A product manager brings a team of cross functional stakeholders together to build a product that is valuable, usable, feasible.

This definition builds on Marty Cagan’s articulation of product management by explicitly calling out the role of the product manager in bringing a team together. I’m aware that there is definition out there that explains what the product manager does by describing a person who spends time at the intersection of technology, design, and user experience. While there are many problems with that definition, the most important is that it is output focused vs. outcome focused. …

“What is a day in the life of <insert role you’d like to learn more about>?” is a common question when you’re looking to learn more about a role in a particular company. It is a surprisingly powerful question as you aren’t expecting the person on the other side to open their calendar and rattle out their schedule for the day.

Instead, the question behind the question often tends to be — “What are the skills required to do what you do?” That turns out to be a difficult question to answer because the skills required to a job well…

a16z Board Partner and former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky had a great post on Medium (originally a tweet storm) in which he shared an alternative view on Amazon’s journey. Instead of the usual narrative about world domination, he makes the case that this Amazon’s moves are Amazon just becoming a traditional retailing empire — like Sears, WalMart, et al.

For Amazon’s logistics mastery, think of Walmart in the 1980s. For the loyalty driven by Amazon Prime, think of the Sears store credit card. For Amazon Basics, look at house brands of nearly every retailer. …

France were crowned the new world football champions in the summer. Croatia were the runners up.

The interesting question, then — can we confidently say Croatia was the second best team in the tournament? Would they have beaten Belgium or Brazil if either team had been in their half of the bracket?

While it is likely to be just a battle of your opinion versus mine, I’d hazard a guess that Belgium and Brazil were probably better teams. The challenge is that elimination via brackets does a good job identifying the winner. But, it does a poor job of finding…

The intent of good quotes is lost over time. So, they are often misunderstood and misused because they are applied out of context. Reid Hoffman’s quote — “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.” — is a great example of loss of intent.

I’ve seen this quote used as an excuse to justify a crappy v1/first version product. I haven’t heard Reid talk about this in person — but, I’m fairly certain that that wasn’t the intent.

There are two good reasons to be embarrassed about v1 (in hindsight). The first…

Edward Bernays is one of the most influential persons in the 20th century. He is considered the father of “Public Relations” and changed how we think of mass marketing and advertising at scale. And, yet, it is likely you’ve never heard of him.

Despite his enduring impact on the world, there are many reasons for this lack of popularity. However, chief among them is a reluctance among the folks in his industry to talk about his work. So, you don’t hear Marketing professors or advertising executives mention him or his work. …

When we make career transitions, we typically change one or more of the following — (1) Company, (2) Role, (3) Industry, and (4) Location. These are ordered in ascending order of difficulty with changes in location — for the majority of the folks on the planet who do not possess rich country passports — being the hardest by a distance. Most importantly, combining these factors does not simply mean adding up the difficulty — the change gets exponentially harder.

Thus, career transitions can be very hard to make. While there is something be said about experimenting in the early stages…

1) Not just joining the bandwagon. On first glance, Facebook’s Blockchain initiative seems to be perfectly described by this Marketoonist cartoon.

But, there’ are two reasons that lead me to believe this is not just about Facebook joining the Blockchain bandwagon. They’re i) David Marcus and ii) Kevin Weil. The former was the CEO of PayPal before he became Head of Messenger and the latter was a VP of Product at Twitter before becoming VP of Product at Instagram. There’s an old saying that you can tell how serious a company is about new initiative by looking at who they…