Perspective Newsletter # 1
Curated content across Tech, Product and Startups.
Work - Sahil Lavinga
A really breath taking, high impact piece. Sahil is the founder of Gumroad and here he talks about his approach to work and running Gumroad with a small team that too working part-time.
This challenges the general idea of growth but more than that, in my opinion, it challenges that startups need not focus on building feature after features. That engineering is the main cost center for majority of startups and most are stuck in build traps. It might make sense for companies to invest in new features once they have a certain market but before achieving that scale, one should not grow teams. A team of 10 might be 10x more productive than a team of 100 on per person basis. Also, overall output might be more, but overall outcome might not be so different, because with increased bandwidth, good to have/low impact items start getting picked.
Also with increased sizes, communication and process overheads impact productivity. Having a linear output growth with manpower is a difficult feat to achieve.
Lenny’s Podcast - Shreyas Doshi
Shreyas Doshi talks about his approach to Product Management in this podcast with Lenny.
Pre-morterms → Good way to think about what could go wrong, especially in big projects. A way to give a safe space for people to talk about situations that won’t be generally discussed. One highlight is the prompt to start discussion → Imagine we are 6 months in future and this project failed miserably, what would be the reasons?
LNO framework - Leverage, Neutral and Overhead tasks. A simple way of thinking about where to put in the most effort at this moment based on your productivity. If you are feeling most productive, work on highest leverage tasks.
Three levels of Product work - Execution, Impact, Optics. All three are important depending on the context. Be clear on what you are working on and what other people are evaluating you on.
Prioritization - don't just think about RoI i.e. Impact to effort ratio, also think of opportunity cost, things we are not doing.
Seeing Like an Algorithm
Eugene Wei writes about Tiktok from the perspective of algorithm and UI
Removing friction - the clear center of UI philosophy for the last 2 decades. This article makes an argument to add another dimension to this i.e. algorithm. By making choices that give very clear signal to the algorithm at the cost of increasing friction little bit is a tradeoff one should always consider.
Think about Tiktok - a simple change in UI - The entire screen is filled with one video. Just one. It is displayed fullscreen, in vertical orientation. This is not a scrolling feed. It’s paginated, effectively. The video autoplays almost immediately. This design puts the user to an immediate question: how do you feel about this short video and this short video alone? Everything you do from the moment the video begins playing is signal as to your sentiment towards that video. Do you swipe up to the next video before it has even finished playing? An implicit (though borderline explicit) signal of disinterest.
The default UI of our largest social networks today is the infinite vertically scrolling feed (I could have easily used a screenshot of Facebook above, for example). Instead of serving you one story at a time, these apps display multiple items on screen at once. As you scroll up and past many stories, the algorithm can’t “see” which story your eyes rest on. Even if it could, if the user doesn’t press any of the feedback buttons like the Like button, is their sentiment towards that story positive or negative? The signal of user sentiment isn’t clean.
TikTok doesn’t have an explicit downvote button, but by serving you just one video at a time, they can infer your lack of interest in any single video based on whether you churn out of that video quickly A quick swipe up before a video has completed is like swiping left on Tinder.
Algorithm-friendly design need not be user-hostile. It simply takes a different approach as to how to best serve the user’s interests. Pagination may insert some level of friction to the user, but in doing so, it may provide the algorithm with cleaner signal that safeguards the quality of the feed in the long run.
Minimizing friction is merely one means to a great user experience. The goal of any design is not to minimize friction, it’s to help the user achieve some end. Reducing friction is often consistent with that end, but not always
Another key highlight from this is, a clear feedback helps in arresting the discontent drift as soon as it starts. If the algorithm isn’t "seeing" signals of a user’s growing disinterest, if only positive engagement is visible, some amount of divergence is unavoidable. You might see that a user is slowly losing interest, not liking as many items, not opening your app as often, but precisely which stories are driving them away may be unclear. By the time they're starting to exhibit those signs of churn, it's often too late to reverse the bleeding.
Lenny’s Podcast - Building Substack
Sachin Monga, Head of Product at Substack, talks about culture at substack and Product Management in general
The best part of this talk was about the team size, Substack had 4 PMs at the time of this podcast (Oct 2022). Looking at this, most companies feel so bloated and inefficient.
Another highlight is the point that Substack is a philosophically driven organization which means driving vision, strategy and other long term plans becomes easier. What I have seen is, very few companies are driven by philosophy and thus digress as soon as external pressure increases. Only companies with philosophy/long term vision can create great sustaining cultures in my opinion.
Ending with a quote for this week -
“In the short term, you are as good as your intensity. In the long term, you are only as good as your consistency.”