August 2016 Summaries

A product manager is a broad generalist in early-stage startups, responsible for doing everything that's not engineering or design work. As the team grows, the role shifts to require specific expertise in various areas, and eventually becomes more specialized. A product manager connects user experience, technical requirements, and business requirements together, owning the "Job-to-be-Done" and having a vision for delivering a 10x product. The role involves both internal and external aspects, including communication, research, and fighting complexity, and is often misunderstood as being glamorous or easy to excel in.

Editing is a crucial skill that's often overlooked and under-appreciated. The best editors serve as proxies for readers, providing strong opinions and helping writers refine their ideas. Editing is not just about correcting punctuation, but also about challenging opinions and adding clarity to writing. It requires a partnership between writer and editor, with the editor serving as a proxy for the reader's needs and preferences. Good editing involves taking away unnecessary words and focusing on communication, rather than trying to add or change the author's ideas. There are different types of editing, including copy editing, which can be focused on style and tone, and structural editing, which focuses on organization and flow. A solid editorial process with a willingness to challenge writers' opinions can lead to improved writing and a better reader experience.

Our goal is to make data make sense to everyone in the company, and we're exploring new ways to structure our analytics events to achieve this. We've moved from a flat list of event names to a reusable and structured set of categories, using Action, Object, Place, and Owner to better understand interactions and identify reactive and proactive behaviors. This new approach allows us to see events not just as flat, disconnected moments, but as rich, 360-degree interactions. With this structure, we've reduced the number of required events from 500 to just one owner, 8 actions, 9 objects, and 2 places, making it easier for product teams to improve their products and better understand customer behavior. By making our data democratic, we're empowering engineers and product managers to analyze raw data themselves, which has led to interesting questions and insights that can inform product decisions.

When big meetings are better`: The early days of Intercom were marked by a focus on minimizing meeting size to optimize efficiency, with most meetings consisting of only two or three people. However, as the company grew, this approach became less effective due to changes in communication dynamics and the need for more context and rationale behind decisions. Today, big meetings can be beneficial if everyone understands their role, allowing for faster decision-making and improved outcomes. By embracing bigger meetings and learning how to facilitate them effectively, startups can benefit from increased collaboration and productivity.

We launched a free version of our product, which took over a year to get 100 paying customers. To find them, we created content around topics related to our software and shared it with potential customers before launching. This helped us build a captive audience and network that signed up for our product immediately after its launch. We also leveraged platforms like Hacker News and Product Hunt to gain traction and attract the right kind of customers who were interested in our ideas.

The article emphasizes the importance of empathy in creating effective support content for businesses. It highlights two types of empathy: cognitive and emotional. Cognitive empathy involves understanding how customers feel, while emotional empathy involves feeling the pain customers are experiencing. The article suggests that businesses can build cognitive empathy by surrounding themselves with customer information, staying on top of their product's evolution, and immersing themselves in the world without their product. Emotional empathy is achieved by experiencing the complexity of a problem, not ignoring broken windows or limitations, and knowing what to write when creating help content. By combining both types of empathy, businesses can create support content that resonates with customers and addresses their needs effectively.

The article highlights four key traps that founders often fall into when building successful software businesses. Firstly, it warns against solving small, rare problems, as they may not be worth the effort and resources required to monetize them. Secondly, it cautions against offering cheap, complex products that cannot justify real customer acquisition costs or provide sufficient support. Thirdly, it advises against solving problems people don't know about or don't care about, as these types of products are unlikely to succeed. Lastly, it emphasizes the importance of raw experience and understanding of the problem being solved, as this is essential for creating a high-quality solution. The article concludes that quality is not enough, but sustainability is crucial, and that survival is the best product strategy.

The article critiques the tendency for designers and critics to focus solely on the logo when evaluating a brand's identity, rather than considering the larger system as a whole. It argues that design criticism should be done within the context of the success or failure of the brand system, taking into account the various elements that make up its identity, such as imagery, typography, color, and tone of voice. The article also emphasizes the importance of context in evaluating a rebrand, highlighting how kneejerk reactions to logos can overlook the months of iteration and compromise that went into creating the system. By waiting for the system to reveal itself over time, critics can provide more thoughtful and fair assessments of the brand's identity.

Our company's mobile team, working in a horizontal structure, had separate processes for web and mobile products. This led to inconsistencies where mobile would follow the decisions made by the web team, often resulting in designs being handed off from web to mobile. To build a truly cross-platform product, we broke down silos between web and mobile teams, working as one cohesive unit across platforms. We found that having just one product manager for all three platforms helped us learn from each other's challenges more quickly. Managing a large group without bureaucracy required finding ways to keep everyone on the same page while retaining speed and efficiency. Our 15-person stand-up meeting increased signal-to-noise ratio, allowing teams to focus on essential updates. By working across platforms, we learned that learning from other platforms can help open our eyes to new possibilities and improve product development.

Intercom is expanding to a third office, located in the Fulton Market area of downtown Chicago, Illinois, to better serve its customers. The new office will be centered around customer support and will help improve the company's product by empowering its support team to provide valuable feedback. This expansion aims to address the issue of delayed customer experiences due to time zone differences between Intercom's current offices in Dublin and San Francisco. The Chicago office will enable faster and more reliable support for customers worldwide, while maintaining a strong presence in both Dublin and San Francisco. Intercom is committed to investing in great people and culture to drive its mission to make internet business personal.