3-Bullet Thursday – 3/3/2022
How PRDs force you to think, why you should fall in love with the process over the outcome, and why we should copy more.
Hi friends 👋
I hope you find these as interesting as I did!
A PRD forces you to write. Writing forces you to think.
A fascinating thread on how PRDs (product requirement documents) have been used in a variety of ways at a variety of companies. We shifted to using a form of these about a year ago but they’ve been largely limited to larger-scale project work. More recently I’ve been thinking about how we write more as a team and was reminded of this.
Related: here’s how Marty Cagan, managing director of the prolific Silicon Valley Product Group, suggests a good PRD be written. Buyer beware, he’s more recently posted up on twitter (2018) that PRDs are decades obsolete.
Effort.
“Here’s what I know: if someone’s much better than you at something they probably try much harder. You probably underestimate how much harder they try.”
Ava goes on to make the point that successful people fall in love with the process, not the outcome. Most people want to have run a marathon, but aren’t so interested in the training. They want to have written a book, but don’t want to commit the time to sit, consistently, and write. That’s why effort matters.
Battle Royale, time management, and why we should copy more.
"On one of my trips to China, I was at a dinner with a large group of Chinese entrepreneurs, and I mentioned the hubbub over Instagram copying Stories from Snapchat. One of the chief product officers of one of China's top companies laughed and remarked, "In China, if your competitor doesn't copy one of your successful features inside of two weeks, they must be incompetent."
There’s a whole section on this in AI Superpowers, another interesting read.