Product Habits - Are you taking breaks between meetings?

Building Out Customer Experience at Notion & Dropbox

Kate Taylor has spent her career focused on finding the balance between sales and product at Salesforce, Dropbox, and now Notion. As startups increasingly move toward product-led growth, Taylor shares some of the common traps and most effective strategies she's witnessed during her career. This is a fascinating read about ultimately finding the middle ground between self-serve and enterprise—and how to optimize customer experience on both ends of the SaaS spectrum. 

Microsoft Outlook Now Lets You End All Meetings Early To Give Your Brain a Rest

For decades, calendar software has defaulted to on-the-hour meetings. It's not uncommon to be able to manually set defaults, but most people stick with 30-minute and 60-minute meeting blocks. Outlook just made a significant change: offering company-wide scheduling defaults. While it doesn't solve the problem of digital overload completely, it is a good step in the right direction. 

Why Not Discord for Business?

Pretty much everyone who could start working remotely last year did. Though I think the tech world was headed in this direction already, the speed of change has certainly lead to burnout. The center of remote work these days is Slack, but it doesn't help cultivate the same sense of community we feel in an office. Do you think a tool like Discord, which was built to be a community-first interface, could change the future of remote work? 

How To Build a Technical Leadership Career

I listened to the Inside Intercom podcast recently for an episode featuring Calm's CTO Will Larson. In it, he brings up an interesting point: How else can you continue growing in your engineering career if you know the manager role isn't for you? Beyond a senior engineering role, Will suggests a staff engineer position. Here's what the job entails, and how to navigate the path towards getting there. 

Building Effective Product Systems

As a team grows, things inevitably get more connected and complicated. For instance, if you launch a new feature, it might impact the usage of some preexisting ones. If you improve acquisition, it might decrease retention. The list goes on—and that's because products are systems. Every change you make has second and third-order effects. Here are some thoughts on how you can minimize the impact one change has on the rest of your product. 

The Ultimate Keyword Strategy To Fill Your Editorial Calendar

Everyone knows how important SEO is, but in my experience, many marketers don't intentionally connect their content calendars to a specific keyword strategy. If you haven't done it yet, this is a helpful guide about how to do keyword research, prioritize your keyword list, and build a content calendar in lockstep with your SEO strategy. 

Your Website Is Your Most Important Marketing Asset

Your website is your most important marketing asset, and yet, many startups don't fully explain who their product is for and what problem it solves. This is an important read about the common mistakes startups make when building their first (or second, or third) website—and how you can avoid them. 

Freshworks Journey to India's First SaaS Unicorn and Beyond

Freshworks grew from $1 million to $100 million ARR in just five years. This company teardown explains how Founder Girish Mathrubootham built the company using a red ocean market strategy—in other words, building products where a clear market already exists, and winning with easy configuration, smart execution, and elevated design. Check out the full read here.