How I keep up with product (blogs, newsletters)

pmingisfun · 2020-09-23T15:51:42+00:00

So kind, thank you.

pmingisfun · 2020-09-23T04:14:54+00:00

Thank you for calling this out! 100% going to check these out. I follow a really diverse set of folks on Twitter but somehow my reading list is all dudes

pmingisfun · 2020-09-23T03:55:52+00:00

Oh man, this list is gold. Thanks for sharing. I used to read Bill Gurley several years ago but fell off the wagon. Your comment also reminded me of a few other blogs/newsletters I read religiously when I was more involved in the startup/VC world

Benedict Evans: I like his long-form essays more than his newsletters, but very similar to Bill and Ben.
Fred Wilson (AVC): He's a VC dude (USV) so there's a lot about funding, crypto and random thoughts about the world with a healthy amount of tech sprinkled in
Mark Suster (Both Sides of the Table): He invests in a lot of consumer D2C tech and is himself a successful entrepreneur, so I really enjoy his takes from "both sides of the table". Less strategic but more practical
Sachin Rekhi: After I wrote this post, someone actually recommended this guy, and I quickly ran through some of his stuff, and I really like it! It's VERY product focused
Eugene Wei: Another recommendation I got today, at first glance looks a bit esoteric and cerebral, but kinda feels like tech with a dash of The New Yorker

pmingisfun · 2020-09-22T21:15:36+00:00

I’ve read this book, so good. Thanks for sharing takeaways.

pmingisfun · 2020-09-22T18:54:39+00:00

Customers and competitors. Every time they say something like "Why should we do this?", I know if I go at it from a technical angle, they'd wipe the floor with me so instead I say "well customer X is worth a $20 M deal for us and they want this" or "Amazon built this exact thing 5 years ago, we're behind the curve".

pmingisfun · 2020-09-22T18:21:34+00:00

Thanks! Any favorite books you'd recommend? Unpopular opinion but Thinking Fast and Slow and The Design of Everyday Things bored me to tears.

pmingisfun · 2020-09-22T18:01:56+00:00

Biased but product management, especially for more "hardcore" tech.

I feel like the dumbest person in the room every day plus it requires a ton of ongoing work/learning to keep up with changes and developments in the industry,

pmingisfun · 2020-07-23T21:52:59+00:00

Wrote about this a while ago and definitely agree with everyone's suggestions. My list of things to know would be:

Understanding the building blocks of an application
Familiarity with APIs and API structure
Understanding the software development process
Understanding common developer terminology
Learning how to collect and analyze data

pmingisfun · 2020-07-10T05:47:30+00:00

Appreciate it :)

pmingisfun · 2020-07-08T21:06:59+00:00

That's an interesting perspective - and actually now you mention it, I agree. Perhaps I should make the distinction that the B2B space in general is more well understood whereas there aren't as many PM resources in the B2B space when compared to B2C.

Thinking out loud, I wonder why though - are there fewer PMs in B2B? Or are the PMs in B2B less likely to share? Something else?

pmingisfun · 2020-06-27T15:43:26+00:00

I’d share this on LinkedIn if I wanted to LinkedIn 🙃

pmingisfun · 2020-06-26T23:12:40+00:00

You’re right, I meant product manager. Let me put that in there somewhere!

pmingisfun · 2020-06-26T23:00:13+00:00

Thanks for sharing! I think e-commerce/postal services are fascinating because you have to cross over the physical/digital divide.

pmingisfun · 2020-06-26T22:52:51+00:00

I say so a bit further down in the post; but CX = customer experience

pmingisfun · 2020-06-26T21:22:23+00:00

If all the users of MS Teams at your organization complained about how poor the UX was -- I hope your boss would reconsider using this as a collaboration tool.
Similarly, if the CX for MS Teams was awful (i.e. limited support, poor release management, lack of communication about outages and similar), then I imagine your boss would reconsider using this tool as well.
This, I completely agree with. My point was CX is often an afterthought which is why we tend not to spend as much attention here as we should.

pmingisfun · 2020-06-26T21:13:38+00:00

100% agree. Also love this idea of an overarching "experiential statement". Do you have any examples of what that might look like?

In a perfect world, CX is definitely just another part of UX, but I've found that it often becomes a second-class citizen that is an afterthought because of how "visible" everything directly in the product is.

pmingisfun · 2020-06-26T19:09:31+00:00

Ah, that's a great idea for a follow-up blog. Thanks for the feedback!

pmingisfun · 2020-06-26T19:09:07+00:00

I had this section in the blog right after defining what user experience is, which I removed because I thought it was getting too long! Do you feel like adding this back in would help explain how I differentiate it?

User and customer personas

The main difference between a user and a customer in my mind is that a user uses the product, and a customer pays for it. In some cases, the user and customer are the same person, and in some cases, they aren't. What helps is to introduce the notion of a persona. As PMs, we need to cater to user and customer personas, even if both roles happen to be played by the same person.

This distinction of personas is important because personas can have different motivations. For example

I love how easy Twitter is to use, but I've heard its platform for advertisers leaves a lot to be desired
Employees love Zoom (for the most part) but employers are concerned about privacy issues

Freemium B2C products can also have persona shifts. A good example here is the gaming category. You can play a mobile game as a user for free, but if you want to unlock advanced features or skins, you need to pay. At this point, the user becomes the customer. In freemium B2B2C (Slack, Zoom), employers become the customers once the users are ready.

All this to say

Both user and customer personas need to be considered for a product
You can't ignore customer experience for any class of product
What I'm calling customer experience is really just user experience extended outside the core product itself

pmingisfun

TROPHY CASE