📬 This Week In Product #3
Hey There! I’m Simran, and here’s my weekly round-up for you✨
🌐 Thought Leader That I am Hooked onto
I think I was living under a rock to not discover Naval Ravikant sooner! or rather I should curse spending more time on Instagram than Twitter?
I was introduced to Naval’s writing in a not-so-welcoming way. I had cold emailed a senior Product Manager with some questions and below was his revert verbatim.
“I would really appreciate if you have a crisp agenda/questions that I can answer.
Sorry, I don’t intend to be rude and I do want to help but I am working on some side projects on weekends so I like to save my time. Here’s a video that can explain my meeting philosophy.”
This was the video, and from thereon I am hooked onto Naval’s philosophical outtake on business and life. Interested in reading more on his work? start here ⬇️
💡 Something I Enjoyed Watching
Theme: Entrepreneurship & Start-up
Kevin is one of those people who gets to the bare bones of a topic. His thought process is extremely simplified and so are his slides. If you haven’t already watched any of his past talks then I highly recommend starting from here.
If you like this then you would love the other resources by YC — Startup School. ⬇️
📄 Impactful Book That I Read Last
Escaping The Build Trap by Melissa Perri
Theme: Product Management & Start-up
I love the narration of this book, stringing a story about a fictitious company but deriving from real-life experiences of the author’s past projects and jobs. I wish I had read this book when I was just starting out as a PM. I could visualize a lot many situations at work that I could have easily avoided with this knowledge.
🎧 Podcast of the Week
How I Built This hosted by Guy Raz in conversation with Tope Awotona, Founder @ Calendly — a scheduling service expected to make about $60 million this year.
Theme: Entrepreneurship & Start-up
It’s a well-known fact that the least successful way to build a start-up is to come up with an idea and out-source it to an agency to build it out. Why? Firstly an agency doesn’t have equity in it and treats it as just another project. Secondly, to build a successful product you need to continually pivot basis user feedback.
Listen to this rollercoaster episode of Tope recounting how he built Calendly from scratch with his own savings and limited investment by outsourcing most of the implementation work. ⬇️
🎁 Twitter Finds
Easily one of the best pages that I discovered on Twitter! The illustrations are simple yet impactful and you would be guaranteed tempted in saving a lot of these in your screenshots folder. Check out the twitter handle here
👩💻 I would love to hear from you!
As always, if you’d like to drop me a note, you can email me at contact@simranpandey.com or find me on Twitter at @simranpandey97, on LinkedIn at @simran-pandey, and on Medium at @simranpandey97
If there’s any specific topic that you want me to write on or if you simply want to give some feedback then you can use this short form ⬇️
