Productivize - Issue #20
Featuring 3 product champions, resources, interesting products and a book you should read.
Hey there 👋 Happy Tuesday! Each week Productivize is something I look forward to as it allows me to sharpen my product mind and provide value to you all at the same time. Thank you for reading and learning with me 🙏
Here is what’s inside this issue:
Biases and fallacies we encounter when building products
A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit
What is good retention?
Product champions you should follow - Sherif Mansour, Josh Elman, Teresa Torres
Interesting products you should try - Vowel, Siteoly, Spread the World
A book you should read - Managing Product = Managing Tension
Before we dive, I just wanted to thank you all for your incredible support you have given to Shoutout. Curtis and I are super excited to launch a fully coded V1 soon. I will keep you guys posted about the launch details. Meanwhile, if you haven’t joined the waitlist, you can do it here. And it would mean a lot if you can spread the word within your community!
Let’s dive in to this week’s issue 👇
Biases and fallacies we encounter when building products
Shreyas Doshi shares an insightful thread on the “biases and fallacies we encounter when building products" He reminds the need for deep empathy towards customers and also covers how to recognize these fallacies, tame them and come up with a long-term solution. IMO these make a great set of daily reminders for product leaders. Dive in:
A Quantitative Approach to Product Market Fit
This post by Arjun Sethi from Tribe Capital is packed with a ton of valuable lessons/methods/techniques like Growth Accounting, Customer Cohorts and I highly recommend founders to bookmark this one. Read more.
What is good retention?
In this post, Casey Winters(CPO at Eventbrite) talks to Lenny Rachitsky about GOOD and GREAT retention. They both did amazing research reaching out to twenty of the most experienced growth practitioners and came up with a set of concrete recommendations for GOOD and GREAT retention across most types of businesses. Take a dive into the single most important factor in product success. Read more.
Sherif Mansour
Sherif Mansour is a distinguished Product Manager at Atlassian with over 15 years of experience. Over the last 7years, he has been responsible for Confluence, a popular social collaboration tool for product teams. He often tweets about agile product development, product tips for PMs. Give him a follow here - @sherifmansour
Josh Elman
Josh is a product leader and an investor from SF. He was an early PM leading growth and engagement teams at Twitter and LinkedIn, launched big platforms like Facebook Connect/Login, and worked as VP Product at Robinhood. He is also a VC at Greylock Partners where he led multiple investments He's currently on the board of Medium, Discord, and Mammoth Media. Give him a follow - @joshelman
Teresa Torres
Teresa is a product discovery coach who helps product and design teams gain valuable insights from customer interviews, run effective product experiments, and drive product outcomes that create value for their customers and their businesses. She writes at Product Talk where you get easy to digest and immediately actionable product content. I love her Worthy Read segment on her feed. Give her a follow here - @ttorres
Vowel
A video conferencing tool that makes meetings better.
Siteoly
Turn your Google Sheets data into a website without writing code.
Spread the World
Get feedback and acquire early users from 400+ websites
A book you should read - Managing Product = Managing Tension
Marc Abraham in this book focuses on what it is that impacts the products we build and how we manage them, namely; mind, matter, and moves. Each of these factors in their own right creates tension and in the book, he outlines how we can make the most of these tensions to create great products. Get it here.
That’s all for today. I’ll be back with new learnings and findings next week. My goal is to give you the best experience and value through Productivize and I hope you enjoyed reading this issue.
Lastly, I’m gathering feedback on how can I make Productivize better for you. I would love to know what you think. Tap on the below button and let me know. Thanks for reading!
Until next week,
Sharath