Reforge offers selective growth-focused programs for experienced professionals in marketing, product, data, and engineering

Reforge

reforge

Safeguarding Your Digital Realms with OWASP's Arcane Security Practices 🛡️🌟 (Along with Gandalf the Grey🧙‍♂️) In every developer’s saga, genuine might lies in their unwavering commitment to , as resilient and watchful as the Elves of yore. This chronicle imparts upon thee, the true guardians of the code, the sacred and guarded tutorials to shield your containers from all that lurk in the digital shadows. 🛡️🌟 mastering the arcane security practices bestowed by OWASP In the silvery domains of our servers lies the heart of our craft: the containers, akin to the One Ring in their significance. And just as Gandalf the Grey mustered the Fellowship, —to safeguard these vessels as Gollum guards his treasured ‘precious’. OWASP unites developers under a singular banner "My Precious! 💍" - The Art of Container Protection with OWASP's Secret Runes Evoke the treasures hidden within the deep mines of OWASP, ensuring that not a soul taints your digital 'precious.’ Here's the enchanted armory awaiting thine summoning: 1. Defensive Spells & Potions 🧙‍♂️🧪 (Best Practices) These are tried and tested methods that provide security for your containers. Some of the best practices include: Implementing to prevent common vulnerabilities like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). secure coding practices to address known security vulnerabilities. Regularly updating and patching your container images and dependencies to protect sensitive data. Enforcing strong authentication and access controls Implementing secure communication protocols, such as HTTPS, to ensure data privacy and integrity. , such as using secure configurations and hardening Implementing secure deployment practices container runtime environments. : 2. Alerts of the Citadel 🚨🏰 (Vulnerability Alerts) These alerts notify you about emerging security threats and vulnerabilities. Stay informed and prepared by: Subscribing to to receive timely updates about new vulnerabilities. security mailing lists and vulnerability databases from relevant software and container image repositories. Monitoring security advisories and alerts for known vulnerabilities using security scanning tools. Regularly scanning your container images and dependencies Establishing a to quickly identify and remediate vulnerabilities in your containers. vulnerability management process : 3. Sword and Shield ⚔️🛡️ (Security Tools and Techniques) These tools and techniques provide additional layers of security for your containers. Consider using: that provide runtime defense mechanisms, such as container isolation, access control, and behavior monitoring. Container security platforms that analyze container images for vulnerabilities and provide recommendations for remediation. Container image scanning tools Intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS) that monitor and protect containerized applications from malicious activities. that centralize log data and provide real-time threat detection and response capabilities. Security information and event management (SIEM) tools Elven Enchantments 🧝✨ (Advanced Prevention Techniques): To further enhance container security, consider implementing the following advanced prevention techniques: Utilizing to detect and mitigate vulnerabilities that are unknown or have not yet been patched. zero-day protection mechanisms Implementing sandboxing mechanisms to within the container environment. isolate and restrict the execution of untrusted code Utilizing to secure the interfaces and endpoints your containerized applications expose. API protection measures Remember, implementing these technical details in your container security practices will help fortify your code against potential threats andprotectf your digital assets. At the Council of OWASP: Where the Wise Converge 📜🔍 Even as the wise of Middle-earth gathered in solemn conference to safeguard their realm, so too does the Council of OWASP bring forth a grand conclave of security loremasters. In their united prowess lies the salvation of code and container alike, as they bestow upon us their sacred knowledge: Scriptures of Power (OWASP Top Ten): is a widely recognized and regularly updated list of the most critical web application security risks. It serves as a comprehensive guide for developers, security professionals, and organizations to prioritize and address common vulnerabilities. The top ten risks include: The OWASP Top Ten : Involves malicious code being injected into an application Injection : Flaws in authentication and session management Broken Authentication : Failure to properly protect sensitive information Sensitive Data Exposure : Disclosure of internal files and denial of service attacks XML External Entities (XXE) : Unauthorized access to resources Broken Access Control : Misconfigurations that lead to vulnerabilities Security Misconfigurations : Injection of malicious scripts into web pages Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) : Remote code execution Insecure Deserialization : Using outdated or vulnerable third-party components Using Components with Known Vulnerabilities : Hinder detection and response to security incidents Insufficient Logging and Monitoring Guiding Maps (Cheat Sheets): are invaluable resources that provide . They offer concise information, tips, and code examples on various security topics, including: OWASP Cheat Sheets practical guidance and best practices for secure coding Input Validation Authentication Session Management Secure Communication Secure Deployment By following the recommendations outlined in these cheat sheets, developers can significantly reduce the risk of common security vulnerabilities and strengthen the overall security posture of their applications. Congregation of the Stewards (Community and Conferences): is a vibrant and inclusive network of developers, security professionals, and enthusiasts who are passionate about application security. Engaging with this community provides developers with valuable opportunities to learn, collaborate, and share experiences. serve as platforms for knowledge exchange, where experts in the field share insights, present research findings, and discuss emerging security trends. By actively participating in these gatherings, developers can: The OWASP community OWASP conferences, meetups, and online forums Expand their network! Stay updated on the latest security practices! Gain practical insights from real-world experiences! The collective wisdom and collaboration within the OWASP community contribute to continuously improving application security practices and developing innovative solutions to combat evolving cyber threats. With the guidance of OWASP's mighty council, developers become Embrace their wisdom, for it is through their teachings that we shall prevail against the ever-looming darkness. May the fellowship of developers unite, armed with the knowledge bestowed by OWASP, and together, we shall forge a secure future for the realms of code. guardians of their code and protectors of their digital domains. https://hackernoon.com/the-7-pillars-of-zero-trust-security-a-developers-zero-trust-christmas-carol?embedable=true Within the cavernous belly of Moria dwell the multifaceted securities of your Docker quest. Traverse each layer with caution and strategy: 1. The Beacons Are Lit: Foresight of the Threat Landscape 🔥✨ To anticipate the ever-evolving cyber threats, staying ahead of the game is crucial. , developers can receive timely notifications about emerging security risks. These signals serve as a signal flare against the encroaching dusk of cyber dangers. Developers can ensure that the darkness shall find no purchase in their container environments by heeding these calls and promptly addressing the identified vulnerabilities and threats. By closely monitoring the warning lights of Gondor, which represent the alerts from OWASP 2. The Tragic Flaw: Anticipating the Mortal Blunders of Man 💔🔮 Just like Boromir's fall in the saga of Middle-earth, every developer has the potential for missteps regarding Container Security. Recognizing this inherent humanity, By doing so, they can weave their protections all the stronger, ensuring the resilience and integrity of their containerized applications. developers should proactively anticipate possible mistakes and implement robust security measures. https://hackernoon.com/rbac-the-bouncer-with-a-code-of-conduct-in-the-devops-dance-hall?embedable=true 3. Vision from the Great Eagles: Supervision with Advanced Spellcraft 🦅🔍 To achieve a comprehensive view of the container environment, developers should trust OWASP's higher sight, which is facilitated through . Like the great eagles of Middle-earth that have a superior vantage point, these methodologies allow developers to detect even the slightest rustlings in the shadow. By employing threat modeling techniques and leveraging automated security tools, developers can gain valuable insights into their containerized applications' vulnerabilities and adopt proactive measures to safeguard against potential threats. and threat modeling automated security tools 4. Coronation of Order: The Return of Regulation to the Digital Realms 👑⚙️ Just as the rule of Elessar brought order to the Age of Men, developers should ensure that their . Developers can enforce secure deployment practices by implementing robust governance mechanisms, maintaining proper access controls, and adhering to regulatory compliance requirements. By upholding order in the digital realm, developers can ensure the integrity and security of their containers and the applications they support. governance of container environments adheres to established security regulations and best practices Conclusion - The Dawn of a Secured Age: Ensuring the Sanctity of Middle-Internet 🌅🔐 In a riveting conclusion, it is essential to emphasize the significance of securing containers to protect the dominion of code. Developers can fortify their container environments against ever-evolving threats by implementing a multi-layered approach to container security. It is crucial to remain vigilant and avoid the twin traps of inattention and hubris. By continuously monitoring, updating, and strengthening container security practices, developers can safeguard their digital assets and ensure the sanctity of the “Middle-Internet”. Fellow developers, the journey's end for our tale is nigh, but thine own adventure is just at the dawn's edge. OWASP will be your guiding star and steadfast companion in the quest to fortify the sacred containers. So gird up your loins, take up your tools, and into the fray you march—silent watchers over the vast realms of code. For indeed, "not all those who commit to code are lost"; some are graced by the guiding hand of OWASP, ensuring the sanctity of our digital Middle-Earth against the ever-looming darkness. Tread carefully, code bravely, and 🌟🎇 may the light of the Eldar shine upon your pathways. "In every line of code, the light of OWASP; protecting, guiding, unyielding in the digital quest." 🧙‍♂️💻 Lore of Frequently Asked Questions: Q: Is absolute security attainable for my containers with these scrolls from OWASP? A: Alas, in absolutes, the wise do not deal. Yet, adhere to OWASP's scripts, and your containers shall be as guarded as the fortress of Barad-dûr—close to impregnable. 🏰 Q: As time's river flows, how often must I return to the enchantments for updates? A: As the seasons change in a perpetual cycle, so too must you revisit and renew your defenses. Reforge your incantations to strengthen your fortifications with each new moon or upon news of updates from OWASP's sages. 🌒⏳ Q: Do not some counsels of OWASP seem too burdensome for my humble code? A: Fear not the breadth of their wisdom. In truth, their counsels, though vast, are but shields overlapping to cover every flank. Their strength lies not in their individual weight but in their unity. Embrace them wholeheartedly; let no Orc's blade pierce through. 🛡️🧝

"Not All Those Who Commit to Code Are Lost": Strengthen Your Containers with OWASP🧝‍♂️

Diablo 4 was released to significant expectations. It was seen as a potential return to form for Blizzard, after the disastrous rollout of Overwatch 2, the failure of Warcraft 3 Reforged, and the spluttering decline of World of Warcraft, there has been very little in the last decade that Blizzard can point to as successes. While the game received initial praise for its gameplay loop and itemization, it has become clear that the core gameplay loop is barebones, minimal, and cannot sustain a healthy population. Especially insofar as Blizzard’s stated motivation for maintaining Diablo 4 as a Game-as-a-Service. Twitch viewership numbers support this. had 937,000 peak viewers at launch and has dwindled to just 3,600 today. There is simply no appetite for long-term commitment to Diablo 4. There's nothing to watch. There's no hard content, there's no endgame, there's no loot-hunt and, as a consequence, there’s no interest anymore as seen in the . Diablo 4 player-count figures Diablo 4 Simply Doesn’t have the Gameplay Loop to Support a Dedicated Playerbase It’s difficult to understand, and perhaps Diablo fans simply have to acknowledge at this point, that Blizzard never really had a plan for Diablo 4. Even according to Blizzard’s own for the game, things have gone wrong. stated objectives We went from plans for sets, one-per-character Mythics, Runewords, relevant blue items via expanded affix ranges, low-level uniques with one-of-a-kind appearances, multiple legendaries , skill/passive rank affixes that let you skip multiple nodes in the skill tree (now a twig), attributes mattering and changing how your skills behave, etc. per skill What happened in the last 3 years to cause everything to be stripped away and replaced with: sifting through mountains of Yellow items to find vulnerable and critical modifiers, ignoring legendaries once you have a few well-rolled aspects, barely any uniques with most being unusable. We will only know in the future after the inevitable documentary is released what went wrong behind the scenes. Diablo 4 Monetization has been Fumbled With Diablo 4’s stated monetization model being that of a GaaS, the release of its Battle Pass, and the expectation that it would follow industry convention as far as player rewards, was hoped to stem the the decline in player interest. That has not been the case. With the start of Season 1, and it's already not looking positive for player feedback. Players have discovered that the pass offers a Platinum payout of 666 Platinum, an amount that’s not enough to make a single purchase in the in-game store, let alone afford the next BattlePass, which is a common standard amongst all Battle Pass available games, such as Apex Legends, or Fortnite. Blizzard seems to fundamentally misunderstand the industrial psychology behind how Battle Passes encourage player-retention, these namely being: The concept of sunk cost plays a significant role here. Players who have invested time and effort into a battle pass feel more compelled to continue in order to "recoup" their investment. This often leads them to spend more money to reach completion, even if it doesn't make financial sense. Sunk Cost Fallacy: The battle pass system's promise of getting more in-game rewards than the initial cost is a powerful incentive. Players perceive that they are getting a good deal, especially when they think they've made their money back. Perceived Value: The use of premium in-game currency creates a psychological separation from real money. When players are spending virtual currency, they might not feel the financial impact as strongly as when they use real currency, encouraging more spending. In-Game Currency: The sense of progression and the achievement of completing challenges or levels in a battle pass are highly motivating factors. Players often want to "finish what they started," leading them to spend money to ensure they don't miss out on rewards. Progression and Achievement: Seeing others with battle pass rewards can create a social pressure to participate and match others' progress. This drives more purchases to keep up with friends or the wider community. Community and Social Influence: The battle pass model provides gaming companies with a steady stream of revenue throughout its duration. This predictable income allows companies to plan and invest in the game's ongoing development. Predictable Revenue: All of these factors are to the company’s benefit when a player fails to complete a Battle Pass, it does not mean , which simply causes players to abandon the game altogether - which is what Blizzard has done in the case of Diablo 4. reducing the rewards of completing the Battle Pass itself The End of the Road for Blizzard? Diablo 4's release, amidst a backdrop of heightened expectations and eager fans, was met with initial applause but has since failed to maintain its momentum. The lack of a robust gameplay loop, coupled with controversial decisions around its monetization strategies, has raised questions regarding Blizzard's vision and direction for the game. In an era where player retention and sustained engagement are paramount, especially for games adopting the GaaS model, the dwindling numbers for Diablo 4 serve as a stark reminder of the delicate balance between player satisfaction and revenue generation. As the game finds itself in an uncertain trajectory, the gaming community and industry at large will be keenly watching Blizzard's next steps, hoping for a resurrection of its former glory or at least, a blueprint of lessons to be learned for future game developments.

Diablo 4 is Dead and Blizzard Never Had a Plan

ডায়াবলো 4 মারা গেছে এবং ব্লিজার্ডের কোন পরিকল্পনা ছিল না

Diablo 4 ist tot und Blizzard hatte nie einen Plan

Diablo 4 está muerto y Blizzard nunca tuvo un plan

Diablo 4 est mort et Blizzard n'a jamais eu de plan

डियाब्लो 4 ख़त्म हो चुका है और ब्लिज़ार्ड के पास कभी कोई योजना नहीं थी

Diablo 4 は終了し、Blizzard には計画がありませんでした

디아블로 4는 죽었고 블리자드는 전혀 계획이 없었습니다

Diablo 4 está morto e a Blizzard nunca teve um plano

Diablo 4 Öldü ve Blizzard'ın Asla Bir Planı Olmadı

Diablo 4 đã chết và Blizzard không bao giờ có kế hoạch

暗黑破坏神 4 已死，暴雪从未有过计划

A Practical Advice for Building Products in Cybersecurity

No part of this article was written by an AI, just a flawed human… This is the first year I’ve worried I will lose my job to a machine. My solution? I know that sounds kind of obvious, but it’s really the only thing I can think to do. Work while you can. In 2022 we witnessed assistive AIs become more competent at performing tasks like drawing, compiling research or even writing code. As a result, I predict that the things we do uniquely well as humans won’t be our technical skills but our ability to think creatively, grapple with philosophical and ethical questions, and simplify complex ideas. Hopefully, we will live in future where these smart machines remove our daily drudgery and simply help us rediscover what makes us uniquely great. Perhaps we will start working and thinking less like automatons and more like … well … people. In an attempt to hedge my bets against AI, many of my insights this year focus on the types of human vocation I believe an AI will always struggle with. From being more creative, managing information overload, the dangers of programming fairness into systems, finding purpose in one’s work, and how to stop the grand innovation slowdown we have been experiencing since 1970. I hope you find something inspiring here today, and remember to enjoy your work while you can … because change is a comin’. Building a system that generates ideas Remember, the concept of “having new ideas” is still a relatively new concept, historically speaking. “You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did he do it? He must be a genius!” — Richard Feynman, the theoretical physicist and all-around genius One of the benefits of, say, going to a yoga class or church is that it’s impossible to work while you’re there. Presence, I find, is better protected by obligations than intentions, and that helps when creating an environment to cultivate ideas. When we’re curious, we tend to question the world around us more. This can be as easy as looking at our surroundings and asking ourselves, “What must have been true in the world for this thing to exist?” The best way to come up with better ideas is to deliberately re-expose yourself to notes and ideas you’ve previously captured, and no better time exists for this than Lunchtime. As Mark Twain said, “I have never let school get in the way of my education.” We can’t always rely on others to feed us new perspectives on the world, so seek them out. Reading List (Book) The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius (Roger’s Bacon) Create your legacy through work Why Aren’t Smart People Happier (Adam Mastroianni) The Intelligence Trap Revolutionise your Thinking and Make Wiser Decisions Using notes to better organise my thoughts for work happiness I find that when we read intending to find something that resonates, the experience becomes more intentional. Our minds are always on the hunt for insights, and we can’t help but resonate with content on a deeper level. Even though it’s exhausting, once the insights are saved, it feels worth it and becomes part of our working memory over time. This allows me to connect the dots between different pieces of information more efficiently and clearly see the big picture. The people who took the extra time to plan for failure were up to three times more likely to achieve their daily goals, and, not insignificantly, they were substantially happier at the end of each day! “We learn from reflection on experience, not from experience itself.” — John Dewey, Philosopher Before adding any note one of the most important questions I ask myself is: — Is It Surprising? If you’re not surprised, then you already knew it at some level, so why take note of it? A great life hack I’ve learned is that I could cognitively offload most things by simply writing them down. Usually, I do this by journaling before bed, making a schedule, or creating a to-do list for the day ahead. This way, I can clear my mind of everything I need to do and focus on enjoying my free time or getting a good night’s sleep. Reading List Day in the life of an obsessive note taker Discussion on productivity and second brain (Zain, LinkedIn) Sometimes, paying attention means we see the world less clearly (psyche.co) Building a Second Brain (Tiago Forte) It's futile building things that are completely fair The risk is that in trying to enshrine fairness into services, we always risk enforcing new biases upon people in the future by making them see the world as we do today. Our tools impose rules on us as though all people are the same, and the context won’t change. Long-term solutions don’t account for how the self changes over time. An algorithm that is fair along one standard will inevitably be unfair along another standard. Although no mathematical definition of algorithmic fairness fully encapsulates the philosophical notion of fairness or justice Historical opinions risk becoming ghosts in the machine that haunt generations to come. We should strive to never solve a long-term problem without first building platforms that help us understand their nuance and complexity. We are all required — tech users, critics, and product teams — to ask ‘what if’ and ‘why not’ about the possibility of technologies designed to support a long-term spirit of questioning. Until we do so, the riskiest person in control of our work will always be us. Reading List Escaping the Impossibility of Fairness From Formal to Substantive Algorithmic Fairness (Green, Ben) The dangers of Product Longtermism A Theory of Justice — John Rawls How the EU’s Flawed Artificial Intelligence Regulation Endangers the Social Safety Net Questions and Answers (Human Rights Watch) Overcoming the overwhelming amount of information we consume By condensing everything I value into two summary emails , I no longer feel the need to constantly be engaged. I can focus on other tasks and enjoy my downtime without worry of missing out. daily A study cited by the Times estimates that we consume the equivalent of 174 full newspapers’ worth of content daily, five times higher than in 1986. But instead of empowering us, this deluge of information often overwhelms (and depresses) us. Information Overload has become Information Exhaustion, taxing our mental resources and leaving us constantly anxious that we’re forgetting something. Instantaneous access to the world’s knowledge through the Internet was supposed to educate and inform us, but instead it has created a society wide poverty of attention. Reading List Day in the life of an obsessive note taker The Collector’s Fallacy (zettelkasten.de) What is this? The case for continually questioning our online experience (systems-souls-society.com) Your Attention Didn’t Collapse. It Was Stolen (Johann Hari) Mortality should be our great motivator “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” — Steve Jobs Taken literally, even Steve Jobs’s efforts to “put a dent in the universe” ultimately failed: 10,000 years from now, no one’s going to know what an iPhone was. Human civilization can be seen in many ways as the reflexive response to our awareness of our own mortality. When we accept that death is a tool that gives our lives and work meaning, the things we choose to do with our time here begin to become more meaningful. The fact that someone took the day off and decided to spend it with you doing something fun suddenly makes it all the more special. Humans seem to really love a sense of looming fate; how else could five star chrome extensions exist that remind us of how long have left to live? “Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience. It should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful.” — Albert Camus That six-page proposal your boss asked for by Monday is saving us from existential crisis, and we didn’t even get them a thank you card. The great thing about building legacy and immortality projects is their ability to help us build a life full of fulfilment while hopefully making other people’s lives better along the way. Reading List The Creation of Meaning — Escape From 163 (Philosophize This!) Create your legacy through work A Philosopher’s Case Against Death (The MIT Press Reader) Soft skills are essential for navigating ambiguity We don’t always need to understand all the complexities of a user’s problem. Sometimes we just need to build the tools, features and ways of working that enable us to do things independently. Our greatest challenge as product people is understanding a user’s intent when even the user doesn’t know what they want. Practising the “art” of product management is more valuable than the “science”: communicating, empathy, leading without authority, having difficult conversations, storytelling, making decisions when you don’t have all the information, dealing with ambiguity, inspiring others, and connecting deeply with users. Finding peace with the ambiguity of product work means discovering ways to . The best way to achieve this is by focusing on skills that facilitate robust working methods and ensure strong teamwork. reduce uncertainty Reading List So you want to build a search engine What I’ve Learned in 45 Years in the Software Industry We need to get better at recognising truly complex problems Product people tend to presume, rather than openly investigate, the problems we set out to tackle; reaching for solutions before questions have been fully asked. We are drawn to develop solutions based on our dominant assumptions, but in the absence of that, we do the next worst thing: trying to decipher the ‘truth’ of a problem by looking for its mythical average. Our problem is that in trying to fix things, we start viewing society in terms of . Therefore it becomes easier to view solutions to our problems in terms of data networks, surveillance coverage, and interactions among distributed people and devices that must be regulated. networks of harm all In many ways, search products like many product develop processes are a sum of destructions. You need to predict a little bit at a time and then verify. Our role in product is to connect a love of the problem with the available technology. We need to be technical enough to understand the vocabulary of engineers, but not so much that our vocabulary restricts our vision. “Nothing important comes with instructions. Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything” — George Bernard Shaw Reading List So you want to build a search engine The Use of Knowledge in Society The dangers of Product Longtermism Inspired How To Create Products Customers Love (Marty Cagan) Small things matter, but don’t take your eye off the bigger picture Regarding the (80/20 Rule) — our question should become: what opportunities do we miss by ignoring that 80%? Pareto principle other To usher in a more mature tech paradigm, we need to start seeing products not just as solutions but as instruments that teach us how to see the world more fully By focusing on longer-term product impact, we didn’t get distracted by arbitrary goals like optimising search relevancy. Instead, we concentrated more on the holistic user experience and prioritised features that built trust, such as explaining result relevancy or assisting users with choosing better keywords … otherwise I doubt we would have achieved our double-digit growth and engagement success. “Your life is the sum of what you focus on. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. ” Henry David Thoreau. Reading List 4D Roadmaps (reforge.com) The dangers of Product Longtermism So you want to build a search engine We are not innovating fast enough Transitioning from 1970 to 2020, besides computing and genetic engineering, one can’t help but notice a lack of revolutionary breakthroughs compared with previous decades. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number in the early 1970s. In fact, research teams have nearly quadrupled in size over the 20th century, and that growth continues today. required Tackling things like climate change requires more exponential technology, not less. Reversing a trend of technological stagnation begins with first acknowledging the stagnation and ends with believing change is possible. The current response to the burden of knowledge is to develop increasingly specialized fields with increasingly specialised experts to occupy them. I wouldn’t be surprised if its this trend for building narrower domains of knowledge becomes one of the biggest contributors for decreasing technological innovation. Instead of focusing on one discipline at a time, we need to focus on patterns that can be applied from one knowledge domain to another. We need to learn to be unsatisfied with predictable incremental progress. Reading List Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck (Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen) The dangers of Product Longtermism How to Analyze Progress, Stagnation, and Low-Hanging Fruit (The Roots of Progress) Artificial Intelligence (Melanie Mitchell) AI will become super memory companions AI agents may not be able to make us super-intelligent, but they could pass knowledge on to us from the lessons of history — a sort of super-history. AIs, in Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser’s view, will soon “possess a historical consciousness far superior to ours,” allowing them to “make better, faster, and more varied history than we ever did,” with the result that we’ll leave the business of history writing to them. AI will always be limited by only what it knows — a machine is unlikely to start an airline when no airlines exist. Only the right kind of machine, one that is embodied and active in the world would have human level intelligence in its reach. Reading List If We Succeed (American Academy of Arts & Sciences) AI Has Become a Design Problem Artificial Time (fortelabs.co) Search changes the way we think and see the world Search changes our perception of the world and our ability to live within it … it changes text, changes reading, how we understand and even what it means to be literate. The ubiquity of the search engine has given rise to a widespread anxiety that search has become a mentality, a mode of reading and learning that is supplanting the old modes is, we are told, changing our brains, shortening our attention spans and eroding our capacity for memory. What we would later learn is many users don’t actually know what they are searching for. Users were effectively using search to try and make sense of information chaos and develop a vocabulary to better articulate their query. Reading List So you want to build a search engine How Scholars Once Feared That the Book Index Would Destroy Reading (Dennis Duncan) We need to start prioritising individual creativity over groups “invention occurs at the level of the individual, and we should address the factors that determine individual creativity.” — Joel Mokyr Genius starts with individual brilliance. A singular vision can lead to innovation, but it takes teamwork to make creativity happen. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarised the science: “Serendipitous thought, the kind that makes critical breakthroughs and solves challenging problems, does not occur in groups.” Let’s do better by providing a more nuanced picture of innovation in which solitary exploration by “geniuses” and collaboration both play critical roles. “Most geniuses especially those who lead others prosper not by deconstructing intricate complexities, but by exploiting unrecognized simplicities.” — Andy Benoit Reading List Groupthink (newyorker.com) The Myth of the Myth of the Lone Genius (Roger’s Bacon) The dangers of Product Longtermism Why Brainstorming Doesn’t Work (inc.com) The Ingredients For Innovation Happy new year EVERYONE!

A product manager’s 64 insights from 2022

What kind of relationship do you have with your manager? Is it a thriving one or are you barely surviving? Most people attribute a poor relationship with their manager to the manager’s fault. If the relationship isn’t working, the manager must either be bad, uncaring, or downright incompetent. Out of hundreds of things a manager is expected to do, maintaining a healthy relationship with their people is just one of them. And it’s true that a good part of a manager’s job is to invest time in their people and their growth. But a relationship isn’t a one-way street. You can’t have a healthy relationship with your manager unless you are invested in your own growth. In my experience, people who excel at work don’t blame a poor relationship on their manager. They’re willing to do the work necessary to make it work. They understand that an important factor to work with others is to not only care about your own but also about what the other person . needs wants This is the key differentiator. When you’re willing to look beyond yourself to what your manager also wants, they see you as an ally. Your leadership abilities stand out. It’s a partnership and no longer a one-way street. They’re invested in you precisely because they see how much you want to make it work. When you manage up well, your manager has to do less managing down. Put yourself in their shoes and think about their busy schedule. It’s a big relief to have someone else shoulder the responsibility. Someone who not only cares about succeeding but is also willing to share their pains. When you think of your relationship with your manager as a partnership, it changes the game. You stop seeing success in isolation. Your work is no longer about your own goals, but also how they fit within the goals of your team and your organization. It’s a subtle shift that often comes with huge personal rewards and long-term gains. People fail at managing up when they primarily look at their boss as leverage to their career and have zero empathy for them. Good managing up is someone who is a giver to their leader; bad managing up is someone who is only a taker — Matt Greenberg, Reforge CTO To build a healthy relationship with your manager, connect the dots to your own success starting with these three questions: What do I care about? How do I communicate this to my manager? What does my manager want? Let’s explore each in detail. What do I care about? Everyone wants success and growth, but very few care to define what success means to them. When you don’t know what you want, you often go with the flow. Making decisions on the fly leads to suboptimal prioritization. Conflicting priorities cause frustration. You think you’re lacking in some way. Unable to diagnose what’s leading to negative feelings of disappointment, resentment, and dissatisfaction, you think it must be the job. And if your job isn’t working, it must be your manager’s fault. Your manager just doesn’t understand. They don’t care about what you want. But think about it, is it really your manager’s fault when you haven’t even defined what success means to you in the first place? Once you know what you value, you can align expectations with your manager. You can tell them what you want. You no longer have to choose between work and life goals. You can have both. Do you care about leaving home early to have dinner with your family or do you care more about a flexible schedule in the morning? At work, are you more interested in solving complex problems or is it leading a team that energizes you? These are simple questions. And yet, we don’t consciously think about them. We leave most things to luck, even though luck plays a very small role in our success. A healthy relationship with your manager starts with defining your priorities well. To do this, ask yourself these questions: What are your career and life goals? Both are important. Leaving one out often leads to stress and confusion later. What skills do you want to build? What do you care about more at work - learning, specific kind of opportunities, fewer meetings, growth, expertise on something? A list of your top two priorities about work will help set clear expectations with your manager. What are your strengths? How can you leverage these strengths to better manage your goals? When you first sit down to ponder your goals for the future, remember to have your core values and life priorities handy as points of reference. As long as your values and priorities remain valid, they should be the compass for directing your goals. Otherwise, you set yourself up for a future of frustration and unhappiness - S.J. Scott It may be a little tough to get these answers for yourself in the beginning. But, if you think about them often, over a period of time, you will know what you want. You don’t have to lock down your life goals forever. As you grow, your goals will also change over time. Repeat this exercise. Revise them and reset expectations with people who need to know about them. How do I communicate this to my manager? Knowing what you want is the first step. The next step is to communicate this to your manager. Once you align with them, you can remove the burden of daily decision-making or prioritization that adds to cognitive load and often leads to mental fatigue. No longer worried about misaligned expectations also frees up your resources to focus on work. You’re able to create a better impact with less demand on your time. To align your career goals with your manager, set up a meeting and discuss the following: Your goals for the next 1-2 years. Discuss the key areas you want to focus on. Find out what opportunities are available and how you can utilize your strengths to contribute to those areas. Talk about the skills you want to build. Ask for advice on the best ways to practice these skills within the available resources in the organization. Find out how they view your job and your role in the next 1-2 years. It’s important to understand the gaps they see between where you are and where you want to be. Practice key points you want to communicate and show flexibility to hear your manager’s viewpoint. Seeking their advice and feedback on your goals and priorities is important. You don’t want to come across as demanding. Remember this though: communicating this once is not enough. Your manager has a lot of things on their mind. You’re the one who has to take the lead and reinforce your priorities. You have to remind them of the opportunities you need. You have to work on finding new and creative ways to practice your skills. Have regular discussions with your manager on opportunities and priorities. Keep them in the loop on what you’re doing, the challenges you’re facing and the solutions you’re implementing. Seek their advice on better ways to do these things. By taking an active lead, you’ll spend less time feeling disappointed, anxious, and stressed and more time in productivity growth. What does my manager want? This is where partnership comes in. You shift your focus from your success, your challenges, and your priorities to learning about your manager’s goals. Looking at the workplace from their viewpoint changes your perspective. You get a much better understanding of how your work blends with what the organization needs. Taking a lead on some of these opportunities, contributing to key areas that your manager values, and reducing their pain points, makes it hard for them to not notice you. It gives you an edge where you get to have conversations that are not only valuable for your own growth but also add value to your manager, your team, and your organization. You'll never know everything that's in your CEO or boss's head. They may very likely be working off an entirely different set of assumptions than you. Part of our job is to ask questions and make sure we're all working off the same information to the best of our ability. The other important part is to make sure that we are aligned on expectations and results, irrespective of what information we might be privy to. This takes real work and effort but is required for success, especially in these really fast-paced environments — Joanna Lord To understand what your manager wants, ask these questions: What does success look like for your manager? What challenges do they face? What are their top priorities? What keeps them up at night? What pain points keep them anxious and stressed? Work with your manager to identify how you can help and add more value. Proactively approaching them and lending them a hand in contributing to their areas of focus goes a long way in showcasing your abilities, building trust, and doing impactful work. Once you have a thriving relationship with your manager, work brings in extra joy. You feel a sense of progress, purpose, and belonging that’s essential for your mental health and personal well-being. Instead of holding your manager responsible, learn to manage up and take charge of your own growth. Summary Managing up is a key skill to take charge of your own growth at work. Your success doesn’t happen in isolation. It’s a balance between what you want and what your manager needs. When you treat your relationship with your manager as a partnership and stop blaming them for the way things are, it changes your perspective. Building a thriving relationship with your manager requires work. You have to take the lead. Identify your life and career goals, skills you want to build, strengths you possess, and small things that matter to you. Discuss these expectations with your manager. Seek advice on your goals and discuss the opportunities you need to practice new skills and achieve success and growth. Shift your perspective from focusing only on the self to also understanding what your manager wants. Learn about how your manager defines success, what are their top priorities and pain points and take a lead on some of these opportunities. Previously published . here

The Key to a Good Relationship With Your Manager

While companies become increasingly both customer-centric and product-centric, PMs are still sitting in a gold mine of underused customer knowledge. How can we leverage customer feedback to make better product decisions? As Product Managers, we make decisions every day. It’s the core of our job. For every decision we make, it’s important to have a clear problem and objective (what do we want to achieve?), defined success criteria, and a good understanding of the context of that decision. Understanding the context is probably where we should spend the majority of our time as Product Managers, and that's why Product Discovery has become such a hot topic in the industry nowadays. With that in mind, Product Management professionals are using different techniques & sources of data to support their understanding of the context and mitigate as many risks as possible, especially for harder-to-make decisions (the ones that will have a higher impact on our problem, metrics, and objectives). Companies can, for example, look at market trends & industry reports, competitors' benchmarks, financial analyses, product analytics data, customer research & interviews, customer feedback, and much more. Customer-related data has been trending and becoming more important for companies, (with public review websites - like G2, Capterra, Amazon, etc., social media, NPS surveys, customer service data, interviews, and more) thus more concerned about using customer perception as a key source for product prioritization and innovation. especially as the amount of feedback generated grows exponentially and companies become increasingly both customer-centric and product-centric, And that is where things start to become more interesting. More than a decade ago, companies like Amplitude and Mixpanel revolutionized how we use customer behavior to make product decisions, creating a category called Product Analytics. Today, these tools are a must-have in every Product Manager’s tech stack. When we talk about customer perception, though, things get different, and we are still in the stone age: PMs are sitting in a gold mine of customer knowledge that we are underusing. Customers' inputs that go beyond numbers - qualitative feedback - come from all sorts of sources, from support tickets, win/lost reasons, and NPS surveys to reviews and research, and it is impossible to read every customer feedback or talk to the majority of your customers. What happens then is that Product Managers significantly slow down their capacity to improve product discovery and decision-making velocity, simply because they don’t have a way of centralizing and analyzing all that information. So the question is: how can we leverage customer feedback to make better product decisions? Enters Feedback Analytics. Why Feedback Analytics for Product teams After interviewing almost 100 product professionals from different organizations, we at confirmed that the , and we found a great opportunity to facilitate how PMs can leverage customer opinions to make better and faster decisions, even in more complex scenarios. Birdie #1 pain for the majority of PMs is categorizing and analyzing customer feedback In a context where qualitative data from feedback is increasingly growing - just like quantitative behavioral data did in the past - Product teams will soon need to add to their basic tech stack something we call Feedback Analytics. Feedback Analytics solutions help teams process different types of customer feedback from multiple sources to quantify opinions and generate insights about their products. That’s exactly what Birdie does: we are a . Our platform was built by Product Managers, to Product Managers, and combines leading-edge technology (AI & NLP) and human expertise to help companies create effective product strategies. feedback analytics platform for product teams But you don’t need a tool like ours to start leveraging customer feedback to make better product decisions. Based on our research and experience, you can start simple and do it with 3 key steps: 1. Create a Feedback River A Feedback River, according to Sachin Rekhi (Reforge’s co-founder), is a single source of truth for multiple sources of customer feedback. In the beginning, this central repository could be a Slack channel, Google Sheets, Jira, Trello, etc. The important thing here is to centralize feedback coming from support tickets, NPS surveys, discussion forums, win/lost reasons, survey forms, or any other relevant feedback source, to a single place, where the product team will be able to read, learn and share customer perceptions. 2. Establish a process to categorize feedback Once you have a place to store all that feedback, you need to make sure that you’re not only reading but also categorizing the feedback correctly. If you don’t do that, you will still miss the big picture and let trending aspects, issues, or opportunities slip. With organized feedback, it's easier to generate new hypotheses, evaluate ideas and suggestions, prioritize features, and better select customers for interviews. 3. Share these findings with other areas The organized learnings acquired thru customer feedback analysis are important for the whole organization. You will be able to, for instance, easily get some customer quotes and volumes to exemplify and justify why your team is making a specific decision. Having a way of sharing and discussing that information will Marketing and Product Marketing teams will be able to use the feedback to review key selling points and positioning, and CX will have a better understanding of customer satisfaction with other aspects of the product and user experience. increase collaboration, customer empathy, and creativity among teams, fostering a truly customer-centric and product-centric culture among other areas. The best part of establishing a process like this is that you will see yourself spending less time trying to make decisions and moving from guesswork to fact-based conversations, which will also make it much easier to get the buy-in from other team members. Together with quantitative data analysis, customer feedback works pretty well to get stakeholders' buy-in and reduce the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) problem. Our solution allows you to consolidate customer feedback from multiple sources and uses Machine Learning and NLP to automate the process of categorizing and analyzing customer feedback, something that will help Product teams save countless hours of manual work while getting all the benefits discussed here. If you’re interested in testing the tool for free, you can . join our waitlist

Making Better Product Management Decisions with Customer Feedback Analytics

I was at the job interview. My wife was impatiently waiting for the good news. I did my best to stay focused. The image of her with our newborn baby under a mountain of overdue rent notices and unpaid bills haunted me all the time. A Swedish IT company with an office in my home town. It smelled like new comfy chairs and regular payments. The only multipurpose suit I wore at my graduation, wedding, and countless job interview prior to this one still looked good. Officially, as included in a job ad, they were looking for an in-house paralegal. Unofficially, as presented at the beginning of a job interview, they also needed someone to organize the documents jungle, and assist the CEO. Not exactly how I imagined my career as one of the top law students in my class. Not the time in my life to be picky either. So far so good. Both, a young CEO and I, knew that there was no easy way to deal with the mother of all job interview questions. I couldn't be more relaxed and prepared. In this round of my Mortal Kombat, I was Sub-Zero about salary expectations. "One final question." A dramatic pause. "The most important one." Sure thing buddy, bring it on. "What's your favorite video game?" Oh, I'm so funked. If he's not a Half-Life dude, then he must be one of those GTAddicts. Of all the things and possible scenarios, a video game was to decide whether or not I had to ask for more money from my family. Here goes nothing. Let me get over with it as quickly as possible. Time to go home with the tail between my legs. "Sorry to disappoint you, but I have to be honest about this one." The CEO raised his eyebrows. "It is what it is. I'm an old-school guy. StarCraft is all that I know, love, and want." I was already eyeing the door when he jumped off a chair. He wasn't blinking while pointing the finger at me like a gun. "Would you like to be the pylon of our company effective immediately?" "Dude, You Are So Hired!" (If you haven't seen the movie, wait for it till the end of this clip) I didn't just get a job, but a ticket to a gaming paradise too. My Protoss boss embraced me as a Terrain ally. It's good to have something in common with your boss. We both didn't like Zergs. Those guys were brutal, man. I didn't only become a reliable provider, but the hero in my wife's eyes. Every Friday at noon, not a second later, wartime baby. You have no idea what it meant to have a happy (casual) Friday till Saturday dawn. With my eyes blood red, fingers still shaking, and ears still ringing, I could barely see and hear my wife. "Those heartless monsters! What they're doing to you?! Unbelievable! You should quit right away!" "It's not as bad as it looks, honey. I'm doing it for us, for you, and our baby." Lord is my witness, I had never been so loved and admired by my own wife. "You're my hero. I keep telling everybody, how much you sacrifice yourself without a single word of complaint. All of my girlfriends are so jealous. Oh, my poor baby. What would you like for breakfast? You must be starving." I had so much pizza and soda the night before that I could barely breathe, but that's me. Always willing to sacrifice for the greater good. Warcraft and The Frozen Blizzard's Creativity Throne Here's the thing with all software companies, more or less. People come. People go. New people. New gaming habits and preferences. There was a World of Warcraft group of devs. They were never into the good old StarCraft. I'm not saying that was necessarily bad. If there's one thing you should never discuss with your colleagues or friends that's politics, and more importantly games. . That was it, the farthest we were willing to go. We, the StarCraft people, stayed frozen in times with Warcraft: The Frozen Throne Around the same time, I couldn't help myself noticing that Blizzard got frozen too, in terms of creativity. I found a new company to work for, but I kept my old StarCraft buddies to play with. We were loyal and stubborn. We also felt like Blizzard's outcasts. If it hadn't been for the StarCraft fanatics from South Korea, we would've asked ourselves what was wrong with us. The rise of new powerful machines with shiny graphics made StarCraft look obsolete. I mean, you could still play it. You could also stretch it to fit the full screen, but the price was too high. The old graphics made you feel old like nothing else in real life. Then, twelve years StarCraft 2 was released. It was beautiful to watch and terrible to play. I wasn't the only one to ask, hey Blizzard, was that the best you could do? Seriously? It's a mess. I quickly lost all hope and a desire to play. While we are at it, I had a beautiful and emotional Mortal Kombat moment with my, now a young teenage daughter. I never go through their Xbox games. I respect her choices. But, one day, I saw her playing it. We even saw both movies, the old one with Christopher Lambert, and the new one with stunning visuals. We got Mortal Kombat face masks at the premiere. I showed her how this game used to look like when I was her age. She laughed. The first game we've ever played together. I consider myself to be a reasonable father in terms of gaming expectations for my only child. For the record, daddy's little girl is one heck of a CS 1.6 and CS:GO player. OK. The GTA phase for her whole generation was unavoidable. She surprised me with Red Dead Redemption, though, in a nice way, of course. It sucked that the Blizzard torch won't be passed to the next generation in my family. But hey, we weren't to blame. Then, one day, out of the blue, I sweat this is true, my daughter asked me to order her 
Diablo III: Reaper of Souls. I kid you not, I had tears in my eyes. Quo Vadis, Blizzard? StarCraft: Remastered proved me right that StarCraft 2 sucked, plain and simple. Then, they reforged (remastered) Warcraft III too. For me, that was a clear sign that Blizzard was running on creativity fumes. All this time, I've been totally unaware of the harassment lawsuits. It was heartbreaking. While I was in gaming paradise, the poor girls were in Blizzard's hell. I felt bad, dirty, and betrayed. Once brilliant, now dirty minds were coming up with "creative ways" to hurt people. Talking about game makers who were playing games with real people in the most despicable ways. The tenth circle of hell is reserved for those who ruin gaming innocence, purity, and legacy. For f's sake, all of my desktop wallpapers were Blizzard's artworks for years. Not to talk about all the merchandise that ended up in the garbage. More than twenty years, more than one generation, and gaming legacy ruined. For what? I don't buy that "the dark side of the Moon" or "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" BS excuses. Nietzsche said that "without music, life would be a mistake." He was so right. You have to listen to some awesome music while you're playing your favorite game. Have you noticed how many words rhyme perfectly with gamer: writer, developer, Nooner, , and so on. Critical Thinker For the end, a quote from the movie "Tag" (2018). You can tell a lot about people based on the games they play, and whether or not they play at all. Beware of those who don't play games in the virtual world because they certainly do in the real world with real peoples' lives. There's one word that also starts with "B" and rhymes with Blizzard, but I'm not going to use it. They aren't worth my words and time, not anymore. Yup, the whole article about Blizzard without a single Blizzard picture. Someone once said, “We don't stop playing because we grow old. We grow old because we stop playing.” We just never stopped playing. And I like to think that simple thing, playing a game, is what made me the man I am today. "Tag" (2018)

Twenty Years of My Gaming History Ruined Bit By Bit By Blizzard

More than a decade ago, editor Kevin Kelly wrote an essay called “ ,” predicting that the internet would allow large swaths of people to make a living off their creations, whether an artist, musician, author, or entrepreneur. Rather than pursuing widespread celebrity, he argued, creators only needed to engage a modest base of “true fans”—those who will “buy anything you produce”—to the tune of $100 per fan, per year (for a total annual income of $100,000). By embracing online networks, he believed creators could bypass traditional gatekeepers and middlemen, get paid directly by a smaller base of fans, and live comfortably off the spoils. Wired 1,000 True Fans Today, that idea is as salient as ever—but I propose taking it a step further. As the grows, more people are monetizing what they love. The global adoption of social platforms like Facebook and YouTube, the mainstreaming of the influencer model, and the rise of new creator tools has shifted the threshold for success. I believe that creators need to amass only True Fans—not 1,000—paying them a year, not $100. Today, creators can effectively make more money off fewer fans. Passion Economy 100 $1,000 Sound unlikely? We’re already seeing this shift, according to creator platforms. On , the average initial pledge amount has increased 22 percent over the past two years. Since 2017, the share of new patrons paying more than $100 per month—or $1,200 per year—has grown 21 percent. On the online course platform , the number of creators earning more than $1,000 in a month is growing 20 percent each month, while the average number of customers per creator is growing at a rate of 10 percent. Likewise, on , the average price point per class offering has risen roughly 20 percent, year over year. In 2019, nearly 500 Teachable course creators made more than $100,000; of those, 25 averaged more than $1,000 per sale. Patreon Podia Teachable Now, 100 True Fans and 1,000 True Fans aren’t mutually exclusive, and the revenue benchmark of $1,000 per fan per year isn’t intended to be an exact prescription. Instead, this thinking provides a framework for the future of the Passion Economy: creators can segment their audiences and offer tailored products and services at varying price points. Here’s how it works: A creator can cultivate a large, free audience on horizontal social platforms or through an email list. He or she can then convert some of those users to patrons and subscribers. The creator can then leverage some of buyers to higher-value purchases, such as extra content, exclusive access, or direct interaction with the creator. those This strategy is closely related to the concept of “ ” in gaming, in which of users drive 80 percent of gaming companies’ revenue (though that model is ). Put simply, if you can convince a small number of super-engaged people to pay more, you can also have a general audience that pays less. By segmenting the customer base and offering greater value to top fans—at a higher price point—creators can earn a living with a smaller total audience. whales 1 to 2 percent evolving Again, returning to the examples above, this isn’t purely hypothetical. One creator on Teachable who advises artists on how to sell their art made $110,000 last year with only 76 students, at an average of $1,437 per course. Another creator who teaches physiotherapy made $141,000 with only 61 students, at an average price point of $2,314 per course. On Podia, the average revenue per user is increasing, as well. Creators who started out solely selling courses on the platform can now further monetize their audience by expanding into downloads and membership subscriptions. While making a living off the 100 True Fan model is far from commonplace, it’s increasingly possible. How to earn these high-paying super-fans? There is a substantive difference between monetizing through 1,000 True Fans (at $100 a year) and 100 True Fans (at $1,000 a year). Whereas a creator can earn $100 a year from a fan via patronage or donations, collecting $1,000 a year per fan requires a wholly different product. These fans expect to derive meaningful value and purpose from the product. This represents a move away from the traditional donation model—in which users pay to benefit the —to a model, in which users are willing to pay more for something that benefits . What was traditionally dubbed “self-help” now exists under the umbrella of “wellness.” People are willing to pay more for exclusive, ROI-positive services that are constructive in their lives, whether it’s related to health, finances, education, or work. In the offline world, people are accustomed to hiring experts across verticals (think interior designers, organizational consultants, public speaking coaches, executive coaches, and SAT tutors) and are willing to pay premium prices for the promise of measurable improvement and results. Now that mindset is filtering into our digital lives, as well. creator value themselves This relates to ’s concept of intrinsic motivation: we’re driven by Autonomy (the urge to direct one’s life), Mastery (the desire to get better at something that matters), and Purpose (the yearning to do work in the service of something larger than one’s self). Daniel Pink Regardless of the terminology, products and services in this category solve high-priority problems for consumers. Creators pursuing the 100 True Fans model recognize and monetize the desire for improvement and transformation. And better technology, such as video course platforms and improved real-time video streaming, allows for richer, higher-quality content than was possible a decade ago. There are many examples of existing premium subscription services that have already conditioned consumers to pay high prices for services, whether $200 per month Equinox memberships, $159 per month subscriptions to Rent the Runway Unlimited, or $250+ per month subscriptions to Purple Carrot. This trend is paralleled in the , where paid versions of free software cater to power users or prosumers. Though free versions of these products exist, power users chose the paid version for the efficiency and heightened user experience. Compare, for example, YouTube’s wealth of free video tutorials versus a paid education platform like ($90 per class) or ($250/month for private kids coding classes). While YouTube offers a massive amount of high-quality free content, it can be difficult to navigate and personalize. New paid creator platforms are less about mere entertainment or delight, and more about providing a full solution for the user’s desired outcome, including curriculum, accountability, and community. SaaS world MasterClass Juni Learning The recipe for earning $1,000 per fan The monetization strategy for 100 True Fans also differs from the 1,000 True Fans convention. Easy perks like offering users ad-free content and access to back-catalogs can help creators monetize at a lower dollar amount. But to gain fans who are willing to pay $1,000 a year—no small sum—creators need to offer a step-function increase in value. The recipe, then, is to go and to tap into users’ desire for results. Practically, what does that look like? It means providing differentiated content, community, accountability, and access. niche Premium content and community that has no close substitutesDelivering tangible value and resultsAccountabilityAccess, recognition and status Let’s unpack each: People are willing to pay high prices for exclusive, differentiated content and access to a network of like-minded individuals. In late 2019, two financial advisors-turned-podcasters launched a private, paid community called Advisor Growth Community (powered by the platform ). The online hub charges financial advisors $2,000 per year to collaborate with colleagues and learn how to grow their practices. It currently has nearly 100 members in its ranks. The career development program Reforge, a masterclass for growth and marketing strategies, charges upwards of $3,000 per seat to hundreds of participants each year. Premium content and community with no close substitutes Mighty Networks Frequently, premium content and community are bundled together to enhance the student experience by providing valuable social reinforcement and support. In China, the unicorn audio course platform Dedao sells paid audio courses that appeal to users’ desire for self-improvement and lifelong learning. The best selling topics include management, study skills, and public speaking. These classes can reach up to 199 RMB (approximately $28 USD)—a meaningful sum in a country where the average income is (~$3,100 USD). The most popular course is taught by former Peking University professor Xue Zhaofeng and has over 470,000 subscribers. Delivering tangible value and results 21,600 RMB While the US podcasting industry is still through advertising, the flourishing ecosystem of paid meditation and audio wellness apps like Headspace, Calm, and Aaptiv—all of which charge subscribers directly—indicate that users are willing to pay for content that tangibly affects their well-being. modestly monetized The more a student pays up front, the more invested he or she is in achieving the desired outcome. Higher-priced creators don’t only offer more or better content, they also motivate and incentivize students to get what they paid for. For instance, the premium version ($699 vs. $499) of productivity expert on digital note-taking and productivity includes eight expert interviews, 16 note templates, six advanced tutorials, and access to a members-only blog. Tiago also shares , reinforcing the perception of accountability. Accountability Tiago Forte’s Teachable class his numbers publicly On Patreon, the comedy podcast has $5 per month and $15 per month tiers, both of which afford access to a Discord community and extra content. The creator also offers a limited number of $69 per month ($828 per year) subscriptions, which provides a monthly, 30-minute livestream, among other benefits. But the highest-priced offering is a $500 per month ($6,000 per year) tier, which grants users personal coaching sessions with the podcast hosts, via video chat, every 3 months. The top tier offers a level of exclusivity and access that matches the price—100 times more expensive than the base tier. Access, recognition, and status This Might Get Weird There are also big, growing businesses in China, such as Bixin, Taobao, and Heizhu Esports (from Netease), in which people pay creators to play video games with them. Some of these users are as paid game companions. Beyond purchasing personal recognition from the creator, there’s also the potential recognition of other fans. In the gaming world, whales often lord their big spending habits over non-spenders, thus providing an aspirational target for everyone else. More broadly, products can be designed in such a way that super-fans receive social affirmation from “normal” fans, triggering a positively reinforcing network effect that increases the value of super-fans, beyond the monetary spend. earning tens of thousands of dollars per month Twitch streamers can rake in hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from donations and tips—in one recent case, a streamer received a . The personalized shoutouts from the streamer, recognition, and elevated social status that such donations afford lead to higher levels of spending. It’s worth noting that limited access and recognition are unscalable, to some extent: people are, by definition, paying high amounts to gain exclusive access or to elevate their status above other users. $75,000 tip From 1,000 to 100: Fewer, truer fans The creator economy is in the midst of a decisive shift—from a “bigger is better,” ad-driven revenue model to one of niche communities and direct user-to-creator payment.An emerging category of digital platforms is helping people to translate their skills and talents into businesses. But as the creator landscape evolves, the playbook needs updating. Rather than viewing one’s fans as a uniform group, the 100 True Fans model calls on creators to distinguish between various subsegments based on affinity and willingness to pay. The relationship super-fans have with creators is different from regular fans: they become disciples, protégés, co-learners, and co-creators. As such, they require a whole new set of tools and platforms. The key to monetizing at $1,000 per fan, per year is tailored offerings priced at tiered levels. A creator might have a broad follower base on free social platforms, convert some of those followers to one-time purchasers or patrons, then uplevel some of those users to high-paying super-fans. For founders and operators, that means building products that align monetization with the end user value. The 100 True Fans concept isn’t for everyone, nor is 1,000 True Fans. Creators that have larger, more diffuse audiences with weaker allegiance or engagement are likely better off monetizing through sponsorships or branded products. For many, that path will be more lucrative—and require less heavy lifting—than designing the sort of high-value, personalized program 100 True Fans demand. As the tech analyst and blogger Ben Thompson once said, “The internet enables niche in a massively powerful way.” For creators who earn the trust of a niche audience and who deliver what those users crave—whether self-improvement, connection, recognition, or belonging—100 True Fans provides an updated monetization model for the fast-growing . Passion Economy Previously published at https://li-jin.co/2020/02/19/100-true-fans/

How 100 True Fans Can Change Everything

A version of this article previously appeared in . Forbes In this second installment of my conversation with George Powell, Founder and President of , he describes how Tony Hawk and the other members of the Bones Brigade revolutionized skateboarding and made it cool again, after its near death in the late-1980’s. He also shares his frank thoughts regarding his long-standing relationship with Stacy Peralta. Skate One Skate One is now the world’s largest skateboard company, with best-selling brands such as , . Powell•PeraltaSkateboards BONES Wheels and Mini•Logo Skateboards You can read part one of our discussion , which covers a number of insightful topics, including the origin of Skate One and George’s multi-decade partnership with Stacy Peralta. here In the late 1970’s, George partnered with Stacy Peralta, who at the time was a 20-year old world champion skateboarder. Together they created skateboard team which launched the careers of not only Tony Hawk, but many of skateboarding’s other stars, including: Alan Gelfand, Mike McGill, Steve Caballero, Rodney Mullen, Lance Mountain, Tommy Guerrero and Kevin Harris. The Bones Brigade How did the Bones Brigade come together? John Greathouse: George Powell: This is Stacy’s (Peralta) fault entirely! He handpicked all the skaters, determining who was going to be the best of the young, just emerging amateurs, and bonded them together into a team we called the Bones Brigade. The key for him was to NOT steal well known skaters from other companies, but to start over completely with a new crew of unknown skaters, to make it fresh and inspiring. Using unknown skaters in his unique ads made them even more interesting. You and Stacy parted ways in the early 1990’s and then re-united almost 20-years later. What led to this hiatus? By the early 1990’s, our successful partnership was being used against us. WE were successful, and BIG, one of what the smaller companies called, the BIG 5 (PP, Tracker, NHS, Thrasher, Vision). They felt we were so big and so successful that they could not compete with us, so a skater named Steve Rocco, formed a coalition of skaters to start their own company or join his, and wrest the industry away from what we had built, for themselves. This turned out to coincide with the switch from Vert (vertical) skating to Street skating, a change we had orchestrated ourselves, to expand the industry, and those top skaters like Tony Hawk, Lance Mountain, Tommy Guerrero, Mike McGill, Mike Vallely and Rodney Mullen, all saw opportunities to leave our team, and start their own brands, in order to stay relevant, and run their own company, which they did. Stacy and I disagreed on how to handle this. He wanted us to create a brand for each guy and let them go on their own, just manufacturing decks and wheels for them. I did not think that the economic model Stacy wanted us to use would work, and we would just use up all our resources launching a brand for each of these guys, and loose the margin that paid for the marketing to keep us at the top. I was for fighting to keep our leadership roll, and as much of our team intact as possible. Stacy was broken hearted, because he loved his team, and wanted them to have what he had achieved. My refusal to do this caused him to give up on our partnership and the industry entirely. He picked up his skate film-making career and took it to Hollywood. This estranged us for more than a decade. Over time, I think we both saw that it was silly to be ignoring each other and I reached out to Stacy to at least reestablish communication and attempt to resolve the hurt feelings we both had. Over a period of a few years, we gradually spent more and more time together again, and his interest in the skate industry and our legacy partnership, which had by this time evolved into Legend status, began to draw us back together again. His films Dogtown & The Bones Brigade: a documentary have both reforged relationships within the industry, and partially healed old disagreements that time has clarified, between the Bones Brigade team, he and me. Doing the BB doc was a real ice breaker for all of us, and I think it was the real beginning of our reforming of a partnership to promote skateboarding again. Today, Stacy works with us between his commercial projects to create films that showcase our skaters, brands, and skateboarding. As time continues, I think the impression that we were both probably better when we worked together than when we worked alone, will keep us doing fun projects together going forward. That’s cool that you and Stacy are working together again. How has your history together impacted your relative roles at Skate One? Greathouse: Powell: Stacy and I are both creative people that function best when allowed to focus on what we do best. At this time, I have the luxury of an incredible staff, who are better than me at handling our company’s day to day responsibilities, allowing me to focus on product development and graphics, my strong points. When we initially worked together, I had to abandon my R&D roll, in order to run our madly growing company. Stacy was more or less free to focus on marketing and team promotion, but this dual roll used up a lot of time that kept him from focusing on his filming and marketing. Now, we are both more experienced in our rolls, and freed up to do what we do best, with a great group of friends at Skate One to support our efforts. I expect this more mature level of focus and separation to enable our new partnership to proceed forward even more forcefully than it did 30 years ago. You started working with Tony Hawk when he was 14. Was it clear at that young age that he would become the most recognizable face of the sport? If so, what made him standout? Greathouse: Powell: When he first came on the team, he was exceptional, and very driven, so we recognized that he was going to be successful, but neither of us would guess that he and Rodney would become the trick creators and innovators that they both became. They are both so creative, driven, and sensitive. It was a pleasure to work with them both, even though they both went through some very rough times as they matured and became skate stars. These issues are examined in much more intimate detail in the BB Documentary, and provide fascinating insight into the stress of adolescence and growing up as sensitive, driven, young star athletes, in a world that discounted their skill and incredible creativity as childish folly and a waste of time. Is it true you once issued Tony a royalty check for .85 cents? Greathouse: Powell: Yes, that’s how bad things got in the 1980–1983 dark ages period, when we were hanging on like the picture of the cat clinging to the bar by its claws. There was tension among your executives that these ‘kids’ were making so much money. How did you deal with this and keep the company rowing in the same direction? Greathouse: Powell: It was hard for us to see a 12 year old kid join the team and a few years later, after we had given them tons of equipment, clothing, love, travel expenses, and guidance, suddenly make more money than any of the people who were supporting them at the time, and without whom they could not have risen to the level they did. Nonetheless, it was equitable, necessary and appropriate in the light of what professional athletes make, or movie stars make, but is it fair? Who is to say. I did have trouble rationalizing it with our management team, for sure it was a tough sell, but we made it. Who is to say what’s fair. Why should the union longshoremen on the west coast make more than twice as much as police, or teachers? It seems that Lance Mountain had an attitude that my students could learn from — he consistently showed up ready to do whatever was required. Even though he might not have been the most talented skater, he made himself a valuable member of the team. Greathouse: Powell: I think that point is best covered by what Lance says himself in Stacy’s BB doc. He did what no one else wanted to do, look like a dork, and not always just show himself making great tricks. He provided the comic relief, and in return, he got the extra publicity that endeared him to millions of young skaters who were inspired to play around like Lance did in the films, and feel good about themselves. He was an enabler supreme. In retrospect, he brought in more customers than Tony did. Tony impressed, but Lance provided an on ramp into skateboarding for everyone else. This was an example of Stacy’s genius. If you had a do-over with your entrepreneurial career, what is/are one or more mistakes you would like to avoid? Greathouse: Powell: What! Who me make mistakes? <pauses> Let me count the ways. 1. Do not listen to what your competitors say about you or your company. Create your vision and hold to your plan to achieve it. Understand that in today’s global business environment, those who would like to have what you are perceived to have will lie, cheat, and steal anything they can from you, and rationalize it as just business. As I was finishing college, my father use to say, business is a jungle son, and I laughed at him, smugly knowing he was being over dramatic and out of date…sadly, I was wrong. Human nature has not changed at all, and there are now even more ways for others to steal from you and/or assassinate your character or company. 2. Do not allow yourself to be put on the defensive, or rerouted from your plan in order to address a perceived insult, lie or problem. Just like the Islamic State terrorists try to provoke us by doing thing’s so outrageous that we are manipulated into reacting to them, instead of working our long term plan to defeat them on our own schedule and way. The way you win is to get to the finish line first and/or with the best product and marketing. If you allow yourself to get distracted, you will fall behind. 3. Be continuously vigilant in guarding against the natural arrogance, conceit and infallibility that comes with the smallest success. Be constantly cautious and wary of your ego. 4. Never assume that tomorrow will be like today or yesterday. When things are going really well, and you are succeeding beyond your initial expectation, it is easy and convenient to think that this will go on forever, and your growth curve is unstoppable. BEWARE! Life is not a constant up or down curve, but goes in cycles. Look for them and use them like a hill or a wave. 5. Be VERY cautious of over reaching financially, when you can, based on the above foibles. Consider “what if” scenarios to account for the normal business and economic cycles that will surely affect your future. 6. Follow the advice in Zero to One, by Peter Thiel as best you can. I found this book embodies much of the lessons I’ve learned over the past 50 years in one little book. It is a nice distillation of smart strategies and tactics. 7. Persevere! There are cycles, up and down. When things go south in the economy or your company or your industry, don’t quit and look for greener pastures. Here is where your love of what you do, and belief in its integrity come in to reward you, for only your love of what you are doing will motivate you to keep going, endure the pain and loss that will happen at these times. So just put your head down, go into survival mode if you have to, so you will be there, plugging away at what you love and believe in, when the tide turns and it is your time again. You will be in place, ready to go, with a head start. I suppose I should temper this advice with the caveat not to believe in the typewriter, when computer word processors arrive, but I’m sure you get my meaning and will not become ostriches with your head stuck in the sand. What advice do you have for students who are looking to combine their passions with a startup career? Greathouse: Powell: Do so! Do not plan a career in a field you are not passionate about. Do not just think of making money. Think about making insanely great products, services, or whatever your passion is. Never settle for being a “me too” company. Strive to be the leader, the innovator, the best. Follow your heart. Life goes by pretty fast (warp 9.0 at my age), so don’t settle for less than being the best you can be at what you do. Word. How do you think the future of skating will differ from the past decade? Greathouse: Powell: Skateboarding has undergone a number of cycles; decade long economic cycles, sociological cycles, cultural cycles, and maturity cycles. While this is not the place for a long treaty on the essential nature of skateboarding and its evolution, I believe we are embarking on a brand new cycle, the likes of which we have not seen since 1975. A forty year cycle. Each of skating’s major cycles have involved a new generation coming into the realm, in order to experience it and reinvent it for themselves, after the previous generation has taken it as far as their vision permitted, and stalled. We are at the most dramatic “reset” I have seen in 40 years! It is very exciting to me because we have transitioned in just a couple of years from a mono focus activity to a multi focus culture that is embracing diversity of age, style, and intensity. It is very healthy right now, and this is giving us the opportunity to address each of these new centers of interest and activity with new insanely great products! I know your passion is product development. Can you give us a hint as to what you are currently working on? Greathouse: Powell: Ha! Well, as you can probably tell, I’m a big fan of Steve Jobs, and he learned the lessons I’ve mentioned to you earlier than I did, but I’ve learned them. I will give you this general information, though. Our future products will employ new materials not found in today’s skateboards, and will be designed for all the facets of skate culture and terrain. We will be redeveloping each skate component to optimize it for each intended use. The skateboard is a very efficient transportation tool, and recognizing this, we will be making it even easier and more fun to ride, carry, and use. Our R&D budget is as big as we can possibly make it. Everything we make goes back into new products. We are the current leader in polyurethane wheels, and quality bearings, and aim to be the best in trucks and decks too. We are very excited about this opportunity to reinvent ourselves as the sport reinvents itself. You can read part one of my interview with Mr. Powell . here Follow John’s startup-oriented Twitter feed here: @johngreathouse .

How Stacy Peralta, Tony Hawk And The Bones Brigade Broke The Rules & Owned The Competition

Hey there, I read a good bit this last year and want to share the ones that made my year 10x better. I work in technology but have interest in health, psychology, behavioral economics and more. Stick around the site and check back in for more book writeups. For now though, let’s dive in to the ones I read last year that made my year 10x better. Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda Yes… obligatory cliché Steve Jobs book. I know — the FIRST one too. But give me a chance, this is actually written by the engineer who worked on the iPad keyboard. He gives great detail about interactions with the product team at Apple, and how they operate. Apple sold 320 million iPads since the product debuted in 2010, so Ken’s work did make quite an impact. That’s more people than there are alive in the United States. If you work in product this book is a must read. View the way a visionary ran his company. Order here. Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis This is one of the many books that I was late on. The book is filled with actionable advice, along with charts to support real results from methods discussed. My copy is covered with notes, and ideas sparked from the insights provided by Sean. I am a big fan of and from and they referenced this one a good bit. I decided to pick it up and couldn’t put it back down — if you have any interest in growth then this is an essential. Andrew Chen Casey Winters Reforge Order here. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield I recently became obsessed with content creation. Steven does a great job breaking down the walls you need to destroy to be a great creator. Order here. Those people fighting are your thoughts. Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman I have not finished this one but am throwing it in here anyways. Reid is a total badass when it comes to story telling. I listen to his podcast “Masters Of Scale” religiously. If you love the idea of growing companies at bullet train speed then check it out. Order here. If you want to `send it`, you may as well read how others have `sent it` :) Rework by Jason Fried and David The guys at get a lot of flack for their controversial approach to work. It is so opposite to what everyone in the Valley has been preaching, and I love it. This book goes deep, taking a totally different mentality towards work, and the way to get it done. These guys have gone on to write many more, including Remote which I read. Short after reading this, my VP of Engineering, and I decided to flip our processes on their head. Now we follow suit on many of the methodologies taught in this book. We agile’d agile. Basecamp Kayle Order here. Remote by Jason Friend and David. Work doesn’t have to be done in an office. Managers no longer need to be chair counters, now they can be doers. Remote talks all about, you guessed it, working remote. Basecamp is comprised of a team of people located all across the United States. Jason and David do a great job explaining their process and how they continue to run a profitable company while having a majority of employees working remote. Order here. Body by Science by Doug McGuff Md I read a lot about fitness and health — this is a great book for understanding the basics of different exercises. Sure you can look up different exercises online, or purchase a plan.. but that wasn’t enough for me. I was curious as to how all these muscle groups work with one another. If you’re a health nut, pick this one up. Order here. The Power of When by Michael Breus, PhD If you’re in to understanding your body, and when you should do certain tasks than this is a good one. We all kind of know that some people are night owls, some people are morning people. This guy breaks it down to a science. If you are this type of person, do these tasks at this time — very specific, actionable advice. The book talks about chronotypes — which are the behavioral manifestation of underlying circadian rhythms, of myriad physical processes. He talks a lot about sleep. Check it out. Order here. Inspired by Marty Cagan This is a must read for any PM out there. Talks about different levels of product growth, and was the best product book I read all year. It starts out with lessons from top tech companies, get s into talking about right people, then dives in to product breakdowns. Order here by Elad Gil High Growth Handbook Looking for a lot of different topics about startups? The role of a CEO, Managing the Board, recruiting, hiring, managing, building an exec team, marketing & PR… You get the idea. Lots and lots of information on scaling startups from 10 to 10,000. Overall a great book to skip around to check things out — not a cover to cover book. Order here. by Al Ries & Jack Trout 10 Immutable Laws of Marketing If you have any sort of interest in marketing than this is a must. It does a great job of breaking down the different “laws” of marketing using companies we are all familiar with, ie. Apple. One that is particularly interesting is The Law of Perception. Marketing is not a battle of products, it’s a battle of perceptions. I got this recommendation from listening to Seeking Wisdom — a dope podcast by and . Dave Gerhardt David Cancel Order here. by David Asprey Bulletproof I have been on the bulletproof coffee train since reading this and haven’t turned back. David did an excellent job keeping nutritional information interesting. He gets a bit in to biohacking, aka taking supplements, doing certain things in your day to day to increase brain behavior. This was the first book that has sent me down the rabbit hole that is bio hacking. If you want to live longer read his book. Order here. Bulletproof coffee is tasty and gets the day going. by John Joseph Meat is for Pussies: A How-to Guide for Dudes Who Want to Get Fit, Kick Ass, and Take Names As I peer over at my bookcase, selecting recommendations from the books I read this year I wonder how this one came up. I must have read some blog article about how terrible meat is for you. Anyways the name itself kicked the tempo off for the book. It is rare that I find a book that I cannot put down. This is by far the best vegan … only vegan book I have ever read. “Walk past the morgue and head straight to the vegetables.” Such imagery. Order here.. by Brad Frost Atomic Design If you are in product you must read this. I don’t care if you’re a designer, engineer, or product manager. Brad does an excellent job of breaking down his philosophy behind UI design. The result is cleaner, more consistent products which lead to happier users. Everyone wants happier users. Order here. by Scott Jehl and Josh Clark Designing for Touch & Responsible Responsive Design, These books absolutely nail how to design for touch, as well as responsible responsive design. If you are a UX researcher, UI designer, or product designer you should highly consider reading these. They break things down, and give you the chops you need to work with devs on mobile and responsive projects. Order here. Thanks for reading — follow along with my thoughts on twitter.

Download these Books and Crush Life

At , SEO is a big customer acquisition channel for us. We get more than 70K unique visitors a month from it, in which a percentage of those visitors convert into actual paying customers. Fiix (www.fiix.io) In this reading, I’ll show you our journey of how we built our SEO. If you have any questions throughout, feel free to send me a message through Twitter: 👋 www.twitter.com/ZainManji Feel free to subscribe to my free newsletter as well, where I periodically post articles just like this one: 🎉 https://zainmanji.substack.com Please share with anyone you feel may find value from it as well 🤗 SEMRush (www.fiix.io) SpyFu (www.fiix.io) What is SEO? SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of growing organic visibility in search engine results through a non-paid manner. In simpler terms, it’s the process of aiming to have your website shown as the first result in Google (or other search engine) for specific search queries without needing to pay for ads to do so. What does Google care about most when assessing webpages? Relevance and authority. People go to Google to ask questions and receive answers. Google’s #1 priority is to answer the user’s question as quickly, as accurately, and as reliably as possible. If someone visits Google and has trouble finding the answer they’re looking for, Google considers that a poor experience. Therefore, Google is very particular about which websites they display first. Why is SEO important? SEO is one of the few acquisition channels with true scale. If done correctly, it gives your website an immense amount of traffic for free, which you can then convert to users/customers. The only cost to develop SEO is engineering opportunity cost. Some of the best companies today rely heavily on SEO to grow and retain their user base: Pinterest, Amazon, Yelp, Trivago, GrubHub, Expedia, and more. How did we decide to build out our SEO? To give a little more context, sends expert, licensed mechanics to people’s homes, offices, or locations to repair their vehicles. Our target customer is anyone that owns a car and needs a car repair. So when thinking about the decision making process an individual goes through when they experience an issue with their car, they either do one of the following primary actions: Fiix (1) Ask the car expert in their close circle for help (e.g. father, friend, etc). (2) Go to the closest repair shop to them. (3) Go to Google to find some answers to problems they’re experiencing. When we asked ourselves what the best method to tackle #3 was, we found that SEO was the clear solution 🔥. What was our goal with SEO? Our goal was to entice our target customers to visit our website to purchase an auto repair service that would be conducted at their home. When a car owner searches any topic to do with their car on Google, we wanted to be the website that shows up first after the user types in their query and be the place that a user can rely on to find answers. Okay, cool… so what did we do start? 1. Start by leveraging Google Adwords (SEM) and Google Keyword Planner SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is the process of gaining visibility in search engine results through methods. For example, if you pay Google to run an advertisement campaign for you, they can put you in the ad section at the top of the search results after searching in Google. paid SEM is great for short-term/immediate results and SEO is great for consistent, long-term results. Even though we knew SEO would be an important channel for our customer acquisition, we also knew that we could not expect immediate, next-day results from it. It takes a while for Google to index your webpage, for Google to analyze and assess whether your website is popular and trustworthy, and for you to see organic traffic build up from there. Knowing this, our goal with SEM was to not only create profitable, successful ad campaigns, but also to identify which keywords/queries were yielding us our highest ROI and acquiring us our target customers. Metrics we would track in our SEM campaign would be: (1) : How many people saw our ads for a given query. Impressions This would tell us whether the keyword/query we were targeting was highly searched or not. (2) : Total # of clicks / total # of impressions. CTR (Click Through Rate) This would tell us how enticing our ad copy was to users. A high CTR was a very good sign and would influence how we construct our metadata and content for our organic webpages when it came time to develop SEO for the keyword. (3) : The total $$$ amount we had to pay every time someone clicked on one of our ads for a given query. CPC (Cost Per Click) This helped tell us whether the query was a competitive query or not, and whether our ad had a good quality score or not. (4) : # of clicks (interactions) with our ad / # of conversions. Conversion Rate This would tell us which keywords/queries were yielding us paying customers. : to get some of this info, you don’t have to run an SEM campaign. You can instead use to figure out some general statistics. We did SEM because we wanted to create profitable Adwords campaigns regardless. Note Google Keyword Planner After a few experimentations we were able to see which keywords our target customers were searching for and whether they were converting into paying customers. From this, we now knew which keywords we needed to focus on and target when developing our SEO. What were our findings from SEM: From our SEM efforts, we then figured out which keywords and queries users were searching for and that worked well for us. From this we knew we had to create pages and content on our website that would target these keywords, as these were what our customers were searching for on Google. 2. Instead of manually creating webpages, dynamically create them by leveraging data. The most time-consuming thing we could have done when creating our webpages would be to manually type out all the content we wanted on your website. It’s not truly scalable, it’s annoying, it’s time consuming, and can easily be automated with proper programming. In our database we had a ton of information regarding all types of information related to our service offering. So what we did was dynamically create hundreds of thousands of pages with this data and form content that was specific to each data category. All of these pages were dynamically generated through templates we created for each page and by populating the templates with content from our databases based on the given URL and query params. This allowed us to hit every long-tail keyword/query we wanted to target. The way we thought of creating this engine for developing pages on our website was sparked through . Andrew Chen (Partner at Andreesen Horowitz) and Reforge, in their lesson about developing growth loops within your product (Highly recommend you check it out) 3. Now that we had our keywords and content, how did we optimize for SEO? It was one thing to have content and pages across our entire website, but if it was not structured and presented in a way that makes it easy for Googlebot to crawl, then we would have difficulties showing up on Google. Wait, what’s Googlebot? Googlebot is Google’s web crawling bot (also referred to as “spider”). Crawling is the process by which Googlebot discovers new and updated pages to be added to the Google index. When Googlebot is crawling our website, our main goal is to make sure that Googlebot is able to extract and interpret all the relevant info as easily as possible. So what do we improve and optimize for then? On-Page factors. These are factors that are controlled by you or by the code on your page. Proper use of HTML elements and structuring throughout each web page (e.g. h1, h2, h3, title, meta, etc) Uniqueness throughout every webpage. Each page’s content needs to be at least 70% unique compared to every other page on the website and contain barely any duplicate content. Discoverability in each webpage. Content displayed on a webpage should be displayed in text and not so much images, JavaScript, or CSS. Even though Googlebot is intelligent, it has a much easier time parsing text. Freshness throughout every webpage. Content on each page should be updated periodically to show Google that the website is actively being maintained and staying relevant. Placement of targeted keywords in important places in the HTML structure. For example, placing important keywords in the first <h1> tag, in the title tags, and other metadata spots. Having diversity of content throughout page (images, lists, videos, text, etc). It shows Googlebot that the page is rich in content. Server-side rendering, not client-side rendering when rendering content on the webpage. We didn’t want our content to be loaded dynamically after the page loads, because Googlebot crawls pages as soon as the browser receives the HTML response from the server. Google structured snippet Using Google structured snippets whenever we could, so that Googlebot can parse it easier and also be able to showcase content better within the search results such as in the image to the left. Making use of internal links throughout the webpage so that GoogleBot can continue crawling the website and so that in can pass on SEO juice to others pages of the website. : User Experience (UX) Making sure webpages are mobile responsive. Making sure webpages load quickly. Off-Page factors. These are factors that are not directly controlled by you. Backlinks. The quantity and quality of external links linking to your webpages is a very important factor. It helps Google understand how authoritative the website is. If a lot of high-authoritative domains linked to our website, it signals to Google that our website must be authoritative as well. Anchor text of links. Ideally the anchor text should be consistent to the target keyword for the page it’s linking to. Metrics from search engines. A high bounce rate tells Google that the user went to our website with a question in mind and likely didn’t get that question answered from it. A high CTR tells Google that users are intrigued with our website and want to learn from it. Micro-Optimizations Making sure filenames had target keywords in it. Making sure the hierarchy and sitemap of the website was well structured so that SEO juice can flow nicely and to our highest ROI pages first. Not unnecessarily linking to other websites and keeping as much SEO juice within our website. Increasing page session time of a user with interactive applications, online chat sessions (e.g. ), and more. Intercom Using or to see how users were interacting with our webpage and whether they were getting confused or not. Hotjar FullStory A/B testing metadata (titles, description) to increase CTR. We did this internally and used as well. RankScience How do you measure SEO? How do you know it’s improving? There are a bunch of websites out there that automatically measure SEO efforts. However the accuracy of them is unsure. Some of these websites are: SpyFu, SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz, and more. We personally use and to measure most of our efforts as we can get precise numbers on traffic, CTR, rankings, and more in an aggregate view and on a precise keyword level. Google Analytics Google Search Console At this point, doing all of this immediately made us way better than our competition. But how can we improve past the basics? After reading some more talks from Casey Winters and Andrew Chen, we strived to do 2 more things. (1) Grow our SEO through “User Generated Content” (2) Create custom content, manually User generated content is an important growth loop that can greatly boost SEO. By allowing users to create high quality content on our website, we could tackle more long-tail keywords, continue to provide answers to other users’ questions, and encourage more and more content to be made. The way we went about this was by developing a “Stack Overflow for Mechanics”, where users can ask any car related question they had, and other users and staff members can answer any question. We decided to create custom content manually as well, as there was some content we knew users would search for that just needed to be authored manually. What do we still need to do? More user-generated content throughout the website Integrating more of Google’s technologies to make the UX of the website better, such as Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages ( ) https://www.ampproject.org/ More natural, organic backlinks for authoritative domains (e.g. press articles, blogs, influencers, etc) That’s it! And with all that, we built the foundation of our website and let Google and time take over to bake our SEO. Now, we have 70K+ visitors a month. And even though we’ve achieved this, we still have a lot to do to make our SEO even better. If you have any questions throughout, feel free to send me a message through Twitter: 👋 www.twitter.com/ZainManji Kudos 👏👏👏 Thank you to the following people who helped us learn more about SEO and shape our growth efforts. Twitter: www. Gustaf Alstromer twitter.com/gustaf Website: Twitter: Andrew Chen www.andrewchen.co/ www.twitter.com/andrewchen Website: Twitter: Casey Winters www.caseyaccidental.com/ www.twitter.com/onecaseman Website: Twitter: Julian Shapiro www.julian.com www.twitter.com/Julian **RankScience**Website: https://www.rankscience.com/

How We Grew Our SEO To 70K+ Visitors A Month

Every product team loves seeing the numbers go up and to the right. But how do you actually grow a product? Last year, I was lucky enough to take the , an 8 week course taught by and . I’m certainly no expert, but I wanted to share a few basic lessons that I think any team can use to grow their product. Reforge Growth Series Brian Balfour Andrew Chen If you enjoy this post, I’m writing a book for new and aspiring product managers to help them get a head start in their PM career. Sign up at to get a free chapter now. principles.pm Growth comes after product market fit This may sound obvious, but you shouldn’t grow a product that doesn’t . If a startup is trying to hire you as their first growth PM, check to see if their product has good retention and strong word of mouth. This is because: solve a real customer problem Growth is about getting users to experience the product’s core value (the magic moment) as quickly and frequently as possible. Pursuing this goal requires discipline. As a growth PM, you need to understand not just the core value of your product but also the levers that you can pull to help more users experience that core value. You need to be so disciplined that the first thing you should learn is accounting. Accounting for user growth Suppose you have job offers from two startups and both show the same growth in monthly active users (MAU). Which one should you join? Your first step should be to use the growth accounting formula to break up each startup’s MAU curve: Change in MAU = New + reactivated - churned This formula states that the monthly change in users is the sum of new users acquired and inactive users that were reactivated minus active users that have churned. Even if both companies have the same MAU curve, their growth accounting graphs could look very different: Source: Jonathan Hsu, Accounting for User Growth In this example, company A is rapidly acquiring new users but churning them just as fast. Company B isn't adding a lot of new users but is retaining most of the people that they do acquire. Without knowing anything else, I would join company B because it has better user retention. Growing B involves scaling user acquisition while keeping a close eye on retention. Growing A could be much harder — you would need to understand why the churn rate is so high and where the new users are coming from. For example, company A’s new users might be coming from a paid ad campaign that’s creating a hole in their finances. Growth accounting gives you a sense of whether a company or product’s growth is sustainable. But to understand what levers you can pull to drive more growth, you need to look at loops. Why loops and not funnels? Most people think of growth as optimizing funnels (e.g. acquisition, activation, retention, referrals) but funnels have several drawbacks: When orgs are isolated into funnels (e.g. acquisition PM, retention PM) no one is thinking about the whole picture. For example, if acquisition is bringing in low quality leads, retention could tank. Funnels don’t emphasize building sustainable growth engines. They focus your attention on getting to that next active user instead of on how that active user can bring in more people. Instead of funnels, think of growth as building loops. There are two types of loops: Retention loops drive reactivated and churned users. Acquisition loops drive new users. Retention loops Retention loops help deliver the core product value as frequently as possible. These loops have four components: Source: Reforge : The cue that inspires action. Triggers can be external (e.g. Jane just tagged you in 5 photos) or internal (e.g. I’m bored and want to check out my Instagram feed). Trigger : How the trigger is delivered. Channels could include e-mail, mobile push, in product, paid media, snail mail, and more. Channel : The dopamine hit that a user receives for responding to the trigger. Rewards are strongest when they’re variable (e.g. you never know how many likes you’ll get for your Instagram post). Reward : The action that the user takes to get the reward. Action A simple retention loop is receiving a comment on a social media post: : Jane, a friend of a friend, comments on your post. Trigger : Instagram sends you an on-site notification that Jane has commented. Channel : You get a dopamine hit that someone cared enough to comment. Reward : You respond to the comment, add Jane to your network, or publish a new post. All of these actions drive new loops. Action Acquisition loops Acquisition loops convert new users to active users and then encourages them to bring in even more users. An active user should be someone who has experienced your core product value at least once. If you have a video app for example, an active user is someone that has watched a video, not someone that has logged in to your app. There are five main types of acquisition loops: Source: Reforge A simple acquisition loop is content and SEO (search engine optimization): A user publishes an article on LinkedIn. The article gets indexed by Google. Someone searches on Google and reads the article. That person is prompted to sign in and create more content. Ideally, a product will have a few acquisition loops that it can rely on. Relying too much on one loop is risky, especially if that loop is likely to change. For example, if 80% of views for this blog post came from Medium’s homepage, a change in how Medium ranks articles (e.g. prioritizing paid posts) could significantly hurt this post’s overall views. Give your users a magical onboarding experience A critical step in every acquisition loop is new user onboarding. Your goal should be to get a new user to experience the product’s core value as quickly as possible. New users who haven’t experienced your product’s core value aren’t really motivated so every unnecessary step that you add to the onboarding flow could lead 50% or more people dropping out. In fact, the onboarding flow itself can be a magic moment. Most products have terrible user onboarding, so you can really differentiate your product by building an . unforgettable first time user experience The ethics around growth Growth teams are usually more metrics focused than any other team in the company. But as I mentioned , it’s easy to become so metrics obsessed that you lose sight of the customer. For example, recently I discovered that a messaging app I used often didn’t have a sign out button. Yes, preventing users from signing out might increase messages or some other core metric, but it could also erode user trust. Just because trust is harder to measure for this quarter doesn’t mean that it’s not important. before I’m writing a book for new and aspiring product managers. If you enjoyed this post, visit principles.pm to get a free chapter.

How to Grow a Product: A Beginner’s Guide

Step-by-step instructions to increase customers and fuel your business. I run the Growth Product Team at : 1 Designer, 7 Engineers, and 2 Product Managers. We are responsible for building products to acquire new customers and increase revenue across Rev’s 6 businesses. The team has acquired over 100,000 customers and we’re just getting started. Rev.com In the past 18 months, we have tripled the conversion rate for 3 separate Rev-owned services — (On-Demand ), (AI Transcription Service), and (On-Demand Math Tutoring) — across three different mediums — Mobile Web, Desktop Web, and Mobile Apps. Rev Human Audio Transcription Temi MathElf Increasing conversion = more money for same cost! I started the Growth Team at Rev and focused on one service line and one channel. At first, my work (landing page design and graphics, service information, copy, and checkout flow) all relevant metrics. There was doubt brewing. By focusing on Growth as a process rather than a series of growth hacks (hat tip to ), we saw the metrics turn and then skyrocket within a couple months. tanked Reforge After seeing success, I petitioned for more resources. I was turned down. To prove the growth process I was building was not just random luck, I set out to do it again. This time, I called my shot, starting with writing out a playbook that anyone could run with. At first, it was ugly. I cut excess steps. Added necessary ones. Honed the process. Applied the . Feynman technique Then, I applied the playbook to a new service line and saw another 3x conversion improvement! It was gold, and I felt confident we could replicate our success. Overview What I am sharing here is the conversion playbook that you can apply to websites, mobile apps, or any business you’re trying to grow. The steps listed will help you work on the right projects. By being as user-centric as possible, you will see the best results. This is an open book process. Please ask others for help—no work is done in a silo. Step 1: Information Gathering (Understand the Problem) Key Questions Where is the biggest opportunity in improving conversion? Which pages or steps have the highest bounce and exit rates? What information is lacking? What are people not engaging with? Look at all sources of funnel information. If you’re not tracking your funnel, you won’t be able to accurately measure changes. : Gather Your Data. Here are some of the tools we use Observe, don’t assume customer behavior / : watch user sessions (pro tip: filter for ‘rage click’ to see frustrated users) FullStory AppSee Understand your customers Who are they? What positions do they hold and at what sort of company? What is important to them? What are they trying to accomplish? Look at NPS results, past orders, and talk to customers : D Step 2 evelop a hypothesis. Seek to understand the problem. Get ideas for improvements. Talk to customers Intercom Telephone calls Emails NPS Survey Other surveys Watch customers FullStory Talk to strangers — bring in randoms to use your product. Great for general exploration CraigsList — remote user testing. Use for one-off questions. Validately Talk to experts Wherever you can find them Past examples: , Conversion Experts — @ , @ Online Geniuses Slack Group Chris Neumann CRO Metrics Joshua Bretag Blueprint Solutions Copy Ideas from Successful Websites Dropbox, Box, Stripe, Square, Grammarly, Airbnb, Asana, Drift, etc. Depends on what you’re designing for — should always be relevant to the problem No need to start from scratch on what will change and why. Hypothesis should be tied directly to a metric and have the following form: Develop a hypothesis The current state is ___. If we do ___, then ___ will happen to our key metric because ___. of ideas based around your hypothesis and learnings. Create a list Step 3: Prioritize Tests using ICE framework or related framework Score each test on 3 areas Impact, Confidence of Success, Ease of Implementation High = 3, Medium = 2, Low = 1 Rank the tests by score Ignore anything below 7 Before working on a 6, rinse and repeat Steps 1 & 2 to find great tests Small tests will likely not show statistically relevant in a small timeframe If necessary, look into batching a few 6’s together to create a bigger overall test Focus on High impact wins Prioritize small, quick wins over huge “big bang” improvements that may take a month to get in front of customers. Bring the top tests to your peers and on best tests. Pick one and proceed to the next step. get feedback Step 4: Design Your Visual and Content Changes Visual Design Create rough mock-ups showing what you are changing and how (I use Skitch) Nail the copy Appeal to the customer and their sense of value . Take the words you want to say. Cut it in half. Cut it in half again Simplify Make it honest and believable Ask yourself, is this valuable for the user? Will they benefit from this information? Get v1 Iterate until completed Show to other people (product/design/management/strangers) and get feedback Incorporate feedback with all of your other inputs Look at more best-in-class examples Repeat Get sign-off on the test Step 5: Final Checklist Questions With the resources available, is this the best test we can be running right now? Is this the most efficient way to test the hypothesis? Is our test instrumented correctly? Are we collecting the right data? What is the right amount of data we need to gather for this test to be valid? What do you expect the results to be and why? Step 6: Run Your Test Confirm test with your team/key stakeholders Prioritize the test in the engineering backlog Run the test until you met the appropriate (predetermined) threshold of data Look at the results Step 7: Results Measure whether your test (challenger) had a higher conversion rate than the current design (champion). Declaring a winner 1st method: challenger > champion with >=95% statistical significance 2nd method: challenger > champion and provides value for users Value = information, context, etc Losers Challenger =< Champion Challenger slightly > Champion but not statistically significant or better for users Aesthetic change, small copy change Step 8: Analysis Was our hypothesis correct? Why or why not? What is the major takeaway? Are there any common learnings with our other tests? Does this influence the next test we should run? ALWAYS communicate results and learnings from the tests. Even the losers. You lose credibility if you only talk about the wins and gloss over losses. Final Notes about Rev’s Growth Team The Growth team is hypothesis and data-driven We believe in constant experimentation. Always Be Testing We expect most tests to fail. The test failed, you didn’t fail We don’t need to test everything (e.g. button colors) If you are working on Growth or have questions about the above, feel free to reach out: Barron.Caster@gmail.com. To see specific examples run through this process, click “Follow” to subscribe

The 3x Conversion Playbook

Growth involves much more than just grow retention, conversion or increase any specific action Source You can read the Portuguese version here . I know that you have been listening and seeing like ever before. Strategies that increased the conversion in X%, retention grew Y% and a lot of other numbers that grow based on smart movements. Growth But at the end of the day, we need to discuss and prepare a lot of stuff before start and analyze behavior, numbers to optimize growth. When I start talking about it on the first in January at Product Arena Rio de Janeiro Edition, the students look me like a stranger. After I gave a lot of examples, exercises, and discussions, they understand the importance of the Mobile Growth Workshop Foundation of Growth. One thing that helps to understand it is the growth pyramid that explained in one of his articles about growth: Brian Balfour Source: Brian Balfour's blog Starting by Principes and not by tactics make sense once all tactics are different from each product. And for sure that you know your product, your audience, your users, and the customer journey are so different, right? Rather than ask about: Tactics that help X% active faster the service; or Tactics that grew the retention by Y%, People should ask: How are created the principles of growth and how that keeps working? And, the pyramid has other essential points: Help orientate/priority hypothesis and focus, and of course, alignment; Process: Define the process is so important to create your team; Team: Are the "Hands on" part. Turbinated and evolved by the Team. Good Process and the right Team are essential to be successful here. Tactics: To learn more about the Growth Pyramid, read more and here here . Ok, and then…? What is the most critical area that we can focus our effort with minimal resources? The one billion dollars question that helps define a lot of things. For example: Will we invest effort in of users or the of new users? Activation Acquisition For sure that both make sense. But, if you don't have enough resources what the priority is? Make sense acquire new users if they not back? That's why (and I recommend you to read by and about my keynote on ProductCamp) Retention is king! this article about retention Andrew Chen this one Virality Vs. Retention. Andrew Chen's Blog Source: PS: did you know that can be 25x cheaper retain a user than acquire a new one? Source: Harvard Business Review About it, two more topics need attention: and . North Star Metric The Only Metric That Matter is the to measure the value that your product delivery to users, and North Star Metric best metric is the number that needs attention at the moment The Only Metric that Matter only (and maybe in the future , you need other OMTM) Basically, is the number that will help your next fund rising, and will help orientate your startup in the long term. OMTM startup NSM Examples of : North Star Metric Daily Active Users (more users access, more info/status users look and of course, more segmentation they have to Ads) Facebook: Nights Booked (value to the hosts and guests) Airbnb : Examples of Only Metric That Matter: ; Medium: Total Time Reading : SumoMe One Billion Page Views In One Year If you want to learn more about these topics, I encourage you to about and about read it NSM this one OMTM . As soon users exposed to these value, the conversion grow. Inside Intercom Poadcast Source: You can have a lot of answers to Like: What is the most critical area that we can focus our effort with minimal resources? Activation (Onboarding); Acquisition (New Users); Retention Former Postmates VP of Growth, shared one interesting example about Onboarding at an interview on . Postmates allows getting anything from anywhere, like a Nintendo Switch from Target. That’s an advantage if you compare competitors like UberEats. (also, in Brazil we have a startup doing the same of Postmates, called So, as soon users exposed to these value, the conversion grow. Siqi Chen podcast Inside Intercom Rappi ). The next level of growth Another good example of is The that recently , Instead they think just make users send more messages, WeChat trying to grow the growth is not just growing specific action WeChat. Asian Juggernau, achieves 1 Billion monthly active users number of tasks that can be done through the app in the daily lives of users. Crazy, no? Source: Y-Combinator To think in this way, you need your . But, you can step back and understand and your customer interacts with your product/service using a simple framework, called Make a copy to apply to your product and get some insights: foundation of growth prepared how where User Channel Map. Download User Channel Map Template User Channel Map — Source: Growth Series by Reforge To resume: Better questions always bring better answers. Do not forget that Growth is much more than just tactic; Find your NSM as soon as possible to orientate the future of your company; NSM is different from OMTM; Understand what your customer do during the day can bring a lot of insights to take your product to the next level; Define the foundation/principles of help better tests, hypothesis and probably, best results and velocity. Growth So, are you ready for Growth? 🤓 If you like, don’t forget to 👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏 You can check all references linked in the article or below: by On Growing: 7 lessons from the Story of WeChat Y Combinator by Siqi Chen, former VP of Growth at Postmates, on scaling a growth team Intercom by Retenção e Engajamento — Quando tudo começa pela emoção @arthurklose by Retention is king Andrew Chen by Don’t Let Your North Star Metric Deceive You Brian Balfour by Does a North Star Metric Oversimplify Growth? Sean Ellis by Medium’s metric that matters: Total Time Reading Pete Davies ? by What is North Star Metric Sean Ellis by The Only Metric That Matter Josh Elman by Building A Growth Machine Brian Balfour by Principle, Process, Team and Tactics Brian Balfour _Read writing about Growth in Hacker Noon. how hackers start their afternoons._hackernoon.com Growth - Hacker Noon _Read writing about Growth Hacking in Hacker Noon. how hackers start their afternoons._hackernoon.com Growth Hacking - Hacker Noon

Growth is NOT just growth.

Many startup teams fail to bring in product marketers with the right skill sets at the right time, and end up paying for it with failed product launches. Because product marketing is a relatively new role, a majority of technology companies don’t know what product marketing is or how it’s different from marketing, growth marketing, digital marketing, brand marketing and product management. For that reason, founders often ask me some combination of the following questions: What do product marketers do? What are they responsible for? How are their goals different than those of marketing, growth and product management? How do we know if and when we need to hire a product marketer? To unpack the answers to these questions I generally start at the top with the goal: “A product marketer’s primary goal is to deliver the right product to the target customer at the right time to ensure customer adoption.” Then, I walk through how I break down the role of a product marketer — their key responsibilities, how those responsibilities align to different phases in the product growth cycle, and when is the right time to hire. In this post, I’ll share the 3-step process I’ve developed for working with teams to help them understand the role of a product marketing manager and get as much value out of their product marketing efforts as possible. The steps of the process are outlined below: , initiatives, product roadmap, decision making structure, culture, and brand. Clarify the company’s overarching business goals The 10 questions to ask leadership when starting a new project. — early, mid, or late stage. Assess the stage of the product’s growth cycle What activities is the company engaged in? What stage of funding is the company in? within the three typical areas of focus for product marketers (we’ll go through these in detail): Uncover where you can make the biggest impact Market validation Framing the message Go-to-market strategy (GTM) and delivering the message Then, I’ll dig into where companies go wrong when it comes to product marketing and how to avoid common pitfalls. My goal in sharing the process is to help teams and product marketers alike determine if, when, and how they should be working together, and identify the pitfalls that may prevent them from delivering the right product to the target customer at the right time and driving customer adoption. Let’s walk through the process. Step 1: Clarify the Company’s Overarching Business Goals Whenever I begin working on a new product, I take a step back before jumping in to spend time with the leadership teams to answer a handful of guiding questions: What is the company’s larger mission? What are the overarching business goals? What initiatives are they pursuing in the quarter and year ahead to achieve those goals? What does success look 3–6–9–12 months from now? What gaps exist that may prevent the company from reaching its goals? Is there time, capital, and an openness to additional testing for an existing product roadmap? Where operationally or strategically can I make changes? How do they want the brand and company to show up in the market? What is the core culture of the company? Is it product-led? Marketing-led? Design-led? Or governed by some other underlying value system? Who are the key decision makers? Spending time focused on the larger goals of the organization is the most important place to start. If the team and the product marketer don’t know the answers to these questions, if they are vague, or better yet, if the leadership team thinks it’s a waste of time to establish or review them, everyone will have a big problem on their hands down the road. In the words of Yogi Berra, “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else.” Every team in the company should be working towards a common goal — whether that’s revenue, user growth, retention, or to become an industry innovator & thought-leader. There will be more unknowns for early stage products, but regardless of the stage of growth, you need to have answers to these questions to ensure you’re working on the right things. The risk of skipping this step is that you’ll end up being ineffective, tinkering away on something in a silo. This happens a lot. Understanding existing goals and gaps is critical to delivering value. Every project is different, and every company and team chooses to optimize towards various objectives, and has different obstacles standing between them and their goals. Working within the existing culture and leadership structure is equally as important. Some companies are “product-led,” like Facebook, others are “marketing-led,” like Apple, and others are “design-led,” like Airbnb. Understanding the often unspoken rules of how different companies make decisions, and which executives are the key decision makers, is crucial when creating and executing a strategic go-to-market plan. Once I’ve gotten a clear picture of the answers to these higher level company questions, I then have a foundation to move to the next step of determining where the product is in its growth cycle. Step 2: Assess the Stage of the Product’s Growth Cycle The next question I ask as I develop a strategy for working with a new company or product is: Which growth stage is the company or product in and how does that align to its product life-cycle? A product marketing manager’s scope of work and focus is largely dependent on the company’s or product’s growth stage, and the growth stage is highly correlated with the product development lifecycle. To help me determine which growth stage a product is in, I’ve broken down the product growth cycle into three phases — early, mid, and late — and identified the activities teams generally engage in at each stage. The types of problems teams are trying to solve and the initiatives they’re pursuing to solve those problems, tell you much of what you need to know to identify the growth stage. Additionally, funding stage is often (but not always) a useful indicator in assessing where the product falls in the growth stage framework. The Product Growth Cycle for Product Marketers When I begin working with a new product, I use the framework pictured above to determine its stage. Making this call early on sets me up to accurately determine where I can make the biggest impact against the overarching goal. For example, I recently started working for a company in the seed to series A stage, and I spent a majority of my time focused on customer research and working with the engineering teams to determine the right MVP to build before moving on to a beta program. Step 3: Uncover Where You Can Make the Biggest Impact After digging into the company’s goals and culture with leadership, and assessing where the product is in its growth cycle, my next step is to define a hypothesis on where I can make the biggest impact against the goal of ensuring customer adoption. This hypothesis helps me decide what to work on and where to focus my efforts. To facilitate the process I’ve broken a product marketing manager’s key activities into three buckets: Market validation Framing the message GTM & delivering the message before and after launch Let’s dig into each bucket individually to get a clearer picture of the day-to-day work of a product marketer, and how it differs from marketing, growth and product management. MARKET VALIDATION In the market validation phase, product marketers collaborate with cross-functional teams to conduct customer research and testing. They also generally do the market research to understand the competitive landscape and pricing considerations. When it comes to customer research, they work with various teams to create a master list of questions to gather business, operational and technical insights from customers. Product teams generally focus on technical or product requirements, business development & sales teams focus on business questions, and user experience teams focus on usability. These various cross functional teams focus on very different parts of the market research process, and it’s the product marketer’s job to centralize the inputs and align them with the company’s larger business goals. It’s also their responsibility to bring together all components of the customer research process and present the insights to the company. By composing and telling the story, product marketers share the context leadership needs to make informed strategic decisions that balance customer needs with those of the business. FRAMING THE MESSAGE After customer and market research is completed, product marketing managers take the learnings and insights they distilled during the research process and translate them into a positioning document. They share this document with cross functional teams and leadership with the goals of: Establishing buy-in Giving all teams a master document to use in creating product assets to ensure consistent branding & messaging. Additionally, during this phase product marketers work closely with many cross functional teams, like legal, finance and brand, to mitigate potential legal risks when building out the messaging and launching and packaging the product. GTM & DELIVERING THE MESSAGE BEFORE AND AFTER LAUNCH One of the most important parts of a product marketer’s role is to create a go-to-market (GTM) plan. The GTM is a blueprint or roadmap that accounts for all of the inputs into how the company will take a product to market, build a competitive advantage, generate demand in the market and ensure customer adoption. It answers the who, what, where when, why and how of a product launch. Product marketers “quarterback” the entire operational, business, and product roadmap for a launch. They ensure the right assets are created, from marketing content to sales collateral, and that all internal and external communications about a product are strategic and timely to enable a successful launch. Once the product has been launched, new prospects are considering the product, and customers are using it, product marketers must analyze performance of the funnel inside and out. They need to study each step of the buyflow, figuring out where, when and why customers are dropping off or churning. Once they understand the gaps in the funnel, they can optimize on delivering the assets where customers are stuck or leaving. Below, is some of the pre and post product launch work that is generally completed by a product marketer, while working closely with the creative and acquisition marketing teams and the product manager. Product marketers own the entire funnel, and are responsible for creating the full suite of assets that move customers through the funnel to purchase. At the top of the funnel they engage in activities focused on demand generation that produce brand and product awareness, such as creating buyer personas, product pages, webinars and other assets. At the bottom of the funnel, they work on assets and activities that offer more detailed explanations of the product to drive customer conversion and purchase, such as product demos, sales enablement materials, email campaigns and more. For example, if customers are getting stuck at the conversion stage, a good product marketer would double down on producing the right materials to ease conversion. In one particular product launch, we saw that prospects became interested in the product when they were introduced to the benefits. The problem was that they got stuck at the set-up and sales enablement stage. To address the issue, we worked with the product team to improve the buyflow with in-app user experience changes, followed by a product demo that walked the prospect through the set-up process. In general, when product marketers are working to improve the funnel, all of the strategies and tactics they employ should align with the larger company strategy and be in service of the company’s goals. This kind of alignment with the company’s target outcomes facilitates buy-in across the company. In an ideal world, a product marketer is empowered to join these 3 buckets of activities together into a complete 3_-step product marketing journey_ of market research and validation, positioning and framing, and finally, GTM & execution. Allowing them to embark on this 3-step journey in its entirety, increases the team’s probability of successfully building and launching the right product and features and driving adoption. In reality, this is most often where companies go wrong when it comes to product marketing — they fail to consider and bring on product marketing early enough, during the beginning phases of product development. Growth lessons from today’s top practitioners The Biggest Mistake Companies Make in Product Marketing A majority of companies hire product marketers reactively, and at the wrong time, when one or more of the following occurs: A product launch fails Initial product success stagnates Their product becomes more complex Their customer base is new or changing Market conditions change Competitors leapfrog their product They make matters worse by asking the newly hired product marketer to work on positioning, framing, and GTM, without allowing them to start with understanding the customer. This is problematic. The underlying foundation for driving a successful launch is developing a deep understanding of the customer — and this happens before positioning, framing and GTM. Bringing a product marketer into the mix late in the game, and skipping the research phase, sets the product marketer, the rest of the team, and the product up for failure. Often, during the product development process, product managers or business development partners sync with customers. But this isn’t enough to develop a deep understanding of the customer. These team members are generally interested in understanding the problem as it relates to their own role and responsibilities, and don’t extend beyond their immediate domain to develop or communicate deeper, holistic insights on the needs and psychology of the customer. To exacerbate the issue, they store a majority of the customer feedback they receive in their own heads. Product marketers work closely with product managers, growth marketers, business development, business operations, and other partners, depending on the company. Because a product marketer’s primary responsibility is to deliver the right product to the target customer at the right time, cross functional collaboration with many other teams is essential to build the optimal product roadmap and feature set. While some teams own a majority of the information on a particular topic, it is a product marketer’s responsibility to understand the key themes, construct the story of the product launch, communicate it across a broad and diverse audience of functions, and earn buy-in from leadership. An effective product marketer will understand these cross-functional dependencies, identify the customer unknowns, do the research, document learnings and create a GTM strategy coordinated with product, business, and operational functions. Just as important, they will take the lead on communicating the strategy to leadership, and other stakeholders. This part of a product marketer’s job is so important because it’s impossible to launch and service a product unless the entire company rallies behind the launch. And this kind of cross functional collaboration and buy-in takes time to build and needs to start early in the product development process. The Right Time to Hire a Product Marketer Based on my experience of launching multiple products, the best time to hire a product marketer is as soon as the company hires a product manager. Because product marketing exists as an extension of product management, with a focus on the market adoption of a product, a product marketer is best set-up for success when they can work closely with their product manager. Bringing the product marketer in at the early stages of a product development roadmap, allows the company to be strategic and proactive about customer adoption rather than reactive. Being proactive requires building growth and customer adoption into the DNA of the product from day one, rather than trying to bolt it on later. And hiring a product marketer to help bridge the gaps between marketing, growth, and product, will meaningfully increase any team’s chances of success when launching a new product. The original article was posted on Reforge on Jan 3rd, 2018 If you’re seriously interested in go-to-market, I recently created two new online courses: “ What is Product Marketing ” and “ Launch Your Product. The Essential Go-To-Market Course ”. And my book “ is available on Amazon! Product Marketing Debunked. The Essential Go-To-Market Guide”

Why Do So Many Startups Get Product Marketing Wrong?

Friends, at some point in time you’ll re-evaluate your professional life and try to strategize how you could get to the next stage in your career. Whether that strategy revolves around a complete career shift, developing your skills, or even going back to school, there are many challenges that come with each one- for myself, it ended up being a combination of all three strategies. This is the story of how I transitioned my career from a $12/hr job to startup founder to growth marketer and what I’ve learned in the process. This will specifically help anyone thinking about getting into growth. 1. Career Shift Right after I graduated college, I felt extremely motivated, but at the same time a little entitled — I naively assumed that I would get a high paying job at a company I deeply admired. As reality humbled me, I ended up getting a job that paid me a $12/hr wage and it was at a company I never heard of. Even though I worked with some great people and on thought-provoking challenges, after working there for almost a year, it made me realize that I was being careless with my career. For a whole year, I didn’t try to understand what excited me, how to develop my skills; I just showed up and worked on my job with little inspiration. I felt anxious to find something creative to apply myself towards. Scrolling through Facebook, I saw some of my friends making websites for fun and some even made a living out of it. Immediately, I saw this as an opportunity to apply myself and fill this itch to get enthusiastic at the prospect of learning again. I made a site called Beepyo, with my friends Bryan and Richard, which was an item-sharing platform for college students. Bryan and I ended up quitting our job realizing that taking it seriously required our full attention. Ultimately, it failed (see ), but I learned how to scale something from 0 people to thousands in 3 months — something I never did before that time. It was marketing, product development, talking to people who used the product — the foundation of growth marketing. I wasn’t disappointed that it failed, instead, I was ecstatic for finding a deeper purpose and direction for my career. 3 mistakes validating my idea Addicted to learning more about the process of launching and scaling software products. I knew that this would be the start of my journey towards growth marketing. I knew that if I wanted to get to the next level in this field I would have to enhance at a technical level. I had no idea what it took building a website back then and decided to try it out anyway. Stop strategizing your next step, just start. Lessons learned:**** 1. Try new things and be action orientated. If we decided to keep our jobs and pursue Beepyo being part-time, we’d probably still be building the site. Even if it did fail, we progressed our personal skills and shifted our entire career trajectory. 2. Take a risk, it’ll pay off. 2. Developing My Skills After Beepyo, I bought more than 10 Udemy courses (there was a Black Friday Sale 😉), enrolled in an online digital marketing course, and started a small project to apply my learnings.  Brian Balfour has a really great on how to start a career as a customer acquisition expert that focuses on how you should shape yourself like a “T”. The article breaks down the path of becoming an expert into 3 layers: The base layer, marketing layer, and channel layer. article Shape Yourself Like A “T” by Brian Balfour focuses on getting a foundation on subject matter that doesn’t necessarily relate to marketing but are the building blocks of everything you do in a career that requires critical thinking: Analytics, Stats, Branding, Behavioral Psychology, etc. emphasizes learning subjects that you would typically use for every channel in marketing such as SQL, A/B testing, Funnel Metrics, Photoshop, etc. keeps you on path that forces you to focus on becoming an expert on only one or two channels. It takes time to become great at one particular channel, almost a year or two, so you have to be strategic on what you want to hone in on. The base layer The marketing layer The channel layer I adopted this “shape yourself like a T” methodology and took it to heart and it paid tremendous dividends. From getting consulting gigs to working on amazing projects with industry experts; this “T” furthered my skillset to become a complete growth marketer. Sometimes when we’re learning something new, we don’t prioritize what we should be learning. This ends up being discouraging after we realize that the skill we learned turns out non-applicable to our job. Lessons Learned: 1. Research a path and follow it. 3. Going Back to School Ok ok I didn’t really go back to school in the sense of getting an MBA, but I did enroll in a program called , which was like a trade school for established growth marketers. The Reforge program is hosted by the former VP Marketing of Hubspot, Brian Balfour, and the Head of Growth at Uber, Andrew Chen. The price was steep but definitely worth every penny!  Reforge is 7 weeks long and it helped me accomplish two things: Reforge completely shifted how I thought about growth by teaching me how to formalize tactics into a growth engine. From learning about modeling, acquisition/retention loops, building a growth team from within an organization, and much more; this program significantly expanded my depth of knowledge. Reforge 1. Learning about growth, not at a tactic level but at an in-depth framework level. For the first time, I was getting an inside look on how top growth experts approached challenges and now I had that knowledge to adopt on opportunities back at my company. Most trade school type programs I’ve been exposed to have a tendency to attract people who are really new to the industry and want to make a complete shift in their career. One thing an offline classroom does better than an online one is creating a strong community. When you have people who are at completely different levels in their career it makes it challenging to connect with other classmates. 2. Building relationships with growth professionals in the tech industry. However, Reforge efficiently created a network of engaged peers; growth professionals that I can confidently ask for advice from and bounce around ideas. Going through this program made me establish a more professional boost in both my skillset and my network that I know will payoff for my entire career. To me, it was important to meet numerous growth professionals working on similar problems, because I know that having a one-sided view doesn’t expose me to new ideas. Reach out to the top people in your industry and read their material, ask questions, and maybe even grab a cup of coffee.    To all those looking to make a shift in your career, just know its never too late. Lessons Learned: 1. Find a community of professional peers. 2. Learn from the top 1% of professionals.

An Exploration of How I Learned Growth

I’m a big believer in . I read everything I can get my hands on, listen to audiobooks at 2x speed, and rely on products like Blink and Audible to learn even faster. Everyone has the ability to learn faster than they think they can, and increase their daily consumption of information. lifelong learning To become a learning machine though, you can’t just overload yourself with information. You have to apply critical thinking to what you’ve learned. One of the most helpful I’ve found for this is cultivating an understanding of different mental models. tools Professor of digital computing at MIT Jay Forrester as: defined a mental model The image of the world around us, which we carry in our head, is just a model. Nobody in his head imagines all the world, government or country. He has only selected concepts, and relationships between them, and uses those to represent the real system. A mental model is a framework that we use to make decisions, explain concepts, or make sense of the world. Understanding mental models helps you increase self-awareness in the cognitive principles behind what you think and why you think them. For product managers, this practice is especially important. Product managers aren’t developers, marketers, or salespeople. They’re a little bit of each. PMs don’t just have to understand and eliminate their own biases — they have to dig in and understand what makes their users tick. Below, I’ve included some of the mental models I’ve found most valuable for each stage of growing a product, and how to apply them. 1. The 5 Whys When you set out to build a product, the most obvious problem isn’t always the real problem you should be solving. Developing a deep understanding of the root problem helps you save time and money before writing code. The “Five Whys” is a mental model developed by Sakichi Toyoda, the founder of Toyota, for solving this problem. It simply involves asking “Why” five times. The problem: The vehicle won’t start 1st Why? — The battery is dead. 2nd Why? — The alternator is not functioning. 3rd Why? — The alternator belt has broken. 4th Why? — The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and not replaced. 5th Why? — The vehicle was not maintained according to the recommended service schedule. Following the model above, getting to the first “Why” might lead an engineer to conclude that a battery is broken, and to try to fix the battery. Asking “Why” multiple times leads to the conclusion that vehicle maintenance is the root problem — not the battery. This mental model is a powerful way of stripping back your internal biases around what you think the problem is, and what the deeper underlying problem is. Downtime at FogBugz Back in 2008, Joel Spolsky and the team at Fog Creek Software, were running a developer task-management tool called FogBugz when suddenly, the site went down. It turned out that one of the sysadmin’s hadn’t correctly installed a switch — it worked, until one day, it didn’t. For a company like FogBugz, downtime is deadly. Customers use FogBugz every day to help them do their work. If FogBugz was unreliable, people would stop using it. network To solve this problem, one of the sysadmin’s suggested putting together an internal service licensing agreement (SLA) that defined the percentage of “uptime” to aim towards and hold themselves accountable to. The idea was that once the sysadmin team knew what percentage uptime to aim for, this would be translated into day-to-day practice. This is a common, instinctual reaction to a problem. When an existing process fails, it’s normal to assume that the solution is more process. As Joel Spolsky points out in his , though, the issue with an SLA is the lack of statistical meaningfulness: writeup of the episode Measuring the number of minutes of downtime per year does not predict the number of minutes of downtime you’ll have the next year. Using the “5 Whys technique,” the team was able to get down to the root challenge: Problem: Our link to Peer1 NY went down. Why? — Our switch appears to have put the port in a failed state. Why? — After some discussion with the Peer1 NOC, we speculate that it was quite possibly caused by an Ethernet speed / duplex mismatch. Why? — The switch interface was set to auto-negotiate instead of being manually configured. Why? — We were fully aware of problems like this, and have been for many years. But — we do not have a written standard and verification process for production switch configurations. Why? — Documentation is often thought of as an aid for when the sysadmin isn’t around, or for other members of the operations team, whereas, it should really be thought of as a checklist. Ultimately, it wasn’t about guaranteeing 99.999999% reliability — which would have been incredibly costly to configure. The root problem wasn’t a lack of guaranteeing uptime — it was the lack of documentation around how to install a switch in the first place. 2. Inversion Or Working Backwards — Charlie Munger “Think forwards and backwards — invert, always invert” Inversion, or working backwards, is a helpful mental model for taking large complicated problems and breaking them down into smaller, easier problems. When you’ve attacked the problem the same way 100 different times, a better approach is often to turn the problem around. As the vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Charlie Munger, : says The way complex adaptive systems work and the way mental constructs work is that problems frequently get easier, I’d even say usually are easier to solve, if you turn them around in reverse. In other words, if you want to help India, the question you should ask is not ‘How can I help India?,’ it’s ‘What is doing the worst damage in India? What will automatically do the worst damage, and how do I avoid it?’ Inversion is a mental model that helps you revisit your core assumptions, and find new solutions to hard problems. Onboarding at SideKick Brian Balfour and the team at Sidekick, HubSpot’s freemium sales product for email, were facing a churn problem. People would sign-up for Sidekick, and promptly leave after the first week. To improve retention, the team focused on improving the onboarding experience of the product. They hypothesized that the onboarding experience didn’t teach people how to use Sidekick well enough. Because they didn’t understand how to use Sidekick, they left the app. With the , the team believed they could solve Sidekick’s churn problem. right onboarding experience They tried… Decluttering the welcome screen: Adding sample data to the welcome screen: …and five additional experiments. Nothing worked. Finally, the team went back to the drawing board. They had to invert the problem, and rethink their assumptions about how to solve it. As Brian Balfour says: It wasn’t about improving the landing experience of the product, it was about improving the experience of the product itself. Meaning we were advertising a product about your email on the landing page, we had you install the product within your email, and then your first experience was basically this web page within a web application. The problem wasn’t that people didn’t understand Sidekick’s product or how it worked. The problem was that people wanted to start using Sidekick faster. To fix retention, the team had to invert the problem and rethink their assumptions about solving it. Ultimately, what finally worked was removing a welcome screen to Sidekick’s web app. Instead, after installing Sidekick, they were taken straight to their inbox: 3. The Problem Hypothesis When you’re building or growing a product, you’ll have . Taking a rigorous, scientific approach to validating these ideas is how you build something that people actually care about. a lot of great ideas The “problem hypothesis” is a mental model for taking your great idea, and reframing it around a problem that can be tested and validated. For example, if you have an idea for , your problem hypothesis might be: building a product that schedules tweets on social media People want to share on social media, but they have a problem scheduling tweets individually. When you come up with a problem hypothesis, you have to be careful to test and analyze data objectively. It’s easy to manipulate the data to tell the story you want to hear — that’s why you need to be rigorous about your hypothesis and how you test it. The problem of user feedback When we were doing customer development for KISSmetrics, my web analytics company, we noticed that a common problem that our customers were facing was getting feedback from their customers. While this wasn’t a problem that was directly related to what we were doing at KISSmetrics, we heard it repeated so often that we thought it might be worth building something around. But before writing code, we wanted to test our idea and validate it by creating a hypothesis. It was: Product managers have a problem doing fast/effective/frequent customer research. To test our hypothesis, we started out by learning more. We wanted to know: What are customers doing now? What other tools are available? Who is involved? How frequent / severe is the pain? What else are customers complaining about? We ran around 20 interviews with customers by phone, and three in-person user tests with paper prototypes. We learned that because people had a hard time getting customer research, they weren’t doing customer research. They were using existing survey tools like SurveyMonkey, which made it hard to get rapid, instant feedback. Customer research was a constant pain that needed to be solved. It wasn’t enough to 100% prove our problem-hypothesis, but this early data was convincing enough that we built an initial product. Within a few months, we had over 1,121 websites using KISSinsights — and it all began with a problem hypothesis. 4. Anchoring Bias So far, we’ve discussed mental models that help clarify your thinking to build better products. But mental models are also a powerful tool for better understanding your users. “Anchoring” is a good example of a user-focused mental model. Anchoring explains the human tendency to rely heavily on the first piece of information it receives to make subsequent assumptions. A common example of anchoring effect occurs during negotiations. Say that you’re at an antique market, and see a chair that you like. You ask how much it costs, and the vendor replies “$50.” You counter-offer at $25, the seller counters again at $30, and you buy the chair. The chair may have been worth $25 — but you negotiate around the anchor, or the initial $50 offer. Once an anchor is set, people tend to make decisions around that initial piece of information. In the context of building a product, understanding how anchoring works is really important. The language and way your users initially encounter your product determines how they’re likely to think about it and use it (or not). How to acquire 46M users by changing one call-to-action Over ten years ago, James Currier was developing an online photo product that helped people store their photos on the internet. The problem was that people weren’t biting. Currier was having a hard time acquiring new users as competition in the online photo-sharing site was heating up. In an , Currier points out: interview with Reforge We said, ‘You can store your photos here now that you have digital photos,’ and this was triggering people’s protectiveness, says Currier, because the word “store” sparked users’ motivation to defend and collect. The issue was that the word “store” had an anchor effect on what people thought was possible with the product. Storing led users to think that the product had a limited use-case — backing up and collecting their photos online. In reality, there was a lot you could do with the photo product. By talking to their users, and testing and iterating on the sign-up call-to-action, Currier ran into a more powerful anchor term that would tap into a different motivation for users to try the product. Instead of telling users they could “store photos,” they changed the call-to-action to “share your photos.” “Sharing” anchored the product within a completely different context: instead of just passively storing their photos, new users anchored their understanding of the product with the ability to show their photos off to others. Rather than trying to motivate users to store their photos online, “share your photos” tapped into the more powerful motivation of passing photos around to friends and loved ones. 5. Loss Aversion Loss aversion is a psychological principle that states that people prefer avoiding losses to making an equivalent gain. We’d rather lose $5 than gain $5. not To measure your own aversion to loss, ask yourself, “How much would I need to gain to balance an equal chance to lose $100?” According to behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman, for most people the answer is $200 . Psychologically, we respond emotionally to decisions around winning and losing. The fear of losing typically outweighs the prospect of winning. –2x the amount lost In building products, loss aversion is a double-edged sword. Loss aversion can help you retain users by helping create a sense of progress in your app. But it can also create friction toward adopting your product in the first place. How understanding loss helped Amazon reduce friction When you’re launching a new product, loss aversion can be one of the biggest sources of friction for acquiring users. New products typically replace old ones, which means that switching products incur some type of loss. This was exactly the case at Amazon Music. Amazon Music is Amazon’s music streaming product, similar to Spotify or Apple Music. When Amazon Music first launched in 2013, some of Amazon’s customers had already purchased the equivalent of hundreds of dollars of CDs through Amazon. Seeing the option to purchase digital music triggered their aversion to loss. Switching to digital music would have meant either losing all the money they’d invested in CDs, or expending a lot of time and effort to rip CDs one by one. So the product team at Amazon launched “AutoRip” a product that gave people digital versions of CDs that they had already purchased. That helped reduce friction to adopting the Amazon Music’s product. As Kintan Brahbhatt, one of the product leaders behind Amazon Music, , “Customers were thrilled, and we eliminated two causes of anxiety — decisions and loss — with one product launch.” explains To arrive at insights like these, Brahbhatt recommends that product managers “Make a list of all decisions a customer needs to make in order to complete a task in your product. Then question each one.” In the case of Amazon Music, you might think that the decision to switch to digital music was obvious — customers don’t have to deal with importing CDs, can play music across their devices, and more. But by digging deeper and trying to understand the mental model of loss aversion behind their customers’ decision-making, the team at Amazon was able to reduce friction toward adopting the new product. More Mental Models When you’re dealing with product or user problems, you’re likely going to be overloaded with information. Not all of it is going to be helpful. Mental models help you sort through and cut to the heart of the problem. Then you can develop solutions that get at the deeper issues and prevent these problems from happening again. Here are some more mental models that help you increase your awareness of your own thinking and solve smarter: — A list of 181+ mental models Mental Models I Find Repeatedly Useful — A curated list from Tren Griffin of Microsoft A Dozen Things I’ve Learned About Mental Models from Charlie Munger — A canonical book by Dr. Robert Cialdini Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion Recognizing and shaping the way you think is one of the most immediate ways to improve as a learning machine. As your company develops, utilizing mental models helps you to continue to hone your problem solving skills. — You should sign up for my free email newsletter, Product Habits I share the best Product development and business content each week.

5 Mental Models that Help Product Managers Acquire and Retain Users

Yesterday my co-founder asked me why do I still use . And to be honest, especially now when my feed is full of tweets about Donald Drumpf and Election Debates — I often ask myself the same question. Probably the one and only reason why I still haven't given up on Twitter is because it's a great place to find inspiration. Twitter Even though, I never followed more than 200 people (at any given time), my feed is (usually) full of interesting stuff. So I ran a small analysis of the best accounts I follow and I've decided to make a list of some of the most inspiring ones. To make it a bit more interesting — I've decided not to include accounts which have more than 25,000 followers, as you probably already follow them. (For the same reason I also excluded all accounts with a over 60, and everyone with a over 65). Followers/Following-ratio Social Authority Index Here is my list of 20 Influencers worth following 1. — Co-Founder at Student.com — Investor in @Spotify — Friend of @charitywater | Followers: 20,619 | F/F ratio: 7.8 | Social Authority: 65 Shakil Khan _The latest Tweets from Shakil Khan (@shak). Co Founder at https://t.co/9L9KKmHwin - Investor in @Spotify - Friend of…_twitter.com Shakil Khan (@shak) | Twitter 2. — @clearbit co-founder. Tea, Earl Grey, hot. | Followers: 17,859 | F/F ratio: 8.5 | Social Authority: 64 Alex MacCaw _The latest Tweets from Alex MacCaw (@maccaw). @clearbit co-founder. Tea, Earl Grey, hot. San Francisco_twitter.com Alex MacCaw (@maccaw) | Twitter 3. — CTO @producthunt Tech/Product/ of guy | Followers: 11,375 | F/F ratio: 3.7 | Social Authority: 63 Andreas Klinger Growth-kind _The latest Tweets from Andreas @ 🇦🇹 (@andreasklinger). CTO @producthunt Tech/Product/Growth-kind of guy. SFO.us & VIE…_twitter.com Andreas @ 🇦🇹 (@andreasklinger) | Twitter 4. — 80’s kid, 90’s internet explorer | Co-founder of growth marketing agency @offtherecord | Made @startupstash | Digital Strategy & Startups are my thing | AMA! | Followers: 12,944 | F/F ratio: 2.9 | Social Authority: 62 Bram Kanstein _The latest Tweets from Bram Kanstein (@bramk). 80's kid, 90's internet explorer | Co-founder of growth marketing agency…_twitter.com Bram Kanstein (@bramk) | Twitter 5. — Co-founder, CEO of @shyp. Canadian. Ship me stuff @kevin. | Followers: 4,552 | F/F ratio: 9.1 | Social Authority: 60 Kevin Gibbon _The latest Tweets from Kevin Gibbon (@kevingibbon). Co-founder, CEO of @shyp. Canadian. Ship me stuff @kevin. https://t…_twitter.com Kevin Gibbon (@kevingibbon) | Twitter 6. — eFounders is a Startup Studio — we’ve built @textmaster @frontapp @aircall @mention @spendesk @hivyapp @illustrio @forestSaaS. | Followers: 3,494 | F/F ratio: 4.3 | Social Authority: 60 eFounders _The latest Tweets from eFounders (@efounders). eFounders is a Startup Studio - we've built @textmaster @frontapp…_twitter.com eFounders (@efounders) | Twitter 7. — Entrepreneur. Board member @GoodbabyInt, Founder/Chairman of @Socialbakers, Forbes 30 Under 30, Chairman @GameeApp, Organizer #Engage2017 | Followers: 20,019 | F/F ratio: 3.2 | Social Authority: 54 Jan Rezab _The latest Tweets from Jan Rezab (@janrezab). Entrepreneur. Board member @GoodbabyInt, Founder/Chairman of…_twitter.com Jan Rezab (@janrezab) | Twitter 8. — Aspiring inventor. CEO and co-founder of @intercom | Followers: 9,093 | F/F ratio: 18 | Social Authority: 54 Eoghan McCabe _The latest Tweets from Eoghan McCabe (@eoghanmccabe). Aspiring inventor. CEO and co-founder of @intercom. San Francisco_twitter.com Eoghan McCabe (@eoghanmccabe) | Twitter 9. — Co-Founder of Lemonade & Fiverr, Entrepreneur, Father of two amazing kids | Followers: 2,672 | F/F ratio: 37.6 | Social Authority: 53 Shai Wininger _The latest Tweets from Shai Wininger (@shai_wininger). Co-Founder of Lemonade & Fiverr, Entrepreneur, Father of two…_twitter.com Shai Wininger (@shai_wininger) | Twitter 10. Pieris — VP Growth @TransferWise | Followers: 3,017 | F/F ratio: 1.9 | Social Authority: 52 Nilan _The latest Tweets from Nilan (@nilanp). * VP Growth @TransferWise * 🇱🇰. London, NYC, Tallinn, Черкаси_twitter.com Nilan (@nilanp) | Twitter 11. — I run and write about Growth & Startup Marketing | Followers: 3,618 | F/F ratio: 5.2 | Social Authority: 51 Ryan Gum attach.io _The latest Tweets from Ryan Gum (@ryangum). I run https://t.co/xhyvonF3a2 and write about Growth & Startup Marketing…_twitter.com Ryan Gum (@ryangum) | Twitter 12. — Founder/CEO @ Reforge, Previously VP Growth @ HubSpot, EIR @ Trinity Ventures, Co-Founder at Boundless, Viximo, and PopSignal. | Followers: 11,619 | F/F ratio: 55.6 | Social Authority: 48 Brian Balfour _The latest Tweets from Brian Balfour (@bbalfour). Founder/CEO @ Reforge, Previously VP Growth @ HubSpot, EIR @ Trinity…_twitter.com Brian Balfour (@bbalfour) | Twitter 13. — CMO at @routeinsights a Marketing Automation Startup. Inbound and content marketing certified professional by @HubSpot and @rockcontent | Followers: 1,646 | F/F ratio: 1 | Social Authority: 46 Felipe Cardoso Barbosa _The latest Tweets from Felipe Barbosa (@felipecb_). CMO at @routeinsights a Marketing Automation Startup. Inbound and…_twitter.com Felipe Barbosa (@felipecb_) | Twitter 14. — Head of Design at @thenextweb • Natural born chiller | Followers: 1,435 | F/F ratio: 4| Social Authority: 50 Alexander Griffioen _The latest Tweets from Alexander Griffioen (@oscaralexander). Head of Design at @thenextweb * Natural born chiller…_twitter.com Alexander Griffioen (@oscaralexander) | Twitter 15. — Early stage VC @idinvest. Ex @mangrovevc. Want to connect with top European Internet / Software entrepreneurs. French/Portuguese. @INSEAD MBA. Football player. | Followers: 1,308 | F/F ratio: 1 | Social Authority: 44 Guillaume Durao _The latest Tweets from Guillaume Durao (@Guillaume_Durao). Early stage VC @idinvest. Ex @mangrovevc. Want to connect…_twitter.com Guillaume Durao (@Guillaume_Durao) | Twitter 16. — Product Leader @Amazon. Passionate about making our everyday life easier. @Forbes #30under30 2016. snapchat: therealnavid | Followers: 9,930 | F/F ratio: 31.3 | Social Authority: 40 Navid Hadzaad _The latest Tweets from Navid Hadzaad (@navidhadzaad). Product Leader @Amazon. Passionate about making our everyday life…_twitter.com Navid Hadzaad (@navidhadzaad) | Twitter 17. — Co-Founder & CEO of @thumbtack | Followers: 4,338 | F/F ratio: 3.6 | Social Authority: 40 Marco Zappacosta _The latest Tweets from Marco Zappacosta (@mlz). Co-Founder & CEO of @thumbtack_twitter.com Marco Zappacosta (@mlz) | Twitter 18. — Co-Founder & CEO @SimilarWeb | Followers: 1,044 | F/F ratio: 4.7 | Social Authority: 29 Or Offer _The latest Tweets from Or Offer (@oroffer). Co-Founder & CEO @SimilarWeb. Tel Aviv_twitter.com Or Offer (@oroffer) | Twitter 19. — Co-founder, designer of @helpscout | Followers: 1,088 | F/F ratio: 2.9 | Social Authority: 23 Jared McDaniel _The latest Tweets from Jared McDaniel (@jaredmcdaniel). Co-founder, designer of @helpscout. Boston, MA_twitter.com Jared McDaniel (@jaredmcdaniel) | Twitter 20. — i’m a paulista living in berlin. citizen of the world. learning to fly. a startup’s first investor. entrepreneur at heart. founder/ceo @MAKERSdo | Followers: 288 | F/F ratio: 0.3 | Social Authority: 20 Friedrich A. Neuman _The latest Tweets from Friedrich A. Neuman (@faneuman). i'm a paulista living in berlin. citizen of the world. learning…_twitter.com Friedrich A. Neuman (@faneuman) | Twitter Please let me know in case I missed someone really interesting. And feel free to share your own list in the comments section. Written by Dominik Vacikar . Astronaut • Founder • Previously CMO @spaceshyp @rentomato @nestpick **Spaceship** | join beyond spaceship.rocks

Stories, News & Mentions about REFORGE

Reforge’s Stories on HackerNoon