I think this is the best definition I’ve seen so far of that elusive term “product sense”:

I define great product sense as the ability to do two things without having extensive data (i.e. without running lengthy research upfront):

• Generate many solid, highly profitable ideas for ways to make money
• Intuit whether a product is likely to be successful with a high degree of confidence

The detail of having this sense without extensive data is important. Anyone can get to a great product via guess-and-check. The best product minds reliably take a more direct path.

Ben Balter has a solid post on remote and async work, in which he makes the point that meetings are a point of escalation, not the starting point of a conversation:

A few minutes of reading or a few comments on an issue or Google Doc can often replace waiting days for mutual availability and a dedicated 30-minute block of time. In this sense, you can think of meetings as a point of escalation based on complexity, not as the default starting point for a workstream, initiative, or conversation.

Also see his excellent list of benefits of working asynchronously. Also also see Sisi Wei’s excellent guide on asynchronous participation in brainstorming, including this really great idea:

After the meeting, redesign that shared doc to become a worksheet for people participating on their own time. […]

The document should now read like it was designed for asynchronous participation to begin with. Instructions you may have given verbally – even helpful tips you realized and delivered impromptu – should now be captured as written instructions in the document.

Ravi Mehta’s 4 Effective Product Team Structures is a helpful framework for leaders to figure out how to organize product teams:

Because of the nature of product work, there are two vectors that product teams need to be organized around: area of focus and level of accountability.

1. For area of focus, product teams can align their work with either business outcomes or feature development.
2. When considering the level of accountability part of the structure, product managers either act as fully responsible owners of the work or as facilitators of the work, where they share metrics responsibilities with cross-functional partners.

In the article he goes through the pros and cons of each of the 4 structures.

In Be a thermostat, not a thermometer Lara Hogan provides a helpful analogy for leaders on what to do when meetings go off the rails…

Once you’re able to start noticing when someone’s amygdala-hijacked, or simply that the vibes are off, you can reframe and use “be the thermostat, not the thermometer” for good. Since humans tend to mirror each other, you can intentionally change the energy in the room, setting the thermostat to a more comfortable temperature.

Elena Verna has a great summary of leading metrics for B2B SaaS companies, including some really useful benchmarks. Also a good reminder that revenue is a lagging metric:

Many leaders obsess over revenue. And rightfully so, because revenue is the outcome of any business. But revenue is a lousy metric to goal the team against because it assesses past performance instead of predicting the future.

If you want to dig a little deeper on the best metrics to choose for SaaS companies, here are a few more resources:

• 11 essential product metrics for measuring product-led growth by Appcues.
• The SaaS Marketing Metrics that Matter to Product Managers by ProductPlan.
• How to pick your activation metric by Henrique Cruz.

No image posts today, but it’s a blockbuster edition of the link roundup this week! I hope you find something interesting in here…

1 → LinkedIn power users are turning to ghostwriters (Vox)

LinkedIn remains a complete mystery to me.

“It’s cliché, but it’s true that people want to work with people, people buy from people, people want to see the human side of who you are before they decide to work with you,” says Tara Horstmeyer, an Atlanta-based ghostwriter who offers packages for 12 LinkedIn posts for anywhere between $2,000 and $3,000.

2 → How the Great Recession paved the way for the influencer industry (Vox)

It’s worth reading this fascinating interview with a curious mind. Especially if you, like me, are “of a certain age” and feel like you just don’t get it…

Influencers are neither ‘a flash in the pan’ nor ‘a bubble about to burst,’ but indicators of a paradigm shift in the way we think about each other and ourselves.

3 → On Place (Alica Kennedy)

This is a lovely, rich essay on the difference between “destination” and “place” when we travel, how digital nomadism displaces locals, the pursuit of a “decent meal” abroad, and more.

Continued economic dependence upon tourism leads inevitably to brain drain, when a labor force no longer wishes to work only service jobs. What does ‘local’ as an experience mean when it’s not in service to those who are literally local?

4 → The Life I Refused to Surrender (The Free Press)

This short essay from Amanda Knox packs a huge punch and really got to me. All we have is now…

No matter how small, cruel, sad, and unfair this life was, it was my life. Mine to make meaning out of, mine to live to the best of my ability. There was no more waiting. There was only now.

5 → The Streaming Market Is Fundamentally Broken. It’s Time To Fix It. (Public Knowledge)

There is just so much wrong with the music streaming industry.

Artists aren’t allowed to see the deals that set their streaming payment rates; indie labels aren’t allowed to see the deals distributors cut with labels on their behalf . And in many cases, artists aren’t even allowed to compare notes and talk about their own contracts.

6 → People Started Buying Crocs During the Pandemic. They Can’t Stop. (NYT Gift Article)

I have no pithy comment for this one.

“I roll into the gym with my Crocs on and everything, and people ask, ‘Aren’t you going to change shoes?'” Mr. Ndugga said. “No, this is how I’m going to live life for now.”

7 → Free Bird (Substack)

A top-to-bottom excellent post about Twitter from Ed Zitron. Read the whole thing!

Twitter can create an incredible sense of both intellectual invincibility and vulnerability that can drive someone quite mad.

8 → The Counterintuitive Thing About Trust That Explains Why So Many Teams Have Issues With It (LinkedIn)

This is an insightful post on the leader qualities that really build trust. In short, it’s about showing that you really, truly care.

Studies indicate that conveying benevolence is much more likely to earn you trust than conveying how competent you are. […] That’s why all things being equal, a person who is charismatic and kind will gain more trust than a person who is seen has having good ability.

9 → The Dangers Of Highly Centralized AI (Medium)

I agree with this take from Clive. It’s like we’ve learned nothing from social media.

The field of large language models is becoming dangerously centralized. A huge amount of power resides in the hands of a tiny number of firms.

10 → The Stories That Bind Us (NYT Gift Link)

This is a wonderful essay about the things that ensure happy and enduring families.

The bottom line: if you want a happier family, create, refine and retell the story of your family’s positive moments and your ability to bounce back from the difficult ones. That act alone may increase the odds that your family will thrive for many generations to come.

I enjoyed Bill Gates’s post The Age of AI has begun, right until he got to this bit:

When productivity goes up, society benefits because people are freed up to do other things, at work and at home.

The idea that increased productivity gives people more time to do other things that are more useful and fulfilling is a thoroughly-debunked theory. First, there’s the question of what we even mean by “productivity”, especially in the context of the Productivity Paradox:

The productivity paradox (also the Solow computer paradox) is the peculiar observation made in business process analysis that, as more investment is made in information technology, worker productivity may go down instead of up.

But even if we can get to a point where we agree on how to define the word, we have known for a long time that the only thing that increased productivity does is create more work:

The usual first response to encountering the Productivity Paradox is disbelief: “If I have to write a few emails so that I don’t have to use a carrier pigeon, sign me up!”

But in a bureaucracy, the story of those few emails usually doesn’t end there. So, you send your few emails, and then you soon get email replies and comments. Now, you have to write more emails in reply to those emails, which are then sent up the hierarchy and to a chain of full-time reviewers, who each make a comment to show that they are useful.

So when we get more productive the time we “save” on one type of task just gets filled with a different, not necessarily more valuable task. But what about “at home”, you ask? Nope. We have also known for a very long time that instead of giving us more time for hobbies and hanging out, technology is killing leisure time:

The very tools that were supposed to liberate us have bound us to our work (and schools) in ways that were inconceivable just a few years ago. Almost all of us have less leisure time than ever. We work harder, take fewer vacations for shorter periods of time, report more stress than almost any other demographic group and find the boundaries between work and play increasingly blurred. Computing and communications technologies are destroying the idea of privacy and leisure.

So anyway, Bill Gates wrote a pretty insightful take on AI, in my opinion. But the idea that generative AI will free up our time to do more valuable and fun things is not backed up by history at all. Or to put it slightly differently:

This is such a great post by Will Larson about onboarding executives into a new role. His recommendations for topics to cover in the first two weeks are especially good. Like this:

Where can the new executive find real data to inform themselves, rather than relying on existing narratives? The best executives will listen to you, but won’t fully believe anything until they’re able to find data to substantiate your perspective. That’s not because they don’t trust you, but because any seasoned executive has been burned by trusting someone who fervently believed something that ultimately wasn’t true.”

And this:

Who do they need to spend time with to understand the current state and the company’s implicit power structure? Especially the longest tenured employees who uniquely hold parts of the business in their heads, and individuals who have significant influence over the executive team that wouldn’t be obvious from the reporting hierarchy.

Turns out there’s a Donella Meadows quote for everything:

Before you charge in to make things better, pay attention to the value of what’s already there.