#1: Pursuit
Having the freedom to pursue the continual grind you most enjoy.
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Pursuit. I spend over 10 hours each week learning about building products, improving productivity, and living fulfilling lives. I created "Pursuit" to share these digests with a larger community and connect with others who share similar interests.
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This week’s ideas:
How to Live By Your Values This Year (read ~10min)
Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions (listen ~3min)
You’re (Probably) Using NPS Wrong (read ~7min)
Apple’s Decision-Making Framework To Build Revolutionary Products (listen ~7min)
How to Write a PRD That Actually Helps You Build Products (read ~11min)
How to Live By Your Values This Year
Values aren’t something you reason your way to. They aren’t moralistic, and they don’t require any rational justification. Values are about what gives you an experiential sense of meaning and purpose, not a philosophical position on what you think should matter in life or what someone else thinks is important.
Values are the ways of being and doing that, looking back from your deathbed, would make you think, “That was a damn good life.”
👉🏼 10-min read
Process saves us from the poverty of our intentions
Tomorrow morning, when you wake up, you probably won't feel like engaging in the practice. And if you do, you probably won't feel that way the next day, that what we do is once decide, we decide that we're a runner and runners go running every day. We decide we're a blogger and bloggers blog every day. And that decision lightens the cognitive load so much, because there's no time, no reason to negotiate with ourselves. Because we already had the meeting, we already decided. Now the question is not, should we go or not? The question is, should we go left or right? But we're going.
👉🏼 3-min snip
You’re (Probably) Using NPS Wrong
Rather than embracing what NPS does best – measure social viral acquisition loops (aka “Word of Mouth” or WOM loops) — people have turned it into an inactionable vanity metric.
At Slack, in addition to measuring overall satisfaction in our quarterly tracking surveys, we also measured things that we believed to be “drivers of satisfaction” like product completeness, fit for your team’s needs, performance, quality, and reliability. We ran regressions on these metrics to understand the degree to which the changes we made in a given quarter impacted these various drivers and overall satisfaction.
👉🏼 7-min read
Apple’s Decision-Making Framework To Build Revolutionary Products
In the development of a new product or service, many decisions are based on opinions rather than data
It is important to be able to clearly articulate and own these opinion-based decisions, even if they turn out to be wrong
As a product evolves and more data becomes available, these opinion-based decisions can be informed and modified accordingly
👉🏼 7-min snip
How to Write a PRD That Actually Helps You Build Products
A product brief typically includes descriptions of the following:
Opportunity: What is the problem we are trying to solve? For what audience segment(s)? Why are we prioritizing solving it
Supporting Evidence: What evidence do we have to validate this opportunity and why are we best positioned to solve it
Success Metrics: What are the key qualitative and quantitative indicators that will tell us whether or not we’ve addressed this opportunity?
Non-Goals: What are we not solving, and why not? Given we’re not solving these things, how does that impact possible success or failure?
Some briefs also include emerging hypotheses around the solution scope or user experience.
👉🏼 11-min read
Tunes for your 👂🏼s:
Music can bring good vibes to your life, making it feel oh-so-fulfilling. It's not always about getting better and better; sometimes, it's just about feeling good and grooving to the beat. You’ll find mostly Ethnotronica, Organic House, and Organic Electronic here 👇🏼
