Productivize - Issue #5
Featuring 3 product champions, resources and interesting products.
Hey there 👋 Happy Monday and hope you had a great week. It’s surreal to say that Productivize was launched a month ago and now you are reading the fifth issue. The last four weeks were amazing, I had the opportunity to learn and provide value to you all. I wanted to take a moment to apologize for not adding URLs to interesting products section last week (trust me, I proofread this issue like 1000 times 😀) Despite that, you have read issue #4 and it is standing with the highest number of open rates with 60% and 385 views. Thank you for that 🙏
Before we dive into this issue, I wanted to talk about a few adjustments I made this week. I gave my personal take on why you should care about anything here (digestible byte-sized takeaways), there will be bonus content at the end where you will find a new section called Book to read and finally I have figured a way to gather your feedback. Hope you found and learned something new today.
Let’s get started 👇
Teresa Torres
Teresa is a product discovery coach who helps product 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. She often shares incredible content through her Worthy Read segment on her twitter feed. Give her a follow here - @ttorres
Arun J.
Arun is a rare breed who masters in Product Management × Design x Growth × SEO × Analytics. His twitter feed is full of insights about the latest products and he often shares his thoughts on product design and how you need to focus on growth. His past experience at LinkedIn, Pinterest and Slideshare reflects in his advice. He is from Silicon Valley and currently working as a PM at Scribd. Give him a follow here - @SimplyArun
Inga Chen
Inga is a passionate product manager who has a knack for community building and promoting diversity in tech. She is currently working at Spotify as a PM and hosts NYC chapter of Women in Product. She tweets about machine learning and its ability to hyper-personalize user experiences. She is also a tea enthusiast. Give her a follow - @ingachen
Crafting the first mile of Product
In this terrific article, Scott Belsky explains the importance of designing the first mile of the product. The first mile consists of the welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, the empty states, and so on. Scott explains how we need to find the right balance in listening and responding to your loyal power users and keeping your focus on new users and their experience. This article is packed with great insights and explicit clear principles to follow. Read on here.
What’s your favorite way to get product feedback?
Hiten Shah is a master of asking product related questions and getting answers on twitter. This thread is the sole proof. Dive into the hacks people use to get product feedback. You will find a lot of value in this thread.
What is good retention?
In this exhaustive Benchmark study with Lenny Rachitsky, Casey Winters(CPO at Eventbrite) writes 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 on here.
Future Me
Write yourself a letter to the future!
Marketing Examples
A gallery of real-world marketing examples.
Matter
Gather, clarify, and give professional feedback all in one place.
A book you should read: Shape Up - Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
Written by Ryan Singer from Basecamp, this book is a guide to how to do product development. It’s a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process. Whether you’re a founder, CTO, product manager, designer, or developer, this book will teach you how to go from zero to one. Get it here.
Newsletter you should subscribe:
The Slice by Nic is a curated weekly newsletter that keeps startup founders, entrepreneurs, freelancers and devs up to date with emerging SaaS, apps, productivity tools, actionable podcasts and newsletters for them to apply to their own projects.
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 trying to gather feedback from you and recently found this new way (emoji way I guess). I would love to know what you think. Feel free to tap on the below button and let me know. Thanks for reading!
Until next week,
Sharath