Product Habits - Product management is hard

Timing Is Everything at a Startup

What often looks like luck can be explained by timing. Bill Gross has founded over 100 companies in the last 30 years and found that timing was the biggest determining factor of success, followed by team and execution. Here's my tweet thread where I share my favorite reads about the topic of startup timing. 

How to Kill a Unicorn

Companies like Notion, Canva, Mailchimp, and Figma have unseated previous category leaders with less money and smaller teams. Chris Frantz argues that they've done it by opting for a product-led growth strategy fueled by virality, and an innovative pricing strategy (read: compelling freemium options). This is a great explanation of how freemium really works for scaling new businesses, making them profitable, and ultimately helping them take over as category leaders. 

How Figma and Canva Are Taking On Adobe—And Winning

Adobe is a very strong company, having made a relatively seamless transition to SaaS and continuing to be best-in-class at M&A. That said, companies like Figma, Canva, and Sketch are creeping in as new market leaders. While it's incredibly difficult to break into a market with such a dominant leader, it's not impossible. These companies are doing it by addressing rapidly changing customer needs. Here's how.

How We Cut Our Dev Cycle by 75%

The Process Street team moved from Scrum to Shape Up (Basecamp's development methodology), which was designed for product development teams who struggle to ship. One of the reframing questions I appreciate about Shape Up is the shift from asking "How long will it take to fix the problem?" to asking "How long are we willing to spend on fixing the problem?". This is how the Process Street team made the switch and cut their dev cycle by 75%. 

Why Product Management Is Hard

Product management is hard because there are rarely one-size-fits-all solutions to problems. There is no such thing as the "right way" to build a product, grow a business, or make an important decision. This jam-packed tweet thread is a reminder that the most important thing you can do is become a clearer thinker and employ thoughtful frameworks.

Making a Decision To Buy

In sales, you want to help people make better decisions rather than come to a compromise. When tradeoffs are framed well, it's easier to sell. I thought this article provided an interesting peek into how people make decisions and why understanding the tradeoffs your potential buyers are willing to make is so important. 

Which B2B Company's Marketing Do You Admire Most?

A few days ago, I asked people on Twitter which B2B company's marketing they most admired. The responses are illuminating. Companies like HubSpot and Drift kept coming up in people's answers, but there were a number of surprising, under-the-radar choices, too. Check out how people responded. 

The $4B ARR Company

The opinions about GoDaddy are all over the map, but none of us can deny the company's success. Founded in 1997, it now achieves $4B in ARR and still grows at around 12% YoY. In 2020 alone, the company spent almost $440 million on marketing and ads. These five interesting learnings from the tech behemoth might surprise you.