Product Bugle 18/8: Summer special 2
5 things that you will hopefully find interesting or useful. Keeping it simple for the summer.
1. Lessons from Google and Coda
I’m still too mean to purchase a subscription to Lenny’s Newsletter, but his (free!) podcast continues to deliver in spades.
This week's edition - this week with Shishir Mehrotra CEO/ founder of Coda; and ex VP of Product at YouTube covers a number of bases. The thinking behind Coda is fascinating, as is Shishir’s planned book on business rituals.
I found the PSHE framework for calibrating and evaluating Product managers particularly neat.
If you can’t make your way through the full 90 minutes. It’s worth jumping to these point.
[24:37] Shishir’s upcoming book The Rituals of Great Teams
[46:45] A backstory on YouTube, and valuing consistency over comprehensiveness when deciding whether or not to link out to .content they didn’t have (eg: Modern Family)
[53:00] Eigenquestions: What they are, how to use them to help make decisions,(more about Eigen Questions here)
[1:03:11] How to evaluate/ calibrate product talent: the PSHE model
Also from Lenny, this collection of useful one pagers and templates for Product Managers is enough to keep you busy over a long weekend.
2. Learning from the FAANG
A lot of what’s in that podcast is interesting because it gives you insights from Shishir Mehrotra’s time at Google. And, we’re all slightly fascinated by what happens at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google (although strictly it should be MAANG now - but that’s just not as catchy)
Itamar Gilad wrote this week about the pros and cons of trying to learn from and/or replicate Big Tech’s ways of working. Pointing out the perils (specifically: once you’re inside you see it’s not all perfect there; and what companies do vs what they say they do is often very different).
That said there’s a set of common themes/ principles you tend to see in play at these organisations..
Customer-focus
Hiring great people
Empowered cross-functional product teams
Business doesn’t run the show
Being bold and questioning conventions
Continuous iteration and feedback loops
Those are difficult to disagree with, but there’s more to it than the headlines. Worth reading the piece to read what he has to say about each of these..
3. Brands and NFTs - the playbook
While the whole frenzy of people spending millions on NFTs seems to have died down - for now - there’s still plenty of activity going on; and lots of brands are getting involved, often with mixed results.
Peter Yang over at Creator Economy has put together an NFT playbook for brands - which covers some of the good and the not so good. Surprising to learn that the two most active product categories are Food & Drink and Movies & TV. Apparel - which I thought might have led the pack came third.
4. Some internet nostalgia
As part of Gizmodo’s 20th anniversary (and oh, that makes me feel old!) - they’ve interviewed David Bohnet, the founder of Geocities - to get his take on how the internet has evolved from an altogether more innocent time. I like this quote..
I’ve been surprised at sort of the evolution away from self-generated content and more toward centralized programing and more toward sort of the self-promotion that we’ve seen on Facebook and Instagram and TikTok. And GeoCities was not about self-promotion. It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge.
5. Good Strategy vs Bad Strategy
Geocities, as you might remember was bought by Yahoo for $3.6bn. Yes really. It was then shut down in 2009. Over at Productify, Bandan Jot Singh has done a quick case history on How Yahoo Lost The Internet.
Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20 here - and really it’s a little too simplistic to put it down to ‘bad strategy’ - although I do like his summary of ‘bad strategy’
Long on goals
Short on identifying problems:
Short on Policy
Short on Action
As I’ve said before - the bible on this is Richard Rumelt’s Good Strategy, Bad Strategy - which everyone should read.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a debate on Good vs Bad Product Strategy - you can start with this thread from Shreyas Doshi..
And then contrast with Tim Herbig’s much more understated Rather Useless vs Rather Useful product strategy comparison.
And finally…
I’m (still) reading Andrew Chen’s The Cold Start Problem
I’m watching Black Bird on Apple TV
I’ve been listening to Fringe Network: Alien State (Apple / Spotify)
Next week
A final simplified summer special coming out on Thursday before coming back with full gusto in September.