This post is an attempt to synthesize my current thinking about product development. It’s not meant to be exhaustive or original but, instead, to force clarity and help me be consistent about how I operate. Cycling and Speed Before I get into the details, I believe that just as important as what you do (at each step in the process) is how fast you do it. I’m very much a fan of Certain To Win ,…
Being Data-Pilled Andrej Karpathy was pretty data-pilled in his podcast with Dwarkesh last year. Seemed bearish on AI’s current state and seemed to attribute that to the poor quality of the internet as a dataset. This reminded me of the “data-centric AI” trend from a few years ago. During the deep learning boom, everyone obsessed over model architectures. Then people realized cleaning data could…
Book 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy Author Hamilton Helmer Published October 27, 2016 Elegant = “simple but not simplistic”. Strategy must be elegant. Also relates to “Occam’s razor”. A Strategy framework must be “simple but not simplistic.” If not simple, then concepts cannot be easily retained for day-to-day reference—usefulness is lost. If simplistic, then you risk missing…
Bio/ healthtech is notoriously a volatile and uncertain industry. There’s been even more uncertainty recently with all of the changes at HHS/FDA. One thing is certain: with all the cuts in personnel, biopharma and biotech will likely more even slowly than they have historically, which is to say glacially . These are crisis-inducing changes, but also a massive opportunity. US healthcare is broken…
Title Lean Analytics Author Alistair Croll, Benjamin Yoskovitz Published April 16, 2013 Lean startup methodology is a way to mitigate/ reduce risk by prioritizing learning. Learn what you can sell, then make it. The Lean Startup movement is galvanizing a generation of entrepreneurs. It helps you identify the riskiest parts of your business plan, then funds ways to reduce those risks in a quick,…
Title Blue Ocean Strategy Author W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne Published January 20, 2015 Red oceans are markets that already exist. Blue oceans are markets that do not. Red oceans represent all the industries in existence today. This is the known market space. Blue oceans denote all the industries not in existence today. This is the unknown market space. In the red oceans, industry boundaries are…
Book Unlocking the Customer Value Chain: How Decoupling Drives Consumer Disruption Author Thales S. Teixeira and Greg Piechota Published February 19, 2019 The concept of the “customer value chain” Wondering precisely how disruptors were unsettling small parts of incumbents’ businesses, I turned to a basic framework that my colleagues and I teach our students: the customer’s value chain, or CVC. A…
Ever thought you needed another framework for “doing product”? Yeah, me neither. Agile. Lean. Jobs to be done. Customer journey mapping. It’s all a bit much. That said, I recently came upon what may be the most elegant and effective way to build successful products from scratch. It’s called “the 5Ps” and heavily inspired (read: stolen) from The First Round 4Ps and it goes like this: People =>…
Book Thinking In Systems Author Donella H. Meadows and Diana Wright Published December 3, 2008 Essense of systems thinking Once we see the relationship between structure and behavior, we can begin to understand how systems work, what makes them produce poor results, and how to shift them into better behavior patterns. As our world continues to change rapidly and become more complex, systems…
Book Elon Musk Author Walter Issacson Published September 12, 2023 Like him or hate him, Elon Musk is one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history. Since products are mini-businesses and entrepreneurship is the art of building a business from scratch, I think there’s a lot product leaders can learn from his approach. Speed Speed is the most important metric he optimizes for. How fast he makes his…
Book The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done Author Peter Drucker Published 1966 Effectiveness of Knowledge Work Two hundred people, of course, can do a great deal more work than one man. But it does not follow that they produce and contribute more. Knowledge work is not defined by quantity. Neither is knowedge work defined by its costs. Knowledge work is…
There are good reasons for the recent critiques of the product management function in tech. Product leaders have gotten to wrapped up in productivity theater , rather than focusing on delivering true value. Product is not about applying the latest framework, or implementing the right process. Product is about producing . 1 Specifically, it’s about producing something that satisfies a need or…
Book Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value Author Teresa Torres Published May 19, 2021 The essense of capitalism: “Managers must convert society’s needs into opportunities for profitable business.” — Peter Drucker I don’t necessarily agree with this. Boredom/ lack of enjoyment is a problem, and all of these solve for that: In the product…
Data is footage. It’s not “the new oil” . Or “butter” . It’s footage of specific scenes over specific periods of time. Of people, places and events in those scenes. But here’s the thing: no one wants footage, they want films . People want stories, and respond to them better than raw, unedited facts. Pre-Production Just like making a film from footage, data can only be made compelling when it is…
Strategy Often Seems Complicated Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting article exploring how business strategy principles can be used to enhance personal life. However, the author’s lengthy 7-step process made it pretty impractical. Their approach seemed overly complicated and not specific enough to be easily actionable, typical of an academic perspective. Wasn’t able to finish…
Book The User Experience Team of One: A Research and Design Survival Guide Author Leah Buley Published July 9, 2013 User research vs user experience (UX) User research is about understanding users and their needs, and user experience design is about designing a user’s interactions with a product from moment to moment. Goal of UX design = user happiness When the point of contact between the product…
Book The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed and happiness Author Morgan Housel Published September 8, 2020 Happiness = results - expectation Modern capitalism is a pro at two things: generating wealth and generating envy. Perhaps they go hand in hand; wanting to surpass your peers can be the fuel of hard work. But life isn’t any fun without a sense of enough. Happiness, as it’s…
Book How Data Happened: A History from the Age of Reason to the Age of Algorithms Author Chris Wiggins, Matthew L. Jones Published March 21, 2023 John Tukey’s principles of data analysis Data analysis must seek for scope and usefulness rather than security Data analysis must be willing to err moderately often in order that inadequate evidence shall more often suggest the right answer Data analysis…
Project management is often wrongly confused with product management. To be fair, it can be a delicate distinction, and the fact that they both start with p doesn’t help. (Not to mention program management!) The way I’ve been thinking about the difference recently can be captured by the following, where \(J\) is a measure of project success and \(D\) a measure of product success: \[\begin{align*}…
Book Swipe to Unlock: The Primer on Technology and Business Strategy Author Parth Detroja, Aditya Agashe, Neel Mehta Published September 19, 2017 Great quote on agency When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money.…
Book The Right It: Why So Many Ideas Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Succeed Author Alberto Savoia Published February 26, 2019 The Law of Market Failure Here are the main takeaways from Part I, worth repeating, memorizing, and perhaps tattooing somewhere on your body as a reminder: The Law of Market Failure: Most new ideas will fail in the market-even if competently executed. Most new ideas fail…
Becoming Data-driven Being a data-driven product team is critical to being competitive in the modern digital product marketplace. [1] [2] However, many teams tend to overweight the importance of technology adoption, relative to culture and process change, in efforts to become more data-driven. [3] Thus, product teams should begin their data-driven transformation by firstly buying into and applying…
Book Living in Data: A Citizen’s Guide to a Better Information Future Author Jer Thorp Published May 4, 2021 Data: a new era for the computer “Data” has always been a restless word. It first appeared in the English language on loan from Latin, where it meant “a thing given, a gift delivered or sent.” It spent its early years in the shared custody of theology and mathematics. The clergyman Thomas…
Book First Things First Author Stephen R. Covey Published July 14, 2015 Importance of production capacity (PC): A significant part of effectiveness in any role is in the balance between developing and doing, between production (P) and increasing our production capability (PC). We see it in the executive who goes to a seminar to learn things that will help her be more effective in her business…
Product Operations Product operations is a relatively recent term ( probably invented by marketers ) which refers to a subfunction of product management that integrates and manages feedback collected from analytics and customer success to inform product development and strategy. But there’s another meaning of the term “product operations” that I think is equally important for some products, which…
Book Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger Author Peter Bevelin Published January 1, 2007 This book was dense with rational and highly useful frameworks for thinking. Loved it. A couple nuggets below. Status Quo and Do-Nothing Syndrome You can’t get anything done when there are constant objections to action and progress. Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be…
Book The Personal MBA Author Josh Kaufman Published December 30, 2010 This is the best, most practical Business 101 book I’ve ever read. Highly recommend. Below are some nuggets, but by no means do they capture the full comprehensiveness of the book. Automation is never a fix for a broken process or value chain, but instead amplifies the properties of that process. The first rule of any technology…
Book User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product Author Jeff Patton, Peter Economy Published October 21, 2014 Importance of product ownership and decision-making. Don’t design by committee: In my vision of good product development, the product owner is a critical leader. He keeps the product and whole team focused on moving the same direction. The alternative is design by…
The AI Cold Start Problem Here’s the scenario. You want to be fancy and build a product that leverages some of the latest and greatest in AI to satisy and delight your (future) users. Given all the recent developments (like GPT-3 ), you want to use a pre-trained model to do the leg work but realize, after some light experimentation, you’ll need more data to futher optimize the model for your use…
Objectives This should be done at the beginning of a product management/ development lifecycle: Describe 3-5 high-level objectives that your business wants to achieve with their product(s) For each of those objectives, list 3-5 quantifiable key results that define the criteria for determining whether that objective was achieved. These key results should be metrics that can be tracked throughout…
Ever get frustrated by to keep your resume up-to-date on your Github Pages website? Here’s the process/ workflow I came up with to make that process easier using Google Drive and some light automation. Create a Google Cloud Platform account (if you don’t have one already), and enable the Google Drive API. Configure the OAuth consent screen for a Desktop application. Also make sure that all of the…
Book High Output Management Author Andrew Grove Published 1983 Teams and Leverage High output work fundamentally depends on teams. And the output of a team depends on the effectiveness of the team manager, in the sense that they can influence them to increase output. The second idea is that the work of a business, of a govemment bureacracy, of most forms of human activity, is something pursued not…
It’s pretty incredible how little leaders in civilian organization delegate. Down right criminal. Delegation not only increases leverage for your highest value people (hopefully those on your leadership team), but is also the only way your organization learns and evolves. Delegation helps you complete more work in less time using parallelism, while also enabling your org to evolve. Win-win all…
Much ink has been spilled over the relationship or dichotomy between management and leadership. But even still there are managers and leaders who don’t appreciate the difference or haven’t taken the time to. It occurred to me that it might be more digestable in tabular form. The left represents what leaders do or what leadership is, the left what managers do or what management is. Leadership…
No News is Good News Ever hear this quote? Half of what we currently believe is true is actually wrong. We just don’t know which half. Except, when something is new–say, like a new scientific discovery–it’s probably wrong more than 50% of the time because it hasn’t yet stood the test of time. This is why you may want to read only older books that are “good” because they’ve already been thoroughly…
Competence vs. Comprehension Daniel Dennett in “The Evolution of Minds” talks about competence vs. comprehension: how organisms/ systems that evolve don’t comprehend/ understand why they’ve evolved the functions/ compentencies they have. Understanding is another whole level above being competent at something, and usually an unnecessary part. Birds evolved the capacity for flight (competency),…
Vagueness and Philosophy vs. Science Recently read this interesting article that argues against video verification in sports, that is using instant replay to assist referees in making close calls. The argument was basically as follows: inherently rules in sports (and other domains of human activity) are very difficult to make specific enough to eliminate all vagueness , and so because of this…
A Race To Somewhere Starting Nowhere Working at a startup is like you’re in a rally car trying to win a race where the finish line is unknown, the route is unclear and your speed virtually limitless. The faster you go the more fuel you use, and you only have limited fuel. So maybe you keep some fuel in reserve. Or maybe some company gives you free fuel in exchange for putting ads on your car. Or…
Generalists > Specialists in Data Science I recently read an HBR article by Stitch Fix’s CIO Eric Colson , where he argues that generalist—or “full-stack”—data scientists are much more desirable than specialists for effective data science teams. 1 According to Colson, generalists work best, for all except the largest data science teams (where he still recommends starting out with generalists and…
Ne te quaesiveris extra. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance Man is his own star; and the soul that can Render an honest and a perfect man, Commands all light, all influence, all fate; Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. John Fletcher, An Honest Man’s Fortune I’ve always been drawn to the opening quote of Ralph…
Hardware Is Harder Than Software This seems like a pretty obvious point, but in a world where Big Data, AI and Software are King it bears repeating. (And this from a guy who very much believes they should be.) In addition, I think this worth reiterating to those who are enamored or even just excited about the prospects of software/ computation to make messy/ difficult endevours easier or more…
In Zero to One , Peter Thiel’s manifest on startups and the future, he argues that innovation —doing/ creating something new—is fundamentally more important than globalization —implementing/ copying in other places what has been shown to work in innovation centers. One of his main arguments is that globalization focuses on dis/replacing workers with automation, while innovation focuses on…
Understanding a scientific talk or paper is difficult business. Not only because the concepts can often be complicated, counterintuitive or unsettling. But also because even scientific talks/ papers are subject to errors. Depending the field’s expected level of rigor, any given paper or talk will inevitably present with errors and ambiguities, especially when probed. Moreover, these errors can…
Specificity and Biology Generality has never been medicine or biology’s forte. In the biological sciences, the more specific, the better. (Generally speaking.) Biologists have always been more concerned with naming new species, or finding new unique biological pathways or mechanism. You can see this in any cursory study of molecular biology. The naming schemes in molecular biology are…
First, if you haven’t already heard Guy Raz’s “How I Built This” , definitely give it listen. Excellent stuff. What’s most interesting about many of his stories is that at some point in the life of an idea, when it gets to the point of being fully fleshed out and instantiated into a fully functioning company, it starts to live on its own. And oftentimes the founders will take a backseat role, or…
Recently read this piece on Elon Musk’s most recent venture, Neuralink. Fascinating article for a fascinating company. To set the stage for Musk’s vision for the company, Urban recaps not only the whole of human history but also the history/ evolution of cephalization generally. Implying that arguably we humans are the peak/ pinnacle of a long process of nervous system evolution, driven by the…
Book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Author Yuval Noah Harari Published 2011 This is undoubtedly the most elegant/ clear/ succinct, comprehensive and scientifically accurate account of the history of humanity ever written . If you have not yet read this book, stop what you are doing, go buy/ borrow it now and read. This book will straight-up make you a better human .
Recognition And Compensation Most of the time I’m against all professional recognition and large amounts of compensation (i.e. awards and money). Because it distracts from the work. After all, what matters is the results, the product, the endpoint. Which is all fine and true up until the point where someone gets recognized/ compensated whom doesn’t seem to really deserve it, forcing me to come to…
Wrong Is More Likely The state of “being right”, in the most general sense (i.e. for any statement of fact, solution to problem) can be described as: \[\prod_{i=1}^{N} b_i = 1 \hspace{2.5mm} \mid \hspace{2.5mm} b_i \in \{0, 1\}\] Where \(N\) is the number of “atomic” assertions/ pieces/ dimensions (i.e. binary variables \(b_i\) that take value True = \(1\) or False = \(0\)), which that statement/…
This is an argument for biology as a viable medium for engineering. Biology Is Soft Biology has failed to find a central/ general/ formal framework for thinking about organisms. In this way it’s always been unlike its peers, physics and chemistry, which translate much better to the applied domain. Sure, we have the central dogma: DNA \( \to \) RNA \( \to \) Protein. Which gives a high-level…