Product Habits - Product roadmap detours

Success and Failure at Pebble

A decade ago, Pebble Watch launched on Kickstarter. The team ended up raising $10 million from 68,000 people worldwide. In the few years that followed, the company sold 2 million watches and did over $230 million in sales. Pebble successfully invented the smartwatch and created a brand new product category. But they couldn't build a sustainable and profitable business in the end. Co-founder Eric Migicovsky reflects on why Pebble didn't work in the long run. 

DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content

Last week, OpenAI released DALL-E2, which produces and edits images based on textual prompts. It looks poised to compete with artists, but if you dig deeper, DALL-E2 highlights a significant missing piece in a metaverse future. This is a fascinating read about what is to come. 

Inside the Longest Atlassian Outage of All Time

On Monday, April 4th, a multi-week outage began for Atlassian. Close to 400 companies have had no access to JIRA, Confluence, OpsGenie, and other Atlassian Cloud services. For the first week, the company mainly went silent. It took nine days for executives to acknowledge the outage publicly. This is a breakdown of what happened and what Atlassian customers are saying now. 

The Joy of Small Projects

Many people experiment with side hustles, but few get very far with them. This is often the result of choosing something too big to work on. I stumbled upon this simple process for figuring out how to narrow the scope of side projects, pick an aggressive completion timeline, and reduce the project to its absolute minimum. Read this if you want to get better at completing the projects you start. 

Product Roadmap Detours

Every SaaS company will inevitably face the decision to break its product roadmap to build a one-off feature or custom integration for a significant customer. Unfortunately, there isn't a one-size-fits-all formula for roadmap detours. While the default response to customer one-offs should be "no," sometimes you have to pursue opportunities that will give your company significant leverage. Here are some considerations for breaking your roadmap. 

16 Ways To Generate Stellar Content Ideas

Most content creators will tell you that sometimes ideas come to them effortlessly. Other times, you can't think of a single thing to write. If you're in a content dry spell, this is a helpful list of suggestions for uncovering unique topics that will drive your target audience directly to you. My favorite two are hosting virtual lunches for customers and looking for pain points in case studies. 

Nobody Cares About Your Story

A few years ago, virtually no one was pulling back the curtain and building their startups in public. Now, so many people are doing it that it's no longer remarkable. Michael Forrest started a thought-provoking conversation on Indie Hackers about #BuildInPublic. I highly recommend reading through the comments on this thread.

Seven Legends of Leverage

Doing the right work will always be more important than the amount of work. Astronomical success is often not the culmination of a master 10-year plan but rather the result of compounding leverage. These examples will encourage you to build leverage into your work and life. I was particularly impressed by the story of how a laid-off hardware engineer built a web3 app worth over $1 billion in a year.