3-Bullet Thursday - 6/5/2021
Personalisation in practice from Booking.com's data science team, the upsides to "unshipping", and Amazon's infamous 6-page memos.
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Hi friends 👋
I hope you find these as interesting as I did!
Personalisation in Practice
As a team that’s just starting to explore the opportunities for personalisation within a holiday-booking context, I found Booking.com’s recent tutorial on this wonderfully well-timed. Tutorial might the the wrong word… their webinar, or presentation, is a touch over 4 hours and covers:
Trends in personalisation
Sequence modelling
Uplift modelling
Contextual bandits
User perception
I’ll be the first to admit that a lot of this went over my head (it’s presented by their data science team, after all). The pieces on trends and user perception are useful for anyone else like me though.
Upsides to unshipping: The art of removing features and products
Arguably, killing portions of a product is one of the most challenging aspects of leadership. Our biases, and several other reasons, encourage us to keep things. Even the most experienced product managers have little to no experience and craft in reverting decisions after a feature has already made it live into production.
Mixpanel’s article dives deep in to how and why to encourage the removal of features as much as the addition of others. This can often seem like a tough proposition as most features probably exist because the once had a purpose, or still do but for a small (and non-growing) user segment, and change is hard.
The Amazon 6-Pager
I’m reading Empowered at the moment, by Marty Cagan. It explores how to develop extraordinary products and teams by people who’ve helped grow and develop some of the most successful products and teams in the world.
One particular piece on coaching product managers took me off on a tangent. It was about coaching clarity, especially in writing, and used Amazon’s infamous 6-page memos as an example.
Meetings at Amazon are different to most meetings. Bezos has a strict “no powerpoint” rule:
The traditional kind of corporate meeting starts with a presentation. Somebody gets up in front of the room and presents with a powerpoint presentation, some type of slide show. In our view you get very little information, you get bullet points. This is easy for the presenter, but difficult for the audience. And so instead, all of our meetings are structured around a 6 page narrative memo.... If you have a traditional ppt presentation, executives interrupt. If you read the whole 6 page memo, on page 2 you have a question but on on page 4 that question is answered.
The kicker is that writing coherently and concisely for 6 pages is really hard.
Here’s how Mäd have tried to emulate Amazon, and how you might try.