Startups & Product Management 🚀

• 5 min read – Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way, reflects on what traits top performers at big companies and startups have in common
• 8 min read – “Product Manager has become a catchall title, which makes it meaningless for daily use”. John Cutler, on why companies need fewer Product Managers
• 8 min read – Companies need to put metrics in the right context for them to be useful. Experiment Velocity has become a popular way of measuring innovation, but as with other Vanity Metrics it can be gamed. How can a company measure progress without it?

Digital Strategy and Trends 🔀

• 15 min read – Software development has the magical properties of value retention and infinite reproduction. That is, money is invested upfront in R+D, whilst later commercialisation happens at a zero marginal cost. An analysis on the case of Amazon Go
• 10 min read – Dating clubs or online travel websites are examples of multi-sided markets where firms aim to connect suppliers and consumers on the same platform. Andrei Hagiu, Professor at MIT, discusses this new field of business research [via Harvard Business School]
• 10 min read – CEO of Western Union Holdings, Hikmet Ersek, explains how the money-transfer company brings in the multicultural voice of the customer and what does that mean for its top executive team [via McKinsey Insights]

Must-listen Podcasts 🎧

• 60 min read – Pieter Levels, founder of Nomad List, Nomad Gear and Hoodmaps, on his talk “Turning Side Projects into Profitable Startups“
• 50 min read – Reid Hoffman interviews Sam Altman, Y Combinator’s President and founder of the first company funded by this famous Venture Capital group [via Masters of Scale Podcast]

Interesting Reads 🤓

• 8 min read – Just about two months ago I stopped reading news. The rationale, they weren’t adding any knowledge and instead chipped away at the time I could spend reading other things. Farnam Street hits the nail on the head describing why you might want to try it out too

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