Finest-5 Product reads #3
Finest-5 Product reads #3
Your favorite weekly product newsletter bringing the best of the internet in your palms
Hi,
As it goes, a PM must be curious, and reading quality content is the best way to satiate one’s curiosity. But are you able to find the insightful reads regularly? If not, here is the place you find them every week.
In the 1st edition of this newsletter, I covered Airbnb and Disney, and it feels serendipitous to see how one’s storytelling skills deeply inspired the other. Ken Norton interviewed PMs and engineers from Airbnb. As an output, there are lots of intriguing insights. He discusses multiple factors including storytelling, design, influence, vision, etc. to find out everyone has their side of the story. Continue reading..
Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
There is a constant fight to ship new products. But do you ever leave the default path to feature creep and think what to unship? There are instances, such as strategic alignment and redundancy, where features need to be dropped. However, before we remove a feature, we must also understand how it affects metrics. As biases are at play that make it difficult to unship or understand the outcome. Continue reading..
Inside Paytm 3.0: Vijay Shekhar Sharma's vision for India’s one-stop finance shop
A product manager also needs to appreciate the beauty of business and strategy. And a deep dive into India’s most complex product or a potential super app is always worth it. Started in 2010 as one 97 communication, today Paytm has 14 subsidiaries. With 300 million wallet users, Paytm’s is focused on its revenue, payment, and wallet experience. However, Paytm does not want to lose an opportunity to be the financial services super app. Continue reading..
The Big Lie of Strategic Planning
This article from Harvard Business Review defines how planning is about detailed spreadsheets, whereas Strategy is about making hard decisions. People often confuse strategy with planning. As Planning is simple and structured, people fall into a comfort trap. Other comfort traps we fall into include cost-based thinking, Self-Referential Strategy Frameworks. Knowing and overcoming traps by making strategy simple and away from planning can help. Continue reading..
Freemium isn’t a trend — it’s the future of SaaS
With people losing faith inch by inch on sales reps, freemium is the pricing strategy that has come out as a leader. A lot of companies have switched to it in the last couple of years including behemoths such as GoDaddy and Atlassian. Freemium has its advantages with increasing CAC, decreasing the willingness to pay, and skyrocketing number of options. And with industry focus on product, that seems to be the obvious way. Continue reading here and here.
Product of the week: Beamer
Beamer is an easy-to-use product for announcement of news/updates that keeps the customer engaged. The product has a lot of valuable features ranging from customization to targeted notifications. A simple pop-up, and an option to give quick feedback, makes your customer feel more involved. Besides, an amazing support team is cherry on the top. Explore..
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