They had product that could have disrupted the industry by moving VAS to a Revenue Share model from the Fixed Cost model championed by an incumbent. An Incumbent who made his fortune by riding on mobile wave.
That incumbent pulled a dirty trick and snatched the contract right from his hand at the last minute. (a story for another day when I am drunk . its worthy of a Netflix Mini Series).
A multi part thread on empathy and its importance in product design. 🧵
Often times in my discussions with fellow PMs and Designers topic of empathy comes up. Everyone agrees that empathy is an essential starting point for a delightful design.
While everyone understands its importance in theory. In practice. Few actually do anything about it. Empathy is one of that woo-woo new-age concept that is hard to translate into action. That is why we see a lot of sub-optimal designs and dysfunctional products.
AFAIK evidence against Nieman is at best circumstantial ergo non-conclusive. In all likelihood, he will get away with a slap on the wrist.IMHO It's a courageous but immature move on part of Carlsen to walk away from competition because of that.
First Naomi Osaka and now Carlsen. It is surprising how young upstarts and [potential] future doyens of sports are choosing to opt-out of competitions (and contractual obligations) because of personal [subjective ] assessment.
Is it because they are more loyal to the game than the governing body? That kind of transcendence is unlikely at a young age. Or is it the case of a lack of resilience and willingness to fight to change the system from within?
Of late there has been lot of talk on twitter around cost of hiring in startups. Consensus seems to be that : Salaries for top talent are through the roof → You need top talent to succeed → You need a war chest of a funding to hire .
A corollary of same is that Bootstrapped or Seed funded startups are at disadvantage because they can't pay top salaries → they won't get top talent ( 10 X Engineer) and this constraint will jeopardise their chance of success .
This Ongoing conversation on Flow Vs BaseCamp Vs Asana is a perfect case study on the complexity of how things happen in the real-world and how single-factor explanations are almost always too simplistic.
This offers a chance to talk about how to assimilate content you consume on internet , process it, and extract gasoline of knowledge from the crude oil Narrative. #badanalogy
Here @awilkinson told his version of events. tipped his hat to the winners ( @asana & @basecamp ) Then @jackiebo refuted it in the thread nested thread above 👆 Claiming there was more to Asana's success than just VC money .
Disclaimer: I am no expert in this. This theory is not subjected to statistical rigor and probably I am confusing correlation with causation.
I love studying system dynamics. How Individual performance is often shaped (in great part ) by their environment. If we can identify those environmental levers we can increase the baseline performance for everyone. Here is a case study on the same.