In 2002, Amazon launched a side business with little fanfare: cloud Infrastructure as a service. 20 years later, it now makes over $70B in annual revenue. It’s a huge business. In fact, AWS’ hefty profit represents well over 50% of Amazon’s total. It is Amazon’s crown jewel. In a conglomerate full of great businesses, it […]
Product managers need to be multi-lingual. If you do not speak the language of the function you are interacting with, everything becomes more difficult. Conversations take longer. Alignment becomes tedious, if it ever happens. Stakeholders come back after a feature is launched with a list of complaints. The best PMs prevent these messes by speaking […]
How does a company navigate the clashing waves of the travel industry? Adeptly, like a master using a Kayak. The meta-search engine started in 2004 can be a forgotten site in the business coverage of travel. Certainly, at 30M visitors per month, it’s not forgotten in the actual travel side of travel. Kayak is ubiquitous. […]
India is exploding as a hub for innovation. These days, it seems more common to hear Unicorn announcements out of Bangalore than out of San Francisco. The numbers back up the feeling. Unicorn announcements in India have literally 10x’d. In 2021, India had 44 new unicorn announcements. Only 37 companies had hit that mark in […]
Principle 1: More is not better Start with the minimal, most important information: user story, success criteria, & design/ mock. Then, add in additional layers. Fewer people will read long specs. And even fewer will walk away with the right takeaways. Principle 2: Quality matters A bad user story is worse than none. Same for […]
From the New York Times and Wired to Allure and Vox, everyone seems to be writing about digital fashion. For gamers like myself and our collaborators for the week at Master the Meta, this is a bit of a head-scratcher. Cosmetics have existed in games for over 20 years. So, the question of the day […]
Write a PRD The buzz is don’t write them, that’s for design & eng to build these. But what if you freed them up to work in Figma & code? In our remote world, a collaborative PRD that is iterative and not dictatorial can be high leverage work for a PM. Help QA PMs from […]
If there were ever an example of greatness, it would be Tom Brady. Starting from nothing as a backup QB on a lossless team his freshman year of high school, Tom Brady faced adversity every step of the way. At the University of Michigan, Tom had to watch from the bench as Brien Griese led […]
Feedback, used well, can multiply your impact. But 9/10 PMs use it wrong: Used sparingly This is the mistake 9/10 PMs make. They are team players, nice, and want to take on problems themselves. Feedback has to be used to shape the team to achieve the outcomes PMs are responsible for. So how should it […]
Too often, the literature focuses on what PMs should do. But what is the anti-pattern? What should PMs avoid doing? Trying to do everything The PM version of gluttony is trying to do everything. Being the “hero” PM does not mean doing everything, it means doing the right things. Acting like the boss “CEO of […]