Finest-5 Product reads #49

How OpenAI Grows, Customer Love, Product channel fit and other reads...

Jan 29

Hi, Happy Sunday,

As I work in F&B, this week was great to have a lot of insightful discussions. I learned a lot about how data points are important in an industry to increase the adoption of tech. Also, I have been reading into GTMs for SaaS and how PLG and SLG both work together to bring efficiency.

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!!

How OpenAI Grows

OpenAI as a whole has run a bunch of experiments, launched GPT-3, and has three core products out there; Codex, DALL-E, and ChatGPT. Also, ChatGPT, at an unprecedented rate, in just 5 days reaches 1 million users.

Key Takeaways:

AI is categorised by what it’s capable of - Reactive Machines, Limited Memory, Narrow AI, Artificial General Intelligence, Theory of Mind, Self-Aware, Strong AI, Super AI.
The AI industry is structured in three layers: L1 is core platforms and infrastructure for AI, L2 is specialised AI models, L3 is the application layer.
Like Epic Games’ strategy of growing their business by focusing on game creators and growing the entire gaming ecosystem — this is what OpenAI is doing. They are opening up AI to entrepreneurs and builders.

Customer Love: A Deep Dive.

To create an emotional connection, businesses must go beyond showing care and passion for their products and customers. To understand customer love, there must be consistency. Like a romantic relationship, love is not a one-off event.

Key Takeaways:

Four characteristics are bound to appear in most definitions of love: feelings or sentiments, loyalty, satisfaction, and delight.
Spotify’s success can be attributed to its focus on delight and personalisation, which has helped it build a product that customers love and capture the hearts and pockets.
While B2B products may not be as flashy or exciting as B2C products, they can still be designed with user-centred and delightful elements to build a strong and profitable business.

Product Channel Fit Will Make or Break Your Growth Strategy

Products are built to fit channels, not the other way around. The reason for this is that you do not define the rules of the channel. The channel defines the rule of the channel.

Key Takeaways:

“Distribution follows the power law.” At a moment in time, a company that has product channel fit will get 70%+ of their growth from one channel.
Don’t have team members focused on user acquisition and team members focused on product in silos from each other.
Product Channel Fit is always evolving and can break as a new channel emerges or an old channel gets killed off.

The most important soft skills for product managers

Product managers are always building products, managing products, and leading the teams and organisations who make them. And all of this requires a lot of skills. While managers have hard skill, soft skill is still work in progress for many.

Key Takeaways:

Learn the difference between Urgent and Important. Learn to identify which activities have a high leverage (high impact to effort ratio).
Focus on information, on actionable intelligence, rather than noisy raw data or prescriptive catalogues, and ensure this gets disseminated.
If you demonstrate both passion and compromise, and just get shit done, then people can trust you.

The Top 1-5% PM Growth Equation

The right mindset is to optimize for: (Scope x Complexity)^(Influence). Assuming you would perform as per the owned goals, and culturally you’re a company fit.

Key Takeaways:

Take on challenging projects: Once high-impact areas of work have been identified, product managers should aim to take on projects that are challenging and complex.
To increase the visibility of their work, product managers should communicate effectively with stakeholders.
Product managers should also look for opportunities to drive metrics for other teams within the organization.

Product of the week: Glean

Know what your company knows, instantly.

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