#3: Make Big Money Mistakes Early
Product strategy, PM skills, PLG motion, entrepreneurship, and relationship boundaries
👋 Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Pursuit. I spend over 10 hours each week learning about building great products and living fulfilling lives. I created "Pursuit" to share these discoveries with a larger community and connect with others who share similar interests.
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This week’s discovery:
🎧 The Difference between Speed and Latency #PRODUCT
📖 How to Become a Peak Product Manager #PRODUCT
📖 Five Steps to Starting Your Product-Led Growth Motion #PRODUCT
📖 Make Big Money Mistakes Early #LIFE
🎧 Boundaries You Need To Set In Your Relationships #LIFE
The Difference between Speed and Latency
Ravi discusses the difference between speed and latency in decision-making, specifically in the context of product development. Latency is the time it takes to go from an idea to testing it, while velocity is the quantity of work done. He suggests that it is not always possible for startups to use an experimental approach to decision-making due to a lack of users, so they have had to shift to a conviction-oriented approach where they make decisions based on the available data and then move forward quickly.
🎧 80-min
How to Become a Peak Product Manager
Some of you might be already familiar with this chart. It’s from one of the most classic and widely shared articles on product management skills. If you’re a product manager, I strongly recommend reading the whole article and sharing it with your fellow PMs in your company.
These are my favorite highlights from this article:
The best PMs — the peak product managers — don’t just ship features. They do whatever it takes to deliver valuable outcomes for their users, their team, and their company. They do whatever it takes to deliver business impact.
Product Managers are like the mortar in a brick wall. Like mortar, they must fluidly fill the gaps to make the whole team stronger.
Peak PMs think about data differently than the average PM. Too many PMs think their job ends at reporting results. The best PMs dig deep to understand the "why" behind the trends they are seeing in metrics. They translate reporting into actionable learnings, and they use those learnings to guide iterative product development.
The Peak PM’s job is not to make everyone happy. Compromise is at the root of many bad product decisions. Compromise leads to bloated, difficult to use products. Compromised products cater to the teams who built them, not to the customers who use them. Peak PMs are willing to make the hard product decisions, and they are able to align everyone to those decisions — including the dissenters.
📖 15-min
Five Steps to Starting Your Product-Led Growth Motion
Companies need to dedicate engineering resources to instrument tracking properly. Many B2B companies are significantly lacking in product analytics —watching product usage closely is less important when you sell via human touch— but without a strong foundation of product analytics, PLG will never work.
If you want to launch a PLG motion, data infrastructure is an absolute must. You need to be willing to make the investment to build it out. Once you have it in place, implement an experimentation platform and lifecycle marketing tools to test things out and move the needle. From there, adopt pieces from the PLG tool stack as needed to solve your most pressing problems more efficiently.
Make Big Money Mistakes Early
I'm glad I took a chance and started my first business when I was younger. Even though I failed and lost some cash, it taught me how to be resilient and build something from scratch.
You have certainly seen or heard of stories of people who wait until later in life to start their first entrepreneurial endeavor. And while that’s still admirable, if you’re young and have the opportunity to try your “someday” dream earlier, you absolutely should. Not just because you’ll get better over time but because the cost of failure will be much lower.
📖 4-min
Boundaries You Need To Set In Your Relationships
What stood out for me in this episode:
Prioritize your family's opinion: When considering a new partner, make sure they integrate well with your immediate family, especially those who matter the most to you. If there is discord between your family and your partner, it can lead to problems in the relationship.
Speak up for yourself: Do not downplay your strengths, ambitions, and accomplishments for the sake of the relationship. Speak up for yourself and make sure your partner respects and supports your goals and aspirations.
Trust your instincts: If you notice any red flags in the relationship, don't ignore them. Trust your instincts and address any issues as soon as they arise.
⭐ Communicate directly and honestly: Make a commitment to always say what you mean and mean what you say in your relationship. Avoid being coy or hinting around your feelings, as this leads to miscommunication and exhaustion.
🎧 60-min
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 👇🏼