Product Habits - The founder and funder experience

A Technique To Accelerate Your Progress

This is a fantastic read that gives you enough detail to replicate the process it describes, should you find it valuable. It centers around a concept called Risk-Reduction Rate (RRR), which advocates for prioritizing tasks not in terms of absolute risk, but the amount of risk they will reduce per hour or dollar you invest. This framework is meant to help you order your work in a way that, over time, reduces the risk of your company or project failing. 

The Founder and Funder Experience

This is my overarching thesis for building great companies: Hunt for a problem worth solving, and then solve it better than anything else on the market. It's better to come up with solutions that serve as genuine fixes versus quick bandaids—building a startup around the former is more invigorating and valuable. In a recent conversation with the Format One team, I talk about problem hunting, my five-day MVP rule, and how to solve for the future faster. You can watch it here.

5 KPI Management Best Practices for 2021

It has become commonplace for tech companies to use a KPI framework for business goals. But, if you don't have a process in place to fully manage KPIs, setting them in the first place is relatively pointless. This is a useful read about how to actually execute, track, and analyze KPI progress throughout the year. 

The Point of Product Analytics Is Revenue

This article cuts right to the point: If you're building a product for businesses, it needs to clearly help those businesses generate more revenue. Product analytics in particular can help you drive revenue, but only if you measure and apply learnings effectively. Read this if you want some food for thought on how to use analytics to drive conversion, retention, reduced churn, time to market, and business efficiencies. 

Productivity for Product Managers

John Yeung interviewed more than 50 product managers last year about their workflows and processes. Now, he's sharing his valuable list of distilled learnings. A few things I found particularly important: beware of splintering information, progressively organize, and remember that there is no such thing as a perfect system. This is written from the lens of product management but is helpful for quite literally anyone looking to be more productive. 

How to Build an Attribution Model for Your Business

One of the hardest things about marketing is understanding how to effectively test, measure, and double down on what's working. If you want to know which marketing strategies or channels are working best for your business, you need to build out a multi-touch attribution model. There is currently no one-stop-shop, but here are a handful of strategies you can glue together to help you measure your marketing efforts more effectively. 

The Last SaaS Churn Guide You'll Ever Need to Read

If you can find ways to reduce churn as much as possible early on, your chances of growing a healthy, sustainable business over time increase exponentially. The two main types of churn you have to consider are customer and revenue churn. This is a bookmark-worthy read on how to calculate churn, determine an acceptable churn rate for your business, and reduce preventable churn over time. 

How To Feel Productive as a Manager

Generally, managers start out as independent contributors. The switch to managing can feel jarring because it's hard to get a feel for how you can best add value when your people are doing the work implementation. Job satisfaction is going to feel different for you. I agree with this outline of the three ways you can have an enormous impact and ultimately help your team thrive.