PM Snacks #10 / Falling in love, faking some things and be lazy

I'm Olivier Courtois, Head of Product @ comet & Startup Advisor. You are receiving this email because you signed up to productverse, a weekly newsletter about Product Management. Thank you for being here. If this email was forwarded to you, subscribe here

1️⃣ Falling in love with problems  • Aug 2020 • 11 min read
An honest testimony (and little marketing too) about how Station had to pivot after 3 years on the same idea. They had a product-user fit: die-hard users, raised money, a trending solution but when this niche was saturated, they didn't grow anymore and couldn't figure a way out. A good tale on why falling in love with your solution often lead to difficulties, instead fall in love with problems #startup #discovery

2️⃣ Product Manager Interview: The Favorite Product Question • Aug 2020 • 3 min read
We continue the series on interviewing: if you have ever been asked what is your favorite product, raise your hand 🙋‍♂️. I don't like very much this question since it can be very rehearsed. I prefer to ask: what is the last product you have used and found interesting (can be physical or digital), what would you change? why? do you think it would be the main priority of the company based on what you know about this market? #interviewprep

3️⃣ Wizard Of Oz • Apr 2011 • 2 min read
To speed up learnings, especially when uncovering brand new areas, a perfect way is to fake things and to not build it. IBM used this tactic in the 70s to test users' interest for Siri (kind of). They asked people to enter a room, tell the computer what they needed and the computer would display the result. In the 1970s! Can you imagine? The trick was that the microphone would send the sound in another room, where a teammate would type commands (computers looked like this) and the results would be displayed to the users (fig). If IBM could do it back then, what can you fake to learn faster? #prototyping 

4️⃣ Intercom’s fundamentals of good interaction design • Sept 2019 • 6 min read
9 rules collected by intercom for their own design system. Lot of basics that you should make yours if it's not already the case. From progressive disclosure, visual hierarchy to responsiveness #ux

5️⃣ Lazy Leadership • Jun 2016 • 13 min read
A highly recommend read by Andrew Wilkinson* targeted at entrepreneurs but that completely works for product management too. His advice: become lazy! Work on your business, not in your business by building a machine that produce desired outcomes. Ask yourself what results matter, track, and process/delegate things that don't matter. * He owns several companies like dribbble, metalab (they created the first design of slack), etc #mindset 

See you next week!
Olivier

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