A thread of product management frameworks:

(this might be useful if you are a product manager, product leader, or founder)

Before we jump in:

Frameworks will not fix all your problems.

Used right, they should help you
1) better understand your context
2) create structure for problems
3) communicate ideas & solutions

I often use these frameworks in my product work, sometimes without realizing it.

1/
3X framework (Kent Beck)

A product can be in one of 3 stages
1. Explore
2. Expand
3. Extract

For product leaders this is the most vital framework to understand because almost every important decision should account for the stage your product is

Examples of decisions you can make more rigorously with the 3X framework:
- optimize for inputs, outputs, or outcomes?
- set more qualitative or quantitative goals?
- how to measure progress?
- what skills to look for?
- how to evaluate PMs'

2/
5Qs for product rigor

1) Who is the customer?
2) What is the problem/opportunity?
3) What is the main customer benefit?
4) How do you know customers want this?
5) What is the customer experience?

This framework provides useful structure for product proposals, reviews, etc.

I've read all of Jeff Bezos's 23 years of Amazon shareholder letters twice now.

It's an MBA of its own.

Here's what I learned about startups, entrepreneurship, investing and more:

Your customers are loyal to you right up until the second that someone else offers them a better service.

Listen to customers, but don't just listen
to customers also invent on their behalf.

Here's Jeff Bezos on coming up with the Amazon Kindle:

We set ourselves the incredibly audacious goal of improving upon the physical book.

So don't be afraid to set big goals.

And remember that if you don't execute well, it will be done by someone else.

Many of the problems you'll face will have no textbook solutions, and so you should happily invent new approaches.

A distillation of what @naval said on Clubhouse last night:

What you call chaos I call spontaneity.

A regimented life is like a heartbeat that's non-chaotic; it's a system that’s too ordered. It doesn't have any life to it. And real life has lots of ups and downs, some of them very extreme.

I over-plan, but planning is pretty useless. What tends to dominant life are a small number of Black Swan events in both directions, positive and negative.

Expose yourself to asymmetric upside and lots of good options: things that can become massively important for you.

And you want to avoid the asymmetric downside: anything that can end the game, whether it's through financial ruin, or reputational ruin, or physical ruin.

That requires a certain amount of chaos and spontaneity.

If nothing else, 2020 taught the power of optionality.

We think about planning as linear and controlled, but that's not how the world around us works anymore.

The world is dominated by nonlinearities, so understanding options value is far more important.

Finally finished Ready Player Two. Woof. If anyone has a good palate cleanser rec, let me know.

Thread.🧵

Understanding startups (or scaling startups), metrics & valuations
or
how not to be misled by analog metrics when you run digital scalable ventures.

1st a key clarification: there are many kinds of startups - at one extreme, think of a SaaS venture aimed at getting 1m+ developers to swipe their cards, aiming to be a $1b rev biz in 5+ yrs; at other a local restaurant or a pet salon with no rev goals. In middle varying combos.

VCs invest exclusively in the 1st kind of startups - businesses that grow big very fast (or scale) - typically tech or tech-led (incl software, hardware, biotech) ventures. Tech allows you to serve or acquire next customer at low to zero cost. This is an important criterion.

Businesses that scale (technical definition - rev grows without cost increasing linearly) become very valuable & generate disproportionate return. Hence, a VC fund can invest in 20-25 such scalable startups, & 1 hit can pay for the remaining failures.

VC is thus a protocol for discovering scale. Over time, led by Silicon Valley, but now increasingly by Berlin / Beijing / Guangzhou / Bangalore, a set of rules & playbooks have emerged to help a startup scale.

@austinschless and I are curating some of the best content on Twitter

First up: Creator Economy 101

The best tweets and threads from the best creators on Twitter

Thread 👇

(1/11) “There is a moment I’ll never forget. My mother was teaching a class at our home, and my father hit her in front of the students. It was humiliating..."

(2/11) “Suddenly the science and literature books disappeared from our home. They were replaced by Islamic books, all of which were written by men. The rules were tightened..."

(3/11) “After high school I enrolled at a local boy’s college. I was one of fifteen girls at the entire school. And even though my grades were nothing special, I was very involved in student organizations..."

(4/11) “I felt cursed. Why hadn’t I been born a boy? I had all these ideas, and all these dreams, but nobody would ever recognize them. I spent the next few weeks laying on the sofa, thinking about my life..."

(5/11) “Waqas had begun to view me as more than a business partner. This was obvious to me. And maybe I was interested too, but I knew it wasn’t possible. Waqas was younger than me, and from a different caste..."

This thread is about mental health. A decade ago, I was overwhelmed by panic and depression. On the surface, I seemed fine. Inside, I was a bunch of bandaids. I want to share what I've learned about mental health (from a patient's perspective) in case it helps others. Let's go 👇

What makes us unique as a species -- our remarkable memory and tremendous imagination -- is also the root cause of most of life's suffering.

A worm doesn't have a traumatic memory of being stepped on yesterday. It also doesn't anxiously think about if it will get stepped on tomorrow. But we don't have worm brains. We tend to think about the past and the future. A lot. And we suffer because of it.

Consider the military veteran with PTSD that is haunted by memories of war. Or the sexual assault victim that is overwhelmed by fearful thoughts of if the perpetrator will come back in the future. Our memory and our imagination can work against us. It often does.

Put succinctly, thinking in the past is depression. Thinking in the future is anxiety. And thinking in the present is peace. Our aim is to have a present mind as much as possible. With a present mind, we exonerate ourselves from most of life's suffering.

Highlights of what happened after 36/9 - a thread.

#AUSvIND

Boxing Day Test - we lose Virat, Ajinkya takes over captaincy, with a forgettable loss still lurking. We carry a record of not winning at the 'G while chasing. Aussie win the toss & elect to bat, meaning we'd have to bat fourth.

#AUSvIND

With Shami gone due to injury, Bumrah leads from the front making sure the Aussies bundle out within 200 with the other bowlers chipping in at regular intervals. Ashwin picking Smith for a blob is the most special part of it all.

#AUSvIND

At 64/3 & in the danger of conceding a lead yet again and under immense pressure, captain Rahane chips in with a 💯 which is at par with his Lord's knock & with Jaddu's contribution lower down, India manage a lead of 131.

#AUSvIND

Siraj, the son of an auto rickshawman, having lost his father before the series & not being able to attend the funeral, plays his debut Test, tears up during the national anthem. He was the highest wicket taker for India in the 2nd innings wrapping up Aussies for 200.

#AUSvIND

“Creative intensity” is the rate at which products or services go stale and new ones must be created. It is the key factor in predicting the future of marketplaces.

On the left, the marketplace model will ultimately go extinct. On the right, it will persist.

A thread 🧵👇

When Airbnb and Doordash went public, they became two more data points in a long trend toward marketplaces with higher commissions and that do more work to justify those commissions:

But a business that does all the "work" and takes a 100% commission is… not a marketplace. It’s a big supplier.

Does that mean that marketplaces are just an intermediary step as an industry transitions from many independent suppliers to consolidated super-suppliers?

This “work” includes 3 things:

🤝 Coordination: making the product or service legible (categorizing, pricing), matching buyers and sellers, establishing trust

💸 Capital: the full cost and risk of doing business

💡Creativity: figuring out what to sell in the first place

This framework from @onecaseman and @GiladHorev give us some good categories to describe how marketplaces are evolving to do more and more of this

@david_perell @readwiseio save thread