PM Snacks #19 / 🙈 Blindness over ignorance, Microsoft 🦾🦾 vs Slack 💪 & helping your boss...

Learn how to conduct a competitive analysis and use blindness to your advantage, understand why Microsoft won over Slack (for now), and some more...

1️⃣ Blindness is bliss, ignorance a curse • Dec 2020 • 3 min read
Last week I spoke about the importance of looking at your competition to discover overlooked problems. Before deep diving into the method (article n°3), Nicolas Colin explains in a sharp article why you should also study the history of this market, and choose to look at it with a unique angle. Blindness will be your superpower, ignorance your fatal flaw #discovery #strategy

2️⃣ Send your manager a weekly "State of the Me" email • Nov 2020 • 1 min read
Better later than never... I share Lenny Rachitsky's content for the first time in this publication. In this tweet he gives you a pro tip to help your manager help you (remember a manager should be a multiplier of your own forces). Btw, if you don't follow him on twitter, you should. Even better join his paid newsletter, it's worth every penny #managingup

3️⃣ How To Conduct A Comprehensive Competitive Analysis • Aug 2018 • 23 min read
Remember last week article: first ask yourself what would be a useful competitive analysis. Then through today's article, learn 1/ how to pick various competitors based on the solution-problem-customers triad, 2/ how to select interesting features to assess (don't apply the entire template if unnecessary) #discovery

4️⃣ The 5 main anti-trends in design • Sept 2020 • 6 min read
A lighter article on a design trends that have been overused, and that you should probably stay away from, if you want your product to be recognisable. This article could have been simply called the dribbble effect 😅 #ux 

5️⃣ How Microsoft crushed Slack • Dec 2020 • 5 min read
I had to talk about Slack since it's been sold for 27B$ to Salesforce this week. On top of this incredible outcome, there is some lessons to be drawn by Product Managers: 1/ creating the "best" product isn't enough, you need a moat (=a defensible advantage over time), 2/ distribution matters more than startups think (=no B2B product thrives without a efficient sales team), 3/ like Microsoft has shown us here (or Facebook with stories), copying can make sense if your users have the same problems #strategy   

Have a great week!

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I'm Olivier Courtois, 10y+ in product, currently freelance, coach & advisor, former VP-Product comet & Product Director ManoMano. You are receiving this email because you signed up to productverse, a weekly newsletter about Product Management sent to 1200+ persons. Thank you for being here. If this email was forwarded to you, subscribe here

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