Matt Woods 🤙

Tweeting about growing Internet businesses, software, & books worth reading. Product Manager.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Everyone should find 3 hobbies:

One that makes you rich. 💰
One that keeps you fit. 🏋️‍♂️
One that makes you smart. 📖

h/t: @naval

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

“I don't think the answer is to out-produce the machines. I think the answer is to be more romantic than they can be.”

[Behzod @beh_zod]

Why the most important work comes from people who care about things nobody asked them to care about.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Here's the Expansion PM job posting: https://t.co/F6rV3wAQtR

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Exciting news: We're hiring a Senior PM to join Apollo's Growth team to take paid customer expansion to the next level.

For the right early-to-mid career PM who's deeply curious about growth, this is a career-defining shot.

We're looking for someone who...
- runs high-signal experiments to learn at breakneck speed
- has battle-tested opinions on what makes an upsell flow convert (and what will derail it)
- spends consistent time with customers to pinpoint their actual unmet needs (especially when they conflict at face value)

This is the highest-impact growth team I've worked on by a mile. We've crushed our goals, built a scaled and fast-growing PLG motion, and positioned to become dramatically more effective in the coming months.

Check out the full job description below. 👇

And don't hesitate to DM me with questions or referrals!

[Benji Taylor @benjitaylor]

We need to stop talking about product design in absolutes… there are no rules. Everything is made up. Do what makes sense and feels right.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

@mikebeckhamsm Totally agree.

Practically, are you making any major decisions differently at this stage because of your 2020 experience?

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

@kevinyien @nurijanian I’d love to see the new one! Definitely referenced your first PRD template many times as inspiration.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

@derrickreimer @savvycal let’s do it 🤙

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

@shreyas big +1 for demand-side sales! it’s the book i’ve referenced the most for practically using JTBD day-to-day.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

this makes sense to me.

i remember hearing a story that decades ago it took an entire team of software engineers to support a single company’s bookkeeping.

now one person can do that job with Excel.

tools change. the need for creative problem solvers endures.

[Flo Crivello @Altimor]

Been receiving lots of questions about this from folks who expect AI engineers to result in a wave of mass unemployment.

I think the crux of the question is whether there can be such a thing as "too much code" in the world.

As farming productivity skyrocketed in the last few hundred years, we really didn't need all that food, and so the % of the American workforce working in agriculture went from 70% in 1840 to 2% today.

But other goods showed a very different trend, and their consumption increased as productivity increased and prices decreased (the famous Jevons paradox). https://t.co/rKooo9DdOP

This was the case of aluminum and solar panels — Jevons paradox tends to be the rule in commodities, and trends shown by food the exception:

We consume more than 10x more aluminum today than we did in 1950. The trend for solar panels is even more spectacular — we consume more than 1,000x as many modules today(!!!) as we did in 2002. And the trend is accelerating!

My contention is that code will follow the same path, and I think every single big tech company in existence today is one more point supporting this thesis.

Consider the Uber app — Uber spends about $3B per year on R&D right now, per their public filings. You could say the Uber app is an object that's cost roughly $10-20B to produce.

For reference, the Golden Gate Bridge cost $600M (yes, adjusted for inflation). The Uber app is 20-40 Golden Gate Bridges.

We don't realize it because these things are so immaterial, and they seem so small stuck behind the glass of our phones — but software has been very, very expensive. I bet that if you were to do the same math for Google, Microsoft Windows, or iOS, you'd land on something closer to $100B.

Each of these companies has voted with their wallet — they need a lot more software, and are willing to pay *a lot* of money to get it.

That makes sense when you consider what software is — it's just rules and logic. There is no hard coded number anywhere specifying the maximum amount of logic that a civilization can use — my contention is that the more, the better.

Now the question left is — sure, we'll need an infinite amount of software. But won't AI write it all?

And here, I appeal to good old comparative advantage. If you have an asset producing billions of dollars an hour (AI engineers will), it will rationally make sense to pay someone 6 figures who can improve this system by 1e5 / 1e9 = 0.0001%.

I have a hard time thinking human engineers won't be able to cross that hurdle — they'll just operate on a different layer of abstraction, just like we don't code in machine code anymore, but in high-level languages.

And even those still require technical skills — Interestingly, this still applies even in the extreme scenario of "no code," aiming to let even your grandmother build applications. But I think we've all learnt by now that even the no-codest of the no-code products require someone with a programming mindset to build great products.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Want to learn what I wish I would’ve known when I started growing products?

👉 Join me and @kate_syuma tomorrow for a no-fluff webinar unpacking a handful of the approaches we’ve actually used to break through for products like Miro and Coda.

https://t.co/4ZgLzXxGJ5

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Hands-down: Onboarding is one of the *highest* leverage areas to unlock sustainable growth for most products.

Here’s why (and what you can do about it now! 👇)

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Activation is littered with a gauntlet of slippery challenges:

❌“Do I have the right activation metric?”

❌ “Are we actually focused on the wrong problems that block users from hitting the ground running?”

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

@nateliason fascinating. how did you approach tracking your reactions to different foods and how long did this take to build conviction?

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

@DKossnick @coda_hq @shishirmehrotra @lshackleton What a legendary run! Incredibly thankful to have learned from your leadership, craft, and creativity at Coda.

Holding my breath to see what’s next for you. I know it’ll be remarkable!

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

These artifacts were a blast to put together with the @reforge team.

I pulled most of these examples from internal work that hasn’t been public… until now!

[Brian Balfour @bbalfour]

I’ve secretly 🤫 been using a new product every week that is now live for everyone.

Today we are launching Reforge Artifacts and it’s completely free 🆓. Take a look 👇

Artifacts let you access the real work from those who have done it before, so you’ll never have to start from scratch. Some examples:

👆 Product Review Systems from Casey Winters, Tom Willerer, and others

🧠 Product Strategy and Roadmaps from Adam Fishman and Sachin Rekhi

🪜 Career Leveling Guides from Julie Zhou, Barron Ernst, and Kevan Lee

🧪 Growth + Product Experiments from Lauryn Isford, Matt Woods, and Ben Williams

📈 Quantitative analyses from John Egan, Dan Wolchonok, and Yousuf Bhaijee

🧐 User research projects from Amber Rucker, Mike Fiorillo, Shelly Eisen-Livneh

And sooooo many more.

You can sign up here → https://t.co/zcearP8HBR

Preview some artifacts here → https://t.co/VJpV8Q3HoT

These are NOT blank templates. Artifacts are the real work that contain the substance, nuance, insights, and realness.

Here are a few things you can do with Artifacts:

🔎 Find artifacts relevant to what you are working on
💡 Access notes from the creator about the story, lessons, and insights
⭐️ Save artifacts and share them with colleagues
🔁 Remix artifacts to create your own version

Artifacts is such a simple but powerful idea I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before. I’ve wasted so much time recreating something thousands of others have already done.

Artifacts can help accelerate a lot of work (like open-source code) by enabling building on each other.

Would love to know what you think.

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Huge shoutout to the team for shipping this delightful touch.

Feel free to take a peek: https://t.co/hv886oV0nQ

[Matt Woods 🤙 @matopher]

Absolutely loving my updated PM portfolio hosted on @coda_hq — now complete with a brand new custom icon!