Product Habits - Be your own product manager

Be Your Own Product Manager

When you're building a company early on, you typically start with very little help to work on both the big picture and the execution details. You'll be a far more effective founder if you have a system in place to manage your time and bridge the gap between your vision and your to-do list. One of the most important things you can do is radically prioritize, focusing on the highest-value areas and either delegating or releasing the rest. In essence, you need to become your own product manager. Here's how. 

Types of Entrepreneurs

This is a thought-provoking piece that will probably change how you think about entrepreneurs. Jonathan Gheller suggests there are three primary archetypes in entrepreneurs: artisans, business people, and politicians. "These are the core motivations or predispositions that drive entrepreneurs to start companies," Gheller says. 

• The artisan attends to details and respects the creative process
• The business person wants to access power through money and fame
• The politician wants to change how people relate to each other and the world around them

Lessons Learned From Vinod Khosla

Kristina Simmons was Chief of Staff to Vinod Khosla and an investor at Khosla Ventures for almost four years. She shares some of the most valuable lessons she learned during her time at the VC firm. This was a fun one to read. A few that resonated most with me: The people you hire are more important than the plans you make, and you won't make progress if you don't have a belief system. Check out Kristina's list of invaluable lessons. 

The Spectrum of Synchronousness

It's rare I go a day without hearing or reading the words "synchronous" or "asynchronous." This article was written with the engineer in mind, but it applies to every remote worker. The main thesis in this read is that modes of communication are rarely purely asynchronous or synchronous—they live somewhere in between. In order to fully embrace remote working, we have to "shift right," choosing to communicate in ways that enable an equal level of contribution from everyone, regardless of where they are located in the world. How can you shift right?

How To Put Faith in UX Design

Scott Berkun makes an interesting point: Founders' goals, as explained to investors, are to generate profits, growth, and value for shareholders. "How society, the environment, customers, and employees fare is often secondary. They may make things that improve the quality of life, but they are not generally altruistic." It's easy to attribute this exploitation to UX design, but it's much bigger than that. Given this reality, there are only three reasonable choices designers can make. 

How To Measure Marketing ROI

Measuring the value of marketing used to be a black hole. Now, marketers are expected to understand and improve their business impact. It's not the easiest thing to do because building a multi-touch attribution model is an imperfect process. But it's worth trying, and a good place to start is this simple process for measuring marketing ROI. 

Price Optimization in SaaS: Customer Retention

This is one of the questions every company eventually asks: "If we raise the price of our product, will customers leave?" This article explores the relationship between price changes and customer retention. One of the points I found most interesting is that churn in and of itself isn't a sufficient way to measure retention. Instead, you should measure this.