Deuce Weekly #3 | PM Digest
PMs assembly lines | Side-hustles | B2B growth is changing
Hi there,
This week’s digest will be longer, I have tried to include my commentaries and tldr’s where I could.
I had mixed feelings about this article, it is incredibly opinionated and basically says PM roles are highly vague in essence. It tries to make a case that every other discipline out there is full of domain-focused professionals who rarely move between domains. Controversial at best when it comes to software.
In one of the statements, the authors talk about some ether-like tools one PM possesses which aren’t exactly applicable in other settings:
A Product Manager with a background in payments infrastructure at Etsy is asked to start thinking about a totally new product/revenue area with a small team.
This Product Manager automatically gravitates towards setting up infrastructure to scale payments for Etsy's new product.
They don't intuitively consider areas more fitting in this new product situation: market research, user interaction with the product, product market fit, or modeling addressable revenue impact.
I was always sure, that the value of a PM is his/her ability to go beyond the tools and focus on the problem space before one goes on to explore the solution space (as Olsen said).
The rest of this article is bouncing in the same narrative - we need floaters with a certain domain knowledge of X who are basically applying a standardized set of ‘tools’ (their word, not mine) to every next product - forming an assembly line of sorts.
Imo, a good PM is a universal ‘Frederick Taylor’ who tries to learn about the product as much as possible and changing domains is a thing of value on the resume, it is universality you can count on.
I adore people’s side-hustles - be it for $ or some other reason. You learn a lot on a budget going into fields your day-to-day occupation can’t offer you.
Last but not least, it is safe as the failure is as cheap as possible.
See how Dom looks at extracurricular projects, it is adorable.
Oh, Dom is the guy behind mentorcruise.com.
Splendid episode on stuff people go through these days, B2B is hard with its limitless horizons.
“There is so much potential for no-code. We're just scratching the surface.”
Ouch.
The self-driving car company lost $500 million in Q2 2022 alone and widened its losses to $900M in H1 2022 from $600M in H1 2021.
I am still figuring out what the format of this Substack will be - please excuse the irregularities, I wasn’t of the writing type before, quite the contrary.
Bear with me ;)
Gene
Avoid PMs who never experiences other domains perspective :)
Avoid PMs who never experiences other domains perspective :)