ksl

[Shreyas Doshi @shreyas]

What is product management? (a memo)

Product management is the art, science, and practice of making products successful.

You can begin evaluating product success via the product’s User adoption, Customer satisfaction, and Business impact.

Consistent product success only comes from unique customer & market insights, creative product solutions, and disciplined execution across the various functions & teams involved in building & distributing the product. Anybody who has these abilities (or has the capacity & desire to develop them) can do product management. You do not need a specific job title to do product management.

In technology product companies, one or more of the founders initially perform the product management role. As the company grows, product management usually morphs into a specialized role because the depth & complexity of each aspect of the role (i.e. insight, solution, execution) grows. When that happens, the person doing the role typically gets the title of Product Manager.

Product management is a team sport, by definition. This means that The Product is not just the Product Manager’s concern. It is everyone’s concern: the designer’s, the engineer’s, the data scientist’s, the researcher’s, the marketer’s and so on.

An effective Product Manager orchestrates opinions, priorities, and actions across the org while bringing his/her own unique insights and creativity to the mix. A good PM strikes a balance here, just like a good tour guide: when you are visiting a new country, you don’t want your tour guide to order you around & be bossy—but you also do not want your tour guide to simply follow you around without offering any interesting context or observations.

Product Manager is the most generalist role on a product team. A Product Manager must play to the strengths of his/her team and fill gaps where needed. This means that Product Managers’ work will look very different across companies, and even different across different teams within the same company.

Due to the inherently ambiguous & cross-functional nature of the role, Product Managers constantly have to build entirely new skills and adapt their traits to be most effective in new environments. That said, the fundamental skills & traits don’t vary all that much.

3 fundamental skills of effective Product Managers are:
- Critical thinking
- Cognitive empathy
- Influential communication

3 fundamental traits are:
- Curiosity
- Deep care
- High agency

Because product management requires you to “work through others”, Product Managers are rarely in full control of their inputs, outputs, and outcomes. This makes the PM role fairly stressful. Because it is a leadership role, product management comes with major responsibility, but also gives you high leverage from your time.

Product management is not for everyone, but it can be a very fulfilling role & career for people who like solving business & customer problems via products and genuinely enjoy working with other people. And implemented right, it can also be quite impactful for companies.

[ksl @khashilin]

be harnessed for both good and bad, and we must take measures to prevent the bad, which is already starting to creep into our everyday lives from misinformation and scam calls to cybersecurity attacks.

[ksl @khashilin]

This semester, I took the Large Language Model Agents course from UC Berkeley (https://t.co/t43F37kD0F). Our speakers were from renowned AI companies all around the Bay. They presented the core of an LLM agen and explored their vast potential, from applications to implications.

[ksl @khashilin]

3. Urgency of Safety: Finally, as agents become increasingly advanced and capable, safety must follow as well. Robust monitoring, safety evaluations, and mitigations must be implemented while simultaneously developing agentic capabilities. With the great power of agents, it can

[Neel Somani @neelsomani]

It's my birthday today! After six months focusing on health, I found almost every health issue I had was related to the fact that I'm Indian.

Science avoids the topic of race, but what we need is "race science 2.0" to recognize our genetic diversity to improve health outcomes:

[zöda @zodattack]

not to be super intense but life takes very active maintenance and disciple. it takes discipline, it takes waking up early, fitting your friends AND your work, it takes going on that walk instead of doom scrolling, it takes researching the best coffees and getting them, it takes so much work, otherwise before you know it youre older than you realized and haven’t done anything. aren’t where you wanted. haven’t done or seen or learned or felt or read all the things. all these things matter.

lately I’ve been turning off my feelings and doing it. apply to hackathon, scheduling international trips, organizing dinners, not feeding into my anxiety, waking up early, going to the gym, staying up late to finish work, sleeping in, writing, meeting people even if I’m nervous, just all the things. being really really brave and inserting myself in the places and things I want. I thought I’d be exhausted, and I am sometimes, but mostly i feel so empowered and in control.

I don’t want to be at the whim of my emotions. for so long I thought feelings for my strength and I could do anything with this burning desire, but now I realized it’s more nuanced. I still believe they but now I know they sometimes I want to do nothing! and lay in bed for hours! <tw food> i want to skip meals and skip sleep and avoid people and hide from the world. and it means nothing! There’s no sage wisdom there there’s nothing i am lacking (trust me i spent years ruminating on what im missing!) there’s nothing in means I just have to be strong. I have a cozy house, good food, great friends, amazing bf, a career and sooooo many ideas and industries I love, and I could go on but you get it. sometimes my feelings mean nothing besides I didn’t eat and I haven’t drank water and haven’t gotten sunlight.

do the hard things!! don’t give into the self sabotaging emotions!! be strong!! listen to your body but don’t let it dictate everything and love your life goddamn itttt

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

The evolution of Crayola.

[ksl @khashilin]

Reminding myself as a perfectionist:
- failure is humanizing
- set open goals with a lower bar (which is unintuitive after being taught to set SMART goals)

[Sydney Battle @SydneyBattle]

when i was 12 i was guarding this girl at basketball practice and she freaked out and cried bc i was “being pushy/aggressive”. so the coach was like “show me 😡” and i was soo embarrassed but i did and i’ll never forget him turning to go “ok so that’s what u ALL should be doing”

[Naval @naval]

If you want to impact the world, then have good ideas, articulate them well, without ulterior motive, and bring them into reality.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

Cormac McCarthy.

tomorrow is a conspiracy against today