7 Software Engineers + 1 Product Manager + 1 Product Designer is becoming an outdated tech team configuration.

The future will look much closer to:

1 PM + 1 Software Engineer + 1 Product Designer.

Software Engineers are becoming extremely productive. In many modern companies, they’re no longer the main bottleneck in product development.

The bottleneck is shifting elsewhere:

1. What product should we build?
2. How do we build it the right way for customers?
3. How does it fit within our existing product portfolio?
4. Which existing products should we kill?
5. How should we price it?
6. How do we reach customers in a cost-efficient way?

This doesn’t just mean Designers and Product Managers become the new bottlenecks. It also means the expectations from these roles will increase significantly.

A Product Designer who used to focus mainly on perfecting UI will increasingly need to handle:
- User research
- Product validation
- Competitive analysis
- Strategic product thinking

Ideally, designers already do some of this today. But in reality, it’s mostly the experienced ones who operate at that level.

The same shift is happening for Product Managers.

PMs will spend less time managing backlogs and writing tickets. Instead, they’ll need to do more of what GPMs, Product Directors, or startup founders traditionally did:
- Strategic thinking
- Customer interaction
- Go-to-market planning
- Leading growth initiatives
- Owning business outcomes and P&L

I’m not necessarily saying this will automatically lead to fewer jobs.

But the way we hire, structure, and operate tech teams is changing permanently.

Everyone should be leveling up because the job descriptions are changing underneath us.

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Ideally, pretend to be an independent researcher not linked to the product. This should help them share their thoughts with more directness.

During the session:

0. Go wide & build rapport

a Ask them to tell you more about their work/life (depending on your product)

b. Name challenges they are facing regarding that topic

c. What tools/process they use to deal with these challenges

d. What they like about these tools

e. What they think is a gap in these tools

f. How much do they pay for these tools and how they think of that price

g. Ask what a better tool should be like to be an attractive alternative (function, price)

1. Ask potential users or customers to go through your landing page(s) and explain back to you:

    a. What your product does

    b. Who the product is made for

    c. Which products they see as similar

    d. What concerns or questions they have about the product

    e. What actions they would take to find answers to those concerns, and watch them try to find them

    f. What they expect the price of the product to be (hide the price in some sessions)

    g. What they would do to try your product, and watch how they navigate

2. Ask them to use your product:

    a. Ask them to identify a task they expect to accomplish with your product

    b. Ask why, where, when, how often, with whom, and how they usually do this task

    c. Ask them to try to complete the task using your product

    d. Ask them to compare the experience to the tool or process they currently use

    e. Ask them to compare the strengths and weaknesses of your product versus their current solution

    f. Ask them what they would change to make your product more valuable and easier to use for them

No matter what is your experience and background, you will always come out surprised, and have tons of insights that can impact your product.

Tips:

1. Keep the session recorded including their screen activities (with their permission)

2. Talk way way less. Listen more

3. Be comfortable with silence (they will say more)

4. If they ask you how something works, kindly say, as a researcher I’m not allowed to help during sessions. I can help after the session.

5. Before closing, ask them what questions you should have asked but didn’t. And what other thoughts/ideas/feedback they would like to share before closing (there is always something)

If you need help running research for your product, or training/coaching your team, feel free to DM on LinkedIn

This doesn’t mean that all code will become disposable. Critical operations and infrastructure will still require well-maintained, reusable, and structured code. But as AI makes code generation faster and cheaper, we’ll naturally start reducing the amount of code we store and maintain long-term.

In the SaaS and internal tooling context, the layer closest to the user will most likely be produced directly by the user. For many users, it will be easier to generate new code from scratch than to modify existing code they generated previously.

Do you see this pattern emerging in how you use generative AI for code?

Just last week, I canceled my GitHub Copilot subscription and switched to Codeium’s WindSurf. The Pro plan costs 50% more ($15/month), but the boost in productivity and peace of mind is more than worth it.

What’s crazy is both tools use the same LLM model (Anthropic’s Sonnet), but how they’ve implemented it makes all the difference. It’s a reminder not to get fooled by headlines claiming LLM development is slowing down. Even if the models themselves don’t improve as much as they did before, there’s still so much potential in how we use and integrate them into our products and workflows.

I see the Gen AI space as a tree where the roots represent the models. The growing branches are the innovative ways we can use these models. They sky is the limit for this growth.

We’re just getting started. There’s never been a better time to dive in, experiment, and build things that didn’t exist before.

The sweet spot is in the middle. Where a fair exchange of value happens between your business and the customers. Under fair market conditions, you and your competitors will be competing on how to efficiently maximise the value delivered to and extracted from customers.

This sounds like common-sense, but in our daily lives I find that many forget this basic rule for building great sustainable products and businesses that keep adding value to customers as long as possible.

Still, what about the trade-off zone? This is the tricky part. This is where you and your team will have most debates. Decisions are not black and white. Just think together about how to keep the value exchange balanced.

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I’ve been fortunate to spend my career in environments where most people have a strong sense of empathy for customers. We work together every day with a shared goal of creating great customer experiences, and we take pride in being customer-centric.

However, despite this strong empathy for our customers, I’ve noticed that sometimes we don’t show the same level of empathy toward one another. Your colleagues, managers, and direct reports all face their own challenges. Before jumping to conclusions about why they do what they do, try to put yourself in their shoes. If that doesn’t help, invite them for a friendly chat to clear up any misunderstandings.

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If you’re starting a new role, it’s important to build a solid foundation with your manager, colleagues, and direct reports. Start by asking each of them these questions:

1. What are your goals?
2. What gives you energy?
3. What drains your energy?
4. What’s going on in your personal life?
5. What’s preventing you from achieving your goals?
6. How do you expect me to help?

Every time I’ve forgotten to do this exercise with a colleague, I’ve noticed that we aren’t as productive and collaborative as we could be. However, it’s never too late. Whenever I’ve taken the time to do this exercise later, it has transformed the relationship into a much more positive one.

Remember, it’s not just about asking these questions. The questions are only a tool used to uncover how others think and operate. This helps both sides understand how they can collaborate most effectively.

Even if you believe that GenAI is hyped, you can’t deny that the cost of using GenAI has been dropping significantly over the last two years, and it will continue to decrease.

The cost of running a technology is significantly important for accelerating its adoption and development.

Even if GenAI fails to execute a task perfectly on the first try, the fact that it’s becoming cheaper to ask GenAI to retry, will make it more financially viable for businesses to replace many of their current solutions with GenAI powered ones.

A lot of academics, engineers, and consumers judge GenAI by its ability to give a right answer on the first try, but this is not how businesses will judge it.

The more businesses adopt GenAI for handling the invisible work that powers their operations, the faster we will get to the ideal state of, first-time-right GenAI.

Something I learned during my 20 years of following tech trends, never judge a new technology based on how it performs today. Only judge it based on the trends of its development.

Don’t be the person that dismissed the internet because the speed of internet connections was 56kbits/second in 1995.

What do you think? Share your thoughts with me by commenting, sharing and liking this content on LinkedIn and Substack

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“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year that there is a one-person billion-dollar company.”
— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (source)

For years, early-career professionals were advised to avoid being “I-Shaped” and work toward becoming “T-Shaped.” An I-Shaped professional is someone who masters one skill but knows little about related areas. In contrast, a T-Shaped professional has deep expertise in one skill but also a basic understanding of several related disciplines. The value of being T-Shaped lies in the ability to collaborate effectively and know when to seek help from others with different specializations.

A Bit Of History

During the Industrial Revolution, society saw the value of super-specialization. A worker assigned to a single, specific task would, after enough repetition, deliver consistent results more efficiently. By breaking down the process of building a product into a series of specialized tasks, teams could assign workers to narrowly defined roles, creating an efficient and predictable system—the assembly line.

In an assembly line, workers didn’t need to understand what their colleagues were doing. As long as each specialist performed their task as expected, the process flowed smoothly. Responsibility for ensuring all the pieces fit together fell on someone else, typically an overseer or architect, who orchestrated the entire process.

Fast forward a few decades, and a new type of work emerged: knowledge work.

“Knowledge work can be differentiated from other forms of work by its emphasis on non-routine problem-solving that requires a combination of convergent and divergent thinking.” — Wikipedia

Initially, organizations tried to apply assembly-line principles to knowledge workers. However, they soon realized that the output of knowledge work is not as predictable. Knowledge workers rarely repeat the same task without variation. Every new problem requires a new solution. Despite this variability, their work still needs to integrate with others who are also producing unpredictable outcomes.

This unpredictability created the demand for T-Shaped professionals—specialists who could understand how their peers worked and find ways to integrate their contributions.

The Rise of the Full-Stack Professional

Now, in the age of AI, it’s time to reevaluate how we work again. You’ve probably already come across AI tools that can replace some of your colleagues, either entirely or partially. Today, you might not be at risk of being replaced by AI, but sooner than you think, that could change. Soon, AI will handle some of your tasks, making you more productive. At first, these AI tools might make mistakes, and you’ll need to guide them. Many people dismiss these early mistakes, assuming AI won’t improve—but it will.

As AI improves and can perform a knowledge worker’s tasks with high accuracy (even if not perfectly), a question will arise: Why keep an employee whose work is mostly automated when you can have another worker who partners with the AI, guiding it when necessary?

For example, if AI becomes capable of creating usable, desirable mobile app designs, why would companies need as many designers? Maybe one designer would suffice. Worse yet, some companies might ask their product managers (PMs) to provide the AI with the relevant insights directly, based on their research. If the AI makes mistakes, the PM can point them out, and the AI will iterate on the design.

The same logic applies to the rest of the software development team. Not long ago, full-stack engineers who could build web apps from start to finish were common. Now, we have front-end and back-end engineers. But these roles will merge again at many companies—not just because of AI, but also due to economic pressures like the end of the zero-interest-rate era.

If you’re a front-end engineer who refuses to learn about back-end engineering, you’ll likely be replaced by a back-end engineer who’s picked up front-end skills. Handling both jobs won’t be as hard as you think—the AI will take care of most of the heavy lifting. You just need to guide it when it stumbles.

The One-Person Billion-Dollar Company

As Sam Altman predicts, one day, there will be a one-person billion-dollar company. That individual will be truly full-stack, handling everything—marketing, sales, customer support, product management, design, and engineering. With the help of AI, this person won’t be distinguishable from a company run by thousands of people today.

That person could be you. Or, at the very least, you’ll soon be doing the work that five of your T-Shaped colleagues do today.

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As you grow as a manager—whether by expanding the number of people you manage or becoming a manager of managers—your work challenges also increase.

1. You would have less time.

2. The problems that get escalated to you become more complex.

3. You become responsible for bigger targets.

4. The people relationships you manage—up, down, and sideways—become more complex.

5. It becomes harder to see the devil in the details.

The tools that worked for you at one level usually fail at the next. The worst thing you can do is ignore that reality and keep using the same old hammer to fix new challenges that are nothing like nails.

I learn something new about management every day, so don't expect me to have all the answers you're looking for. What works at one organization might not work at another. Still, I’ll try to share some tools and tips over the next few weeks. Some of them might help you with your own challenges. Just follow me on Linkedin or subscribe to shreef.com to get notified about my new writings.

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For now, let me add some color to the points I listed above. If you're already a manager, you will likely relate to some, if not all, of these points.

You Would Have Less Time

Many people believe that once you become a manager, you get to relax in a corner office while your team handles daily tasks. To be fair, many organizations, especially monopolies or those with a very stable market position, have managers like that. When you have tailwinds and a steady flow of huge profits, you don't need to paddle as hard. But the reality is, this luxury is the exception, not the rule.

In a free market and a changing world, most organizations are challenged by competitors, regulators, and evolving customer needs. Managers in such environments are constantly putting out fires, removing blockers, and finding new ways to help their teams succeed—all while operating under constraints.

A manager's first time-management lesson is learning how to delegate. Delegating requires having enough experienced people to delegate to. But this is real life. A good manager of managers ensures budget constraints for their team, so you will never have enough people to delegate everything to.

The second time-management lesson is learning to let some balls drop. All the problems on your desk might be important, but some are more important than others. You have to accept that something less important will not happen, and you will have to keep it aside for some time, even though someone somewhere is complaining about it. After all, you can't make everyone happy.

The Problems That Get Escalated to You Become More Complex

If you're like me, nothing gives you more energy than spending time figuring out a solution to a problem. This is what attracted me to software engineering, and later to product management.The moment you become a manager, you’ll notice that most of the fun problems you enjoyed solving are now being solved by your team. What's left for you are usually the dilemmas—problems that have no obvious solution. These are things that can't be solved by looking into data or conducting customer research because your team would have done that before escalating the problem to you.

So, you need to define frameworks that help you process all the available facts and opinions from your trusted team members and arrive at a decision. There is no guarantee that the decision will always be right, but at least this process helps your team learn about the variables you consider when making such decisions.

Some other times, getting input from your team might be a luxury you don't have. Decisions that impact people in your team are usually the trickiest. The consequences of these decisions can make or break your team, so you often have to handle these dilemmas on your own. This might lead to sleepless nights filled with overthinking.

You Become Responsible for Bigger Targets

With great power comes great responsibility. Early in your career, missing your target by 10% might have meant the company missed 0.01% of its target. But as a manager or a manager of managers, missing your target by 10% might mean the organization misses its target by 5-10%.

Being the manager that the CEO or VP holds accountable for such targets puts you at a higher risk of being fired and replaced with someone else. To be fair, VPs and CEOs usually get the same treatment from the management board, so they apply the same rules to you. Once you grasp this reality, you start to understand how a manager's success is defined. Your management style will begin to adapt to the expectations your senior managers have set for you.

At this point, many managers start questioning their desire to stay on the management path. I know many managers who have voluntarily decided to return to roles with less pressure and expectations. There's nothing wrong with that. It's wise to optimize your career for the life that works best for you. After all, we only live once.

The People Relationships You Manage Up, Down, and Sideways Become More Complex

One of the reasons I switched from software engineering to product management was people. I felt that the daily routine of a software engineer didn't give me enough opportunity to develop my people skills. Working with people is much more complex than working with machines. Everyone has different emotions, opinions, egos, goals, and priorities. Dealing with them as a non-manager was challanging enough. When I became a manager, I realized the complexity significantly increased.

Your manager, their manager, and the managers from other departments—all these people are important for your success. They are usually driven, ambitious, experienced, and very opinionated. Building alignment with them can take longer than expected and might require developing a new level of people skills. The same goes for your direct reports. Maybe they were once your peers, but now you're their manager. Some might challenge your authority, while others might try to present their work in a more favorable light to be seen as strong candidates for a raise or promotion.

The more senior you become, the more you encounter people interactions filled with details and nuances that you might never grasp on your own. The answer isn't in a book; you'll always need a coach or mentor to help you navigate these complex relationships. How you handle people challenges is likely to be the most important factor in your success or failure as a manager.

It Becomes Harder to See the Devil in the Details

As I mentioned earlier, once you become a manager, some of your direct reports (or those reporting to them) will naturally start trying to avoid bringing you bad news that might impact your perception of their performance. You can't blame them. Your organization's performance management processes usually make your perception of them and their work a strong factor in determining their pay and promotion opportunities.

The issue with this behavior is that the information and data they let you see is often a filtered version of reality. When you realize this, you might decide to micromanage some direct reports to bypass intermediaries or decide to set up a better checks-and-balances system for your team.

Micromanaging might work for a short period, but since you’re short on time (see point 1), you’re unlikely to get the desired results from micromanagement. Plus, you’d be neglecting part of your job: building an effective team.

A more scalable solution is to set up a checks-and-balances system to ensure that the reported information is as close to reality as possible, with minimal bias. This is why some companies invest in systems like A/B testing platforms and automated metric reporting to avoid misrepresenting reality.

Setting up such a system isn't something you complete in days or even weeks. You'll likely need to keep investing in evolving that system over many months and years. The question then becomes, do you even have the budget to invest in that system? The system will never be a finished piece of art; it will need to evolve with your business and be tweaked based on how your team reacts to it. (Check out Goodhart's Law: https://sketchplanations.com/goodharts-law)

A more realistic approach combines both potential solutions I mentioned earlier. You need to invest in building a system, but you still need to strategically zoom in on parts of your team's work to fully understand the details. Then use these insights to improve the checks-and-balances system. Then move on to another topic that deserves more of your attention. This process can't be done once; it must be repeated continuously because it will never be finished.

This is a big part of your job as a manager: iterating on the system that powers your team based on the information you gather daily. You’ll be surprised by the number of problems and inefficiencies you’ll discover that no one proactively told you about.

Management is a Fun Job

I don't know how to describe it, but all these challenges make me excited about the job. As a manager, every day is never boring. There is always a harder challenge to tackle and new skills to acquire. Most of these skills and experiences help me grow as a person. I'm accumulating so many stories that I will be happy to write about someday.

If you're looking for a coach to help you grow as a manager or navigate some your daily work challenges, Please check my coaching services page.

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1. They help us save time when making decisions.

2. They give (junior) team members a safety net (You can't screw things up if you follow the rules).

But rules and best practices are like the training wheels on a bike. They are meant to help children safely ride their bikes without needing to learn how to balance. Still, sooner or later, every child gets tired of the training wheels and starts to aspire to ride their bikes without them. While the training wheels help children get a head start with riding their bikes. They also make it harder for children to do more cool and clever tricks with their bikes. 

The reason race bikes don't come with training wheels is not only because professional cyclists are great at balancing themselves on a bike, but also that racing without the training wheels gives more control, efficiency, and freedom to the cyclists to do whatever is needed to win the race. 

In our every day lives, a lot of people miss that point. They mistakenly believe that being a professional is all about mastering the art of using training wheels. That's what it feels like every time I watch someone lecture others on the exact process to follow, or the exact best practice to implement, without considering the context behind the problem they are dealing with, or seeking a more clever solution that gives them some new advantage. 

If you want to win the race, you better challenge the current processes and best practices, and hire more people who are able to think in new ways. 

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If you are into football (Soccer), you know that for a team to win it needs to score more goals than the opposing team. Also, you must already know the governing rules around how the game is played. Like that only the goal keepers are allowed to touch the ball with their hands. Dangerous play is prohibited and comes with yellow or red cards. These rules are not negotiable and are what govern the game. What remains to each team is to decide their strategy for the game and then start executing on it.

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Tactics

When I first started playing football as a little kid. I was clear on the definition of success. Scoring more goals was what would make my team win. The same level of understanding applied to the other kids. Beyond that, we didn’t know anything about how to play the game as a team. So with a clear goal in mind, we all started running in all directions chasing the ball and hoping to somehow end up scoring goals to win the game.

After a lot of effort from our coach, we started to understand that playing like that was not a recipe for winning. Our coach then started teaching us the micro basics of playing the game. These are the tactics that apply to any football game and strategy. I’m talking here about football basics like how to pass the ball to a teammate, how to sprint with a ball, and how to precisely kick the ball towards a specific point.

Strategy & Roles

Only after mastering the basic tactics, the coach started explaining to us the game strategy and what role each one of us will fill. The coach assigned me the Sweeper (Libro) role. Each other player got assigned a role. Then we started practicing to master the responsibilities of our new roles, and how to play together as a team based on that strategy.

That was a huge improvement. We were no more running aimlessly around the football field like headless chickens. Each player knew what positions to hold during the game. During both offence and defence.

However, things were not that perfect. We all knew that scoring goals is what gets most celebrated by everyone. Deep inside, everyone of us wanted to be the star that scores the goals. Even though that we knew what role each one of us should play during the game, still most of us left our positions empty and went into the opponent team’s side of the field hoping to score a goal.

This lack of discipline caused us to lose many games. The football field is huge. Running longer distances cost us a lot of precious energy. Which made it harder for us to fulfil our duties properly. It also meant that we had weakness points that other teams identified and used to score goals.

Only by getting over our egos, and realising that this is a team sport, and winning is all about how we play efficiently as a team. Only then we started to win games.

What do you take away from this story?

• Know what game your team is playing and how a winning team is decided.
  In sports everyone knows the rules of the game and what success is like. At work, this might not be as obvious. If you don’t know, make sure to ask. If you are the manager, make sure to remind everyone what success/winning should look like
  

• Master your craft. Even the micro details matter.
  Whatever your role is, know that it is very important for the success of the team. So become an expert at the role you play and master all the tactics that can help you play better
  

• Have a team strategy and a plan for the game you play.
  A team of superstar players is nothing without a great strategy and a plan that utilises the skills of each player properly. Don’t just copy the strategy of another team blindly. You might be playing under different conditions, with different resources, and different priorities.
  

• Kill your ego and play for the team.
  Play the role that gets assigned to you. If it is assigned to you, know that it is important, even if it might seem to you as a less shiny role.
  

• [one more thing …] Never forget that the goal is to help the team win the game.
  Executing your role well doesn’t matter if your team still loses the game. So take ownership of filling whatever gaps you see in the team’s execution

To clarify what I meant in the last point. Check this 32 seconds video. Wayne Rooney (Number 9) is a well known English striker. During this game, he was playing for D.C. United against Orlando. Both are American teams. The scores were 2 - 2. These were the last few minutes of the game. So it would take only one more goal to decide who is the winner. Watch the video!

As you have seen. Even though that Rooney was the striker, when his team’s goal was under attack, Rooney sprinted as hard as he can to chase the other team’s striker. He tackled the other player. Captured the ball, and started a counter-attack. This ended up making the deciding goal that made Rooney’s team win the game.

Even though that this seems obvious in the context of sports, you would be shocked to know how many of us prioritise doing their role as described exactly in the best practices book, over trying to understand the situation that their team is operating in, to find more creative ways to deliver on what would really make the team win.

Team sports are a lot of fun. They don’t only challenge our abilities as individuals. They also challenge how we collaborate with other humans.

When making decisions that involve multiple stakeholders, a mistake that many people fall into, is that they jump right away into organising a meeting for all the stakeholders. They then start debating the decision without enough preparation in advance. I have watched many of these meetings turn into chaos. Everyone then leaves the meeting confused and dissatisfied about the outcome.

Even when the decision facilitator comes to the meeting prepared with a document that details what exactly is the decision that needs to be made, and proposes some options that the stakeholders can discuss, the meeting can still end without a decision. What usually happens in these meetings is that one or more stakeholders

1. Raise new questions that the decision facilitator didn’t consider.

2. Some also can drop in facts that render many of the decision options invalid.

This ends up wasting everyone’s time, and making the decision facilitator (which can be you) seeming like you are not senior enough to manage a complex decision like that. I’m saying this from experience, because I have been in that situation many times before, until I started to figure out a solution.

Shuttle Diplomacy

Shuttle Diplomacy is a common practice used by diplomacy professionals. Whenever two countries are having a big conflict and fail to agree on a solution, an independent intermediary can jump in to facilitate a solution. The facilitator works directly with each side of the conflict separately to understand their goals, motives, concerns, and areas of flexibility. Based on these learnings from each side of the conflict, the facilitator can start coming up with proposals that might work for both parties. Only when an option is approved by both parties, a meeting can happen to make the decision official.

I found this tactic to be also useful in daily decision making at work even if the stakeholders are not in conflict with each other.

This made me improve my decision making process by turning it into these following steps…

1. Draft a doc detailing

   1. What decision needs to be made and why

   2. Who should be the people involved in the decision making

   3. Define a list of relevant questions that need to inform the decision making

   4. Draft a list of possible decisions and choose one decision to recommend

2. Schedule one-to-one meetings with the key stakeholders that need to participate in the decision making process

3. In each of these meetings, I try to

   1. Clarify if we agree on the goal behind this decision and the definition of success

   2. Uncover any questions or facts I didn’t consider when making the decision

   3. Confirm that I didn’t miss someone that should be involved in the decision making

   4. Discuss the drafted decisions, and clarify any objections (if any)

4. I keep then iterating on the doc and the decision based on my new learnings.

5. I then get each of the stakeholders to agree on a decision during the one-to-one sessions

   1. If needed, I could organise a small meeting between the two stakeholders that might need to talk directly to clarify some points of conflict

6. Once I have everyone’s buy-in for one decision, that’s when I can host a quick meeting with all stakeholders to make it official that we all agree on that decision. (or just send a summary email to everyone)

Even though that this might seem to be a longer decision making process, whenever I followed it, the decision making felt smoother, and everyone were surprised that a complex decision was made in a productive way.

Happy weekend, during the last two weeks, I was a bit busy with personal commitments, plus that I was busy working on some of my other projects. Two weeks ago, I was taking a writing class (gifted to me by my wife), following that, I started investing more time into writing, just for fun, and for the sake of clearing my mind. Generally, writing seems to help me understand myself better. I can even claim that it's a meditative exercise. 

A few days ago, I decided to publish one of my short reflective stories; it was about my childhood memories as a young boy in Egypt going out every morning to buy fresh bread and falafel for breakfast. I have received very positive feedback from my network. So I will try to publish more of these short stories in the future. Check it out and let me know if you liked it.

 Table of contents:

1. Moats and defensibility for startups

2. Visualizing time

3. There is more to life than profit

4. Isaac Asimov's "On Creativity"

5. Yuri Veerman's Art

1. Moats and defensibility for startups

Recently, the topic of business moats and defensibility came up during one of my product management mentoring sessions. The question was, how do startups define their moats? 

The question reminded me of this article by Jerry Neumann. If you're not familiar with this term, a moat is whatever tactic or tool a business can use to stop the competition from eating its market share. 

A lot of VCs like to talk about the importance of moats, but if you try to look around for startups that have strong moats, you will find it hard to name many. The reality is that most startups start as a very fragile organization with some idea about a problem they can solve for some market segment. The only way for that startup to survive is to move fast to acquire more customers and delay any confrontation with the bigger company until the startup is strong enough to withstand a direct fight. That’s exactly what Clayton Christensen described in his book, The Innovator's Dilemma. 

Delaying the confrontation can be done by either choosing to start focusing on a niche market segment that the big competitor doesn't pay much attention to (at least on the short term), or by trying to focus on a different geographic market. If the startup and the incumbent are both operating in isolated bubbles that never cross, the startup will have a better chance to grow its muscles without interruption. 

Most moats are a side effect of being a bigger, stronger company with more cash reserves, more powerful relationships, and more human resources. So a startup should focus first on defining the maneuvering strategy that can help it acquire more cash, and more customers, before worrying about all other kinds of moats. For a list of all possible moats, check Newmann’s article.

2. Visualizing time

Time is precious, we all know that, but maybe you never tried to visualize it, or look at it in this way. This blog post from Wait But Why blew my mind. It was published in 2015, but its content will be forever green. Tim Urban (the author) shared some visualizations and simple math about the average human life, not measuring life by years, but by events, memories, and experiences. If you live till you're 90, how many more tacos would you be able to eat? How many family trips would you be able to have with your parents or with your kids? How many more books would you be able to read? 

This logic is a great way to keep us aware of how finite our time is and how careful we should be when defining our life priorities.

3. There is more to life than profit

I came across this podcast interview with Yancey Strickler, the co-founder and former CEO of Kickstarter. If you don't know, sometime in 2015, Kickstarter switched its business entity structure from being a C Corp (Inc) to being a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). During the interview, Yancey talked about what does that mean, and why it was necessary. 

I was surprised then to learn that C Corps are legally required to mainly and only maximize the value for their shareholders regardless of any negative impact on society or the environment. The law gives shareholders the right to sue the C Corp if it decides to take any action that serves the community or the environment at the expense of profits. That's why Kickstarter and many other companies decided to register their organizations as a PBC/B Corp. A Public Benefit Corp is a new kind of business structure that grants businesses the freedom to be both focused on profit and the public good at the same time. 

That structure doesn't only provide legal protection for the business, but it also creates the kind of internal culture that has its priorities and values clear to everyone. It's a good interview, listen to it, you will learn about why we need more companies that set delivering a positive social impact as one of their top priorities, and really mean it.  

4. Isaac Asimov's "On Creativity"

I was having a discussion recently about creativity, and it reminded me of this essay by Isaac Asimov, the great science fiction writer. In this essay, he put his thoughts about how to get the best ideas out of people. First, you need the right people, the ones that can make connections between two or more different topics. Second, you need to give them time to think about the problem in isolation. Third, you need to provide them with a safe space where they can share their thoughts with each other. 

Asimov's approach is very different from how most organizations run their creativity/brainstorming sessions. Maybe more of us should adopt Asimov's approach and document the experience. 

5. Yuri Veerman's Art

I can't claim that I'm a big follower of the Art scene, but my wife showed me this website of the Dutch artist Yuri Veerman, and I found many of his art projects interesting. The kind I wish I would have worked on myself. His Koppie Koppie project was a website that sold coffee mugs with prints of photos of random babies and children found on the internet. It was an awareness campaign about privacy and the risks of putting your children's photos online. Putin a Rainbow is another one that makes fun of Putin's anti-gay policy and his strange banning of rainbows in Russia. There are many other projects that you can check out on his website.

That’s it. Did you enjoy reading this issue of the newsletter? please forward and share it with your network. Also, subscribe, if you’re not subscribed already.

PS: Reply to this email if you have feedback, or shout at me on twitter.

Till next time,
Shreef

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This year's Nobel Prize drama

Do you have a very smart friend that never gets a haircut except for once a year by the end of September? If yes, I’m afraid to tell you that your friend is an aspiring Nobel prize winner.

Every year around that same time, the new Nobel prize winners get announced to the world, and according to the old tradition, at least one of the prize winners should be the subject of an internet fight.

This year’s internet fight was about 3 of those winners: A. Banerjee, E. Duflo, and M. Kremer won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty. The 3 economists have been strong contributors to the increasing adoption of RCTs (Randomized Controlled Trials, A/B tests) to tackle poverty problems.

The award divided the economists on the internet into 2 groups:

The first, happy for the winners and excited about the increasing use of RCTs in development economics.

The second, angry about that choice and undermine the value of RCTs. Their argument against RCTs is that they are hard to implement accurately and that they drive solutions that are hard to replicate under other conditions. This group is instead in favor of tackling the harder problem that will have a bigger impact, which is developing economic models that can help solve the root cause of poverty.

Does that sound familiar?
The whole thing reminds me of the same debates Design & Product people get involved in about the use of RCTs (A/B testing) when building products.

Some groups usually blame RCTs for being focused only on solving measurable problems and for being short term focused. While this is not always true (it depends on how you use the tool), this group’s recommended approach is to go after big daring projects that are high in risk, but higher in impact.

I don’t personally believe that one approach is always better than the other, but both approaches should get used whenever and wherever it makes sense. Actually, both approaches can be used in parallel with each other.

In the context of tackling poverty-related problems, there is nothing wrong with running small and focused RCTs that try to find effective solutions for specific problems like, how to get more babies vaccinated? how to get more children to not drop out of school? how to get more poor households to benefit from government-sponsored programs?

While answering one of these questions for the residents of one city in a poor country is not going to solve the root causes of their poverty, still, this answer would help introduce a small incremental improvement to the quality of their lives while they wait for the big high impact solutions to be discovered.

If you have some time to learn more about the use of RCTs to reduce poverty, watch the following talk by Esther Duflo (one of the winners). She gives some examples, and honestly they look very similar to RCTs I run with my teams at work but in a different context. I’m happy to share my learnings with others who work in the field of development.

Google, all the things!

This week, Ben Thompson wrote three times about Google. The first 2 times were about their travel & shopping ad products and the third was about their newest payment product. (Everyone is doing payments now)

Add to that, some news leaked that they have built a search engine for medical records that already has access to the medical records of millions of US citizens. Also, the week before they acquired Fitbit for $2.1 Billion (just 1.7% of Google’s cash reserve). The Fitbit deal gives them access to the health data of 28 million active Fitbit users, which seems to be like a good amount of data to start training some new health-related machine learning models.

While there is some chance that Google is going to use this health data to advertise consumers something sooner or later, most probably the first thing to happen is that Google will start utilizing consumer’s search queries and other information they know about them to enrich the medical records they have, and based on that deliver better health predictions about consumers to their doctors and to the health insurance companies.

I really think that Facebook is getting too much attention from everyone just because of their impact on politics, but the real big unstoppable machine is Google.

Human workers in Asia are still cheaper than robots

If you thought that the robots are about to take over all the jobs in factories, it seems like you’re wrong, at least about some of the robots. Adidas announced this week that they are going to shut down their brand new robot factories located in Germany and the USA.

The new plan is to move the production back to Asia where Adidas indirectly employes 1 million workers through its contract factories. While this is not good news for the American or German factory workers, it’s amazing news for the Asian workers that would have struggled if the robots were ready to take over their jobs.

Considering the rapid development in the robotics industry, I would not be surprised if Adidas decides to give the robots factory another shot in 5 years from now.

While robots are not that efficient when it comes to making shoes, they are still very capable of handling a lot of other tasks.

Oxford Economics shared recently its analysis and predictions about the impact of automation on factory workers. The big prediction they have is that by 2030, around 20 million factory jobs will disappear across the world, but they expect that each new robot will increase the economy’s productivity and as a side effect will increase the demand for new workers in the job sectors that can’t be automated yet.

Considering that the average career for workers is 45 years, this means that the low end of workers (the ones with the highest risk of losing their job to a robot) will be changing careers 2 to 4 times. One time for every new significant improvement to the robotics technology, with the assumption that the robots are not going to accelerate their learning speed over time.

What’s the take away for the young people entering the job market for the first time? look for jobs that are hard to automate. Most probably the ones that are very unstructured, and require a lot of emotions, and human connection.

Good Ads

While I don’t sell ads on this newsletter, I want to use this section to advertise good causes. This time I want to persuade you to consider using Kiva to lend money directly to people in need of microloans that can help them get clean water, buy a new cow, or start some small project to feed the family.

This is not a donation, your money will come back to you in installments over a 1 to 2 years schedule. If you have read the previous issue of my newsletter, maybe you remember the article I shared about the negative interest rates. Maybe this is a better way for you to stash a few of your millions without suffering from the negative interest rates. [This is not financial advice, I’m just throwing ideas].

Do good on Kiva, now!

Greatest Events of WWII in Colour

What am I watching these days, you ask? I’m watching this documentary about WWII on Netflix. As an Egyptian, I didn’t learn much at school about the wars that happened outside Egypt and the Middle East. Sorry, we had our own long list of wars that filled all the time during our history classes.

After moving to Europe, I thought that it might be a good idea to start learning about these other wars I didn’t know much about. Luckily, Netflix and youtube have a rich library of war documentaries that can keep me busy for years.

That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed this issue of my newsletter, forward it to your friends, and ask them to subscribe to the newsletter, and follow me on twitter (@shreef). Also, send me your feedback.

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Have a good weekend!
Shreef

My personal todo list is full of books/articles to read, movies/documentaries to watch, side projects to work on, and more working out. All the things I keep adding to the list but never had time for.

I’m even back to coding. It’s 2.5 years already since I transitioned into product management. Since then, I didn’t write any code beyond some basic python in Jupyter to analyze some data. I’m really happy to be coding again. I’m getting my hands dirty building something with Django on top of AWS, and it feels like a rollercoaster.

Coding is fun until you hit a roadblock. That bug that comes out of nowhere, the error message that makes no sense, and the StackOverflow question with no answers. I had one of these yesterday, and it took me 24 hours to figure it out. I was a bit angry about that bug, but here I’m happy again and proud of myself after finding out how to fix it. Coding is really a Goddamn rollercoaster, but that’s what makes it interesting for a lot of creative people, and I think I miss that rollercoaster.

Now let me share with you some of the interesting stuff I came across during the week.

Negative interest rates, the mystery!

Negative interest rates have been alive and kicking in Europe since 2014. It’s a very interesting phenomenon that even economists and finance professionals have no idea how it works exactly. That was Howard Marks’ (famous investor) reaction when he was asked to write about this topic.

"I can’t. I don’t know anything about them” and then I relaized that’s the point. No one does.

So he wrote this memo in a try to answer these questions:

• Why do negative rates happen?

• Why do investors buy negative yield bonds even though they know that this will make them lose money? Are they crazy?

• How do consumers react to negative interest rates? spend more or save more?

• What can you do in response to the negative interest rates?

Howard raises more questions every time he tries to answer one of his questions, but this makes it an interesting read. Read the full memo here.

The grandfather of Silicon Valley venture capital

Don Valentine, the founder of Sequoia Capital, passed away couple weeks ago. As one of the first VCs in Silicon Valley, he has been involved in a lot of the technology innovations that came out of the valley. Starting from semiconductors and personal computers; to e-commerce and digital entertainment.

While going through my twitter feed, a video of one of his old talks (2010) given at Stanford’s Grad School of Business, caught my attention.

Here are my notes for you if you have no time to watch the video.

• Storytelling is a critical skill, but we (Sequoia) deal with a lot of smart people who don't know how to tell a story. So we make it our job to come up with the right questions that can get the right answers out of those people.

• When one of our companies fail, we conduct a post-mortem to understand what questions we should have asked to be able to see what we couldn't see back then.

• Creating new markets is very expensive. We look for existing big markets to invest in. After we find the big market, we try to find out how we (Sequoia) and those founders can build a big company in that market.

• We teach our founders the power of outsourcing. As a startup, you have to be very good at very few things, mainly the technology. The rest should be outsourced.

• We have a search function that keeps looking for the right talent. Not like other investors, we don't wait till founders knock on our door, we knock on their door first.

• We don’t care about balance sheets. Cash is all that matters. So we hire CFOs for our startups that are wizards when it comes to generating cash flow. That’s how to build resilient companies.

• As venture capitalists, we survive by being able to connect the dots today to see the future. Technologies and dysfunctions that exist today can help us visualize how the world will look like in a few years.

Do you want to know what data companies have about you?

Kashmir Hill published this article on the NY Times and it’s an understatement to say that this article caused a big headache for the companies mentioned.

Kashmir used her GDPR rights to ask for a report with all the data stored about her. She received a 400 pages report that included detailed information about her interactions with different companies, like Conibase, Yelp, Airbnb, and others.

No, she was not asking these prementioned companies to hand her her data. Actually, she asked 3rd party companies that collect this data from different companies to be able to build fraud detection products and other products that can classify and predict the behavior of specific consumers (the data is not anonymized).

Do you want to get your report too? follow the instructions she provides near the end of the article. Also, use this GDPR template when asking companies to send you a report about your data.

The Zombie Campaign

Olivia Nuzzi wrote beautifully about Joe Biden’s campaign for president. I don’t usually read very long articles about American politics, but this one was worth it.

The future of this campaign is not so bright, but the fact that it has been that strong for so long, says a lot about how the average American decides on who is worthy of being a president or not.

Don’t call yourself a programmer

I’ve been following Patrick McKenzie for some time on Twitter, but I never noticed that he has a blog until recently. His writings appeal mainly to people working in technology.

If you’re starting your career as a “programmer”, check out this blog post. It explains why you should not call yourself a programmer, and many other tips that will help you have a better career. Some of the things you should learn about your job are

• Engineers are hired to create business value, not to program things

• You are not defined by your chosen software stack

• You radically overestimate the average skill of the competition because of the crowd you hang around with

• Networking: it isn’t just for TCP packets

• Modesty is not a career-enhancing character trait

• All business decisions are ultimately made by one or a handful of multi-cellular organisms closely related to chimpanzees, not by rules or by algorithms

• At the end of the day, your life happiness will not be dominated by your career

It took me many years to learn these lessons, and I still struggle acting on some of these learnings. Your career in tech can benefit a lot from reading this blog post. Once you are done, check more of what Patrick wrote on his blog.

One last thing, I really like how he describes himself in the about page.

Who are you, anyway? A great question! I write well and prolifically, generally on the intersection of marketing and engineering. I’m not the best marketer or engineer in the world, but I’m a better engineer than almost all marketers and a better marketer than almost all engineers. Tactically abusing this combination prints money in a very intellectually interesting way; this site is mostly war stories from doing that. You can read my brief bio for the highlights.

I think that’s how I see myself too, not the best engineer, or the best marketer, or the best product manager. Just the fact that I can mix these skills together gives me a new superpower. Also, his focus on good writing resonates well with me. I get compliments about my writing, but I want to improve it more, and even work harder on improving my speaking skills. As Don Valentine said, storytelling is a critical skill.

That’s it for this week. If you enjoyed this issue of my newsletter, forward it to your friends, and ask them to subscribe to the newsletter, and follow me on twitter (@shreef).

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Have a good weekend!
Shreef

My plan was to send it on Friday night so you can read it on Saturday morning while you are still in your comfy pajamas. Things didn’t go as planned for the newsletter, but it was going better for another side project I’m working on.

Mentmento, that other project

Since the time (2011) I’ve been working on my first startup back home in Egypt, I learned that having a mentor (or a network of mentors) is essential for accelerating my learnings and growth. Over the years, I continued to maintain my network of mentors, and always reached out to the right people to get their advice on whatever problems or decisions I’m facing.

I have been trying since then to pay it forward by always taking phone calls or meetings with people that ask me for career or personal advice. I have a long list of failures (and occasional successes) that can help me put a list of options in front of them, with the pros and cons of each, and my recommended option.

Recently, while enjoying my parental leave, I started to think about how to make it easier for others to grow their network of mentors and at the same time introduce more new people to mentoring others.

First, before jumping into defining how to do that, I wanted to get some signal about the problem and the demand for mentors. I first asked my twitter network to answer a short poll about whether they have a mentor or not? and if not, then are they looking for a mentor?

Based on the answers from that small group, it seemed like there is some demand for having a mentor. Also, the question itself triggered some interesting discussions about the topic.

My next step was to try to get more detailed answers from a bigger sample. At work (we’re hiring), I would have defined what questions I want to answer and the target demographic, and then go ask our amazing research team to help me get some people to answer my questions, but now I needed to depend on myself. I just needed a way to recruit people that can answer my survey.

The Survey

Google Surveys was the first option that came to mind. I heard about it 2 years ago when it was first launched, and I was curious about how it works. In a few minutes, I was able to build a short survey with a couple of screening questions, and then defined the criteria of my target demographic.

Before publishing the survey, Google demands that they first run a test version of the survey for free on a small sample of their traffic to get an estimate for how much they would charge me per completed survey. I had to wait for a couple of hours for the test survey to run, and then Google came back to me offering to execute my survey in exchange for $3 per answer. The minimum number of survey answers to collect is 100, so this meant that I would need to pay $300.

Actually, $300 is not that expensive considering that I was targeting people working in tech. If I was conducting this research as part of a for-profit project, I would have gone for it. This time for my side-project, I decided to pass on Google’s offer, and find another cheaper approach to reach my target audience.

I thought about using Mechanical Turk to get some answers, but considering that my first target demographic is people working in tech, I decided not to go for it. This would work better for typical consumer research.

Another approach

After giving it a little bit of thought, I decided to come up with the smallest version of a possible MVP ever, and utilize my network and Product Hunt’s community to reach my target audience.

I decided then that my MVP’s value proposition would be:

We match mentors and mentees together on-demand based on interest and availability and then schedule a 30 minutes phone call for both to chat.

A mentorship on-demand model

After working for a marketplace company (Booking.com) for 5 years, I can see my bias towards turning everything into a 2 sided marketplace. Anyway, that model seemed to be good enough.

The 30 minutes phone call part is inspired by the mentorship setup I’ve with the great people from Knowledge Officer. They have training programs for Product Managers, and depending on my availability they book 30-minute phone calls for me to mentor some of the students. I like that setup and find it efficient.

Based on that idea for an MVP, using my humble design skills and Webflow, which I also wanted to give it a try someday, I put down a simple but neat looking landing page for my MVP, with a couple of forms for the mentors and mentees to signup. It didn’t cost me a lot of time, but I had to pay $15 for Webflow’s hosting service, and $10 for the domain name.

When mentors and mentees signup, they see a message informing them that they will receive an email once they are matched to someone. I decided to do the matching manually for now. My priority was to know how much demand would this product get before wasting my time building something that maybe no one would use.

With this simple implementation, it was time to list the product on Product Hunt. I just needed to have some banner to explain the concept. I put on my lousy marketing copywriter hat and my tasteless graphic designer hat on top of each other and hacked up some simple banner using Google Slides.

Yeah I know, Google Slides! I didn’t need a fancy tool to put up this simple banner together. It just took me 10 minutes to figure out how to turn the photos of these girls into circles.

The first 24 hours of being on Product Hunt

I published Mentmento on Product Hunt during the first few minutes of the 3rd of November (Amsterdam time).

I thought that the moment I publish the product I would see a stream of votes and signups, but this didn’t happen right away. It turned out that Product Hunt starts its day around midnight New York time, which happens to be the morning time in Europe. That’s when Mentmento made it to PH’s home page, and I started seeing more activity.

The launch day went well, nothing broke, and I received a lot of positive feedback. Even with that very simple product setup, everyone was excited and looking forward to seeing what’s going to happen next.

To share some stats, by the end of the first day, Mentmento had 200+ Signups and votes on Product Hunt, which made it rank as #2 Product of the day.

Considering that this is my first time to list a product on Product Hunt, it was interesting to watch the dynamics of their product and their community. If I learned one thing during that day, it would be that..

People will vote up your product based on their excitement about the problem you’re solving for them, regardless of the implementation details.

I watched other good products get fewer votes in comparison to Mentmento, while it seems that the makers have invested bigger effort in building their product and making it perfect and shiny. So I’m happy with my decision to go with something extremely simple. Also, imagine if the launch of Mentmento was a failure, I’m sure that I would have not been happy about the $300 survey and the hundreds of wasted hours.

What’s next?

So now that I’ve 200+ early adopters signed up, I need to work on making the promised solution happen, and craft it in a good way that makes them enjoy the mentor and mentee experience. Most probably I will have to arrange the matching semi-manually and find a cheap but reliable way for them to make the phone calls without exposing their email addresses to each other to maintain privacy and avoid spamming as much as possible. I will then collect feedback again, and see what should be done next.

Wish me luck, and remember to invite your friends to Mentmento!

PS: Sorry for the long story today. I wanted to reflect on that project in writing as fast as possible. I thought maybe some of you would enjoy following my thinking process.

Next week

Next week, I will do my best to mainly share the interesting reads I’ve collected for you. For now, if you’re into Silicon Valley history, check out this documentary about a company (General Magic) that you never heard of before. It was the birthplace of both, the iPhone, and Android. Things didn’t go as planned for the company, but the innovations they built continues to live with us today. It’s especially a must-watch for startup founders and Product Managers.

Cheers,
Shreef

* If you have comments or feedback, reply to this email, or reach out to me on twitter (@Shreef)

** Reading on the website? Remember to Subscribe to the newsletter

Every week, I will have one main topic to cover in the newsletter. I will also include links to some interesting articles, videos, and products I came across during the week.

While I’m usually known for being a tech guy, I will try to cover non-tech topics that you might also find interesting.

Next to that, in this newsletter, I want to have a Q&A section mainly about building products. If you happen to have a question, send it to me by replying to this email, or @ me on twitter, and I will get back to you next week with the best answer I have.

Now back to this week’s newsletter …

Talking to Strangers (Book)

It’s a long time since I read a book written by Malcolm Gladwell, but I heard a lot of good feedback about his new book Talking to Strangers (Goodreads).

The premise of the book is that we humans are really really bad when it comes to understanding other humans.

The book starts and ends talking about an American black woman called Sandra Bland and her interaction with a police officer on the road. This interaction might have started in a kind of normal way, but things escalated quickly because of a series of misunderstandings. 3 days later, Sandra Bland committed suicide while still in prison. After investigating that incident, it had been decided that the police officer should get fired.

It’s easy to attribute this story to racism, but Gladwell tries in the book to dig deeper to find the root cause behind how both of them behaved, and what changes should be introduced to how police officers operate in the US to avoid having more of these incidents in the future.

The book is not only focused on this story. There are many other amazing stories about humans failing to understand that the person they are interacting with every day is a liar or a con. We, humans, are designed to trust everyone else.

My favorite story in the book is about how the American CIA failed to spot double agents in their ranks, and how Cuba was able to trick the CIA that they have everything under control, while actually Cuba was the one in control.

Tip: Listen to the audiobook version. They produced the audiobook in a format similar to the format of podcasts. Production-wise, It’s the best audiobook I have ever listened to.

The Perils of Perception (Research)

I came across this Ipsos research exploring the gap between people’s perceptions and reality.

For each of the 37 countries covered in the research, they asked people from these countries to answer a set of questions about their population, and then a comparison has been made to see how accurate are the answers given.

It’s no surprise that most people gave inaccurate answers, but it’s interesting to see this comparison done across countries.

Speaking of people's wrong perception of the state of their countries, it’s worth it to mention Hans Rosling’s amazing book Factfulness (Goodreads). If you didn’t read this book already, then you should read it soon. It will correct every wrong statistic and facts you know about the world.

The cool product of the week

Do you watch HBO’s Silicon Valley? you might like this. (not really a product)

TV show of the week

Living With Yourself is a new light comedy series by Netflix. I think you will enjoy it.

That’s it for this week

This was the first issue of this newsletter. I’m looking for feedback. share it with me by replying to this email, or on twitter (@shreef).

Also, remember to send me questions for the Q&A section.

Till next week

Shreef