ProductCafe Newsletter: What is it like to be a PM in Singapore
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Good Afternoon Readers☕️
Welcome to another edition of our weekly newsletter. Zeda.io ensures to keep you updated with the latest industry news, Product Management resources and latest startup news.
Also, we would like to thank our readers for giving us their valuable feedback to improve our Newsletter. We will try to do complete justice to your feedback and come up as more resourceful. We are still keeping the form on in case you missed out last time.
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Good read articles🤓
Your Strategy is not a collection of A/B tests
Many of you know my feelings about A/B testing :-). I thought I would share them in writing and get the conversation started.
Product Strategy != n(A/B tests)
Product strategy is not a collection of A/B tests. Many times, I see product strategy docs written as a list of hypotheses to be tested, alongside the metrics to measure. That approach to product strategy is akin to throwing 10000 things on the wall and see which ones will stick.
In essence, we are "outsourcing" our product strategy to A/B testing tools. And in most cases, it will lead to sub-optimal outcomes and local maximas.
The Product Strategy Stack
As software has eaten the world, product has become the most important lever for a company's success. In the past, companies gained a strategic advantage by excelling in supply chains, logistics, manufacturing, and other operational capabilities. Today, companies win or lose based on the quality of their products—and this puts enormous pressure on product teams to not just deliver products, but deliver products that drive the company's strategy.
But strategy is often misunderstood. The word "strategy" has been stretched to a point where it is almost devoid of meaning. Too often, the terms "vision," "mission," "strategy," "goals," and "roadmap" get conflated into a jumbled mess—leaving product leaders without the context they need to focus their work on the difficult task of moving the company forward.
Webinar/Podcast🎙
What is it like to be a PM in Singapore?
We are delighted to announce that zeda.io has started PM-Spotlight, a webinar series where we bring top product managers from around the world to understand what product management is like in their country.
We will also uncover their journey into product management, a day in their life, what makes them tick, their work culture, lifestyle, habits, and more.
In this very first episode of Product Management across the World, we have a special guest - Keyur Dhamelia who is a Product lead in Singapore. Keyur is also an investor and advisor for Zeda.io.
Let’s find out how his product journey has been like so far.
Building the Decision-Making Habit by Benjamin Keyser
In this ProductTank Berlin talk, Benjamin Keyser, VP Product at Contentful, explains the importance of decision-making in taking a company from the startup stage to the scale-up stage.
The key points of his talk include:
Consequences of poor decisions
Decisions during the startup period
Decision styles
More effect and less affect
Watch the video to see Benjamin’s talk in full or read on for an overview.
What's new going in UX/UI🧑🎨
Designing Spatial Experiences that people would naturally inhabit using Perception Design
Throughout media history, we have always interacted with information on some form of 2D surfaces as observers from the outside. Think books, billboards, TVs, phone screens, car dashboards. People’s ideas have always been presented as flat depictions in one way or another. The only exception (I can think of) applies to theater and sculpture where we enjoy art in its 3D form, and experiential spaces like modern museums and secret cinemas where visitors are expected to engage with the surroundings to live the magic of the story from the inside.
100 Things I Know About Design
1. There are three great design themes: making something beautiful, making something easier, and making something possible.
2. Design is the art of the possible.
3. Design isn’t just about problem-solving; it’s about creating a more humane future.
4. The purpose of any design is to make a hole where the future may enter.
5. Nothing designed exists — until it does.
6. There are all kinds of ways to be a designer and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
7. Design is easy. It's a good design that’s hard.
8. What makes a great designer? Having produced great products. Everything else is potential.
9. Design without thinking is decoration.
10. The best products are also ideas.
Startup News🚀
They create a bridge so that British scaleups can grow in Mexico
In the midst of a health contingency period, the United Kingdom Department of International Trade (UK DIT) , Grupo Financiero Banorte and the Monterrey Digital Hub, joined forces in the joint ScaleUp Bridge program, with the aim of supporting five British fintechs to connect them with Mexico's digital entrepreneurship ecosystem. Banorte, one of the largest banks in the Mexican financial system, promotes this program by providing specialized advice and mentoring to fintechs to reactivate the economy through innovation and attracting talent.
Scaleup Bridge is a joint program of the British government, Banorte and Monterrey Digital Hub, through which the English FinTechs with the highest growth projection were identified and selected to promote their growth under the areas that the institution identified as essential for this program: payments and remittances, scoring, identity and fraud, corporate financial management and crowdfunding, and serving the needs of the Monterrey Digital Hub business community.
The importance of recruiting in early-stage startups
As a serial entrepreneur, I have had to start the recruitment process for a startup many times. It is never an easy process, because once you have created the concept and you know what you want to do, you even already have some clients, you know that you will need talent to join your vision of the company, but in many cases you are still selling air, or a project in a PowerPoint. How do you convince someone to join your adventure? Especially when you have a limited budget and need to manage costs. You must be creative with the recruitment strategy and to find good candidates, since the success or failure of your venture will undoubtedly depend on this first team .
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