Product Cafe: Data, Data everywhere
Hey everyone!
Welcome to this week's edition of Product Cafe. Every week, we curate everything interesting around product management and send it right into your inbox 📩.
Product good read 📚
I watched a movie last week. Superb cast. It was a bliss to watch those incredible talents giving their best throughout the film. Still, I felt something was missing.
So this is what it is. I couldn't figure out the plot till the end. It was going directionless. If you think about it, it applies to many daily life scenarios. Whenever you don't have a goal to move forward to, we feel planless and unfocused.
However, what are goals without being able to track them? So, I thought I'd talk a little about the important goals and numbers to track in Product management in this week's Product Cafe. Hope you find it helpful!
These are the metrics great Product Managers track.
We don't want to do things just for namesake. So here are the reasons why data is something you need to wrap your head around.
Gives you important user feedback on your product
Helps you build the right thing and solve problems quickly
Is a powerful communication tool between teams and stakeholders
In this article, Product School has laid out the main metrics used by great Product Managers to build even greater products.
Curated list ✨
Measure what matters
A good system shortens the road to achieving the goal. But many businesses fail to execute on their best opportunities. They want to achieve great things, but they don’t have a system for managing focus, alignment, and accountability. “Measure What Matters” by John Doerr explains how “OKRs” can help organizations thrive.
Read the summary here —> Measure what matters
The root causes of Product Failure
Why do most products fail? Is it because focusing on the outputs than outcomes? Relying on the wrong source of ideas? Failing to set a clear vision based on customer problems? Marty Cagan, in this video, addresses the 10 main reasons product fail and defines each problem and how he implements a successful approach in the teams he works with. You clearly don't want to miss out on this.
Watch the video here —> The root causes of Product failure by Marty Cagan
Ask me anything
Not sure where you are at your career? Have a ton of questions but not sure whom to ask to? We are hosting an AMA on 22nd December. The doors are open to fire all your questions about anything from building a startup from scratch to taking a call on whether you need to do that long-planned MBA, or how to take the next step in your career ladder? and literally anything. See you there!
Register here —> Ask Me Anything - What’s next for mid-level PMs?
Top pick from our collection 🪧
Product-Led growth: What it’s all about?
When Brian and Joe started Airbnb, many people listed out on their website. But there weren’t too many bookings. Brian and Joe wanted to solve this. So they grabbed their cameras, went to each one of the NYC listings, clicked pictures themselves, brushed them a little, and uploaded them on the website. What they saw on the other side were terrific results. So later, they hired photographers and paid them to take pictures of the owner’s listings. It worked, their strategy worked, people started booking on a large number, and the rest is history.
If you look deep into it, what they did was not just smart but also scalable. Scalability is the most important problem businesses don’t have but still try to solve.
This applies to Product-Led growth as well because it focuses on the product as the primary source of scalable and sustainable business growth.
We unboxed many interesting things about Product-Led growth from our conversation with Ashwin Gupta, the Co-founder of Reslash, a virtual space company that is changing the landscape of how we spend time and interact in a virtual first world.
What's hot in the industry? 🔥
15 startups selected by Sequoia for its first female founder program for South Asia
Sequoia Spark Fellowship is a new program for female founders in Southeast Asia. This program includes 15 startups led by 20 female founders in fields such as Ed-tech, fintech, SaaS, and cryptocurrencies hailing from India, Singapore, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Dubai.
They’ll take part in monthly mentorship sessions, have access to select Surge sessions, and receive hands-on support from Sequoia India portfolio specialists across hiring, legal, finance, product, technology, and marketing
The winners of the first Sequoia Spark Fellowship: Airschool, Ascend Now, Early Steps Academy, Findeed, Finllect, Friz, Jify, Linecraft AI, Loop Panel, Milky Way AI, Nume Crypto, Rowy, Sribuu, and The Nestery. (Source: SaaS industry)
Twitter reshuffles engineering and product leadership after CEO transition
Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, who replaced Jack Dorsey, is reorganizing the company's leadership structure across product and engineering.
To drive increased accountability, speed, and operational efficiency,” the company is establishing general manager positions, and those executives “will lead all core teams across engineering, product management, design, and research.”
Kayvon Beykpour, the former head of product, will become Twitter’s general manager of consumers. Revenue product lead Bruce Falk will become general manager of revenue, and vice president of engineering Nick Caldwell will assume the role of general manager of core tech. (Source: CNBC)
That’s a wrap for this week!
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