Product Habits - The 9 habits of ultra-fast iterations

The Upsides to Unshipping

What if we valued killing features and products as much as we honored shipping them? We often hold onto features because a small number of people still use them and we don't want to disappoint them. But it's worth asking how unshipping might actually improve product metrics. This is a thought-provoking read about when it might be time to sunset a product or feature—and how to do it successfully.  

A Retrospective After a Startup's Year One

Wynter, a feedback panel company with a software layer on top, officially launched in the middle of the pandemic last year. This retrospective about the company's first year is a good reminder that almost always, Year One is filled with twists and turns, plenty of important learnings, and sometimes unexpected pivots. Here's what the company's growth looked like—and how they made decisions along the way to gradually build Wynter from the ground up. 

Crazy New Ideas

In his latest essay, Paul Graham captures a thought many of us have had before: Sometimes crazy ideas actually work. Graham argues that while most implausible-sounding ideas are bad and can be safely dismissed, this isn't always the case—especially when the person proposing the idea is both a domain expert and a reasonable person. When you come across the latter, the best thing you can do is ask questions instead of making judgments. Indeed, the craziest-sounding ideas are often the ones that change the world. 

The 9 Habits of Ultra-Fast Iterations

When you're first starting a company, speed really matters. It saves you precious time on your path to product-market fit. The ability to build ultra-fast product iterations becomes a competitive advantage. I agree with many of the lessons in this article—especially the advice to focus less on perfecting product quality in the beginning and more on doing things quickly and building out from the core. This is a valuable read on tightening feedback loops and driving constant improvement as you learn and scale.

Prioritization Skills for Senior and Staff Engineers

As engineers become more senior, one of the toughest transitions to make is learning how to balance new priorities as decisions get harder and the chances of failure increase because you have less context compared to earlier roles. This is a helpful way to think about prioritization. In a nutshell, make sure you've got time blocked on your calendar to do deep strategic thinking. 

How To Scale SEO Traffic in 6 Months

If you've struggled with SEO in the past, this article is clarifying. The Grow and Convert team shares what they've learned recently from helping younger domains grow organic traffic. This case study explains in helpful detail how route optimization software company Circuit managed to scale organic traffic by 1484% and increase conversions by 313%. The results are impressive and there is a lot to learn from this example. 

The Complete Guide to Lifecycle Marketing

Winning customers over takes time. It tends to happen in the (often lengthy) process of building trust through multiple thoughtful touchpoints. While many startups place emphasis on their conversion funnel, I'm a big advocate for lifecycle marketing, which considers a customer long after they make their first purchase. If you don't have a lifecycle marketing strategy already, this guide will help you build one from the ground up. 

The Path to Self-Growth

These three inner "monsters" can cause a lot of harm—and all of us has fallen prey to at least one of them at some point. I've found it helpful to keep a journal and make note of when I might be falling into patterns that don't support my personal growth. If you can identify with any of these "monsters," it's worth tracking when and how they show up so you can address them more definitively over time.