💰 Building stuff to close deals, maximizing your team's impact & spatial softwares / PM Snacks #39
Learn how to work w/ salespeople, how to empower your team, to know the limits of the product market fit & be inspired by game design
1️⃣ How To Maximize Your Team's Impact
May 2021 • 4 min read • #execution #empowerment
Asking your designer to "mock the feature X" is like asking "Gordon Ramsey to follow your grilled sandwich recipe"... not a good idea. This article gives clear examples & a framework from Brandon Chu to really empower your team:
1/ Consider the relative skillset of a team member (designer, data, eng) & your relative skillset
2/ Depending on the answers the relationship will fall in 3 possible buckets: support, partner, lead. Adapt your style to the current situation & set relevant challenges for your teammates.
2️⃣ Building Stuff to Close Deals
May 2021 • 3 min read • #execution #prioritization
If you have ever worked in a B2B company, there is a good chance the sales have asked you to build one more thing to help them close deals... Same with early stage companies and founders asking you the same. So what can you do?
1/ You need a compelling product strategy (= the whole organization believes in it)
2/ You need a track record of observable impacts (= the product team's work can connect to sustainable & measured impact)
3/ You need "faith" (= because the measures won't be 100% sure, so people need to believe that the product team is having this kind of impact)
4/ Resist the urge to dispute every demand thinking that a rational response will be enough. Unfortunately, you will have to put in the work & build the trust level required. Start by doing things. Measure from the start. While you prove your impact, prepare the strategy (it takes time).
3️⃣ Six kinds of product-market fit
May 2021 • 2 min read • #strategy #discovery
Finding the product market fit sometimes feel like finding the Holy Grail for a startup... but it's actually a never-ending quest. Even when you find it, it can be temporary or "limited". In this short piece, the author list many examples of limited versions of PMF. My favorites are: the purchaser-user fit (when the buyer loves your product but the users not so much) and the phantom product market fit (when a client love the vision but if you present a slightly different product don't want to write a check anymore). The best way to think about PMF is to see it as a funnel of subsequent validations: Zeitgeist fit, problem fit, solution fit, commercial fit, product market fit.
4️⃣ Exploring spatial software
May 2021 • 26 min watch • #design
John Palmer gave one of the best talk I've seen in a long time at the last figma conference. He talks about spatial softwares: how & what every product can learn from games. You may have seen recent examples of this trend through Gather.town, Animal crossing or even Figma & Miro. Some of the advantages being the afforded intuitions, expressiveness & presence. He also wrote an essay.
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