Building a predictable and sustainable growth model should always be the priority, but there are many situations where smaller-scale growth tactics can make a huge difference. Including profiling questions in onboarding enables companies to identify effective and long-lasting growth strategies. Implementing reverse trials in a freemium model can increase conversion rates since it gets users hooked on paid features. Ensuring lower-tier customers have clear visibility into the features of higher-tier plans is critical. Finally, improving high load times on critical pages increases the number of users that convert.
The new year is always marked by a sea of emails. This post contains 16 sample subject lines to serve as inspiration for standing out in your 2024 New Year’s campaigns. It also shares best practices from past holiday email campaigns from brands like Postable, Lands’ End, and Gussi.
XML sitemaps help Google crawl a site, understand its structure, and discover more pages. This guide walks through how you can use Google Search Console reports to identify and fix indexing issues in your sitemap. Cleaning up sitemaps ensures smooth crawls from Googlebot and helps improve SEO performance.
Now is the time to take action as Google and Yahoo will be rolling out their new sender requirements on Feb 1, 2024. This guide covers how to implement email authentication with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, provide one-click unsubscribing, and keep spam rate below 0.3%.
Brands and creators can now go live on Instagram using streaming software like OBS or Streamlabs through a stream key. A stream key can be obtained via the “Create” menu in the desktop version of the app. This update is designed to encourage more creators to easily stream high-quality broadcasts on Instagram.
This post contains 3 predictions for product management and 3 for growth and product marketing. The author predicts there will be a higher emphasis on product collaboration with marketing in 2024. Additionally, to grow B2B, SaaS products will opt for cheaper alternatives to freemium and free trials, such as sandboxes and interactive demos. Product-led sales will also intensify, with the “human touch” being critical for conversion.
Leading tech companies are successful because they use OKRs as a tool to focus their teams’ priorities and work. This guide is based on the book Radical Focus by Christina Wodtke. It covers why companies need OKRs, best practices, common mistakes, and advanced techniques.
Hubspot’s Inbound, Peloton’s Homecoming, and Slack’s Frontiers are all events that help their brands grow. This post contains frameworks to use if considering events for growth.
Tubi, Liquid Death, and the Las Vegas Sphere came out on top, while other campaigns missed the mark this year.
This opinion piece contends that supporting women in AI is not just ethical but a strategic move for innovation and financial success in the industry.
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Your B2B SaaS product needs to provide seamless native integrations [5] to meet customer requirements. But each integration takes months of engineering to build. Instead, the fastest growing SaaS companies are buying embedded iPaaS solutions [5]. Is this the right solution for everyone? What are the tradeoffs?
Slack's Chief Product Officer Noah Weiss spearheaded Project Day One, an overhaul of Slack’s first-day UX, reviving growth. Weiss advocates a nuanced approach to decision-making, emphasizing the limitations of data reliance, promoting shared context, trust-building, and strategic risk assessment. In this article, he introduces the 1-way vs. 2-way door decision framework and recommends the 70:20:10 model for a balanced product roadmap. Weiss underscores the role of organizational culture, values, and humility in fostering innovation and enabling bold decision-making.
Airbnb's decision to replace product managers with product marketing managers ignited a debate on effective product governance. Models like the Trio (PM + Dev lead + UX designer) and Leading with Context, with their cross-disciplinary collaboration and evidence-guided decision-making, are potential solutions.
Ben Evans covers AI in this presentation: the boom, the science, the rush to regulate, the platform shift, and more. Most relevantly to this newsletter, he thinks through bundling and unbundling and raises a product paradox - does 'general purpose' AI mean general-purpose tools, or must it be wrapped into a single-purpose product?
This guide delves into structuring and designing user interviews for maximum impact. It discusses the '5 Act Interview' structure, focusing on easing participants into the interview with contextual questions before diving into core questions or prototypes. The guide emphasizes asking powerful, evidence-based questions to uncover deeper user needs and behaviors, highlighting the importance of high-quality data collection for insightful product development.
This episode compiles stories of failure from over 100 episodes, showcasing how mishaps like freezing onstage, workplace interventions, and significant product investment losses contribute to growth. It reframes failure as an essential detour towards personal and professional development, offering insights on the value of learning from setbacks.
The link between purpose and value is really important for product success. Purpose without value creation will lead to product failure. Value creation without purpose will lead to a demotivated team and “metrics over user” culture. This article gives a few strategies to build the link between purpose and value.
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An empowering roadmap is the glue between vision, strategy, audience, and outcomes. This article provides a template to create an effective roadmap.
Picking the right problems to solve is essential to a product’s success. Here is a 4-step guide to make sure you can start with the right problem: writing an interview guide, interviewing people, mapping the interview results, and picking a group to start building.
Focusing on customers' experiences, challenges, and their attempts at finding solutions will give you the best user insights. This approach aims to understand the real problems and frequency of issues, enabling better product development insights.
When using tools like Calendly to schedule meetings, it is important to be aware of the power dynamics and avoid coming across as entitled. This article shares some actionable tips for drafting polite meeting requests that balance efficiency and consideration for the recipient’s convenience.
In common PM thinking, there is a tendency to resist accommodating many customer demands as it conflicts with the idea of discipline and learning to say ‘no’. While small startups thrive on responding to customer demands, larger teams with layers and processes often lose this responsiveness, potentially leading to a disconnect with customers and a decline in innovation and adaptability.
There is a tradeoff between catching up on competitors’ features and focusing on original features. A PM’s job is to decide which battle to focus on instead of trying to win against all the competition.
This case study goes into detail on how to gather learnings and measure product performance in a no or low information environment. Two key takeaways are (1) take small steps to keep trying things and iterating on the metrics, and (2) be open-minded and avoid assuming too much about users’ behaviors.
This article demonstrates techniques for optimizing LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) on high-traffic websites to under 350ms, even with a lot of images and slow connection. This is done by making Google prefetch HTML and critical resources on the Google Search results page. Google does this for websites that have a high position within Google Search results for a given phrase and have properly implemented Signed Exchanges (SXG). The article focuses on how to add SXG to your web application.
Node.js supports two types of modules: EcmaScript (ES) modules and CommonJS modules. ES modules are the official standard and are supported by modern browsers, while CommonJS modules are used by Node.js by default, but are not supported by browsers. Node.js determines which module loader to use based on the file extension: .mjs for ES modules, .cjs for CommonJS modules, and .js with package.json settings. This article discusses optimizations made to improve the performance of package.json reading and parsing in Node.js, ultimately resulting in faster applications.
This author explains how they added call site attribution to their Node.js web app to prepare for a potential 10x growth in database traffic. The attribution helped identify the specific location in the source code from which SQL queries were executed, allowing for quick identification and optimization of performance bottlenecks. Initially, they explored solutions like Datadog tracing and monkey patching, but eventually settled on requiring SQL queries to be tagged with a user-defined string indicating the call site.
DevOps initially focused on optimizing delivery pipelines and processes, but the bottleneck in software delivery shifted to testing. This led to a series of actions that devalued and eventually dismantled the role of QA engineers, resulting in low-quality software. However, quality assurance work which includes defect tracking, bug triage, defect investigation, and end-to-end testing, which all end up being long-term obstacles to sustainable software development.
When managing long-term projects with large teams, engineers should prioritize hard problems and continually reassess them. They need to anticipate hidden work that may arise during the project, address attrition through redundancy, stage the value by setting intermediate milestones, adapt to changing constraints, maintain project confidence and perception, and avoid making exact completion time commitments.
2023.12.15·newsletter.techleadmentor.com·6 min read·TLDR Web Dev How can you tell when you’re ready for the next level as a software engineer? What can you do when you feel stuck at your current level? This post covers the responsibilities of junior-level to staff-level engineers in tech companies and gives 3 tips on how to advance to the next level. The tips include operating at the next level ahead of time, managing up, and spending more time with higher-level engineers.
2023.12.15·levelupsoftwareengineering.substack.com·8 min read·TLDR Web Dev AutoAnimate is an animation tool that seamlessly enhances transitions within your web application without requiring any configuration. It can be integrated into various JavaScript applications, such as Vue, React, Solid, and more.
React Responsive Pagination is a React pagination component designed for accessibility and responsiveness. It includes built-in support for Bootstrap 4 and 5, as well as ready-styled themes or the option to use custom CSS. Additionally, it's optimized for tree-shaking to minimize its impact on the bundle size.
This article discusses an IBM Mainframe COBOL programmer who has worked for one of the largest banks in the EU since 1991. This role is crucial for the bank's operations, and the author highlights the challenges faced by programmers dealing with legacy systems like COBOL and the vast amounts of data that banks must manage. The programmer found her work to be both challenging and rewarding, but she sees the need for modernization in the banking industry.
A developer recently deleted over 50,000 lines of code, approximately 70% of their frontend codebase, and surprisingly, this massive code removal didn't break the application and led to a significant simplification, making the platform feel lighter and more user-friendly. By carefully removing rarely used modules, screens, buttons, and features, they simplified the application, improved performance, and streamlined development.
Commenters share tips for building AI/ML skills, such as building small projects like a baby neural network.
Latin script is based on upper case and designed around that, so it’s the default. Lower case was added on later to support cursive.
2023.12.15·retrocomputing.stackexchange.com·4 min read·TLDR Web Dev An interactive visualization showing GitHub language stats. Python is the most used language in pull requests, with Java and Golang coming in second and third.
Slack’s CPO shares his hot take on two popular pieces of product strategy: experimentation and quality decision-making. In this article, he walks through the three-step process he uses to operationalize quality decision-making, which boils down to sharing context, building trust, and factoring in risk.
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Drata now has +500K users for its top-rated GRC software [5]. Why are companies like Notion and Vercel choosing Drata? 1️⃣ A rich integration ecosystem [5] (85+ integrations) means customers can automatically collect compliance evidence across their cloud and SaaS stack.
Tesla has released a demo video showing the latest version of its Optimus Gen 2 humanoid robot. The video, available in the article, shows a vastly improved robot moving in real time without any CGI performing various tasks like walking, crouching, manipulating eggs without breaking them, and waving its arms. Tesla aims to eventually develop a robot to replace human labor in a seamless way.
2023.12.14·arstechnica.com·2 min read·TLDR Netflix will start publishing comprehensive deep dives into what its subscribers are watching twice a year. Its first report provides viewer data on more than 18,000 titles representing a total of nearly 100 billion hours viewed. Netflix's lack of transparency created an environment of mistrust in the industry. The company says that the data released is the same data that it uses to run its business.
2023.12.14·arstechnica.com·2 min read·TLDR DeepSouth is a supercomputer designed to operate in a manner similar to a network of neurons. It uses interconnected artificial neurons and synapses to emulate the brain's ability to learn, adapt, and process information in a highly parallel and distributed manner. The neuromorphic supercomputer will be capable of 228 trillion synaptic operations per second, on par with the estimated number of operations in the human brain, when it becomes operational in April 2024.
2023.12.14·interestingengineering.com·2 min read·TLDR