Dear friends,

Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on.

I’m going to try to be provocative in those essays to trigger a discussion with the community. Please answer, comment, and ping me!

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Walking to be strategic & creative 

Today, I’m going to suggest you do something simple: go outside and walk at least once a day.

It is a habit that has a huge impact on your physical health, your mental health, and your happiness.

Some tips:

• Walk during a one-on-one and have Tactiq take notes for you.

• Walk when you're thinking about an answer, a solution, and dictate it into your Memo app, then use Gladia for a transcript.

• Walk to prepare one-on-one, a new idea!

• Walk just to think about the topic you're currently working on and try to be creative.

Focusing on a subject while walking is the best way to be creative. It allows you to get some fresh air, it makes you mobile, it makes you a bit happier.

It's something that changed my life and I think it will change yours too and will enable Alan to have better strategies in everything we do.

 Nietzsche said “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

You don't need much. 30, 40 minutes a day and you'll see an incredible impact on who you are. 

Some good articles I have read this week

👉 Mochary Method Curriculum: Turn the Ship Around (Matt Mochary)

• A really good overview of what is distributed ownership, linked with proactive communication:

  • Let know what the decisions are before you perform the action

  • Let others ask questions or give feedback. 

  • Go ahead and act if reviewers aren’t available

  • Even if reviewers give dissenting feedback, be still encouraged to do what you think is best, and own the results. 

👉 Zoï fait des check-up de luxe (Les Echos)

• What I find interesting is the fact that it asks to connect to the calendar to make even more precise suggestions.

• This is something I have thought about for a long time, especially to help people walk more, for example.

👉The Next Corner (Farnam Street)

• “Left unchecked organizations default to bureaucracy. People default to distraction.”

• How to fight bureaucracy? By trying to simplify at every occasion

• Focus on what gets results

👉 Brian Chesky’s new playbook (Lenny's Podcast)

I’m sharing this very long summary of the podcast because I find it really interesting and important. I feel there are things we do better and things where we might want to get some inspiration. 

The role of a leader:

• Know how and when to be in the details

• “We made sure that every executive was an expert in their functional domain.”

  • “How do you manage the people without managing their work? How do you give them development if you're not in the details with them on the work?”

• People should aim to have as few people as possible on their team.

• Push for more ambition so people can think differently

• How can we concretely accelerate? Close issues faster? It is the role of leaders to accelerate the pace thanks to bias to action. 

• When I tell somebody it's not good enough, I believe that you have more potential than you're showing me.

Product teams:

• They combined in one role “the inbound product development responsibilities of product manager with the outbound or marketing responsibilities of product marketing”

• Smaller and more senior group is a good tip. Though I have seen incredible “juniors” moving mountains so I would go against this advice in particular cases. 

• Work with functions, manage by influence

Product x marketing x sales:

• “You can't build a product unless you know how to talk about the product.” ➡️ I agree very much with that

• The health of an organization, one simple heuristic is how close is engineering and marketing? ➡️ I think we can make progress here! In our case, it is marketing and sales. 

  • Everyone should think transversely

Product doing product marketing:

• “The product management also does the product marketing. So they're figuring out how people are going to learn about it, they're doing the demos, they're understanding the story, the videos, they're figuring out all the customer touchpoints, making sure everyone understands it.”

  • ➡️ I like this global approach of what is the story of your product. 

• “Our product marketing works with communications. We work months ahead of time on all the different assets.” ➡️ where I’d like us to go

Roadmap:

• Have a single roadmap for the company with one big direction!

  • Super interesting that they don’t split guests and hosts anymore. Is it the equivalent of members & customers for us?

• When there's lack of accountability, then there's a sense that what I do doesn't matter and that creates complacency. 

• “Now what we do is we have a rolling two year roadmap. We don't even really do an annual plan.”

  • I think 2 years is two long for all teams, but I like the fact it is rolling. 

• “Now planning cycle is just a budgeting cycle and most people only spend a week or two on it. Some don't spend any time on it.” ➡️ I think this is great 🙂

• “Product strategy roadmap that gets updated every six months with releases. We release products every May and every November or October.”

Marketing:

• “If you build a great product and no one knows about it, did you even build a product?”

• Performance marketing doesn't create very good accumulating advantages because it's not an investment.

• “We think of marketing as education. That we're educating people on the unique benefits.”

Marketing writing:

• They merged UX Writing and Marketing Writing as it is the same skill. Should we re-think our org on this? 

The role of the CEO:

• “The CEO should be basically the chief product officer of a product or tech company”

• Weekly reviews of most projects. 

  • “The reviews were the thing that allowed us to dictate the pace.”

  • “I would try to see the equivalent of at least a semi assembly of the entire new product we were working on, which allowed me to identify with teams the different bottlenecks happening in the company.”

Product sense:

• “you can't delegate understanding.”

Chapters:

• You should think of each release as a chapter of a story or like an episode of a TV series.

Product ideas:

• Could we do the same as “Guest Favorites” for doctors? Hospitals?

Design:

• Flat design is over or ending. We're going to move back into a world with color, texture, dimensionality, more haptic feedback.

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Let’s talk about this together on LinkedIn or on Twitter. Have a good week!