Triple Shot Saturday - Edition 8
Three of the highest signal-to-noise ratio snippets from the startup/tech podcasts for founders/operators.
Hi there,
Here are my favorite three snippets from the podcasts I read this week.
Nashilu Mouen-Makoua, who leads storytelling at The Browser Company (which is building a modern browser, Arc), spoke to
of about how they are surfacing the passions/backgrounds/stories of their team to build a brand in public. This is perhaps one of the most unique ways in recent memory to break the clutter around consumertech product brand-building. This costs next to nothing and humanizes the brand.
Can we bring our team to the forefront? Can we be people building a product in a way that you're sharing behind-the-scenes in a way that's never been done by folks before. And so we really started with these videos that were people sharing how we're thinking about performance or how we're thinking about Swift on Windows or why we stopped shipping for a month. And it was always the team sharing the story. And so 2022 is really about blurring the lines between company and our members, as we call them, in a way that hadn't been done before.
I think that there's something about the DNA of this company, which is people who love the product that we're building, love the potential of technology, but also love something outside of technology. And so when I think of our storytelling, I think of Carla, who leads brand, who's an artist who lives up in Harlem with her family, and brings a lot of external feel to the work that she does. I think of Josh Lee, who was a filmmaker, documentary creator before joining The Browser Company. I think of myself, I love writing outside of Browser Co. And so I think that was always my biggest hope was that we would challenge what a tech company felt like and how it would show up in the world. And I think that that comes a lot from just having people who care about things outside of this industry.
Kevin Yien, product leader at Stripe, talks about the 2 orthogonal roles of a PM in a tech company - (a) Setting the perimeter and (b) paying attention to the final deliverable. He was on the Lenny’s Podcast by
.
And so my description is, PM should be doing everything in their power to draw the perimeter of the space, of the problem space.
And it's within that, eng, design, everyone else that you're working with, they can go as crazy as they want, push up against the bounds and it's fill the box to its maximum capacity, but you've now applied the constraints that allow you to actually have productive conversations.
On the other end of the spectrum though, I think there's a lot of folks who think, "Oh, PMs are just strategy high in the clouds. All they do is kick things off." You need to be obsessed about the final deliverable and whether or not value is actually getting to the customer.
On setting the perimeter:
I think it is tempting when we think about engineering product and design to draw these really clear swim lanes and say, "You do X. I do Y. Don't tread on my area." But you need these murky overlaps in order to build something really good.
And so even if the engineers are going to build a better product than you and the designers are going to design something better than you, you need to come with a strong opinion and you need to do the legwork to get their trust so they actually care about your opinion in the first place.
On owning the final deliverable:
Square, we're building a point of sale for restaurants. If you've ever seen one of these in a restaurant, there's this sort of grid of tiles that they tap to enter your order when you're sitting down for dinner. ….
….Well, how do you deal with that level of speed but also the ease of use that anyone can learn it for the first time? And so there was this interaction that we really cared about, which was, when you tap on a menu group, what's the animation to pop you into that next level?
This seems like such a small thing, but it made the difference in how easy it was to adopt for a lot of the restaurants. And so a designer and myself spent literally an entire week just fine-tuning how many milliseconds it would take to pop in and out so that it felt right.
And we actually brought in servers and bartenders to play with the prototypes we had on iPads and be like, "Here's an order. Pop it in." And we would see where they would sort of flinch or hesitate because the animation was too slow and they thought, "I can't tap it yet," or something related to that.
And so it's easy, I think, for a PM to say, "That's not my responsibility. I define the requirements. Have a menu group that goes to the next level, design or engineer, figure it out." No way. That's fully on you, and you better be involved in those details.
Bharat Bhatia, VP of marketing at Junglee Games, and Nishant Jaiswal, VP of marketing at Zupee, spoke to Ankur Gattani of WebEngage on the State of Retention Marketing podcast. This particular part on sending notifications that are not cool (unlike, say, Zomato’s notifications) is very interesting.
Not everyone can send cool notifications. So what we realize is that you have to send notifications which are, which have like, grade five english level, which are at a very basic level that everyone understands. Because our players are 45, 50 year old, our players are 18 year old, 21 year old. So, your language has to be universal in a way. It cannot be very niche. That is what we realize after multiple levels of experimentation. So you have to be very basic in what you say. You have to be very. I think what we've realized when it comes to communication level intervention, is that the easier you keep your creative and you don't have metaphors, similes, etcetera in it, the easier you are able to communicate what you want to as a brand. That is what works for us.
Users who selected Hindi as their preferred platform language tend to respond better with Hindi as their comp language. And we've seen a stark difference in the CTRs on any communication that we send out to them. Over and above that, going more regional on the product side is something that we've explored earlier, still language or beyond that, largely on the language, or let's say, the game itself. But I think the playbook is still at a nascent stage in terms of
That’s all, folks. See you next week.
Rohit