pm junto

learn from amazing products, every day.

The Starting Line Up: Curated Content for the Curious PM

by

Happy Monday! Below is a list of curated content for the week. The goal is to add to the PM toolkit and get 1% better everyday.

For this week’s edition, I wanted to share some awesome PM’s I’ve learned from over the years. Worth reading their blogs and, at the least, following on Twitter.

Monday: Linda @ Product Lessons – You’re More Free Than You Think – Employee Liquidity: What It Means and What To Do.

Linda is a former PM at Faire who turned down a $375K offer from Instagram to write at Product Lessons and share what she’s learned.

Dive into Linda’s library of articles for product insights and interesting stories she’s lived. Her latest article linked above is about Employee Liquidity and the workforce of the future. The internet has allowed us all to make products out of our careers and share our work and our thinking with the world.

Tuesday: Lenny Rachitsky @ Lenny’s Newsletter – What Seven Years at Airbnb Taught Me About Building a Business.

As the title of the above article lets on, Lenny is a former Product Manager at Airbnb and one of the first members of the PM team there. Now, Lenny writes about all things PM and now earns more from his paid newsletter than he did as a PM Lead at Airbnb.

Follow @LennySan

Wednesday: Ellen Chisa @ Ellen’s Blog: Want to Be a PM? Do a Project.

Ellen is a coder, startup founder, former PM, and HBS dropout. I highly recommend her book of Product Management essays that you can buy on her site. For those interested in breaking in, her article above on doing a side project as a wedge into the industry is a great read.

Thursday: David Sacks @ Bottom Up – The SaaS Metrics That Matter.

David Sacks is a member of the PayPal Mafia who went on to found Yammer and is now a master SaaS investor at Craft Ventures. His writing on software and startups is as clear and concise as his law school training demands. In The SaaS Metrics That Matter linked above, Sacks breaks down the most important metrics for Growth, Retention, Unit Economics, Margins, Capital Efficiency, and Engagement.

He’s also known as one of the co-hosts of the All In Podcast along with Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calicanis, and David Friedberg. Learn from Sacks at Bottom Up here and the All In Pod here.

Also, check out his latest company called Callin to see his product chops in action. Callin creates the tools and platform to easily record and share conversations as a podcast.

Sacks & The PayPal Mafia ex Elon

Friday: Nir Eyal @ Nir and Far – 3 Pillars for the Most Successful Tech Products.

Nir is an expert on consumer psychology and how to leverage it to build better products that hook customers. Check out his book Hooked or his blog for many overlapping insights. Follow this link to subscribe and download Nir’s free course on Product Psychology.

Thanks for reading! To receive The Starting Line Up in your inbox next Monday, subscribe below!

Secret Sauce Series: Colossus, Product Manager/Market Fit, and the Magic of Building Products that Scratch Your Own Itch

by

Great products are built by people who scratch their own itch and solve problems they understand deeply. JoinColossus is a perfect example.

Colossus was started by Patrick O’Shaughnessy, a person driven by curiosity and his love of learning. Patrick runs O’Shaughnessy Asset Management and has been reading, writing, and podcasting at Invest Like the Best for years.

Like most people, I listen to podcasts on-the-go. I listen while driving, running, grocery shopping, or doing dishes. The problem is, whenever there’s a great point made during the episode, there’s no easy way to write it down or make note of it for later. I’ll scramble to either text myself a summary or take an iPhone screenshot of the timestamp so I can go backhand re-listen later. I’ve spent hours searching for transcripts and digging through weeks’ worth of episodes just to find a key point I remembered hearing.

While writing about Carvana the other day, I was trying to find a quote from Scott Belsky that I’d heard recently. I remembered Belsky talking about the “first 30 seconds of a consumer’s experience with your product,” and how important that short window is.

But which episode on which podcast did he talk about this? Was it on My First Million or on Invest Like the Best? Despite being a $1T+ behemoth, Apple’s podcast app wasn’t very useful. I googled for MFM transcripts, but came up empty handed. Then, I came across Colossus’s website.

For each of O’Shaughnessy’s podcasts under the Colossus umbrella, there’s a transcript available and a keyword search.

Here’s the Homepage…

I searched for “Belsky,” found the episode, and started to search for “30 seconds.”

Immediately, all potential passages showed up on the screen. I clicked the first one and it highlighted the exact passage I was looking for.

Colossus calls this the “lightening search feature.” You can also click the hyperlinked timestamps and the podcast audio will start playing right at that moment.

Here are a few key insights from Colossus…

The importance of Product Manager/market fit and building solutions that solve your own problems.

According to Chris Dixon from A16Z, “Founder/market fit means the wonders have a deep understanding of the market the are entering, and are people who ‘personify their product, business, and ultimately, their company.'”

A founder is the company’s first PM so “Product Manager/Market Fit” works here too. These builders know a valuable “secret” about their market. They uncovered this secret because, according to Dixon, “… they know the tools better than anyone else, know the problems better than anyone else, and/or draw from unique life experience.” Basically, they’re scratching their own itch.

When a builder has this intimate knowledge of the problem and market, elegant solutions emerge. The team at Colossus produces great content and create a home to easily search the transcripts and keep track of your learning. Patrick O’Shaughnessy was the perfect person to build this.

O’Shaughnessy and the team at Colossus had a unique understanding of the pain-point:

“Over the past ten years, there has been an explosion of content. The number of new podcasts, blogs, newsletters, and YouTube channels is staggering. While this content explosion has been incredible, it is now challenging to find and aggregate the best information…

People listen to audio mostly on their phones, so that is where we need to live. But the podcast players that we all use are one-size-fits-all. They have generic functionality. They are built to consume podcasts, not learn from them.

We want to rebuild a new learning application from first principles. It must be fast, it must remove frictions from the user experience, it must enhance your learning experience, and it must be personalized to the individual.”

Similar to what we learned studying Carvana, removing friction from the UX is a great way to make customer’s love your product.

Be the “editor of the customer’s story.”

I once saw Jack Dorsey present to a room full of Wall Street number crunchers. Sitting up there as the CEO of Twitter and Square, I expected him to cater to his audience and deliver a pitch using financial lingo like gross margins and EBITA multiples. Instead, Jack sees his job as living outside the spreadsheet and said he mainly views himself as the “editor of the customer’s story.”

According to Jack, his main task as CEO is to know the customer’s story inside and out and to constantly refine and edit it. He iterates and experiments to find better ways to solve the customer’s problem.

Whether or not you’re scratching your own itch, immerse yourself in the intricacies of the market and spend quality time with customers. For on example, when the founders of Drizly had an idea to build an app for alcohol delivery, they took jobs at a local liquor store to learn how the industry worked. You can also conduct focus groups and monitor customer behavior on UserTesting.com. Obsess over the customer’s problem and how it can be fixed.

A few years ago, I was on a website called LifeGuides and a chat box popped up. it was the founder, Phil Strazzula, and he had some questions for me. He wanted to know why I was on the site, what I liked about it, and what I disliked about it. Despite the fact that it was a Friday night at 8:30PM, Phil was Gorilla Glued to his computer and messaging users for feedback. That was awesome.

If you’re waiting to launch until a product is perfect, you’re launching too late.

The Colossus team understands the supremacy of customer feedback and including it early on in the product development process.

The team originally planned to launch with a range of features but after they built the lightening search function shows above, they decided to get it into customer hands ASAP. According to the team, “…we decided to simply get it out, build in public, and rely on you, our extremely smart audience, to pull the most valuable features out of us.”

If the thought of launching early and building in public makes you uneasy….good. That’s how it’s supposed to feel. Shipping something tangible to customers and soliciting their raw, candid feedback is a great way to build a product they’ll grow to love.

Also, it pays for PM’s to always be mindful of how products and features can drive value for the business. The lightening search feature is awesome, but on the surface it might not be clear how this drives value. The first CEO of Colossus, Damian Brychcy, kept the business model in mind and immediately courted sponsors for Colossus’ podcasts and newsletter. Within the first 12 months of operations, these sponsorships generated almost $2MM in revenue. As Colossus builds a hub of learning for users, the lightening search is one sticky feature that will delight users and keep them come back over and over again.

For more on Colossus, check out the website here or the launch video below.

Thanks for reading!

The Starting Line Up: Curated Content for the Curious PM

by

Happy Monday! Below is a list of curated content for the week. The goal is to add to the PM toolkit and strive to get 1% better every day.

Monday: Invest Like the Best Podcast: Scott Belsky – Focus on the First Mile

Re-listening to this episode with Scott Belsky to start the week right. Belsky old his company, Behance, to Adobe in 2012 and currently serves as Adobe’s Chief Product Officer.

Belsky and host Patrick O’Shaughnessy discuss the psychology and process behind making great products. Listen to hear why it’s crucial to focus on the “first mile of a customer’s experience with your product” and why every customer “is lazy, vain, or selfish” within the first 30 seconds of trying your product.

Tuesday: CNBC’s Fast Money: Video Interview with Jacqueline Reses

This is a great 5 minute video with Jacqueline who spent over 5 years building products in the FinTech space with Square. As the Head of Square Capital, she built products that helped small businesses access over $8 billion in credit.

Shout out to Jared Franklin, @jsfranklin221, for tweeting the interview and for pointing out Jacqueline’s great quotes for PM’s in her advise to legacy banks at the 4 minute mark…

“Go back to first principles and say: do my customers love what we are doing? And if they don’t, they should figure out how to build better products that customers love, have high NPS scores, and show the growth comparable to what we’re seeing in FinTech…”

Wednesday: Protocol article: Meet the Apple veteran building Square’s bitcoin wallet for the masses

This article is a great introduction to Thomas Templeton, Square’s General Manager for Hardware.

Good ideas for improving digital products can come from anywhere. This is why we look for insights from digital product and physical products at PM Junto. Templeton believes this too and is frequently caught analyzing countertops. Here are some of the many gems from the article:

” ‘My wife gives me a hard time because my camera phone is full of baby pictures and countertops…’ Templeton takes photos of countertops at coffee shops and stores where he gets fresh ideas for improving Square’s ubiquitous point-of-sale registers.

The practice, he admits, is ‘a little weird’ and typical prompts a shop owner to ask: ‘What are you doing?’ … ‘I talk to them and say, your setup is a little bit unique and I’m making it back to the design team…’

His habit of taking countertop photos is part of his process of figuring out ways to make Square products easier to use. ‘We want to be as frictionless as possible,’ he said. “

As pointed out in our recent post on Carvana, making products frictionless should often be a primary goal. Trade-offs are also important for PMs to consider and Templeton touches on the trade-offs that must be made between design and scaling high-volume production. He credits his prior experience working in a chip factory for helping him make informed decisions.

Thursday: Video from Ren@art on Daily Motion: Principles of Good Design by Dieter Ram (Braun) and Jonathan Ive (Apple)

This 7 minute video has great insights from two product/design heavyweights. A few sample quotes are below:

“Good design should be innovative. Good design should make a product useful…Good design will make a product understandable…Good design is unobtrusive…Good design is consistent in every details…Last but not least, good design is as little design as possible.” -Dieter Ram

Good design, according to Ive, just gets out of the way. It is intuitive, makes sense, and make you think: of course…why would it be designed any other way?!?

“It’s really important in a product to have a sense of the hierarchy of what’s important and what’s not important, by removing all those things that are vying for your attention.” – Jony Ive

Friday: TED: The three ways that good design makes you happy, by Don Norman

This is a great 12 minute presentation from Don Norman where he talks about design that is both beautiful, functional, and makes people happy.

According to Norman:

“Pleasant things work better…when you’re happy, you’re a breadth first problem solver, you do out of the box thinking…and we get all these neat ideas. If you’re happy, things work better because you’re more creative.”

Thanks for reading! To receive The Starting Line Up in your inbox next Monday, subscribe below!

Secret Sauce Series: Carvana’s Friction-Free Experience

by

As an exclusive Zipcar user for 10 years, you can imagine my panic when I recently had to sell a used car.

I had no clue where to start so I asked around. One friend told me to sell it on Craigslist, but warned of all the work and sketchiness that would entail.

Another told me to find a used car dealer, but warned me to be tough because they would easily rip me off.

And then, fortunately, someone told me about Carvana. The friction-free experience with Carvana blew me away.

Carvana was founded in 2012 by Ernie Garcia and quickly became known for its car vending machines.

One of Carvana’s Vending Machines (photo credit: Carvana Investor Relations)

In addition to the vending machines, which made for great marketing, the company sought to make buying and selling used cars online a seamless experience. They built out the backend offline logistics and connected an easy-to-use online portal.

The Carvana Experience

Below is what you see when you first visit the website. For all the different things you can do (browse cars, buy cars, sell cars, finance cars, etc…) the UX is simple and straight forward. The background picture shows the mini tow truck that will come pick up the car if you’re selling.

Homepage at Carvana.com as of August 2021.

After clicking “Sell/Trade,” you get to the below screen…

Note the language being used here:

“Get a real offer in 2 minutes. We pick up your car. You get paid on the spot.”

These are some bold promises they’re making to the customer. Can they actually do this at scale? When my pizza delivery says 30 minutes or less, I’m skeptical. But Carvana made bold promises and delivered.

Kudos to the well-written copy. At this point, I was sitting somewhere near the top of the customer funnel as I was looking into other options too, but this copy helped pull me through. I was hesitant to put in my license plate number wondering what they would do with it and if I could trust them with even more data about me. But the copy encouraged me to take the leap.

After putting in the license plate number, I answered a few questions about the quality and condition of the car and got an offer. All in, it took me less than 15 clicks to see the quote.

Through the experience, I noticed a few key ingredients to Carvana’s secret sauce…

Friction-free digital experience. It was unreal how easy it was to get a quote on the used car and make an appointment for them to come right to my home to pick it up.

It reminded me of Amazon’s famous “One Click” order button that removed the friction as much as possible to make customers’ lives more convenient. This was so valuable that Amazon patented the button and got sued by competitors. When Amazon won, the competition did the next best thing and made a “Two Click” ordering button.

Removing as much friction as possible should be a top priority. As Scott Belsky, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, suggests: everyone should focus on the “first mile” of a customer’s experience with their product.

According to Belsky on the Invest Like the Best podcast, “…in the first 30 seconds of every product experience, every user is lazy, vain, and selfish. They want everything to be done for them. They don’t want to read something. They don’t feel like their time should be spent on anything new. And you have to craft hooks that get people through that laziness, vanity, and selfishness…”

Seamless integration of online bits and offline atoms. The whole experience was convenient, end-to-end. On the day of the appointment, a Carvana rep showed up with a mini tow truck. He did a 10 minute inspection to make sure the car was in good condition. I signed a few papers, handed him the keys, and he handed me a check for the exact amount Carvana quoted. As the truck pulled away, I mobile deposited the check and whole thing was done.

The logistics, tech, and infrastructure behind he scenes must be extensive. But both the online and in-person experiences were friction-free.

Easy communication between the company and customers. Throughout the process, I communicated with Carvana through text messages. In 2021, people want to communicate through text and chat, channels we’re all comfortable with and use daily.

As David Cancel, CEO of Drift, agrees, messaging is a “mega-trend” that has hit a tipping point. Today, everyone is “defaulting to messaging as the number one way we’re communicating. This goes for B2C too as customers want to communicate with businesses through messages and chat.

To demonstrate the mega-trend, Cancel shows the dramatic rise of messaging over the years in the below chart.

The Rise of Messaging (source: The Three Waves of Messaging by David Cancel)

Make sure you can deliver on promises being made to the customer. Building trust with customers is crucial, especially with something as complicated as selling a car online. Carvana promised I would get a quote in 2 minutes, and I did. That let me to believe that the rest of the experience would be just as easy too and it pulled me through the funnel. On top of that, they paid me exactly what they promised on the quote with no haggling. The copy was spot on.

Trust with the customer is hard to build and easy to lose. Once that trust is breached, it will be hard to ever regain (see Robinhood’s customer service).

Never stop innovating. A week before my scheduled appointment, Carvana texted me and asked if I wanted to join a beta test and do a Zoom video inspection of the car instead of an in-person one. I could just jump on a video call with a rep, show them all around the vehicle, and they would send over in 30 minutes to pick up the keys.

They were actually making it too easy and fast for me to sell this car. I needed to drive it for another few days before my appointment, so I declined the offer. But it showed me bow innovation is baked into the company’s DNA. The entire process was super easy and quick, but Carvana isn’t resting on its laurels and is constantly innovating to find ways to make things even easier and quicker for customers.

They’re certainly following the Bezos doctrine: “Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day.”

From the first mile to the last mile, Carvana crushed it and provided some useful insights into what make a great product and a great experience.

Thanks for reading!

Welcome to PM Junto!

by

Our mission is to learn from great products every day and to share insights on building valuable products that customers love.

Why PM Junto?

Ben Franklin founded a club of entrepreneurs in 1727. The group met on Friday nights to share ideas, brainstorm new projects, and help each other solve problems in their businesses. He called this club: The Junto.

Inspired by this group of curious colleagues, we started this site to build a community of PMs that learn together and level up together. Also, it doesn’t hurt that “junto” means “together” in Spanish (shout-out to Señor Favulli from high school Spanish)!

Roadmap for PM Junto

You can expect the below types of posts on this site.

  • Secret Sauce Series – Insights from Great Products. Uncovering strategies and secrets from amazing products that solve customer problems and drive value for the business.
  • Builder Profile – Insights from Great Product Leaders. Deep dives on PMs who’ve paved the way.
  • The Starting Line Up – Curated Contend for the Curious PM. Handpicked links to articles, podcasts, books, and blogs that can help us get 1% better at product each day. This is our weekly newsletter to read with your Monday morning coffee.
  • SkillDev. Reviews and recommendations for where to brush up on the PM skillset and add to the toolkit.

The goal is to create useful content and build community. Our content focus will be on Digital products since the internet and mobile are defining technologies of this generation, just like electricity, railroads, and cars defined the generations before us. As software continues to eat the world, more and more products and companies will double down online.

But we strongly believe that good ideas can come from anywhere, so we’ll frequently post about non-tech products too and the insights they teach.

For sharing and connecting, we’ll be active on Twitter so feel free to follow us @pmjunto.

To measure PM Junto’s usefulness, we’ll keep an eye on the KPIs. In the next 6 months, we’re aiming for 10,000 email subscribers with a 50% open rate and 1,000 daily views on the website. Long-term, web lan to keep providing helpful content and will explore paid newsletter options based on reader feedback.

Bottom line… we’re passionate about product and look forward to learning junto!

Subscribe below for The Starting Line Up and thanks for reading!