For anyone else following along on “The Death of Media”… There are plenty of dire stories about layoffs and newsrooms shutting down, so I like finding stories of innovation (or small steps) in the space that appear to be working. I think 404 Media is doing great work, and their latest addition of a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers makes me very happy:

Creating this feed was logistically quite complicated. We are thankful to Maxime Valette of FeedPress, who helped us make the feed, and to Ryan Singel of Outpost, who helped us sync the paid feeds with our Ghost member list. We’re also thankful to our paid subscribers, who have made it possible for us to pay for the development work needed to offer this and have also been very patient with us as we’ve worked behind the scenes to develop this feature.

In other actually good news on the media, The Atlantic is (finally) profitable! Mostly because they went hard on subscriptions.

I wouldn’t want to work in an environment like this because even though delivery is a fun part of building product, I find that for most PMs it’s so much more fulfilling (and you usually get better results!) when they are part of strategy and discovery as well. That said, I’m now long enough into this product journey to recognize that as long as you have a team of people who love execution and are excellent at it, this is a completely valid way to build a company:

We changed this model with Brex 3.0. We killed our planning process, and now have One Roadmap for the entire company. I [Brex CEO] am the ultimate editor of everything that ships. We release 4 times a year, and each release has no more than 3 big themes. This forces me to choose what truly matters, allowing us to make a large, company-affecting investment in the few things that are step-function changes to the customer experience, and drop everything else.

Basecamp works in a similar way, and it works for them. I do appreciate that both companies are honest about how they work, so PMs know what they’re in for and what’s expected of them. The frustration only sets in if PMs think they have some autonomy over their work, and then slowly find out about the “shadow roadmap” they weren’t aware of. Just bring it all into the light, I say.

Alex Heath has a really interesting interview with Figma’s CEO Dylan Field, covering life at Figma after regulators forced Adobe to abandon its $20 billion acquisition of his company. It covers a wide range of topics, but I wanted to highlight Field’s thoughts on generative AI, which largely matches my own viewpoint:

If I was to zoom out even further to knowledge work, we’re very much in a paradigm of AI as a tool and AI helping people get work done, but it’s not necessarily a replacement. I really think that there’s a human in the loop going forward in that AI might be a useful tool, but we all know its limits in terms of hallucinations, in terms of potential inaccuracies. Even if you apply it to rote tasks, it’s important to check the work. And you know better than anyone as a writer that the current models do not match your ability to write, let alone gain context in a conversation to ask the right questions or show the intelligence that you have as a journalist.

If you think about what it takes to create great design, there’s so much in that context window that’s emotional or thinking temporally about a brand experience or a user flow. I just don’t see how, in the near term, AI is able to have that as part of its context, which means that humans are providing that.

I like Jason Knight’s take on 5 Different Types of Debt That Can Hinder Your Product Organization. There’s the usual “tech debt” advice, of course, but also some good insight on other types of debt to look out for, such as…

Revenue debt builds up as companies scale up through unstructured sales-led growth, selling to anyone they can, meaning that they start to build dependencies on a disparate set of customers who have sometimes substantially different needs. This makes focusing, or even saying no, too difficult because there’s too much revenue tied up in each segment.

It took me many years to rid myself of the commonly-held belief that Sales is the “enemy” of Product. Here’s a good reminder that (good) Sales teams are our allies:

Contrary to stereotypes, only part of sales actually involves convincing a customer to buy your product. The person selling your product spends a very large amount of time helping customers successfully navigate their own complex organizations, and purchase a product that they already want (yours).

Great post by April Dunford on how marketing teams and sales teams need to tell different stories about a product:

Our goals in marketing are very different from our goals in a sales situation. Often in marketing, we are simply trying to capture an audience’s attention and get their permission to continue marketing to them. […] Sales, on the other hand, is generally dealing with the folks who have already raised their hand in some form and are in a purchase process. Our primary job in sales is to help guide prospects through the purchase process.

However, both approaches to storytelling need to come from the same positioning source:

Sales and marketing should use the same inputs for whatever storytelling structure they choose, and those inputs should come from our positioning. Both marketing and sales communicate the value that the product delivers that no other solutions can. Both have a common definition of what a good-fit prospect looks like. Both teams need to understand the alternative approaches, including the status quo and more direct short-list competitors. Our positioning defines the inputs for marketing and sales content—we ultimately need commonality across marketing and sales because our positioning defines where we win and why.

In Lessons from going freemium: a decision that broke our business, Bobby Pinero (CEO of Equals) makes some interesting points about what they’ve learned about freemium pricing models. This point about how user friction is not always a bad thing stood out to me:

In all of our pursuit of getting people into the product, the thing we forgot is that the goal of onboarding is not for people to complete onboarding. It’s not to just get people into the product. The goal of onboarding is for people to get their first moments of value from your product. To get “activated.” And removing friction is actually detached from this goal.

Just like everything in product, this all depends. Every business is different. But it’s nice to see things from another perspective

I like this perspective from Ed Sim on recognizing that you can’t always build yourself into product-market fit…

There is no easy answer for a lack of customer traction, but my one suggestion before you commit to the idea that you are one feature away from success, is to go back to the basics and first ask if this is the right user or customer. If you believe you have that nailed, try multiple messages and keep learning from every interaction. You may have the right product today but for the wrong user. Or you simply may just have a cool technology in search of a problem to solve in which case you should start completely over.

I don’t like the “10x” terminology in tech, but The 10x Exercise for Entrepreneurs is not that. It’s about a thought exercise for entrepreneurs as they start to reach product-market fit:

What does our employee org chart look like with ten times the scale? What will our customer mix look like at ten times the revenue? What types of funding sources and capital stack will I need to fund the growth of the business to achieve this scale? What types of partnerships, infrastructure, and geographic locations will be necessary to 10X the business?