Product Habits - Five levels of distributed work

One of the Most Memorable Moments in My Career

This past week, I did an AMA on Capiche. I answered the community's questions about remote work, SaaS products, team collaboration, and startup management. One of my favorite questions was about a memorable learning moment I've had in my career. My answer: I had a billion dollar mistake that was incredibly painful, but also important and memorable. Here's my full response to that question. 

Why You (and Your Manager) Shouldn't Be Afraid of Remote Work

All of a sudden, people are working from home for the first time, and learning how to adapt on the fly. How are people making the adjustment? The RescueTime team looked at anonymized datasets to take a peek into how productive people are when working from home compared to those in an office. They share their discoveries in this piece. Do you find that working from home has made you more or less productive? 

The Ultimate Back-Office Guide for Your Startup

If you're in the early startup stages and scaling your company between 0 and 50 team members, this article is a must-read. It's all about building a back-office stack, which is not necessarily the most exhilarating part of building a company, but it is incredibly important. This straightforward checklist will help you cover everything from bookkeeping and expense management, to HR compliance and benefits. This one is worth bookmarking.

SurveyMonkey's CMO on Making Marketing More Human

Two things are happening concurrently: the consumerization of business software, as well as the consumerization of software distribution. As a result, it's more important than ever to remember that you're marketing to humans, not businesses. This is a worthwhile lesson that has been a longtime coming. Now is the time to humanize marketing, put the customer first, and make sure solving some of your audience's biggest challenges is at the heart of your company's mission. 

SaaS Businesses Weather Hard Times by Focusing on Efficient Growth

This article is timely for SaaS businesses. For the past decade, SaaS has been in a bull market. But, we're now in an unprecedented time along with virtually every other industry in the world, and it's worth asking ourselves these questions:

• How will these macro events impact my business?
• Which metrics should I pay attention to? 
• How do I plan for 2020? 

Enterprise Growth Wisdom From IBM's Zoltan Szalas

If you're thinking about how best to build and manage a growth team in the midst of an ever-evolving global landscape, you'll appreciate this read. Zoltan Szalas leads growth for IBM's data and AI portfolio. He focuses heavily on a data-driven approach to growth, and consistently looks for opportunities to increase user satisfaction while achieving revenue-based objectives. I think you'll get a lot out of his insights on how to structure your growth team, who and when to hire, and how to build a technology stack. 

Distributed Work's Five Levels of Autonomy

I thought this was a fascinating breakdown of the various "levels" of distributed work. It starts with "Level Zero," which is when a job cannot be done unless you are physically present (e.g. firefighters, massage therapists, construction workers, etc). "Level Five" is when you consistently perform better by having a remote team than any in-person organization could. Most companies fall in between these two extremes. Where does your business live?