3-Bullet Thursday - 20/5/2021
The Beautiful Mess (a year's worth of product lessons), how Deliveroo Plus started out, and how to deliver engaging live lectures (a must-read).
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Hi friends 👋
I hope you find these as interesting as I did!
The Beautiful Mess 2020
I warn you now: this will likely take you down a rabbit hole. John Cutler, Head of Product Education at Amplitude, has spent the past year writing weekly posts about product (not unlike me, though his are rather more nuanced!). His original plan was to collate these in to a book, but when that fell through he published them en masse.
John’s delved in to some of the most important aspects of building products and, while I can’t (yet) claim to have read them all, I’d certainly recommend reading:
TBM 27/53: The Lure of New Features and Products
TBM 29/53: Shipping Faster Than You Learn (or…)
TBM 42/53: The Annual Planning Dance
Big Bets: Rob Cooper and Deliveroo Plus
Rob’s story about the launch of Deliveroo Plus is an interesting one. Lacking any form of senior sponsorship or buy-in, the team had to find a way to validate their idea with minimal effort and cost.
Rather than trying to launch a subscription product, they focussed on whether or not people actually wanted free delivery. Customers who filled out a survey were given free delivery and ended up ordering 4x more often. This gave the team the evidence they needed to scale and within a year the team had grown from 10 to 70 and Deliveroo Plus was being trialled across the UK.
The State Change Method: How to deliver engaging live lectures on Zoom
Whether in work, university, or school, we’ve all experienced the monotony of a monologue. Unfortunately, having never been trained differently, it’s a style we’ve likely all picked up and used ourselves. We’ve probably not enjoyed the experience either, which is why so many people hate presenting.
Listening to one person talk for long stretches of time is mind-numbing — especially on Zoom where you have to sit still, stare ahead, and maintain eye contact with a screen. If you’re teaching online, whether informally or formally, it's important to make sure your audience is awake and paying attention.
Wes Kao’s brilliant article shows us how lectures (or any online presentation) can be done differently. He calls out 3 tactics in particular:
Vary your pace/style: Fast and slow, loud and quiet.
Fight the urge to tell. Embrace the Socratic method and ask instead.
Add interactivity. And then add some more.
He’s added some useful case studies too, to show you how to put these in to practice.
If you spend any amount of time presenting, whether online or not, you should read this.
Following up
I wrote about Amazon’s 6-page memos a few weeks ago, and it seems that Stripe operates in a very similar way.
One thing that distinguishes Stripe is that it’s an incredibly deep-thinking culture. It’s a written culture really focused on getting to the right answer. Going really deep and getting all the way down into the details around things, then distilling it down to a form that makes the complexity broadly consumable and actionable.
Engineers, partnerships, PMs, everybody is producing documents. That’s part of how Stripe has always worked, from a perspective of trying to get to the right answer and make sure the best ideas come through, not just the loudest voices. It helps facilitate the flow of information in a world where we’re increasingly remote.