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 […]
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!
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 […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
The anti-pattern I’d like to explore today is what I affectionally call the head of problem aka senior’itis. In my experience, this is the factor in org design that increases burn and bureaucracy. This anti-pattern is lethal for companies. It starts off quite innocently. Let’s assume you are the CEO at the early stages of […]
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 […]
The next few posts are going to be about anti-patterns. These are all about the landmines you should try to avoid – learn from my mistakes :). Almost all problems in companies are people/organizational problems. Hopefully, these set of posts can help you navigate through some of the nuanced ones.
Alphachat (great podcast btw) had a recent episode on Labor market slack that raised some intriguing questions. The central question is how to define slack, what is the right metric. The end result was that slack means different things to different people – but there is one thread that I’d like to explore more. Let’s […]