The Spot #5

Welcome to the SPOT. Your weekly newsletter of the top 3 strategy, product, operations, and tech articles from around the web for PMs at small software companies. Here are this week’s articles:

The Best Metric for Determining Quantitative Product-Market Fit

Somewhere along the way, asking “How disappointed would you be if [your product here] did not exist?” became the de-facto way of measuring product market fit. That’s cool and all. It can be an extremely useful question to ask with enlightening results.

But, the results can be flawed. Like most surveys, a percentage of people will not answer it, it takes only a snapshot in time, and well, tbh, some people will just lie. Using a metric like retention by cohort eliminates the response bias and instead measures fit based on whether your customers stick with you or not.

22 Principles for Product Managers

Another aggregated list of advice for PMs?!?! You bet.

My favorite directive of this whole list? Your job as a PM is to create clarity. Clear goals. Clear metrics. Clear vision. Clear communication. Clear designs. Clear requirements. That’s your job. Do it well and everything else is easy.

Don’t Create Chaos

Are you creating more chaos than you’re sucking up? Does everyone leave your meetings with a solid plan forward? Or do they come out more confused than before the meeting started? If it’s the latter, read this article.

Oh, and “The fancier your title, the more you must avoid causing chaos”. So if you’re a CTO/CPO/CEO/etc, do yourself a favor and stop making off-the-cuff suggestions without caveats - or don’t be surprised when your team takes what you say for gospel and gets delayed building something they think you want you mentioned in a meeting…once.