2023 Wrap-Up🎁+Access Live Courses in 2024 + Lose to your Competition at this one thing (Seriously!)

Get over feature traps in 2024.

🎉Welcome to the last Productify newsletter of 2023.

Today, I keep it short with reflection on the newsletter growth, but I also want to make sure you have a learning to take away from this issue. So, I also leave below a super short write up on: You should lose to your competitors in one aspect. Seems intriguing, isn’t it? Can’t wait to share more.

😊But first, can you help me with a small survey?

I really want to know you more. What do you like about Productify and what can be improved? What kind of product experience do you have? You can even write personal feedback if you’d like optionally.

The survey takes ~30 seconds. And wait, I want to give you ONE MORE incentive to complete the survey.

• In 2023, I led three courses on Strategic Thinking for Product Managers - in partnership with O’Reilly and it ended up with some kickass positive reviews every single time. I plan to continue taking this course in 2024 as well with O’Reilly platform. But I learnt that it is good to bring some of that goodness to subscribers here as well.

• I want to bring live courses to Productify subscribers (that is you!) in 2024. These courses are planned to be spread across entry-level, mid-level and leadership level product management skillsets and each course will be 2 to 4 hours long. So they are short, to the point and high quality. There will be 3 to 4 courses in a single year as a planned start.

• I also want to make sure that I come up with affordable live sessions that don’t cost you your kidney (no pun intended at other product management courses). So trust my words, irrespective of your purchasing power, you will be able to participate in these courses.

So please help me make it happen. if you’re reading this, at-least complete this 30 second survey. All those who fill the survey get first access to discounted 2024 live courses. Please select the choice of course and also your e-mail ID in the survey.

🚀Reflections on Newsletter Growth

I started Productify on substack in December 2021. At around same time, I also started writing on Twitter (now X).

My plan to start writing on substack was with a very clear intent and vision: Share how best in tech build products through case studies

The idea came from the fact that case studies have proven to be the right way to absorb and apply knowledge in the business schools. So why not bring the technique to Product world?

So I stayed away from generic ‘best frameworks for Product Managers’ newsletter posts since I know none of that works in the real world. Real world is about human interactions, calculated risks and hope. That is also the reason I want to next bring this community to live sessions where we can discuss and learn new things together (again do not forget to complete the end-year survey if you’re interested)

So back to Productify newsletter. In past two years, I covered Meta, Spotify, Netflix, Hubspot, Duolingo and many more with guest posts from product leaders from Uber, Miro, Coursera etc.

I have also recently been experimenting with a new format where I bring product leadership skills (like hiring, strategy, workshops) into a newsletter issue. This is the first time I also published something different from case study format.

2023 was a great year. Many of the publications reached huge audience. Here’s a summary of best 5 performing posts of 2023 in case you missed them:

1. Did Airbnb just kill Product Management role?

2. Twitter rebrands to X: The Inside Scoop

3. Uber Cash: The Secret to Uber’s Growth

4. For Product Leaders: How to Structure Product Teams

5. What Stanford teaches about Strategy

Now, across both platforms (substack and X) Productify has 53,000+ followers/subscribers with close to 23,000+ subscribers on substack itself.

So am I happy with this audience growth?

Well, that depends on all of you - are you all happy with the content and insights on Productify? Another reason for you to fill the survey above ;)

Yes for sure, I could dedicate more time on Substack and X, but I want to make sure that I bring quality case studies and articles once I have carefully evaluated what should be next and would be interesting for all of you. While some of my peers have grown 2X to 3X, I made a deliberate choice to not gamify the audience growth or be over obsessed with the numbers.

For example, I don’t publish on LinkedIn and I could start doing that the day I want to chase numbers. I also want to make sure that Product Management remains an intellectually stimulating field and we don’t throw black and white solutions at it (which is always easy to publish).

So, I am chasing ‘the right size growth’ and in 2024 I plan to go deep with you all by starting live sessions 3-4 times a year. Growth then is a by-product of our community.

So, as always, feel free to drop a comment below or share your feedback with me anonymously through the survey. I am also open to hear from you if you have collaboration ideas.

Wish you happy holidays and a great new year 2024!

Before I close this issues, one more thing:

👉In 2024, you should lose to your competitors in this one aspect

I want to introduce a concept called ‘feature trap of a tough market’.

You must have heard about ‘feature trap’ in general. This picture below from Product Insititute explains it quite well.

Product Managers (and leaders) often do two BIG mistakes:

1. Let us ask customers what they need in an existing non-performing product

2. Keep building products in an existing non-performing market

While #1 is often talked about in many shapes and forms (sometimes referred to as Feature Trap that feature factory teams get into). This thinking is often summarized as ‘let us optimize this product by giving customers what they need’ even though the product itself is non-performing as per carefully decided success metrics.

Note that performance of a product here is not only referred to as acquisition and retention success but also being able to generate healthy profitable margins at some point in time.

If you’re in a situation described in #1 - you have some choices.

You could go back to fundamentals and ask : Is this even the right product? or Is this product targeted to right audience? and other such similar fundamental truth questions. Furthermore, you should really be asking customers about their overall needs in hope for a new product discovery.

This way, you could start a journey towards a different product bet that could deliver both customer and business value with better probability. So, more of discovery questions to your customers that lead to new product journeys. Open up possibilities, stop obsessing about your current below-average product and its features.

But even bigger problem is #2. You might be creating products that is backed by a business model in a saturated or a dying market. In that case, even if your customers tell you they want more of your product, you should really be zooming out and asking yourself: how long will this market support my product ambitions?

This #2 is a more difficult problem to have. And the one where product and business leaders need to get into action - bringing market and customer insights along. In this case, the product community should be hunting for niches in current stressed market or look for greener pastures (more blue oceans). This is true strategy in action.

So imagine you and your competitor are chasing these two problems.

One of you that continues to optimize a non-performing product by adding more features is certainly having a worse effort to reward ratio. Let your competitor win in this aspect and don’t really spend time building or optimizing a product that you know customers and clients don’t want (basis your internal assessments and market feedback).

You might have that eerie feeling inside when your competitor announces new features, and they sound fancy - but ask yourself does it matter? Let them win in the feature factory game.

Worry more about problem #2 - do you understand the market and customers more than your competitor? If your competitor is better than you at this - this should worry you more.

P.S Leave it to the chinese companies to compete at ‘who has more features’ game.