1/
Spending some time upstream to properly understand the problem & the domain will save you from spending a lot of time downstream wondering why people aren’t buying your product.

You can’t learn everything upfront, but you can learn many things upfront.

2/
If you are talking to customers with a certain product idea already in your mind, you will usually manage to find great reasons why it makes sense to build that idea.

Starting with a blank slate keeps a product manager’s biggest enemy—confirmation bias—at bay.

Read 9 tweets

Shreyas Doshi

@shreyas

21 Jan

Before going head-to-head against a powerful incumbent, consider these other strategies:

1)
Target a different segment

2)
Commoditize incumbent
(lower/zero cost)

3)
Out-distribute
(via bundling or exclusive partnerships)

4)
Platformize
(enable others to compete)

contd.👇🏾

5)
Attack from the top
(start higher in the stack)

6)
Attack from the side
(tackle adjacent aspect of the Customer Value Chain)

7)
Differentiate on brand
(hard to do)

8)
Eliminate adoption friction

These strategies can be combined.

Avoid playing the Feature Game, if you can.

@aakashthumaty

Some examples, from @aakashthumaty

https://twitter.com/aakashthumaty/status/1352162240137289730?s=20

Read 6 tweets

Shreyas Doshi

@shreyas

18 Jan

@deehock

Dee Hock is the founder of Visa

His writing after retiring from Visa is even more fascinating than Visa's success

I feel very lucky to have found @deehock's work

Decades before Twitter, Dee was packing a lifetime of wisdom in his tweet-sized observations

Here's a few of them:

(consider reading them slowly)

Every mountain is two mountains: the one that urges us to climb and the one that punishes us when we do.

- Dee Hock

Read 26 tweets

Shreyas Doshi

@shreyas

17 Jan

Movies can teach us a lot about the art of listening.

A short thread of 2 movie scenes, that ends with my perspective on how we can learn to be better listeners:

Many of us learn best through examples.

And movies offer superb examples of both bad listening & good listening.

For an example of *bad* listening, let’s learn from this epic scene from the movie, The Darkest Hour.

The setup: World War II. There are disagreements among British leadership about whether they should pursue peace talks with Germany or an all out war.

Go on, watch the scene.

Read 7 tweets

Shreyas Doshi

@shreyas

17 Jan

Listening, *really* listening, is a rare superpower.

I was a bad listener most of my life.

Then I fixed that a few years ago.

Night & day difference in my leadership ability.

I learned that we can learn to listen well.

A thread on listening (and learning it from movies🎞️)
👇🏾

First, why is listening hard?

It’s because we have:
- the fear of being wrong
- an inability to be present
- a desire for validation
- a lack of curiosity
- the urge to impress
- a feeling of superiority