Short post this week, heard an interesting quote attributed to Scott McNealy on the odd lots podcast this week. On a side note – do listen to this week’s episode with John Hempton, he is one of the sharpest short sellers on the planet. Onwards to the quoteRead More »
How to prep for a recession
There is recession talk everywhere with tips on what to do. Time to put my hat in the ring 🙂 Following the scouts’ motto of “always be prepared“, how to go about planning? Where to start?
Great PMs deal with ambiguity
I’ve always been interested in figuring out what signifies greatness in PM, what makes a great PM?
A source of signal for me has been the ability to deal with ambiguity. Great PMs have this innate ability to take ambiguous thoughts/ideas/strategies as input and come up with a coherent executable plan which then they execute ruthlessly. A great PM has the superpower of bringing clarity to everything.
An aspiring PM and an economist walk into a bar
A basic market problem always presents itself to aspiring Product managers. Almost all companies require previous PM experience, why is that? Here is an economist’s view of things. A picture speaks a thousand words!Read More »
Compete or Die – LiveNation Part Deux
Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. The more Successful you are, the more people want a chunk of your business and then another chunk and then another until there is nothing ― Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive
So who should LiveNation be paranoid about? Who are its competitors?
As we saw the last post, LiveNation can be thought of a vertically integrated full-service live entertainment company. A comparable public competitor is the Madison Square Garden Company (MSG). They also describe themselves as the premier live entertainment company. Via their 10kRead More »
Mo Concerts Mo Money – A look at Live Nation (NYSE: LYV)
In the last post, I talked about getting into the habit of reading 10k’s. Time to dogfood my own advice :), for this post, I wanted to look at a completely new industry than the usual fodder. LiveNation is my first pick (NYSE:LYV). Latest 10K for 2018.
What are the goals of this exercise?
- Understand the business model and a bit about the industry the company is in
- What are the key growth levers for the business? What is the flywheel/network effect?
- Who is the customer? What are the customer groups?
- A brief look at the numbers
- And finally – What is the competitive advantage of the business?
So let us begin!Read More »
Specialists vs Generalists – it’s nuanced and why you should read 10-k’s in your spare time
The topic of generalists vs specialists always comes up in PM hiring and strategy conversations. I see PM hiring managers and PM’s themselves struggle with this a lot. What got me thinking about this topic is David Epstein’s new book Range. The core thesis in the book is, and I quote, “Range explains how to maintain the benefits of breadth, diverse experience, interdisciplinary thinking, and delayed concentration in a world that increasingly incentivizes, even demands, hyperspecialization.” So how should you think about this topic? What are the nuances?
Cross-sell is dead
Every companies’ strategy mentions owning the full customer relationship as a key goal. The thinking goes somewhat like this.
- We have identified a customer need in a super specific niche area inside a large industry vertical.
- Once we acquire this customer for this super specific need, we want to continue serving them and building a relationship with them
- This same customer has varied needs that exist in the large industry vertical, a vertical that is unnecessary complex and filled with incumbents offering poor products.
- We will build products that address all their needs. We will cross them into all these products
- The customer is happy as there is only one place to go for all his needs
- We will own the customer for everything they need in that industry vertical – we build high LTV
Anti Pattern – The Head Of problem.
The anti-pattern I’d like to explore today is what I affectionally call the head of
It starts off quite innocently. Let’s assume you are the CEO at the early stages of a company and you have identified a problem to solve, say in the general area of customer support. Customer support as a function doesn’t exist yet. You ask around your peer group, you look at successful companies and then you make the common mistake – you get afflicted by senior’
Anti Pattern – The Ponzi Roadmap
The anti-pattern I’d like to explore today is the Ponzi roadmap. It usually starts with the best of intentions but has extremely harmful effects as a company scales.
When a company is in the initial stages and has a small engineering and product team the planning model that emerges is what I call the pooled model. Engineering is considered a  pool of resources and usually composed of full-stack engineers. The product is typically small and mostly a monolith, every engineer can work on anything and there are just a few PM’s (maybe just one). Since we are all agile, every quarter the PM comes up with a list of priorities and outcomes, engineering staffs the priority from its pool of engineers and delivers outcomes. The next quarter rolls around and we do this all over again. Engineers move on to working on different things every quarter. This makes perfect sense in a small company – but goes horribly wrong as you start scaling up.