A Curious PM

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Finest-5 Product reads #39

acuriouspm.substack.com

Finest-5 Product reads #39

Core Problem, Referral loops, Tech for Product managers, etc.

Harsh Jain
Sep 11, 2022
Share this post

Finest-5 Product reads #39

acuriouspm.substack.com

Hi,

On a personal note, I have been involved with growing my reach. I started exploring twitter and LinkedIn for the same. If you would like to mentor, connect or just talk about social media, I would love to connect and exchange some notes.

Every week, I summarise the best reads from 100+ articles with the sole purpose of helping you become better at product with minimal effort. Subscribe!!

Always solve your customer’s core problems

Customers can have many problems that are small and big. However, we should not be working on just any problem, we need to figure out the core problem to work on and provide a creative solution.

Key Takeaways:
  • Two things that force someone to change their preferred method: a problem with the current method, the benefits associated with trying something new.

  • Take a peek at the valuable data around your customers—questions they ask, products and services they buy, contacts to customer service. Predictable trends show up again and again

  • While operation excellence usually entails using sound business practices known to be effective ; exploration uses sound principles but may need modifications depending on what works best for situation

How to Build Powerful Referral Loops

There are 4 stages of a referral loop: Exposure (cognitive stage), Experience (affective stage), Take action (behavior stage), Distribution or expansion (propagation stage)

Key Takeaways:
  • The basic requirements of a referral loop involves: Value, experience, and large enough base.

  • There are many referral programs possible, customers prefer one of the three major categories or a combination of: Personal gain, Social gain, Altruistic.

  • These are the 3 KPIs you need to check: viral coefficient, conversion rate of referral customers, retention rate of referral customers.

The 5 Phases of Figma’s Community-Led Growth: From Stealth to Enterprise

Founded in 2012, Figma didn’t actually start shipping software to beta users until 2015. After launch, it took another two years to add paid pricing tiers — and a couple more to bring on a sales team.

Key Takeaways:
  • Taking a longer, winding path to launch a product doesn’t mean that you keep customers at arm’s length along the way. Figma team started planting seeds for the community early on that would sprout later.

  • The Figma team focused on two barometers to assess their launch readiness: Generating buzz and Quality, not quantity

  • Focus on getting the end user excited and helping them remove roadblocks, rather than trying to sell from the top down.

Technology Skills for Product Managers

How technical should product managers be? ‘it depends’: on the type of product you’re working on, on your product lifecycle, on where you’re at in your product career.

Key Takeaways:
  • The most important takeaway here is to understand that some technologies will run on the client side and some will run on the server side

  • With APIs, there is no user interface, instead two systems talk to each other using programming interfaces.

  • SQL and Python are some of the most popular ways of getting data out of databases. Learn the most efficient way to get data out of your database, depending on the type of database you use.

Spotify: Music-as-an-algorithm

Given the times of high piracy in music, Spotify founders realised that there was a need to solve the problem for listeners (Access to music with a better experience than pirated websites) and for musicians (to compensate them for their hard work)

Key Takeaways:
  • You cannot expect users to search and discover the music they like on their own - Spotify had to step in with a strong recommendation system that works.

  • Bandits for Recommendations as Treatments and has two elements to it: Exploitation and Exploration.

  • The BaRT algo classifies a recommendation as a good recommendation if the listener doesn’t stop the song before 30 seconds, else the algo will not recommend similar or same songs next time.

Product of the week: Eesel

The new tab for work

A new and interesting browser extension for you, if you write a lot of docs. It helps to quickly locate, create and organise your docs across the web.


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