Why do we call it a “deadline” when the goal is to bring something to “life” by that time? đ¤
Yes, your work might come to an end, but its impact might begin.
Yes, you might finish some tasks, but it might start showing outcomes.
Maybe we should call it â âlaunch timeâ âsomething that would come into existence by that time. đ¤ˇââď¸
What separates a great salesperson from a good one?
It’s the same thing for a marketer, copywriter, engineer, lawyer, surgeon, and many others.
They know more.
There are only 3 ways they can know more:
1. They have more experience
2. They seek more knowledge
3. They continuously apply their knowledge
1. The hack to gain more experience at less age is to be more curious and take risks to work at small-scale companies.
The first job I got in 2002 after college was with one of India’s largest IT providers – Infosys.
I left it in 8 months, took a 40% pay cut, and went to work for a 100 person company.
2. The hack to seek more knowledge is to have a growth mindset and devour as many books and training as possible on the subject matter.
I’m an engineer by education, but people get surprised by how much I know about UX Design principles, Sales methodologies, or Copywriting.
All credit goes to reading a lot of books and taking online courses.
3. The hack to apply more knowledge is to try more in your day job but also do side hustles.
The only way I became an SW engineer from an HW engineer, or a product manager from an engineer, or a salesperson from a PM is – my side hustles.
So invest in yourself and know more than others.
Attention to detail is probably the most underrated attribute because of which many organizations are inefficient.
Every spelling or grammatical mistake, UI inconsistency, confusing copy, branding mismatch, etc., are typically considered as nitpicking and not necessary.
But these details matter.
And it starts with leaders.
If leaders don’t care, why should employees?
Attention to detail is about getting the small things right.
Attention to detail is about building a consistent habit.
Attention to detail is about building a culture of caring.
Attention to detail is about being passionate about your craft.
Attention to detail is about walking that extra mile but leaping miles ahead (in your career).
Is exercising a pain killer or a vitamin? đď¸ââď¸
Is a reading book a pain killer or a vitamin? đ
Is eating nutritious food a pain killer or a vitamin? đĽ
Is playing sports a pain killer or a vitamin? âšď¸ââď¸
Is meditating a pain killer or a vitamin? đ§ââď¸
All things that are essential to living a happy and healthy life donât seem to be a pain killer. đ¤
Then why the heck while running a business, everyone advises buying only a pain killer? đ§
Isnât it too late to buy a pain killer to fix your broken organization?đ¤Śââď¸
Shouldnât you actually be investing in running a better organization and making sure it doesnât break all the time? đ¤
Of course, you can still buy a pain killer (or a band-aid) occasionally when the organization breaks. đđŠš
But why be reactive when you can be proactive? đ¤ˇââď¸
A friend of mine, whoâs is a product manager at a large company shared her frustration recently that there were some reorganization and changes in her company that caused her to manage a different product than she was hired to do.
I immediately resonated with her situation. I had personally experienced similar situations multiple times where I had to give up the ownership of products I had started to other colleagues and take the ownership of new things. But most vividly, I remember a conversation with a teammate of mine, who had also gone through a similar experience.
We had hired him as a Product Manager for our Mobile initiatives, but due to some business reasons, management decided to move the entire product (Engineering, Design, Product Management) to a different geolocation center. And he wasnât happy with this decision at all. He kept mentioning that he was hired as a âMobile Product Managerâ and thatâs what he had done in the past and is great at.
I acknowledged everything he was saying, and tried to give him another product in the Web domain which had similar âconsumer psychologyâ problems, but he wasnât happy. Then I explained him the framework that I use for any decision making for my product or personal career decisions –
I would always put the company first and my interest last. Every single conversation and decisions Iâve made were based on this framework.
With this context, I explained to him that he was thinking about this change in the exact opposite order. He should understand why this is a good decision from the companyâs perspective and support it.
Instead of getting too attached to âMobileâ domain and getting obsessed about the app ecosystem or particular features, he should think thatâââhe was attached to solving customersâ problems and Mobile just happened to be a medium to solve those problems.
I convinced him that he should give a chance to other domain, understand those customers, learn their problems and give it a shot. The Web is just a medium through which we solve those problems today.
Eventually, he agreed and took up the new role. At some later point, he appreciated me for changing his perspectiveâââand thatâs why I remember this story vividly.
Everyone loves to be a problem solver. Itâs a common believe that if youâre exceptionally good at solving problems then you have a distinct advantage to become very successful in your career.
But I cringe to give this advice to Product Managers.
Product Management isnât a well-defined function. Its role is changing rapidly over the past few years. A common understanding is product managers identify problems in the market, come up with a bunch of ideas to solve it, define how the idea should look and work, and then give it to designers and engineers to build it.
Iâve also done this mistake in the past too. When I was new in my Product Management career, I received the feedback from a VP of EngineeringââââAditya, can you please mind your problem boundary?â. That feedback was harsh, but it completely opened my eyes. I realized what I was doing wrong. But I took that feedback positively and quickly stopped my day to day involvement in coming up with different ideas and solutions.
Since then I strongly believe â
Product Managers shouldnât be problem solvers. Their focus should be to â
Essentially Product Managers should identify âwhatâ problems they should solve, âwhyâ their company and a team should solve it, âwhenâ those problems need to be solved and then communicate all these things really well to their Design and Engineering teams and to other stakeholders.
And then let Design team come up with âhowâ it should work and look, let Engineering team come up with âhowâ it should be built, and let Sales and Marketing teams decide âhowâ to give it in customersâ hands.
The most important reason for letting other specialized teams to solve specific problems isâââthey feel valued and empowered.
If you, as a product manager tell a designer what to design and how it should look like, then they donât appreciate it. Similarly, if you tell an engineer how to architect a solution or use specific technology stack, then they donât like it. They donât feel empowered enough to take key decisions. If you take decisions on behalf of them, they donât feel as motivated and involved and then hesitate to take responsibility for those decisions.
In fact, I believe that we should change the title of a âProduct Managerâ role to âProblem Managerâ. Because of the âProduct Managerâ title, there is this notion that they are the owners of the product and get credited for the success or blamed for the failure.
In reality, theyâre just team members playing a particular role in identifying and prioritizing problems. The rest of the team is responsible for solving those problems in elegant, scalable and profitable ways. While product managers are the face of their respective products, they rarely make or break the product. Itâs a collective team who is responsible for the success or failure of the product.
By calling Product Managers as Problem Managers, it will keep them away from solving problems and will remind them to focus only on identifying and managing problems.
Having said all of this, if youâre a very early stage company and canât afford to hire specialized Designers, Engineers, Marketers, and Salespeople, then yes, as a Product Manager you might need to play different roles and get into âproblem-solvingâ mode too. But as the company starts scaling, you should let go your other responsibilities to specialized teams and focus only on identifying the right problems and prioritizing them.
â If you enjoyed reading this article, then please tap or click ââĽď¸â below to share these thoughts with others.
I listened to this Mixergy podcast episode with Andy Rachleff, co-founder of Benchmark Capital and founder of Wealthfront. It is an exceptionally great episode. Normally most of the podcast episodes I listened to are great and I learn a lotâââevery single time. But this episode is special. It had some key nuggets that I had misconceptions or little different understandings. But the way Andy explained it, it made it crystal clear. So I felt compelled to share these nuggets with you in its entirety. Ideally, you should listen to the 1-hour episode, but if youâre running out of time, read the key nuggets here.
âProduct/Market Fitâ (PMF) is a common concept in the startup world. It is widely used in every conversation, especially in early stage startups.
As per Marc Andreessen, who wrote about âProduct/Market Fitâ in his post âThe Only Thing That Mattersâ:
Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.
So the gist isâââthe best team with the best product will fail if the market is not there (using product and service interchangeably). So achieving PMF is âthe only thing that mattersâ and that companies should strive obsessively to achieve it until they do.
So I was under impression finding a great (large and growing) market is the most important thing in finding a PMF. But as per Andy Rachleff –
In contrast to what most people think entrepreneurship is, which is evaluating a market to try to find the holes or the problems and developing solutions of those problems, that leads to very mundane outcomes.
The truly great technology companies are the exact opposite. They are the result of an inflection point in technology that allows the founder to conceive a new kind of product.
The question then is, âWho wants to buy my product?â So you start with the product and try to find the market as opposed to starting with the market to find the product.
PMF is also divided into two key conceptsâââi) Value Hypothesis and ii) Growth Hypothesis â
First you need to define and test your value hypothesis and then only once proven do you move on to whatâs known as a growth hypothesis. The value hypothesis defines the what, the who and the how. What are you going to build? Who is desperate for it? Whatâs the business model youâre going to choose to deliver?
Until you prove your value hypothesis, you waste money to spend money trying to acquire customers. Unfortunately, most people try to get the growth before they prove the value hypothesis. You donât want to get the cart ahead of the horse.
This is another big misconception I hadâââif youâre struggling to find a PMF, then you continue to iterate the product until you find it. But thatâs plain wrong. As per Andy â
Now, within the value hypothesis, people think, âI should iterate on the product until I find something people want.â No. You stick with the product. You figure out if the first group I approach isnât desperate, then Iâll try to find a different group thatâs desperate.
Now, most people donât do that. Most people just keep on trying more people to see somebodyâs got to want it. The first class in my product market fit class I ask, âShould everyone like your initial idea?â The answer is absolutely not, because if they do, then the only reason they do is theyâve been conditioned to like it by someone else. Means people arenât desperate for it because somebody else is serving it.
This is also a great advice on finding ideas.
Great ideas find you, you donât find them. If you sit in a room trying to figure out, âWhat company should I start?â then by definition youâre starting with the market, trying to come up with the solution and that leads to mundane ideas.
Howard (Andyâs investment idol) describes the investment business with a two by two matrix. I think this matrix describes entrepreneurship as well.
On one dimension, you can either be wrong or right. On the other dimension, you can either be consensus or non-consensus. Clearly, if youâre wrong, you donât make money. What most people donât realize is if youâre right in consensus, you donât make money because all the returns get arbitraged away. The only way to make outsized returns is to be right and non-consensus.
So starting with the market to try to find a problem, everybody can do that. Thatâs a right and consensus approach to entrepreneurship. Starting with an inflection point in technology which allows you to build a product and find a solution, that is non-consensus. If it works, it works big. Thatâs where the great venture capitalists all focus, back to the point I made earlier.
If I really want to summarize my understanding of PMF in one sentence isâââfinding a group of people who are desperate to use your product.
What do you uniquely offer that people desperately want because if theyâre not desperate, thereâs a good enough alternative. Let me tell you, if thereâs a good enough alternative, youâre doomed. So, if you want to build a big business, an advantaged business, people need to be desperate.
Also, having a big vision to conquer a big market is great, but your strategy should be to start small in a niche and dominate it â
If you want to build a big business, you donât go after the big market first, because those people only buy based on references, and you donât have the references. You need to create a beachhead, a niche you can dominate. Through references, you grow from that niche of early adopters.
â I hope you found these nuggets valuable and useful. If you enjoyed reading this article, then please tap or click ââĽď¸â below to share these thoughts with others.
A friend of mine recently joined a big company as a Sr. Product Manager after heading the product at an early stage startup. He asked me how should he go about joining a big company, which will be very different in culture, pace, processes, and expectations perspective compared to his early stage startup.
I was surprised he asked me that question as he is an experienced product manager himself with 5+ years of relevant product management experience under his belt. In any case, I shared my thoughts with him and then thought I should expand it more and share it with the larger audience so that all newly hired product managers, irrespective of their position, may find this useful too.
Here are few tips (mostly in the order of its priority) on what you should do in your first 30 to 90 days as a newly hired product management professional in your new company â
First and foremost, you need to be excited about joining this new company and the new possibilities. Youâre going to meet new people, work on new products, and solve new problems. So bring your excitement to the office every day. There will be a lot of information overload and at the same time a lack of clarity in the early days. So unless youâre excited and motivated to come to the office every day, it will be hard to navigate through this haziness.
Also, your colleagues will notice your excitement and enthusiasm. They will understand you are there because youâre interested in the problem theyâre solving and want to make a difference and not just to earn yet another paycheck.
Your understanding of what the company is doing and what is their vision will be limited based on just interview conversations with them. So you need to dig deeper and make sure you truly understand their vision and strategy.
Talk to the CEO or VP of Product and understand the vision and strategy at the company level. Also, talk to your manager and peers to understand the vision and strategy at your product level.
Make sure youâre able to connect the dots between your productâs vision and strategy to the companyâs vision and strategy. If youâre not able to connect the dots, then discuss in detail with your manager or VP of Product to explain how your product aligns with the companyâs vision. That clarity in alignment is absolutely crucial to make sure you will be spending time on the important and required things.
Make sure to meet every single person from your product development teamââânot just the leads or managers, but every single person.
Identify which other products your product is dependent on. Accordingly, meet other product managers and engineering leaders of those products as well.
The success of a product is not only dependent on the product builders (Development, Design, etc.), but also on the business functions of the product too. So meet with all key cross-functional leaders likeâââMarketing, Sales, Finance, etc.
The common theme in these meetings should beâââintroduce yourself, but more importantly, learn about them. When did they join the company, what do they do now, what do they enjoy most, what do they hate most, what do they expect from your product team and specific from you, is there anything you can help them in the short-term, etc.?
Take good notes. Everything will be new to youâââpeople, products, processes, acronyms, etc. So take good notes when youâre meeting people 1:1. It will come handy in future as you start executing.
It would also exhibit your disciplined and detail-oriented execution approach to your colleagues.
Donât treat 1:1 meetings as a one-time checklist item. As they say, itâs a people business. Continue to hang out with your teammates at lunch, coffee, or any casual occasions and build the relationships. It will be a lot easier to get things done from people when youâve good relationship with them.
But make sure you donât abuse your relationship. Be authentic. Everyone is smart. They can smell your fake or aggressive tactics. It takes months to build a good relationship, but it would take minutes to destroy it.
While talking with people, learn how do they work â
This will help you understand whatâs the true culture of the company. Culture is not whatâs written on the âAbout Usâ page of the corporate website or some posters hung up on the office walls.
Once you understand the cultureâââdecide what you want to mend and when do you want to bend. As a newbie, you will find a lot of things different, inefficient, and broken. But resist the urge to fix everything.
First, try to understand the context and history of why certain decisions were made in a certain way. Accordingly, decide what you absolutely need to mend based on your product goals and vision. Sometimes, some battles are not worth fighting, at least in the early days of your career, so just learn to bend during those situations.
Based on what kind of product youâll be managingâââa consumer product or a B2B/Enterprise solution, there will be a different level of easiness to access and play with your product. In either case, setup a demo of your productâand be a power user.
Observe everythingâââfriction points, delightful experiences, wow moments, bugs, lack of documentation, etc. Make notes of these observations and discuss with your design and engineering leads about shortcomings and understand if this is something already known to them, and if it is on their roadmap or is it something by design a particular thing was done in a particular way.
Your goal is to not fix everything. Itâs to understand your product in and outâââwhat are its strengths and weaknesses, the reason why itâs designed and engineered that way, etc.
Once you become a power user of your product, itâs time to understand the mechanics of your product. Meet with the engineering leaders and architects to understand the basic building blocks of your product â
At the end of this exercise, you should be able to draw a high-level architecture on a whiteboard.
While understanding the past and current mechanics of a product is a great thing, it will be equally important to understand what will be its future. Make sure you get some inputs on â
Get access to your analytics system and understand the usage of your product. Understand which metrics are most crucial that defines the success of a product. Donât just look at the numbers, but ask your manager âwhyâ certain metrics are they way it is. It will help you understand how your customers behave.
If there are certain insights you want to know and if those are not available, then discuss it with your manager and see if can you add it. It will accelerate your learning of the analytics and reporting system inside your company.
Numbers will tell you âwhatâ is happeningâââlike which product is growing, or which feature is not working. But it will not tell you âwhyâ is it happeningâââwhy certain functionality took off or why no one is using a certain feature.
The best way to learn these things is to get in front of the customers or users. You can be a silent listener on meetings scheduled by other colleagues, attend any usability research interviews, listen to customer support calls or read customer support emails/chats. Your goal should be to understand why certain customers are happy vs some are frustrated.
Once you understand whatâs working well and whatâs not and why it is so, look for any low-hanging fruit that can provide high value. Ship and deliver the end to end functionality and announce it to the customers who needed it. Make sure to measure the impact of that functionality and report it to management.
By shipping and delivering a functionality end to endâââhowever small it isâââeven a bug, you will be exposed to a lot of processes (security reviews, tech support trainings, etc.) and systems (infrastructure, monitoring, etc.) in the company that are required to ship any feature or a product. This will be a much faster way to learn things than reading hundreds of documents.
Once you start shipping some features or new product releases, youâll feel the momentum of day-to-day execution. But make sure youâre not just spending time on checking off the product backlog items. You need to achieve important goals too and show that youâve moved the needle.
At the beginning of your joining, ask your manager whatâre her expectations from you. What 1 or 2 goals you should achieve by the end of 90-days and what should be its success criteria? And then make sure you focus on these 1 or 2 goals and do your best to achieve those. Ideally, you should aim to exceed these, but since there is a lot going on, simply achieving those would also be great. In general, having a goal-driven mindset is more important than simply getting things done.
Once you learn how your company works, what are the top sources of inputs for feature requests, what is valued moreâââvision or customer requests, etc., now itâs time to define your own frameworks for execution.
These are frameworks for â
The more youâll have clarity and disciplined approach in handling these things, the more effective you will be in your execution. Youâll be in a driverâs seat rather than just getting driven by everybody.
By this time, you should have a good understanding of your productâââwhat problems it solves, who has these problems, how does it solve it, how well it solves it, etc.
Now itâs time to start looking outward and learn â
Subscribe to some of the newsletters, start following few blogs, take any online courses, or buy books and learn as much as you can about your industry and itâs future. You will be able to provide a lot better recommendations in overall product strategy and future roadmap.
Product managers without a point of view will be just project managersâââwho will get things done that have been told by the upper management. But if you truly want to drive a product, then you have to have some point of view, unique insight, and some foresight about the market shift and next trends.
90-days is a good period to learn about the market you serve, your productâs strengths and weaknesses, competitive landscape, technology trends, etc. Once you have all this information, your job is to synthesize it and develop your own point of view. You need to able to clearly articulate â
As you start researching about the industry and future technology trends, share interesting and relevant articles with the broader team. This is an opportunity to inspire your team by sharing with them theyâre working on something thatâs going to be the future of the company and going to improve the lives of many customers.
You can also share articles or podcast episodes about the best product management practices and processes that other companies are following. Be the catalyst to bring good practices in your new company.
The most important thingâââdonât forget to have fun! Enjoy new learning. Celebrate wins and mini-milestones. Embrace mishaps and failures. Make friendships and laugh. If youâre not having fun in what youâre doing, then it would be very hard to give your best.
While this may not be an exhaustive list, I hope I covered most of the key areas. And I hope this will help you make a great impression and build a great rapport with your team in the first 90-days of your new career.
â If you enjoyed reading this article, then please tap or click ââĽď¸â below to share these thoughts with others.
Recently, I had a couple of friends reaching out to me to discuss their startupsâ progress and get some advice on how to take it to the next level. In all these interactions, there were some common patterns –
What surprised me the most isâââwhile there is so much content available on the internet today about how to start a startup, how to follow a lean methodology, how to do a customer validation, how to build viral hooks in your product, how to implement various growth hacks, etc. but still, these entrepreneurs are making the same mistakes that many entrepreneurs have made 10 years ago.
My hypothesis is â
To build a successful software company, there are 3 skills that are essential in the founding team â
After talking with these smart engineers I realizedâ they had largely focussed on #1 but werenât giving enough attention and importance to #2 and #3.
If you are a great technologist and aspire to build a technology product company, then either you grow from an engineer to a product manager/designer, and eventually into a marketer/sales person based on if itâs a B2C (consumer) or B2B (SaaS or enterprise) product or have someone on the founding team who is specialized in these skills.
As an engineer, the technology innovations youâre doing are really admirable and absolutely essential for a startup. Being a smart engineer is the greatest asset you can have in this startup world. Every other âideaâ guy wants you to be on their team to make their idea a reality. So by no means, Iâm belittling the value and the need of having strong engineering members on the founding team.
But I want to emphasize the need of having someone with strong product sense and/or great marketing/sales skills as well.
If you donât prefer to have someone with product design/management in your team, then you will need to play a role of a product manager/designer to truly understand your users/customers and build something they want and solves real problems.
And eventually, you will also need to become a marketer/sales person and reach out your target users/customers, talk to them and convince them to use/buy your product, and eventually know how to do it at scale and do it repeatedly.
Just because you are a great engineer or technologist, donât assume you can build a great product.
And just because you are a great product manager, donât assume you can build a viable business.
There is a difference between a technology and a productâââmost people confuses this. And there is also a difference between product and business.
Typically, technology is an applied science. We build new technologies using some of the breakthroughs in the science world to achieve some objectivesâââi.e. to make existing things (technologies) faster, cheaper or better (larger, smaller, last longer, etc.)
On the other hand, a product is an applied technology. We build products using multiple technologies to solve specific problems that a user faces or tasks she wants to do.
And in the end, a business is an applied product. You need to take your product and reach out to your target users/customers and have them use it, which helps you generate a sustainable economic value.
As an engineer, we gravitate towards building great technologies. Making that code run even faster, improving the performance and accuracy of that function, etc. And some engineers are really good at that. And thatâs why they get hired at some of these great companies, who have built some of the greatest products for mass consumers. But just because these companies have shipped great products, the engineers who work at these great companies start believing that they can also build great products on their own.
While thatâs absolutely possible, it doesnât come handy without you putting any efforts towards achieving that goal. If you are a smart engineer and eventually want to build a great product too, then your existing technical skills are a great asset but are not sufficient. You will need to invest considerable time to achieve those product and business skills as well.
I would recommend learning these skills –
Letâs dive into each one in detail –
If you aspire to build a product that is not only useful (solves a real pain point) and usable (effortless and intuitive to use) but also delightful (that creates happy emotions).
You will need to get into userâs head to understand what specific problem they want to solve and what specific outcome they want to achieve, what effort it takes for them to do that, what emotions they feel after they achieve that outcome, etc.
Once you understand the consumer psychology very well, you will nail the product that will resonate with them very well and chances of them using it actively and recommending it to their friends will increase drastically.
As per Wikipedia, user experience design (UXD or UED) is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.
The last part is very importantââââinteraction with the productâ.
This is the most common mistake engineering founders makeâââthey confuse UX Design with UI Design (User Interface Design). UX Design is a more analytical and research oriented, while UI Design is largely about graphic and visual design. While both are crucial, nailing the UX design (usable) is more critical than the UI design (look and feel).
UX role is quite complex and challenging. It involves consumer analysis, competitor analysis, product strategy, content strategy, wireframing, prototyping, usability studies, etc. So Iâm not suggesting you do this everything on your own and become an expert in this. But if you understand what each function does and practice some aspects of it, then it will go a long way.
At the minimum, to provide a great user experience, focus on the lifecycle of a consumer who wants to use your product. You need to understand what they do in their life before they use your product and after they use your product. And repeat that exercise few times. This will help you understand your target consumersâ life really well to build a product that fits into their lifecycle.
Another most important skill you will need to learn isâââprioritization.
As a technologist, you get sucked into optimizing things that are not required on the day one. You tend to build advanced technologies in-house instead of leveraging off-the-shelf services from the 3rd party providers. You believe that thatâs your core IP and needs to be built in-house. You argue that 3rd party providers are generic platforms and wonât be as effective solving your specific use case. While that all is true, itâs still a mistake to optimize for these things before you even have any product-market fit. You can always build advanced technologies in-house as you start scaling.
I recently learned this from DJ Patilâs Twitter update –
And –
And –
This is such a great prioritization framework that forces you to focus on delivering maximum value at minimal wastage. You will need to learn to be ruthless in your prioritization for all activities.
While this may sound very obvious and cliche, but written, verbal, and nonverbal communication skills are actually the most important traits you will need to master to gain credibility as an effective and trustworthy founder.
While you might be great at explaining technical details extremely well to your peers, now you will need to communicate the problem, the value and the benefits of your product to various different stakeholdersâââpotential teammates, advisors, investors, prospects, clients, etc. You will need to wear a different hat every single time based on who is in front of you and communicate effectively in multiple languagesâââexecutive, development, strategic, tactical, etc.
Your written and spoken communication is going to be an absolutely crucial skill for your sales or marketing efforts. You will need to communicate what value your product delivers and able to align those benefits to the problems prospects have shared and eventually influence them to use or buy your product.
And donât forget, you will need to be equally great at âlisteningâ. Sometimes youâll learn more when youâre actively listening as much as you are speaking or writing.
While this is a broad topic, having business acumen boils down having a minimum level of expertise in strategy, finance, operations, marketing, and sales. You may not need to be the expert in any one of these skills, but while communicating with advisors or investors, you will require some level of fluency and confidence in these business languages.
You will need to understand the basics like â
Now you might say, for a smart technologist by profession, learning all these skills means deviating from their core focus. While that may be true, the key question isâââdo you want to continue to stay only as a technologist or do you want to grow into a founder role?
There is nothing wrong with staying as a technologist throughout your startup, but then make sure you have someone on the founding team who has a great product sense and a strong business acumen.
But if all founders have technology background, then make sure at least you have someone in the founding team who wants to grow into a product manager and eventually into a business operations/marketing/sales role.
I try to read a lotâââmostly blog articles, books, and even e-books. There is no doubt that reading helps you get smarter, improve your vocabulary, explore new ideas, etc. I mostly read about topics which are relevant to my personal and professional development and articles that add positive impact in my life, stories that inspire and motivate me to do something great. I avoid reading daily news about politics, entertainment, etc. unless itâs a really critical news. But since last year or two, in addition to reading, Iâve been addicted to listening podcasts too for my personal and professional development.
While podcasts have been around for about a decade, I personally experienced that theyâre getting mainstream since last few years since theyâre getting extremely convenient to consume. Podcasts are to the radio industry as blogs are to the mainstream media. Anyone who is expert and passionate about any topic can create a regularly updated content and publish a podcast. You can find thousands of podcasts which are well produced, inspirational, educational, and entertaining.
Unlike reading blog posts or watching videos, which require someoneâs full attention, podcasts give listeners a flexibility of multi-tasking. Listeners can subscribe to specific podcasts, auto-download new episodes, and listen whenever itâs convenient for them on their smartphones while doing some other mundane chores. Every day, I listen to somewhere between 30â90 minutes podcasts while commuting to the office (25â35 minutes each way) and exercising (30â40 minutes).
The one overarching reason I listen to podcasts is I learn stuff. As they say, weâre influenced by what we see and hear. Itâs a way of exposing myself to the influences of people who are smart and successful. Iâve found them highly inspirational and educational. Iâve learned how to form healthy habits, how to be more productive and efficient, how to start, run and grow a business, how to manage relationships, how to write better content, etc.
Donât get me wrongâââIâm not saying podcasts are a substitute for reading books or blogs. Itâs just a different mode of consumption for a different kind of content. Podcasts donât give visually rich experience if you want to put the faces in front of names, or see things in picture or action. So there are some things which I still prefer to read at my desk while some things which are better to consume while Iâm driving.
So here are few podcasts that I listen to actively. These are my interests of topics, which are skewed to Entrepreneurship, Startups, Product Management, Part-time Businesses, etc. But you will find podcasts on pretty much any topic that interests you.
Andrew Warnerâs mission is to introduce you to doers and thinkers whose ideas and stories are so powerful that it will inspire you to build something on your own.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
Weekly podcasts from Stanford University regarding entrepreneurshipâââhear straight from entrepreneurs and innovators share their stories.
Hosted by William Channer, a British designer, founder and journalist, this podcast is a show that interviews the worldâs most influential innovators in business, design, and technology.
Hosted by Jason Calacanis, an entrepreneur turned investor interviews some of the most influential names in the entrepreneur and startup communities in order to provide inspiration and advice for aspiring entrepreneurs looking to grow their startup.
Every week this podcast chats with successful entrepreneurs on how to grow a startupâââtopics include self-funding, raising capital, product development, and customer acquisition. These podcasts are packed with informative content that every startup founder needs.
Unfiltered insights and actionable advice straight from the trenches of startup and business life. The show hosts, Steli Efti and Hiten Shah, are both serial entrepreneurs who have founded multi-million dollar SaaS startups.
Sam Altman and the folks from Y Combinator offer up an amazing course in âHow To Start A Startupâ at Stanford. This isnât typical ongoing podcast, but a one-time course.
Steve Chou interviews successful e-commerce entrepreneurs that all bootstrapped their businesses and most of them in part-time while working at their day jobs.
Hosted by Nick Loper, this podcast is for part-time entrepreneurs who are looking for business ideas, actionable tips to start a business, and killer strategies on how to turn their side hustle dreams into a growing business.
On the Inside Intercom podcast, you will hear the team from Intercom interview makers and do-ers from the worlds of product management, design, startups, and marketing.
I hope you will find this resource useful.
Of course, Iâll continue to add more podcasts to my list as I discover interesting podcasts. If you have been listening to any great podcasts recently, and would like to recommend to me or my audience, then please share it in the comments area.
Originally published at aditya.kothadiya.com on March 20, 2016.
Aditya Kothadiya 