Operations are absolutely your business
OPERATIONS ARE ABSOLUTELY YOUR BUSINESS!
I recently saw somewhere on LinkedIn that “a Product Managers job isn’t to worry about profit, its to worry about NPS” or something to that effect. This is absolutely wrong, very widespread dangerous belief and we are seeing some of the consequences of it come out openly and in a very ugly manner. For the past couple of decades we have seen the effects of very low interest rates and very high availability of liquid capital. This led to a “problem of plenty” and for a lot of folks who did not read history or were not encouraged to dig too deeply, there was no reason to believe things would not stay the way they were. When we’re talking about large scale interconnected global topics, we’re squarely in the realm of complex systems that cascade. In short, when things change, they change very fast (not slowly because of some inertia). Counterintuitive perhaps but empirical.
You know what doesn’t change?
Profit = Revenue - Expenses
As a product manager,
if you don’t know how your company makes money
what it does with that money
what are the factors that its rate of money making depends on
You probably don’t know the business.
Which means you probably don’t know the industry and you probably don’t know the customers.
The latest blogposts on “remote work” or “collaboration” or “design interview scrimpts” is not going to change that.
Its all Kabuki.
In good times, and in bad times, know your ops like the back of your hand. Sit in customer support. Fulfil some orders.
THE TWITTERATION
I love Twitter and spend way too much time on it. The most recent changes as anything associated with Elon Musk are quite loud and chaotic. For the first time in a long time, folks are beginning to see some of the real messiness it takes to run large scale tech companies. While some changes, exchanges are public and ugly, there isn’t really that much difference to how a lot of companies are run, just not as publicly and outside of tech things are actually far uglier for the average employee or worker. Its also interesting to see a lot of common tech debt issues surface that show us that these problems are hardly close to being solved or being universal standards or best practices, the company blogs notwithstanding.
I am still hopeful about the future of Twitter. The folks talking about its demise or talking about how irrelevant Twitter is or how unrepresentative Twitter are is are talking about it on Twitter and no where else. And if it is irrelevant then why is it getting so much scrutiny?
Whatever you may think of Musk, it is important to remember that he runs
a car company
a satellite company that provides internet
a rocket company
… and probably more things
These are hard, verifiable problems and there are easier ways to make money in tech. So, let’s see what happens. At the same time, even as a dictator, its obviously not an easy system to make immediate changes to.
A MIGHTY ATTEMPT
Last week, the founder of Mixpanel tweeted about shutting down his latest venture
The reactions are pretty extreme and I don’t understand them.
If the idea is that “this tech was obviously bad by Reddit comment standards”
It says nothing about whether its a good product or a business (see Dropbox)
Its just selection bias
Other forms of criticism include
It was a waste of money! - sure, maybe, but it was investors private money who knew what they were doing.
VC’s seem to hype everything as the next great thing and they’re not held accountable for it - this seems to be a culturally dependent resentment rather than a marker for anything.
If you are the kind of person that can with certainty predict that a “distributed browser” was bound to fail then why aren’t you out there making billions? On the other hand 3.5 years of solving hard technical problems only to realize that a 2X improvement wasn’t worth it is how experimentation is supposed to go. Anyway, hats off to Suhail for the transparency and good luck on his next venture!