselves to superfluous discussions, using comic relief for social media vanity, and tired peripheral discussions that constantly avoid the problem…
Amazon’s 6-page memos; How does it work?
Why memos over Powerpoint? Amazon famously has execs write 6-page narrative-driven memos instead of Powerpoint decks. The practice began in 2004 when Jeff Bezos noticed nothing was being decided after…
Clubhouse is the new Orkut? #GhostTown
Are you still on Clubhouse? Well, chances are that you are done with it. Clubhouse, these days seems more like a ghost town. And this reminds me of Orkut. Remember…
How to Interview a Product Manager
There’s a lot of confusion on evaluating a candidate’s Product Sense in interviews. So let’s analyze bad, good, great answers to an interview question: “Why do threads on Twitter typically…
Decoded: Notion’s Growth Strategies
If you’re a SaaS founder, you need to study Notion The growth strategies used become a $2B startup and reach 1M users after a single seed round A thread👇 1)…
Three traits all world-class product leaders exhibit
“Important” means it fuels a critical business process, has a large user base, or is made by an “important” company. Nobody deserves a promotion to product leadership by virtue of…
6 Product Frameworks From Tony Fadell, the Inventor of the iPod, iPhone & Nest
Tony Fadell on product design do’s and don’ts.
1. “What do you see?” It is in our human nature to stop seeing what’s right in front of us.
2. “For truly great designs, 50% of the design is the design. 50% of the design is the story behind the design.”
3. Create your constraints
4. Find Your Product Development Heartbeat
5. What A World-Changing Founder Looks Like
6. Be A Troublemaker
A certification course in Product Management from an MBA college…or
Question (from many of product management aspirants): Should I spend 2 lakhs on a certification course in product management? However, I would want to change my job role from business…
How do great ideas come from? Lessons from 750+ Founders
I’ve helped 750+ startup founders. I always try to ask: “How did you come up with your idea?” Here are their answers: First, they most commonly say: “Solve your own…
Build Audience Before the Product: Here is how
Build audience before product. But how do you do it? Here’s how I’ve built an audience across channels and grown my startups from 0 to $2 million revenues. Involves a…
How Zerodha optimizes its 20TB of data?
On peak traffic, despite having a heavy “hot” cache layer, the warehouse DB serves up to 40-50,000 queries per second. Instead of normalizing their data, they denormalized it because JOINs across tables holding billions of rows is difficult to scale.
Your product is a joke (and that's brilliant!)
The rules that help make good improv comedy can surprisingly help make good product too. Let’s run through interesting parallels between the two, and how you can apply some lessons from improv to build better product.
The key product lesson is that you should understand the world you are in before you do anything else. This is the base reality of your product. Who are your customers? What are their problems? What do they do about these problems? What part of the existing solutions will you not change? Resist the natural rush to be creative with features, designs, engineering – and first observe and understand your base reality. The base reality shouldn’t be innovative and you should be careful about contriving it to be what you wish. Be specific and truthful. Here are some examples of base realities..
The Black Box Inventor Was Told to Drop the Idea
Warren was studying for his amateur radio license when a World War II ban on hobby radio forced him to redirect his efforts to chemistry sets.
But when Warren gave his supervisor Technical Memorandum 142, describing the use of a wire to record several minutes of cockpit conversation, his boss showed no enthusiasm. Warren was told to pass the idea to the instruments group and “get on with blowing up fuel tanks,” as Warren was quoted in a 2019 BBC News article.
