Multi-product strategy is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, both for the day job and via my various side hustles.

but it’s something where I’ve seen many PMs get into trouble

a 🧵 about Add-On Features vs New Product Lines one of the clearest articulations of how to think about additional products is this diagram from @reforge

when you ship products long enough, you screw up some launches - everyone has a war story like this, some people even have a couple

I had 3. In the span of 24 hours.

A 🧵about an @AmazonKindle @audible_com integration debacle One of the joys of working at Amazon was the hundreds of little tools available to every employee to explore service interfaces.

I was the PM on point for the launch of the original
@AmazonKindle
Fire tablet a decade ago, and today I want to share one of the many war stories I collected from that experience

a 🧵 on how Amazon leverages compound interest in decision making First, let us hear from famous ex-Amazonian Albert Einstein:

“Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.”

Spending as much time as I do studying / building SaaS products, you tend to see patterns emerge. I’m going to share one today for how to bootstrap a 0 -> 1 SaaS offering in 3 steps.  (Yes, I know the diagram looks like a barn - I struggled with how to visualize it.)

In the B2B domain, between buying into a vision of your product and actually fulfilling that vision / achieving real value, there are a slew of hurdles that your prospects and customers face, and these add up to a total cost of ownership (TCO)

🧵 you should be focused on minimizing TCO for your customer as a company and product team

Hiring is probably my favorite way to spend my time professionally. Today I wanted to highlight a term I keep in my back pocket when evaluating people:

exponential hires ( 🧵) It’s a concept I got from my first boss at Twitter, at a time when we were scaling rapidly (people, technology, process).

Planning cycles (annual / quarterly / etc) always brings up the topic of output vs. outcomes. One of the better books I’ve read on the topic is Radical Focus by @cwodtke, which is basically a parable about implementing OKRs.

You read that correctly. I studied a book on OKRs. 🧵 Let me start by saying I'm not generally what you'd characterize as a "process person"; I tend to focus on getting things done and worry about improving the mechanics after, time permitting and team willing.

transitioning to management requires a major mindset shift: you have to let go of your "IC prime"

a 🧵 What is your IC prime? It’s a concept I made up, but basically think of it as the period in your career when you, as a directly responsible inidividual (DRI), have the most impact

Multi-product strategy is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, both for the day job and via my various side hustles. And one of the clearest articulations of how to think about additional products is this diagram from Reforge.

let's deconstruct it in a 🧵... A couple of quick takeaways:

1/ one key reason to add surface area to your product is to expand product-market fit (PMF)

2/ the 3 ways to expand PMF are (a) same product, new market (b) new product, same market, or (c) some combo of (a) and (b)

let's talk about (b) in this 🧵

some of my favorite questions to “pressure test” strategy for B2B SaaS products 🧵 1️⃣ what is your primary customer acquisition channel?

been thinking through opinions I’ve formed about B2B SaaS products the last few years (as a builder, as an advisor, as a user), and I wanted to share out just to see if they’re more widely held, obvious but true, totally counter-intuitive, or perhaps way off-base... 🧵 80/20 equilibrium

getting your user base to an 80/20 split between consumers / creators is a good milestone (lots of successful products live at this ratio)

when you ship products long enough, you screw up some launches - everyone has a war story like this, some people even have a couple

I had 3. In the span of 24 hours.

A 🧵about an @AmazonKindle @audible_com integration debacle One of the joys of working at Amazon was the hundreds of little tools available to every employee to explore service interfaces.

cargo culting (blindly attempting to copy/paste culture) is an interesting organizational anti-pattern

I've been collecting some of the mostly commonly cargo culted corporate customs 🧵

would love to add to this list Amazon’s bar raiser approach to hiring

aboutamazon.com/news/workplace…

Every PM deals with the problem of too many customer requests to accommodate. I find a now / next / later view of the roadmap helps orient customers on if / when you might get to their ask. But there tends to be a lot of stuff in that later bucket…

a 🧵on customer love the moment when you have to share your roadmap and inevitably disappoint someone in your user base is always tough

In a recent discussion with a PM in my network, I learned that Asana actually does something interesting / unique when presenting their roadmaps to customers...

I was the PM on point for the launch of the original @AmazonKindle Fire tablet a decade ago, and today I want to share one of the many war stories I collected from that experience

a 🧵on how Amazon leverages compound interest in decision making First, let us hear from famous ex-Amazonian Albert Einstein:

“Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.”

I did a 5 min audio episode of my newsletter yesterday talking about product intuition vs product conviction

key concepts I covered in the snippet 🧵

runthebusiness.substack.com/p/product-intu… 1/ the difference between product intuition vs conviction

(they're not the same thing, but people hear them as such)

It’s that time of year for many folks: annual planning cycle. And I’ve been pondering why sometimes good intentions lead to bad strategies…

GIGO. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

🧵 Not an original take by me - I got it from @hnshah and @nbashaw. The basic thesis is folks spend too much time on strategy frameworks and not enough time on strategy inputs. But what are the other reasons people fall into the GIGO trap when working on strategy?

Multi-product strategy is something I spend a lot of time thinking about, both for the day job and via my various side hustles. And one of the clearest articulations of how to think about additional products is this diagram from Reforge.

let's deconstruct it in a 🧵... A couple of quick takeaways:

1/ one key reason to add surface area to your product is to expand product-market fit (PMF)

2/ the 3 ways to expand PMF are (a) same product, new market (b) new product, same market, or (c) some combo of (a) and (b)

let's talk about (b) in this 🧵

One of the hardest concepts for me to wrap my head around when moving into PM was “product market fit” (PMF).

It’s easy enough to describe: “pull in the market”. And I was told many a time that if I wasn’t “feeling it” then I “didn’t have it”.

Here's how I made sense of it 🧵 The job of a PM is to not only achieve PMF but sustain it over the life of a product as the market evolves - how are you supposed to do that when you can’t pinpoint where you stand and where you need to get to?

cargo culting (blindly attempting to copy/paste culture) is an interesting organizational anti-pattern

I've been collecting some of the mostly commonly cargo culted corporate customs 🧵

would love to add to this list Amazon’s bar raiser approach to hiring

aboutamazon.com/news/workplace…

I was the PM on point for the launch of the original @AmazonKindle Fire tablet a decade ago, and today I want to share one of the many war stories I collected from that experience

a 🧵on how Amazon leverages compound interest in decision making First, let us hear from famous ex-Amazonian Albert Einstein:

“Compound interest is the 8th wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it; he who doesn't, pays it.”