October 18, 2022 ⢠#
Often you hear product teams talking about their roadmap in investor-like terms. Managing their upcoming initiatives like a financial portfolio, distributing their bets among things of various categories, sizes, and risks â like a portfolio manager would do to hedge risk. Umang Jaipuria makes the case that product teams should be inverting this logic: concentrating their bets (and therefore, money and energy) behind fewer things.
All product teams should have ONE bet they are making, and put all their effort into making that successful. The fact of the matter is that a product team is not an entire company. A product team does not need to âsurviveâ against all odds and hedge their risk. A product team needs to build a successful product. Even if that means failing after a while and having to start anew or go into maintenance mode or join other product teams that need to scale (that dreaded phrase âget reorg-edâ).
He also references the world-class investor Stanley Druckenmiller, and his similar philosophy thatâs helped him to generate ridiculous returns over his investing career through this type of extremely calculated, concentrated betting:
âYeah itâs completely contrary to what they teach in business school which is if youâre highly diversified you have less risk than if youâre highly concentrated. I donât believe that at all. As an investor when I think most people get in the most trouble is when they have stale longs or stale shorts. When youâve got 15-20 percent of your asset base or sometimes in macro positions Iâll have two or three hundred percent. Believe me theyâre not getting stale and you have to have ruthless discipline and youâre coming in every day just to quote Andy Grove âyou could not be more paranoidâ and youâre constantly reevaluating.â
As Druckenmiller has famously said, âItâs not whether youâre right or wrong itâs how much you make when youâre right and how much you lose when youâre wrong.â
September 12, 2020 ⢠#
An option is something you can do but donât have to do. All our product ideas are exactly that: options we may exercise in some future cycleâor never.
Without a roadmap, without a stated plan, we can completely change course without paying a penalty. We donât set any expectations internally or externally that these things are actually going to happen.
I know Basecamp is always the industry outlier with these things, but the thoughts on roadmaps are probably more true for many companies in reality than weâd all like to admit. We tend to look at things in a sort of hybrid way â not a fully baked roadmap with timelines, but a general list of roughly-sorted candidates that gain more and more momentum as we shape them out and prioritize. Every product team has a list of ideas 10x+ longer than anything they can build, so optionality is required to make the right decisions.
Defense tech startup Andurilâs latest hardware, the Ghost UAV system. A pretty impressive and unique modular design for an unmanned platform.
Roam launched an interesting new feature (Î) for setting up spaced repetition flows in your graph.