Handpicked articles, and resources sent once a week to Product People of all kinds - Product Leads, Product Managers, CEOs, Makers, and Entrepreneurs.
Initiator Creator - Issue #138 By Saurabh Y. // 17 March 2024 Entrepreneur Don’t Be Scared to Take on a Monopoly - Every monopolies have already done the hard work of validation for you. And for that reason, they have de-risked the upside of taking them on. From Flagship Back to Fledgling: Lessons on Going Multi-Product From an Early Stripe PM - First Round Tara Seshan shares nine lessons from her playbooks for going multi-product, drawing on examples from both Stripe and Watershed. Product Innovation: Stop Inventing Cool Sh*t Your Customers Don’t Want! - Product Compass The ‘front end’ of innovation being where customer needs are researched and insights are distilled, solutions are ideated, prototyped and tested and business models are shaped. The Rules of Good Pictch by Jean de La Rochebrochard - Substack What is a good pitch? How do you conduct one as an investor? How should you address it as an entrepreneur? Jean Rochebrochard break it down into a few concrete elements Super Specific Feedback: How to give actionable feedback on work output - Wes Kao Giving detailed feedback on work output takes time, and it’s time well spent. There are some things you simply can't outsource. MarketerWelcome to the Distribution-First Era, Where Strategy Starts With Channels and Ends With ROI - Animalz "If you build it, they will come" is a classic startup mistake. It's the belief that customers will find your great product without a distribution strategy. Sometimes they do. Often, they don't. Dissecting the Growth Strategy of ChatGPT - FishmanAF It’s more than a novelty effect - a deeper dive on acquisition, retention and monetization. Should You Run a Survey? - NN/g Even though surveys may be faster and cheaper than other research methods, they are not suited to all research goals. Great Marketing Machines Are Like Costco - Kellblog Searching for Costco’s one thing is as fruitful as searching for El Dorado. There isn’t one. It doesn’t exist. Instead, there are 50 little things. That all work together. Onboarding email series strategy - Substack Such onboarding series emails usually achieve a 40–60% open rate and lead to significant lifts in the number of customers getting to those coveted Aha! and Habit activation moments. Developer How Discord Moved Engineering to Cloud Development Environments - Discord This blog post focuses on how discord transitioned all backend and infrastructure development to a Linux-based Cloud Development Environment Find edge case errors in your code base - Github It’s more than a novelty effect - a deeper dive on acquisition, retention and monetization. How We Engineer Feedback at Figma with Eng Crits - Figma Engineering crits encourage a diversity of perspectives and unblock teams to pursue new ideas. Here’s how we structure and run them at Figma. Learning Lessons from British Library Cyber-Attack - British Library This paper aims to provide an overview of the cyber-attack on the British Library that took place in October 2023 and examines its implications for the Library’s operations, future infrastructure, risk assessment and lessons learned. How Google Blew Up Its Open Culture and Compromised Its Product - Big Technology A seven-year Google veteran shares the inside story of how Google shut down its open culture, and the costs of its absence. Designer ‘If you’re creative, why can’t you create a solution?’ One artist’s imaginative activism - Aeon Mapping the Unknown is centred on Project Row Houses – an initiative Lowe founded in 1993 to transform a series of small, dilapidated houses in Houston’s Third Ward neighbourhood into art galleries and housing for resident artists. Beautiful ugly websites - Product Identity World-popular like Craigslist, Hacker News, 4chan, and niche-famous websites like Bear, Margnilia, and McMaster-Carr are all part of a fraction of the giant internet sphere, which resembles a tiny special corner of the internet. Card Sorting vs. Tree Testing - NN/g Card sort studies help shape information architectures; tree-testing studies evaluate them. How To Build Habit Loops That Get Users Hooked - The Product Manager Habit loops are a clever way to bake retention into your product strategy. Here's how to hook your users for the long haul using the power of psychology. A Web Designer’s Accessibility Advocacy Toolkit - Smashing Magazine Digital designer Yichan Wang has put together this collection of strategies and selling points to help you encourage and advocate for accessibility in your place of work, including useful scripts you can use as starting points. Interesting Read Everyone's a sellout now - Vox The internet has made it so that no matter who you are or what you do — from 9-to-5 middle managers to astronauts to housecleaners — you cannot escape the tyranny of the personal brand. You're Only As Good As Your Worst Day - Fs We tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what happens on the worst day. The science-backed value of boredom at work - Atlassian Why an “anti-power hour” just might lead to your team’s next breakthrough. Community Submissions If you like to share a project or article with the rest of the readers then please DM me at @ICforpreneurs or hit reply Outro 🙏Thank you for reading Initiator Creator issue #138 Forward to a Peer and let them know where they can subscribe Initiator Creator. Want to get featured? 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Handpicked articles, and resources sent once a week to Product People of all kinds - Product Leads, Product Managers, CEOs, Makers, and Entrepreneurs.
Initiator Creator - Issue #139 - ( Read in browser ) By Saurabh Y. // 21 April 2024 Presented by DesignThingy This Week's Notes: Ever-increasing Paradigm of Microsites The traditional concept of microsites is elegantly straightforward: build highly specialized small websites to target niche audiences for lead generation, sales, and brand visibility. Mainly utilized by companies, particularly for marketing (esp. engineering as marketing). These microsites are usually free tools, tailored to...
Initiator Creator - Issue #137 By Saurabh Y. // 08 October 2023 Entrepreneur Mediocre Success Is Worse Than Outright Failure - Every Avoid the messy middle and aim for unambiguous results You Can't Hack Product Positioning - Felicis This problem is acute in SaaS where it is exceedingly rare for there to be true product moats; many startups end up competing on distribution and positioning. Big Tech’s Biggest Bets - Matthew Ball Or What It Takes to Build a Billion-User Platform Next-gen content...
Initiator Creator - Issue #136 By Saurabh Y. // 24 September 2023 Developer TypeScript Origins: The Documentary - Youtube The Documentary features core contributors and community members like Anders Hejlsberg, Steve Lucco, Luke Hoban, Daniel Rosenwasser, Ryan Cavanaugh, Amanda Silver, Matt Pocock, Josh Goldberg & many more How Microsoft does Quality Assurance (QA) - Pragmatic Engineer Microsoft has played an outsized role in the development and importance of quality assurance across the...