Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

First published in 1983 by Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO of Intel, High Output Management describes how to build and run successful companies and teams from the perspective of management and leadership.

This book falls in the category of all-time classics, that is, books that age well and can be re-read without feeling outdated (other examples could be Meditations or Thinking Fast and Slow).

In essence, the book applies traditional production principles to management and leadership. These principles resonate well today also because of the rise of Agile methodologies having been applied so widely in the business world. As an engineer I can’t help but appreciate the pragmatism with which Andrew S. Grove describes complex concepts like how to organise one’s time to optimise for high-leverage activities or motivate subordinates.

On the flip side, I also felt that the book could come across as overly simplistic at times. Reducing complex organisations to production principles (e.g. thinking only from the perspective of inputs, inventory, forecast planning et al) may work well for output focussed organisations but successful ones comprise other moving parts (e.g. managing risk, innovation management or prioritisation amongst others).

Either way, this is a fascinating timeless read about Management and continues to feel relevant regardless of when you read it.

Summary

• Elements of High Output Management
  
  • Output-oriented approach: apply manufacturing principles to the work of managers
  • Organisational work is not an individual effort but a team effort; therefore the output of a manager is the output of the organisation’s units under his or her influence
  • A team will perform well only if peak performance can be achieved within the individuals of that team

Output-oriented Approach

The book models management activities from the perspective of manufacturing and process management. Understanding the elements of production (inputs, outputs, inventory, manpower, quality controls) and developing metrics to monitor these are paramount to managing them effectively. Be cognisant of the limiting step in your production process.

Another important concept is the fact that material becomes more valuable as it moves through the production process. This is why, it’s a manager’s responsibility to fix things at the lowest-value stage of production.

The Manager

Productivity is output divided by the labor required to generate that output. Managers should therefore focus on high-leverage activities, that is, the ones that produce more output for every unit of input.

In order to do that, a manager has limited time to invest, and should focus on:

1. Information gathering: casual verbal exchanges, reading reports, visit particular factories or teams, etc.
2. Decision making: provide factual inputs or opinions, debate pros/cons, review decisions made by others, ratify/veto, etc.
3. Nudge others: stir someone or effort into one specific direction

A manager’s output = the output of his organisation + the output of the neighbouring organisation under his influence.

Most managerial activities are undertaken through meetings. There are two types of meetings:

• Process-oriented meetings: knowledge/information sharing; recurrent
  • 1:1s
  • Staff / Team meeting
  • Operational reviews
• Mission-oriented meetings: Ad-hoc meetings scheduled to reach a decision on a particular topic

Planning

• Step 1 — Establish projected need or demand: What will the environment demand from you, your business, or your organisation?
  
• Step 2 — Established your present status: What are you producing now? What will you be producing as your projects in the pipeline are completed?
  
• Step 3 — Compare and reconcile steps 1 and 2: What more (or less) do you need to do to produce what your environment will demand?

This section sounds very similar to the OKR framework that has been adopted at many companies. Companies have some high-level objectives and devise intermediate Key Results to deliver and move towards them.

Improving the Team’s Performance

The last past of the book focusses on the role of managers as “people managers”. A few concepts:

• A manager needs to set clear expectations and cultural values.
• In order to increase people’s motivation, a manager needs to understand the individual’s needs (i.e. expanding competence or achievement) and preferred way to measure this, whether it’s in absolute or relative terms (i.e. compared to others).
• Depending on the employee’s capacity to develop a task, a manager will be involved in either directing that person’s output or having a more task-oriented management style.
• Once expectations have been defined, performance is assessed by looking at the impact on 1) the organisation overall and 2) the personal impact on the output.
• On promotion, bear in mind the Peter principle, that is promoting someone until that person reaches their level of incompetence at a given level; don’t over-promote.
• A team member leaving, is the manager’s fault as this is likely related to unmanaged expectations on either side.

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Another good title by Steven Johnson that provides insights on elements related to how innovation happens, how to foster it and what to look out for to set up an environment where innovation can thrive. Though not exhaustive, I found the book interesting and took a decent amount of notes around the following areas.

The adjacent possible

The world is capable of any extraordinary change, but timing matters. This is similar to the “standing shoulders of giants” concept. For example, the invention of the spectacles in the XIII century enabled a number of other inventions like the telescope, the microscope, etc. And when Gutenberg invented the press and democratised the access to books, people realised they were farsighted and needed spectacles, which enabled mass market adoption for the product.

Innovation networks

The point here is that the stories of isolated eureka moments that lead to big inventions are rarely true. The trick to having good ideas is not to sit in glorious isolation but rather about getting more parts on the table to work with. Building open networks that allow for information spillover have always been effective ways to spur innovation.

Disorder

Chaos is a productive way to explore the adjacent possible. Industrialisation brought the view that processes, efficiency and order are qualities to strive for in business. The counterintuitive idea here is that disorder in fact allows for tinkering with new ideas, allow for information spillover and enable change.

The intersection between different disciplines

Hunches that don’t connect are doomed to stay hunches. The transition from a hunch to an idea takes time and without a way to materialise them they get lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues. The tradition of maintaining a commonplace book, where ideas were written down in a non-structured format, helped spur innovation and new ideas in the XVII century.

Serendipity

Browsing the stacks in a library is a good way to discover and connect with new ideas across different fields. The raise of the Web has helped serendipity by building a global distributed medium in which anyone can be a publisher. Conversely, hypertext has led to a decline in serendipitous discovery: we went from browsing to looking things up.

Being wrong

A shocking large number of transformative ideas can be attributed to contaminated laboratory experiments. For example, Fleming’s discovery of penicillin when mold infiltrated a culture of Staphylococcus. Good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain noise and error. Innovation thrives on useful mistakes and get suffocated with the demands of quality control.

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We will overcome this, as we have always done. But we must act quickly and decisively. Crisis are times for opportunity and we can’t afford to be complacent. We can and we should decide the kind of world that we will inhabit when the storm passes. It’s time to build the future.

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Product Management & Strategy 🚀

• 5 min read – It’s hard to imagine another history event with such a disruptive impact as Covid-19 in such a short timeframe. Regardless of the durability of the changes this brings they should be acknowledged [via Marginal Revolution]
• 10 min read – Building new things isn’t easy, or we’d already be doing it. Now it’s time to ask what are we building for the future [via a16z]
• 15 min read – As China eases lockdowns it has begun a bold mass experiment to monitor citizens’ activities using smartphones. This is how it works [via The New York Times]
• 10 min read – This storm will pass but the decisions we take now could change our lives for years to come [via Yuval Noah Harari / FT]
• 10 min read – Looks can be deceptive. Although we live in an amazing time for cartography, Covid-19 has exposed the flaws of visual mapping systems [via ArcGIS]

Learn 💡

• 20 min read – The crisis has brought the economy to a near halt and left millions of people out of work. This nearly brought down the global financial system. A recap on how all of this happened [via The Guardian]
• 10 min read – Every interesting game has a metagame above it. That is the game above the game. To get good at something, go after the metagame [via Commonplace]
• 10 min read – Shopify’s Director of Engineering explains how treating one’s mind like technology infrastructure can make you a learning machine [via SuperOrganizers]

Watch, listen, read 👁️‍🗨️

• Video – “Turning Products Into Companies” talks about formulating a go to market strategy and business model for your ideas [via Harvard Innovation Labs]
• Video – Abstract is a TV Series about the most innovative designers in a variety of disciplines that depicts how design impacts every aspect of life [via Netflix]
• Book – “How we got to know: six innovations that made the modern world” by Steven Johnson [via Enric Durany Blog]
• Art – A crowdsourced compilation of the best drawings on the topic of quarantine at home [via CoronaHouse]

Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.

Warren Buffet

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is an exceptional interdisciplinary book encompassing history, science and story telling to review six inventions that changed the world that we live in. Something interesting is that these inventions are not the things that one would guess if someone asked you beforehand. These inventions are: glass, cold, sound, clean, time and light.

Glass enabled things like spectacles, telescopes and microscopes, enabling humans to understand the world around them, from the invisible world of cells and microbes all the way back to the early days of the universe.

The ability to make things cold has enabled humans to reshape migration alongside being able to eat balanced meats thanks to freezing foods to postpone them for later consumption. Cold also enabled global trade and demonstrated the vast fortunes that can be made by transporting a commodity that is ubiquitous in one environment to a place where it’s scarce.

Sound has changed how to we communicate, gather, protest or are entertained. The first break-through in our obsession with the human voice arrived with the non-intuitive thought of writing voice down. This is how the phonograph was invented. This enabled communication across distant areas of the world, alongside with the appearance of monopolies like that of the AT&T network.

Cleanliness has arguably been the most impactful invention of all time, especially as it relates to life expectancy and child mortality rates. In the Middle Ages, for example, submerging the body in water was distinctly unhealthy, even a dangerous thing. Advances in public infrastructure enabled access to running water and in the 1900s John L. Neal’s experiment to start adding chlorine to Jersey City water reservoirs led to a 43% reduction in total mortality in the average American city. Combined with the progress on microscopes and the understanding of germ theory, this led to the appearance of the soap and cleaning product businesses which helped reinvent the advertising industry to what it looks like today.

Time has always existed but it was never measured accurately. Before worldwide atomic clocks each place had it’s own proprietary way of measuring time. Accurate clocks greatly reduced the risks of global shipping networks and the whole idea of an “hourly” wage enabled the resolution of the industrial age. Watches went from being a luxury product in 1850, selling at $40 to becoming a mass market product in 1878, costing circa $3.50. GPS also enabled location tracking by comparing clocks; each new advance in timekeeping enabled a corresponding advance in our master of geography.

Finally, light reshaped human’s lifestyle. From extracting spermaceti from sperm whales’ brain to produce burning oils humans went all the way down to invent electricity, the lightbulb and even a time travel machine by observing light emissions from distant stars. Edison’s invention of the lightbulb is particularly interesting as it comes to show that 1) being the first to market isn’t as important as dominating it; 2) American electronic companies depend on their imports from Asia since many years ago and 3) even though we generally conceive ideas as being those “lightbulb” epiphanies, inventions just like in the case of the lightbulb itself tend to come together over decades, in pieces.

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Marketplaces seem straightforward: it’s all about matching supply and demand. But in reality, marketplaces are anything but simple. eBay, considered one of the first marketplaces to scale both sides of its business – Buyers and Sellers – may look uncomplicated at first glance. It lets Sellers post items they want to sell and helps Buyers find what they are looking for. Behind the scenes though, eBay helps determine which items to surface based on purchase behavior, price, reputation of the sell side, time of the year, etc. Marketplaces are a complex system difficult to start, finetune and scale.

Although marketplaces often start small – eBay started focussing on collectibles, Uber started with a carsharing app for limos and Amazon with books – they can get big – and when they do, they get really big. This is due to their inherent network effects. For every seller or buyer added, the overall utility of the platform increases. This virtuous cycle helps build an engaged audience that translates to highly defensible business models.

But are these winner-takes-all markets always good for end customers? The dominance of these platforms sometimes lead to excessive take rates imposed on each transaction. GroupOn’s take rate of approximately 38% (and this is after asking the merchant to underwrite a 50% discount) means a recovery from each transaction for the supplier of 30%. This is likely behind the struggles in GroupOn’s core Daily Deals business. Deciding between what value can be extracted versus what value should be extracted is paramount to building successful marketplace business models that scale.

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Startups & Product Management 🚀

Source: Amazon

• 12 min read – Marketplaces have unique benefits. They involve low capital costs – as inventory is brought in by suppliers – and they can self-correct by offering more of a product as demand increases. But they have caveats. They need a certain supply from day one and hence are difficult to start as well as they need a close control of the quality of their inventory [via Jonathan Golden]
• 5 min read – Anyone who has worked at Amazon has heard the term “flywheel”. A flywheel is a system where each component is an accelerator. As Amazon increases the number of customers, more sellers are enticed to sell through their platform, which increases the product offer and therefore attracts even more customers [via Amazon]
• 10 min read – Marketplaces start with a niche and then quickly scale into huge networks of buyers and sellers. New geographical markets, new products and price points and decreasing friction are their route to success [via Andrew Chen]
• 9 min read – Choosing and implementing the right business model for a marketplace is not an easy task. As the liquidity of a platform increases the number of monetisation strategies abound [via Pawel Chudzinski]
• 10 min read – A true marketplace needs natural pull on both the consumer and supplier side. And there are different factors to consider when evaluating the potential success of a new marketplace opportunity [via Above the Crowd]

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

Source: McKinsey Insights

• 5 min read – Industry leaders are building defensible businesses by developing new technology platforms. Fiat (connected car), Schneider Electric (smart cities), Goldman Sachs (customer analytics) are good examples. Companies pursuing an offensive platform strategy are achieving a better payoff in both revenue and growth [via McKinsey Insights]
• 5 min read – The rise in dominant digital platforms is forcing a rethink in competition theory. And marketplaces make questions about antitrust more difficult to answer [via Financial Times – requires subscription]
• 10 min read – Marketplaces exemplify the world of the wallet garden. Whilst this offers attractive growth opportunities for startups it also has led to coining Facebook’s mantra: “Join us or we will copy you” [via Matt Ward]

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• 40 min listen – Ridesharing wasn’t a thing 12 years ago when John Zimmer was in college. But a class on green cities got him thinking about the glut of underused cars on the road, and eventually led him to co-found Lyft [via How I Built This]

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To create great products takes skill, intelligence, dedication and discipline. And it requires making bold choices. Innovating to achieve impact with a product makes us take big risks. And striking a balance between speed of delivery and quality of the execution is always tricky.

Understanding what to build and how well we build it can make a difference between a loveable product that scales or failing at solving a customer’s problem.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but it gives an indication of the ways to understand customer problems better, come up with proposed solutions and why does it all matter.

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Startups & Product Management 🚀

Source: Laurence McCahill

• 5 min read – As a Product Manager, you should be managing a problem, not only its solution. This is because understanding a solution can only be as good as your understanding of the problem you’re addressing. And yet, most teams fly through the problem definition part [via Intercom]
• 3 min read – A customer problem statement is a short description of the issues that need to be addressed by a problem solving team and should be created before trying to solve the problem [via Ivan Schneiders]
• 12 min read – When you’re trying to build a product you can’t have it all. This is why people build Minimum Viable Products (MVP). MVP’s maximise validated learning but do so at the expense of lower quality. Minimum Loveable Products on the other hand, maximise love from early tribe members with the least effort [via Laurence McCahill]
• 5 min read – Designing products for impact inevitably entails dealing with risk. When taking a high risk product bet, focus the team’s attention on learning, rather than success or failure [via Ameet Ranadive]
• 10 min read – Learning can be like doing nothing, it’s difficult to know when you’re done. To become a learning machine, we have to overload ourselves with information. Mental models are frameworks can simplify learning, and help us make sense of the [via Hiten Shah]

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

Source: McKinsey Insights

• 10 min read – Customer choice has never been greater, so terrific design is essential for outstanding products and services – and to build lasting customer relationships [via McKinsey Insights]
• 15 min read – Concept Sprints are a set of activities that turn an idea into something that has a greater chance of seeing the light of day and succeeding in the marketplace [via McKinsey Insights]

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• 25 min listen – How do morals and meaning fit into entrepreneurship? Focusing only on the technical problems sometimes misses the humanity at the centre of why we’re building a new product in the first place [via a16z Podcast]

Interesting Reads 🤓

• 10 min read – Nearly all great ideas follow a similar creative process. Although not easy, being creative is something that can be learnt. Following a process can help demystify the creative process and lead to the path of more innovative thinking [via James Clear]

The article How To Design Products that Solve Customer Problems appeared first on Enric Durany.

The year is off to a good start, as I have been able to begin clearing up my reading list which had been growing over the past 18 months.

Below are three short reviews of the books I have been able to go through so far. It would be great to hear back from any book recommendations you might have in the comments.

Thinking Fast and Slow – Daniel Kahneman

Source: Amazon

This book is a must read. Period. Nobel Price winner Daniel Kahneman, to whom it might be one of the most influential living psychologist, revolutionises how do we think about thinking.

The book explains the dual-process model of our brains. To perceive and think about the world we use two systems of thinking: “System 1” and “System 2”. “System 1” is fast, intuitive, automatic and it can’t be switched off. This is where human’s irrationality and cognitive biases stem from. Conversely, “System 2” is slow, deliberate and effortful. To use it, we require attention, and it tends to take over when things get difficult.

This timeless theory has become the foundation of how entrepreneurs and marketers think about products and customer relations. Moreover, there are plenty of interesting cases where this behavioural economics theory can be applied too. An interesting one being Brexit.

The Inevitable – Kevin Kelly

Source: Amazon

Former executive editor of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly reviews twelve of the most prominent forces that, enabled by technology, are shaping our world and will continue to drive human progress over the near future.

Flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking and questioning – Kelly demonstrates the interdependence of these trends and how will they revolutionise how we think, buy and learn. Understanding them is paramount to being able to adapt to the world we live in both in business and in our personal life.

Whilst the book doesn’t unveil anything we don’t already know it’s a great compilation of trends to reflect on how we got here and where do we go to as well as why.

Meditations – Marcus Aurelius

Source: Amazon

One way in which I choose which books to read is by selecting the ones that are more than ten years old but keep being reedited consistently over time. This proves that they are timeless pieces. And this is very much the case with Meditations.

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor from AD121 to AD180. He wrote his Meditations as a series of thoughts or spiritual exercises. His point is clear: everything has happened before – the same plot, the same stage. And people repeat it themselves from generation to generation.

Although these Meditations were composed to provide personal advice and encouragement, in developing these beliefs Marcus Aurelius managed to create a timeless collection of philosophy guidelines that one can feel truly actionable in today’s world.

Photo credits: burst.shopify.com

The article My Best Reads of Q1 2018 appeared first on Enric Durany.

In a world with imperfect information and subject to randomness, good decisions do not guarantee good outcomes. While people should make rational decisions only if they had enough information, Kahneman’s “Thinking fast, and slow” proves how people can decide against their economic interest even when they know better.

This week’s EDebrief focuses on Decision Making and Decision Making Process. Enhancing the quality of one’s decision process as a means to increasing the probability of a superior outcome.

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Startups & Product Management 🚀

Source: Brandon Chu

• 13 min read – Being consistently right matters, a lot. But we live on a world with imperfect information. In such context, the ability to make good decisions depends on choosing the right amount of information and taking them at the optimal speed [via Brandon Chu]
• 5 min read – Different problems might require different thinking processes and actions to resolve them. Applying the Cynefin framework to understand the complexity of a problem [via BitGenics]
• 5 min read – Not all decisions are set in stone. In fact, being able to pivot frequently will build resilience in the decision making process and increase the probability of good outcomes. A compilation of visualizations to understand current activities and the trade-offs to be made to reduce churn when shifting direction [via John Cutler]

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

Source: McKinsey Insights

• 20 min read – Companies with a well-functioning decision making process have a bigger probability to succeed. Understanding what kind of decision needs to be made, by whom and how quickly is at the root of this process [via McKinsey Insights]
• 5 min read – Americans’ proclivity for eating bananas has helped make them the second most valuable fruit crop in the world. And the reason why people tend to eat more bananas than, let’s say, apples is simple: they are easier to peel. If you want to drive decision making, make decisions easy to take [via Harvard Business Review]

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• 50 min listen – Life is series of decisions. But life is filled with complexity, randomness and uncertainty. Annie Durke, a former World Series Poker champion, talks about how to make decisions when lacking perfect information to do so [via The Art of Manliness]

Interesting Reads 🤓

Source: James Clear

• 6 min read – In recent decades researchers have discovered mental errors that lead us to think incorrectly in a given situation. These are some of the most common mental biases that sway you from making good decisions [via James Clear]

The article What Good Decision Making Looks Like appeared first on Enric Durany.

This week’s EDebrief analyses Dropbox’s history and USP, together with opinions on the potential outlook after going public.

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Startups & Product Management 🚀

• 20 min read – Classpass has managed to become one of the main new players of the fitness and wellness industry. Valued at $400 Million in their last funding round, Classpass is on the path to become the next Tech Unicorn. This comprehensive analysis looks at their history, evolution and key pivots to then deep dive into their business model and challenges ahead [via Othmane Rahmouni]
• 5 min read – Mapping the customer journey can help a company understand how are customers interacting and engaging with their brand, and also help illustrate how products and services fit into their lives, schedules, goals, and aspirations [via ThinkWithGoogle]

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

Source: McKinsey Insights

• 20 min read – Subscription e-commerce, such as Blue Apron meal kits, fitness Classpass or Stitch Fix personal styling, is a fast-growing new way of buying online. Fueled by venture capital, startups have launched these businesses in a wide range of categories from beer and wine to cosmetics or pet food. This has attracted established retailers like P&G or Walmart that see in subscription e-commerce a new path for strong organic growth [via McKinsey Insights]
• 20 min read – Chinese tech giants get there faster. Big startups in China are built in three to give years, versus five to eight in the U.S.. The factors: a dense interconnected domestic market, hyper-competition driven by population pressure and the 9-9-6 culture, “9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week” [via Reforge]

Cryptocurrencies and Finance 📈

• 8 min read – Centralised platforms have been dominant for so long that people have forgotten there’s a better way to build internet services. Crypto-networks like Blockchain post a new way to develop community-owned networks and provide a level playing field for new business creators [via Chris Dixon]
• 15 min read – Currently, there is a remarkable divide between the promises of cryptocurrencies and the actual real life cases that they support. This article looks at Bitcoin and considers the potential future use cases that can be deduced from its properties [via Y Combinator]

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• 40 min listen – Classpass founder Payal Kadakia explains how the price point that bleeds your business today may actually save you from going bankrupt. Sometimes you have to scale first and figure out your unit economics later [via Masters of Scale]

Interesting Reads 🤓

• 8 min read – The world appears to be doomed today. 59 percent of Americans believe “this to be the lowest point in our nation’s history that they can remember”. Conversely, the general wellbeing of the population is better than it has ever been. This “declinist” mindset is, according to psychologists, stemming from the biases known as the “reminiscence bump” and the “positivity effect” [via LifeHacker]

The article Breaking Down the Subscription Ecommerce Business Model appeared first on Enric Durany.

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Startups & Product Management 🚀

• 6 min read – Introducing “The Customer Factory Blueprint“, an alternative to The Business Model Canvas, which uses just 7 metrics to replace all the numbers in a typical financial forecast spreadsheet
• 6 min read – Product “tear downs” are an effective way to keep Product Management skills sharp. At Yammer, folks from design, research and analytics “tear down” an interesting mobile or app every week [via Jens-Fabian Goetzmann]
• 10 min read – North Star Metrics are a popular approach to setting long term goals and focus across Product teams. But blindly buying into the concept on the one metric that matters may be a fatal oversimplification for a product 

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

Source: Boston Consulting Group

• 10 min read – The top most innovative companies in the world 2018, according to the Boston Consulting Group [via Boston Consulting Group]
• 24 min read – Agile organizations have five key elements in common: a North Star vision, a network of empowered teams, rapid learning cycles, a dynamic people model and next-generation enabling technology [via McKinsey Insights]
• 5 min read – Spotify’s uses an “Inclusion Index” to gauge how included Spotifiers feel  [via Spotify HR blog]

Cryptocurrencies and Finance 📈

Source: Trustnodes.com

• 5 min read – Coinbase launches a new service for merchants, allowing them to integrate crypto payments similarly to Paypal
• 5 min read – VISA and Mastercard make it harder to buy cryptocurrencies by adding an additional 5% fee [via TechCrunch]
• 5 min read – Forbes list of cryptocurrency’s richest investors [via Forbes]

Interesting Reads 🤓

• 8 min read – Learning to unlearn — identifying the things that you can’t nurture, and letting them go — can be as important as learning new ones [via FastCompany]

The article Using North Star Metrics to Craft the Product Vision appeared first on Enric Durany.

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The article A Strategic Analysis of Amazon Go appeared first on Enric Durany.

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Startup & Product Management 🚀

• Dan Hill, Product Director @Airbnb, shares a list of observations on what successful Product Management looks like
• Brian Balfour, CEO @Reforge, on why retention can be the silent killer of a high-growth startup
• May Wang, Product Designer @Evernote, blogs on 7 insights on Growth Design and how to apply them to your product

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

• McKinsey Quarterly on how companies must compete in a digitalised world without borders
• Discover how much mathematics does an IT engineer (or any other professional) have to learn to work in Data Science and Machine Learning
• Learning about the e-Residency program of one the most advanced digital societies: Estonia

Crypto and Finance 📈

• Must-read article that describes the economics of how the Bitcoin model works
• Elad Gil, on why network effects will help Bitcoin maintain its status as the primary value store, despite it’s technological flaws

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• Brad Katsuyama, founder of the IEX exchange, explains how stock exchanges work, and why trading fees are not their main source of revenue
• Barry O-Reilly talks about what is hypothesis-driven testing, and why does it matter

Interesting Reads 🤓

• Atlassian blogs on how one’s emotions can affect productivity

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Recommend or share this if you found it useful. It gives me 🔋 to write knowing that people find value in it

The article Competing in a World Without Borders appeared first on Enric Durany.

The motivation behind it is twofold. On the one hand, it helps me reflect on the new ideas I am exposed to. On the other, it helps reward all these authors that take some time to share their learnings with the world, making it a better place for everyone.

Do you want to receive this curated list to your email every week? Click here

Useful Mental Models for Product Managers

Source: https://hackernoon.com/5-mental-models-that-help-product-managers-acquire-and-retain-users-ef00e6f3d8a6 
Topic: Product Management
Reading time: 12 min

Mental models are conceptualizations that help us explain things. There are a vast number of mental models, and every discipline has their own set that one can learn. In this article, Hiten compiles five useful mental models to use when incepting products from scratch or fine tuning existing ones.

Compilation of Tools for Crypto Traders

Source: https://medium.com/@ImagineTraffic/27-amazing-resources-for-bitcoin-and-cryptocurrency-traders-911a7e92d918
Topic: Bitcoin / Crypto / Investing
Reading time: 6 min

A useful compilation of tools for crypto (and also retail) trading. From the basics of technical analysis to daily-use trading tools as well as research websites to discover new investment opportunities beyond Bitcoin.

Analysis of the Impact of Futures on Bitcoin

Source: https://medium.com/swlh/will-the-futures-market-do-to-bitcoin-what-it-did-to-gold-b7d35704641
Topic: Bitcoin / Crypto / Investing
Reading time: 8 min

Bitcoin futures have just launched this December (more info on Bitcoin Futures here). And it’s reasonable to think that Ethereum and other crypto futures will follow. With Futures, a new wave of institutional money will likely flow into this new asset class. To asses the impact that futures will have on Bitcoin, this articles reviews the historical effect that futures had on other rare assets classes that also had to be mined: gold and silver.

Shifting To Subscription-based Business Models

Source: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/subscription-myth-busters
Topic: Digital Strategy
Reading time: 15 min

Subscription-based business models are a great way to both enhance customer lifetime value and tap into new customer segments. But shifting from an up-front to a recurring-revenue model represents a challenge for existing high-tech vendors. This article explores five of the most critical aspects of this transition and the existing myths around them.

Streamlining the Efficiency of Online Learning

Source: https://conversionxl.com/blog/online-learning/
Topic: Trends / Learning
Reading time: ~10′

Learning online is probably the new standard for learning. But doing so, and doing it quickly, posts a number of challenges both to one’s long and short-term memory as well as to the traditional cognitive psychology of how people learn. The article explores these challenges and reviews a number of best-practices that can help tackling them.

Past articles in these series

• 5 things I have learnt this week, w49
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w48
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w46
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w45
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w44

Before you go, please consider:

• Recommend or share this if you found it useful. It gives me 🔋 to write knowing that people find value in it
• Subscribe to this blog either via RSS, via email or on Medium if you want more articles like this

The article 5 things I have learnt this week – week 50 appeared first on Enric Durany.

The motivation behind it is twofold. On the one hand, it helps me reflect on the new ideas I am exposed to. On the other, it helps reward all these authors that take some time to share their learnings with the world, making it a better place for everyone.

Want these articles delivered to your email? Click here

101 Guide to Ruthless Prioritization

Source: Brandon Chu
Topic: Product Management
Reading time: ~15′

Prioritization means doing the most important things first. If you build products, then that translates to doing the things that create the most customer value first. In this article, Brandon shares his view on how this can be accomplished both within and between projects; providing with a mental model to ponder dependencies, timelines and team composition to sequence projects based on ROI and their constraints.

How to Kickstart a Company’s Growth Process

Source: Casey Winters
Topic: Growth Hacking / Startups
Reading time: ~15′

Once startups figure out their value hypothesis, and find product-market fit, they still have to sort out their efficient growth levers and execute on them. Growth teams have a clear purpose: to help understand the frictions that prevent more people from finding value in your project.

Fat Protocols are Only Half of the Story

Source: David King
Topic: Bitcoin / Blockchain
Reading time: ~5′

Joel Monegro coined the “fat protocols” theory, which has driven some rethinking on how value is created and accrued on Blockchain-based platforms. David King goes one step further, and argues that the Blockchain winning formula will not only depend on the protocol itself, but also on having at least one successful app built on top to help drive adoption.

Product Hunt’s Best 30 Product Launches in November

Source: Product Hunt
Topic: Startups
Reading time: ~10′

Product Hunt is becoming the go-to place for entrepreneurs to launch their products, and for early adopters to try them out. They publish a useful monthly recap that I would recommend subscribing to. This month’s edition is packed with things like Google’s Poly, Firefox’s Quantum and the brand new Facebook Local.

How To Write Longer Content Like a Pro

Source: Joe Daniels
Topic: Blogging / Writting
Reading time: ~10′

Joe Daniels does a great job explaining why it’s important to write longer content (2,500+ words), both from the perspective of the writer and the reader. He also provides with a useful framework (I have already used it to write my latest article on ICOs) to frame one’s thoughts when planning the structure of a new write-up.

Past articles in these series

• 5 things I have learnt this week, w48
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w46
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w45
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w44

Before you go, please consider:

• Recommend or share this if you found it useful. It gives me 🔋 to write knowing that people find value in it
• Subscribe to this blog either via RSS, via email or on Medium if you want more articles like this

The article 5 things I have learnt this week – week 49 appeared first on Enric Durany.

This year, more than $3bn has been raised through ICOs (Source: CoinSchedule). To put this in context, according to CoinDesk data, funding for ICOs surpassed traditional Venture Capital (VC) funding in 2017 in the months January to July 2017.

Filecoin raised $250m. Tezos, $232m. Bancor, $153m. Yes, that’s an enormous amount of money, specially for companies that at times don’t even have a demoable solution of what they are building.

In this environment, analysts have started to compare this craze to the Dotcom Bubble of the 90’s, where the Nasdaq lost almost 80% of its value overnight, making investors lose ridiculous sums of money.

In this article, I review the different views on this controversial new way of financing for companies, contrasting the pros and cons of what may be the next bubble to burst.

OK, but what is an ICO?

ICOs are a form of fundraising for crypto-startups (companies based on Blockchain technology, most using the Ethereum platform). Just like Venture Capital or Crowdfunding. A lot of these crypto-startups are using ICOs to raise money instead of using Venture Capital.

How this works is by a team coming up with a business idea, writing a an ICO white paper and/or developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and issuing their own coin, or token. The tokens are sold to the public, and will be used in the platform when the product launches.

Investors purchase these tokens using Ethereum or Bitcoin, expecting that they will appreciate as the product gains traction and adoption increases. In other words, you are buying a currency that can only be used on a platform that doesn’t exist or that the team has only started to build. Weird.

The Ethereum ICO, for example, one of the biggest of all time, ran from 20 Jul 2014 to 2 Sep 2014 and raised $18.4m in tokens during this process.

Are ICOs a Scam?

Regulators around the globe have warned about the dangers of ICOs, pointing to an asset bubble similar to the Dotcom Crash via market manipulation and fraud. South Korea and China have already banned all forms of ICOs.

ICOs are companies getting Series C level funding for seed-level products

Because of their novelty, ICOs are not regulated. Thus, you are less protected as an investor. While VC or Angel-backed companies have to prove themselves and comply with strict regulations to IPO, there is no requirement for ICOs to provide any kind of formal plan or contract to their investors. Instead of shares, ICOs distribute tokens which value is often not linked at all to any financial metrics of the company.

Although this doesn’t mean that ICOs are a scam, these are a few things to ponder before getting invested in one of them:

• ICOs attract a lot of scammers. Due to the lack of paperwork, ICOs attract scammers who can simply create a bogus whitepaper, pump it with PR, and then disappear. See the case of Confido’s scam as an example. For more on this, read “How to create an ICO scam in 5 single steps“.
• Some are based in pure speculation. People should invest in an ICO with the same mindset that they invest in a normal startup. That is, because they believe in the target market, the idea and the team. Recent ICO valuations look like investors are more focussed on the potential return due to the crypto-hype rather than because they have done a fundamental analysis of the opportunity.
• Founders making money even if the company goes bust. Tezos, one of the biggest ICOs to date, pioneered the idea of its founders receiving 8.5% of USD proceeds from token sales. That is, even if the company fails (i.e. the investors lose their money), founders still make a profit. Nonsense.
• Some companies create a coin for a business where it is useless. As it doesn’t make sense to use blockchain for their idea, the business will fail. See https://www.dnxtoken.com/ as an example.
• Storing the tokens. If the tokens are based in Ethereum, they may be easy to store in a wallet. If they are not, investors will find it difficult to keep them safe.

What’s the Point of ICOs Then?

ICOs are not all that bad. They give opportunities to promising projects. Think of what Ethereum has accomplished: from becoming the second biggest cryptocurrency in the world, to providing a platform for creation of DAPP projects. Tezos, one of the most relevant ICOs to date, has a clear value proposition focused on decentralized governance and a voting system. Ripple seems to be the natural replacement of SWIFT, and it’s already being tested by big players like American Express.

There is good reason to be excited about several of these projects. ICOs enable these companies to build MVP’s and align incentives between all stakeholders so that networks can grow faster. They provide the type of positive feedback loop that help teams learn and resolve customer problems efficiently.

Some reasons why ICOs are actually good:

• Don’t require unnecessary paperwork. Hundreds of projects don’t get executed because they get caught in the bureaucracy established by incumbent systems. Similar to the Fintech vs traditional banks story.
• Community building. ICOs give the founders an opportunity to build an engaged community around their projects. This not only holds creators accountable, but also provides with valuable feedback loops to develop their product.
• Access to potentially valuable tokens. ICOs give the opportunity to invest in tokens for cheap money. For example, during the Ethereum presale, one Ether was priced at ~40 cents. Today, the same Ether is valued at ~$450.
• Innovation incentives. The current hype about crypto and ICOs is attracting a lot of talent. These new entrepreneurs will drive further innovation into this space, and more interesting products and platforms will be created.

Key Takeaways

1. ICOs are a risky investment, and some are a scam.
If 90% of startups fail, ICOs are, at best, a gamble. The lack of regulation offers great possibilities for innovation, but also represents an opportunity for scammers.

2. Dumb money follows smart money.
Uninformed investors’ money is inflating the value of ICOs. Junk ICOs, and people who support them, will continue to dilute Blockchain’s credibility.

3. Amazing crypto-startups exist.
We have seen a few successful ventures of this kind (Ethereum, Tezos, Ripple, etc.), and we will continue to see more. They generally: have a very clear use case that requires decentralization using Blockchain, have a reasonable valuation based on the size of the opportunity they pursue and have a credible team backing the idea.

4. ICOs help enable positive feedback loops.
Projects that really help to solve real customer problems and that issue tokens to raise funds must place them at the heart of a strong positive feedback loop that incentivises all stakeholders to participate for a greater good.

What next?

ICOs will continue to be an important part of cryptocurrency and blockchains. One cannot overlook the good things they’ve done. From enabling Ethereum to facilitating the creation of DAPPs, and providing incentives to engineers to come up with more and newer exciting use cases.

Conversely, ICOs are, and will continue to be, a very dangerous and risky way to invest. At the end of the day, if the team/product was all that great, why didn’t they raise the money via a VC? Cutting out VCs and traditional due diligence will enable scammers to continue to exploit loopholes for their selfish benefit. Beware.

Before you go, please consider:

• Recommend or share this if you found it useful. It gives me 🔋 to write knowing that people find value in it
• Subscribe to this blog either via RSS, via email or on Medium if you want more articles like

The article The ICO Dilemma: Understanding Both Sides of the Same Coin appeared first on Enric Durany.

The motivation behind it is twofold. On the one hand, it helps me reflect on the new ideas I am exposed to so that I understand them better. On the other, it helps reward all these authors that take some time to share their learnings with the world, making it a better place for everyone.

Want to receive this list in your email every week? Click here

Fostering Innovation in the Insurance Industry

Source: Harvard Business Review
Topic: Organizational Behavior / Innovation
Reading time: ~15′

Reinventing a company culture to build innovation in the core values and norms has proven to be a difficult objective to achieve. This article explains how CSAA Insurance Group went about this process, the challenges they faced and the learnings they got out of it.

Consumption Trends in the Rising Post-90s Chinese Generation

Source: McKinsey Insights
Topic: Corporate Strategy
Reading time: ~15′

A rising post-90s generation is emerging as a strong engine in consumption in China. This article summarizes four trends in the Chinese consumer landscape worth being aware of.

Machine Learning Algorithms: Which One to Choose for Your Problem

Source: Daniil Korbut
Topic: Artificial Intelligence
Reading time: ~20′

A review of the six most well-known Machine Learning algorithms and the use cases where they can be useful.

Valuation Ratios Important to Every Value Investor

Source: Finbox
Topic: Corporate Finance
Reading time: ~20′

As Warren Buffet once said “Price is what you pay; value is what you get”. Understanding valuation ratios can be really useful for both retail and institutional investors. This article sums up the most well known valuation ratios used in finance.

How to Remember What you Read

Source: Farnam Street
Topic: Life Hacks
Reading time: ~18′

It’s not what you read, it’s how you read it. This article contains a number of techniques and mental models to make the most out of your reading time.

Past articles in these series

• 5 things I have learnt this week, w46
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w45
• 5 things I have learnt this week, w44

Have you come across any other articles you would like to recommend? Help the world be 1% better in the comments.

Before you go, please consider:

• Recommend or share this if you found it useful. It gives me 🔋 to write knowing that people find value in it
• Subscribe to this blog either via RSS, via email or on Medium if you want more articles like this

The article 5 things I have learnt this week – week 48 appeared first on Enric Durany.