More on Society & Culture
Scott Galloway
3 years ago
Don't underestimate the foolish
ZERO GRACE/ZERO MALICE
Big companies and wealthy people make stupid mistakes too.
Your ancestors kept snakes and drank bad water. You (probably) don't because you've learnt from their failures via instinct+, the ultimate life-lessons streaming network in your head. Instincts foretell the future. If you approach a lion, it'll eat you. Our society's nuanced/complex decisions have surpassed instinct. Human growth depends on how we handle these issues. 80% of people believe they are above-average drivers, yet few believe they make many incorrect mistakes that make them risky. Stupidity hurts others like death. Basic Laws of Human Stupidity by Carlo Cipollas:
Everyone underestimates the prevalence of idiots in our society.
Any other trait a person may have has no bearing on how likely they are to be stupid.
A dumb individual is one who harms someone without benefiting themselves and may even lose money in the process.
Non-dumb people frequently underestimate how destructively powerful stupid people can be.
The most dangerous kind of person is a moron.
Professor Cippola defines stupid as bad for you and others. We underestimate the corporate world's and seemingly successful people's ability to make bad judgments that harm themselves and others. Success is an intoxication that makes you risk-aggressive and blurs your peripheral vision.
Stupid companies and decisions:
Big Dumber
Big-company bad ideas have more bulk and inertia. The world's most valuable company recently showed its board a VR headset. Jony Ive couldn't destroy Apple's terrible idea in 2015. Mr. Ive said that VR cut users off from the outer world, made them seem outdated, and lacked practical uses. Ives' design team doubted users would wear headsets for lengthy periods.
VR has cost tens of billions of dollars over a decade to prove nobody wants it. The next great SaaS startup will likely come from Florence, not Redmond or San Jose.
Apple Watch and Airpods have made the Cupertino company the world's largest jewelry maker. 10.5% of Apple's income, or $38 billion, comes from wearables in 2021. (seven times the revenue of Tiffany & Co.). Jewelry makes you more appealing and useful. Airpods and Apple Watch do both.
Headsets make you less beautiful and useful and promote isolation, loneliness, and unhappiness among American teenagers. My sons pretend they can't hear or see me when on their phones. VR headsets lack charisma.
Coinbase disclosed a plan to generate division and tension within its workplace weeks after Apple was pitched $2,000 smokes. The crypto-trading platform is piloting a program that rates staff after every interaction. If a coworker says anything you don't like, you should tell them how to improve. Everyone gets a 110-point scorecard. Coworkers should evaluate a person's rating while deciding whether to listen to them. It's ridiculous.
Organizations leverage our superpower of cooperation. This encourages non-cooperation, period. Bridgewater's founder Ray Dalio designed the approach to promote extreme transparency. Dalio has 223 billion reasons his managerial style works. There's reason to suppose only a small group of people, largely traders, will endure a granular scorecard. Bridgewater has 20% first-year turnover. Employees cry in bathrooms, and sex scandals are settled by ignoring individuals with poor believability levels. Coinbase might take solace that the stock is 80% below its initial offering price.
Poor Stupid
Fools' ledgers are valuable. More valuable are lists of foolish rich individuals.
Robinhood built a $8 billion corporation on financial ignorance. The firm's median account value is $240, and its stock has dropped 75% since last summer. Investors, customers, and society lose. Stupid. Luna published a comparable list on the blockchain, grew to $41 billion in market cap, then plummeted.
A podcast presenter is recruiting dentists and small-business owners to invest in Elon Musk's Twitter takeover. Investors pay a 7% fee and 10% of the upside for the chance to buy Twitter at a 35% premium to the current price. The proposal legitimizes CNBC's Trade Like Chuck advertising (Chuck made $4,600 into $460,000 in two years). This is stupid because it adds to the Twitter deal's desperation. Mr. Musk made an impression when he urged his lawyers to develop a legal rip-cord (There are bots on the platform!) to abandon the share purchase arrangement (for less than they are being marketed by the podcaster). Rolls-Royce may pay for this list of the dumb affluent because it includes potential Cullinan buyers.
Worst company? Flowcarbon, founded by WeWork founder Adam Neumann, operates at the convergence of carbon and crypto to democratize access to offsets and safeguard the earth's natural carbon sinks. Can I get an ayahuasca Big Gulp?
Neumann raised $70 million with their yogababble drink. More than half of the consideration came from selling GNT. Goddess Nature Token. I hope the company gets an S-1. Or I'll start a decentralized AI Meta Renewable NFTs company. My Community Based Ebitda coin will fund the company. Possible.
Stupidity inside oneself
This weekend, I was in NYC with my boys. My 14-year-old disappeared. He's realized I'm not cool and is mad I let the charade continue. When out with his dad, he likes to stroll home alone and depart before me. Friends told me hell would return, but I was surprised by how fast the eye roll came.
Not so with my 11-year-old. We went to The Edge, a Hudson Yards observation platform where you can see the city from 100 storeys up for $38. This is hell's seventh ring. Leaning into your boys' interests is key to engaging them (dad tip). Neither loves Crossfit, WW2 history, or antitrust law.
We take selfies on the Thrilling Glass Floor he spots. Dad, there's a bar! Coke? I nod, he rushes to the bar, stops, runs back for money, and sprints back. Sitting on stone seats, drinking Atlanta Champagne, he turns at me and asks, Isn't this amazing? I'll never reach paradise.
Later that night, the lads are asleep and I've had two Zacapas and Cokes. I SMS some friends about my day and how I feel about sons/fatherhood/etc. How I did. They responded and approached. The next morning, I'm sober, have distance from my son, and feel ashamed by my texts. Less likely to impulsively share my emotions with others. Stupid again.
Scott Galloway
3 years ago
First Health
ZERO GRACE/ZERO MALICE
Amazon's purchase of One Medical could speed up American healthcare
The U.S. healthcare industry is a 7-ton seal bleeding at sea. Predators are circling. Unearned margin: price increases relative to inflation without quality improvements. Amazon is the 11-foot megalodon with 7-inch teeth. Amazon is no longer circling... but attacking.
In 2020 dollars, per capita U.S. healthcare spending increased from $2,968 in 1980 to $12,531. The result is a massive industry with 13% of the nation's workers and a fifth of GDP.
Doctor No
In 40 years, healthcare has made progress. From 73.7 in 1980 to 78.8 in 2019, life expectancy rose (before Covid knocked it back down a bit). Pharmacological therapies have revolutionized, and genetic research is paying off. The financial return, improvement split by cost increases, is terrible. No country has expense rises like the U.S., and no one spends as much per capita as we do. Developed countries have longer life expectancies, healthier populations, and less economic hardship.
Two-thirds of U.S. personal bankruptcies are due to medical expenses and/or missed work. Mom or Dad getting cancer could bankrupt many middle-class American families. 40% of American adults delayed or skipped needed care due to cost. Every healthcare improvement seems to have a downside. Same pharmacological revolution that helped millions caused opioid epidemic. Our results are poor in many areas: The U.S. has a high infant mortality rate.
Healthcare is the second-worst retail industry in the country. Gas stations are #1. Imagine walking into a Best Buy to buy a TV and a Blue Shirt associate requests you fill out the same 14 pages of paperwork you filled out yesterday. Then you wait in a crowded room until they call you, 20 minutes after the scheduled appointment you were asked to arrive early for, to see the one person in the store who can talk to you about TVs, who has 10 minutes for you. The average emergency room wait time in New York is 6 hours and 10 minutes.
If it's bad for the customer, it's worse for the business. Physicians spend 27% of their time helping patients; 49% on EHRs. Documentation, order entry, billing, and inbox management. Spend a decade getting an M.D., then become a bureaucrat.
No industry better illustrates scale diseconomies. If we got the same return on healthcare spending as other countries, we'd all live to 100. We could spend less, live longer and healthier, and pay off the national debt in 15 years. U.S. healthcare is the worst ever.
What now? Competition is at the heart of capitalism, the worst system of its kind.
Priority Time
Amazon is buying One Medical for $3.9 billion. I think this deal will liberate society. Two years in, I think One Medical is great. When I got Covid, I pressed the One Medical symbol on my phone; a nurse practitioner prescribed Paxlovid and told me which pharmacies had it in stock.
Amazon enables the company's vision. One Medical's stock is down to $10 from $40 at the start of 2021. Last year, it lost $250 million and needs cash (Amazon has $60 billion). ONEM must grow. The service has 736,000 members. Half of U.S. households have Amazon Prime. Finally, delivery. One Medical is a digital health/physical office hybrid, but you must pick up medication at the pharmacy. Upgrade your Paxlovid delivery time after a remote consultation. Amazon's core competency means it'll happen. Healthcare speed and convenience will feel alien.
It's been a long, winding road to disruption. Amazon, JPMorgan, and Berkshire Hathaway formed Haven four years ago to provide better healthcare for their 1.5 million employees. It rocked healthcare stocks the morning of the press release, but folded in 2021.
Amazon Care is an employee-focused service. Home-delivered virtual health services and nurses. It's doing well, expanding nationwide, and providing healthcare for other companies. Hilton is Amazon Care's biggest customer. The acquisition of One Medical will bring 66 million Prime households capital, domain expertise, and billing infrastructure. Imagine:
"Alexa, I'm hot and my back hurts."
"Connecting you to a Prime doctor now."
Want to vs. Have to
I predicted Amazon entering healthcare years ago. Why? For the same reason Apple is getting into auto. Amazon's P/E is 56, double Walmart's. The corporation must add $250 billion in revenue over the next five years to retain its share price. White-label clothes or smart home products won't generate as much revenue. It must enter a huge market without scale, operational competence, and data skills.
Current Situation
Healthcare reform benefits both consumers and investors. In 2015, healthcare services had S&P 500-average multiples. The market is losing faith in public healthcare businesses' growth. Healthcare services have lower EV/EBITDA multiples than the S&P 500.
Amazon isn't the only prey-hunter. Walmart and Alibaba are starting pharmacies. Uber is developing medical transportation. Private markets invested $29 billion in telehealth last year, up 95% from 2020.
The pandemic accelerated telehealth, the immediate unlock. After the first positive Covid case in the U.S., services that had to be delivered in person shifted to Zoom... We lived. We grew. Video house calls continued after in-person visits were allowed. McKinsey estimates telehealth visits are 38 times pre-pandemic levels. Doctors adopted the technology, regulators loosened restrictions, and patients saved time. We're far from remote surgery, but many patient visits are unnecessary. A study of 40 million patients during lockdown found that for chronic disease patients, online visits didn't affect outcomes. This method of care will only improve.
Amazon's disruption will be significant and will inspire a flood of capital, startups, and consumer brands. Mark Cuban launched a pharmacy that eliminates middlemen in January. Outcome? A 90-day supply of acid-reflux medication costs $17. Medicare could have saved $3.6 billion by buying generic drugs from Cuban's pharmacy. Other apex predators will look at different limbs of the carcass for food. Nike could enter healthcare via orthopedics, acupuncture, and chiropractic. LVMH, L'Oréal, and Estée Lauder may launch global plastic surgery brands. Hilton and Four Seasons may open hospitals. Lennar and Pulte could build "Active Living" communities that Nana would leave feet first, avoiding the expense and tragedy of dying among strangers.
Risks
Privacy matters: HIV status is different from credit card and billing address. Most customers (60%) feel fine sharing personal health data via virtual technologies, though. Unavoidable. 85% of doctors believe data-sharing and interoperability will become the norm. Amazon is the most trusted tech company for handling personal data. Not Meta: Amazon.
What about antitrust, then?
Amazon should be required to spin off AWS and/or Amazon Fulfillment and banned from promoting its own products. It should be allowed to acquire hospitals. One Medical's $3.9 billion acquisition is a drop in the bucket compared to UnitedHealth's $498 billion market valuation.
Antitrust enforcement shouldn't assume some people/firms are good/bad. It should recognize that competition is good and focus on making markets more competitive in each deal. The FTC should force asset divestitures in e-commerce, digital marketing, and social media. These companies can also promote competition in a social ill.
U.S. healthcare makes us fat, depressed, and broke. Competition has produced massive value and prosperity across most of our economy.
Dear Amazon … bring it.
Sam Warain
2 years ago
The Brilliant Idea Behind Kim Kardashian's New Private Equity Fund
Kim Kardashian created Skky Partners. Consumer products, internet & e-commerce, consumer media, hospitality, and luxury are company targets.
Some call this another Kardashian publicity gimmick.
This maneuver is brilliance upon closer inspection. Why?
1) Kim has amassed a sizable social media fan base:
Over 320 million Instagram and 70 million Twitter users follow Kim Kardashian.
Kim Kardashian's Instagram account ranks 8th. Three Kardashians in top 10 is ridiculous.
This gives her access to consumer data. She knows what people are discussing. Investment firms need this data.
Quality, not quantity, of her followers matters. Studies suggest that her following are more engaged than Selena Gomez and Beyonce's.
Kim's followers are worth roughly $500 million to her brand, according to a research. They trust her and buy what she recommends.
2) She has a special aptitude for identifying trends.
Kim Kardashian can sense trends.
She's always ahead of fashion and beauty trends. She's always trying new things, too. She doesn't mind making mistakes when trying anything new. Her desire to experiment makes her a good business prospector.
Kim has also created a lifestyle brand that followers love. Kim is an entrepreneur, mom, and role model, not just a reality TV star or model. She's established a brand around her appearance, so people want to buy her things.
Her fragrance collection has sold over $100 million since its 2009 introduction, and her Sears apparel line did over $200 million in its first year.
SKIMS is her latest $3.2bn brand. She can establish multibillion-dollar firms with her enormous distribution platform.
Early founders would kill for Kim Kardashian's network.
Making great products is hard, but distribution is more difficult. — David Sacks, All-in-Podcast
3) She can delegate the financial choices to Jay Sammons, one of the greatest in the industry.
Jay Sammons is well-suited to develop Kim Kardashian's new private equity fund.
Sammons has 16 years of consumer investing experience at Carlyle. This will help Kardashian invest in consumer-facing enterprises.
Sammons has invested in Supreme and Beats Electronics, both of which have grown significantly. Sammons' track record and competence make him the obvious choice.
Kim Kardashian and Jay Sammons have joined forces to create a new business endeavor. The agreement will increase Kardashian's commercial empire. Sammons can leverage one of the world's most famous celebrities.
“Together we hope to leverage our complementary expertise to build the next generation consumer and media private equity firm” — Kim Kardashian
Kim Kardashian is a successful businesswoman. She developed an empire by leveraging social media to connect with fans. By developing a global lifestyle brand, she has sold things and experiences that have made her one of the world's richest celebrities.
She's a shrewd entrepreneur who knows how to maximize on herself and her image.
Imagine how much interest Kim K will bring to private equity and venture capital.
I'm curious about the company's growth.
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Shruti Mishra
3 years ago
How to get 100k profile visits on Twitter each month without spending a dime
As a marketer, I joined Twitter on August 31, 2022 to use it.
Growth has been volatile, causing up-and-down engagements. 500 followers in 11 days.
I met amazing content creators, marketers, and people.
Those who use Twitter may know that one-liners win the algorithm, especially if they're funny or humorous, but as a marketer I can't risk posting content that my audience won't like.
I researched, learned some strategies, and A/B tested; some worked, some didn't.
In this article, I share what worked for me so you can do the same.
Thanks for reading!
Let's check my Twitter stats.
Tweets: how many tweets I sent in the first 28 days.
A user may be presented with a Tweet in their timeline or in search results.
In-person visits how many times my Twitter profile was viewed in the first 28 days.
Mentions: the number of times a tweet has mentioned my name.
Number of followers: People who were following me
Getting 500 Twitter followers isn't difficult.
Not easy, but doable.
Follow these steps to begin:
Determine your content pillars in step 1.
My formula is Growth = Content + Marketing + Community.
I discuss growth strategies.
My concept for growth is : 1. Content = creating / writing + sharing content in my niche. 2. Marketing = Marketing everything in business + I share my everyday learnings in business, marketing & entrepreneurship. 3. Community = Building community of like minded individuals (Also,I share how to’s) + supporting marketers to build & grow through community building.
Identify content pillars to create content for your audience.
2. Make your profile better
Create a profile picture. Your recognition factor is this.
Professional headshots are worthwhile.
This tool can help you create a free, eye-catching profile pic.
Use a niche-appropriate avatar if you don't want to show your face.
2. Create a bio that converts well mainly because first impressions count.
what you're sharing + why + +social proof what are you making
Be brief and precise. (155 characters)
3. Configure your banner
Banners complement profile pictures.
Use this space to explain what you do and how Twitter followers can benefit.
Canva's Twitter header maker is free.
Birdy can test multiple photo, bio, and banner combinations to optimize your profile.
Versions A and B of your profile should be completed.
Find the version that converts the best.
Use the profile that converts the best.
4. Special handle
If your username/handle is related to your niche, it will help you build authority and presence among your audience. Mine on Twitter is @marketershruti.
5. Participate expertly
Proficiently engage while you'll have no audience at first. Borrow your dream audience for free.
Steps:
Find a creator who has the audience you want.
Activate their post notifications and follow them.
Add a valuable comment first.
6. Create fantastic content
Use:
Medium (Read articles about your topic.)
Podcasts (Listen to experts on your topics)
YouTube (Follow channels in your niche)
Tweet what?
Listicle ( Hacks, Books, Tools, Podcasts)
Lessons (Teach your audience how to do 1 thing)
Inspirational (Inspire people to take action)
Consistent writing?
You MUST plan ahead and schedule your Tweets.
Use a scheduling tool that is effective for you; hypefury is mine.
Lastly, consistency is everything that attracts growth. After optimizing your profile, stay active to gain followers, engagements, and clients.
If you found this helpful, please like and comment below.
Ashraful Islam
4 years ago
Clean API Call With React Hooks
| Photo by Juanjo Jaramillo on Unsplash |
Calling APIs is the most common thing to do in any modern web application. When it comes to talking with an API then most of the time we need to do a lot of repetitive things like getting data from an API call, handling the success or error case, and so on.
When calling tens of hundreds of API calls we always have to do those tedious tasks. We can handle those things efficiently by putting a higher level of abstraction over those barebone API calls, whereas in some small applications, sometimes we don’t even care.
The problem comes when we start adding new features on top of the existing features without handling the API calls in an efficient and reusable manner. In that case for all of those API calls related repetitions, we end up with a lot of repetitive code across the whole application.
In React, we have different approaches for calling an API. Nowadays mostly we use React hooks. With React hooks, it’s possible to handle API calls in a very clean and consistent way throughout the application in spite of whatever the application size is. So let’s see how we can make a clean and reusable API calling layer using React hooks for a simple web application.
I’m using a code sandbox for this blog which you can get here.
import "./styles.css";
import React, { useEffect, useState } from "react";
import axios from "axios";
export default function App() {
const [posts, setPosts] = useState(null);
const [error, setError] = useState("");
const [loading, setLoading] = useState(false);
useEffect(() => {
handlePosts();
}, []);
const handlePosts = async () => {
setLoading(true);
try {
const result = await axios.get(
"https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts"
);
setPosts(result.data);
} catch (err) {
setError(err.message || "Unexpected Error!");
} finally {
setLoading(false);
}
};
return (
<div className="App">
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
{loading && <p>Posts are loading!</p>}
{error && <p>{error}</p>}
<ul>
{posts?.map((post) => (
<li key={post.id}>{post.title}</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
</div>
);
}
I know the example above isn’t the best code but at least it’s working and it’s valid code. I will try to improve that later. For now, we can just focus on the bare minimum things for calling an API.
Here, you can try to get posts data from JsonPlaceholer. Those are the most common steps we follow for calling an API like requesting data, handling loading, success, and error cases.
If we try to call another API from the same component then how that would gonna look? Let’s see.
500: Internal Server Error
Now it’s going insane! For calling two simple APIs we’ve done a lot of duplication. On a top-level view, the component is doing nothing but just making two GET requests and handling the success and error cases. For each request, it’s maintaining three states which will periodically increase later if we’ve more calls.
Let’s refactor to make the code more reusable with fewer repetitions.
Step 1: Create a Hook for the Redundant API Request Codes
Most of the repetitions we have done so far are about requesting data, handing the async things, handling errors, success, and loading states. How about encapsulating those things inside a hook?
The only unique things we are doing inside handleComments and handlePosts are calling different endpoints. The rest of the things are pretty much the same. So we can create a hook that will handle the redundant works for us and from outside we’ll let it know which API to call.
500: Internal Server Error
Here, this request function is identical to what we were doing on the handlePosts and handleComments. The only difference is, it’s calling an async function apiFunc which we will provide as a parameter with this hook. This apiFunc is the only independent thing among any of the API calls we need.
With hooks in action, let’s change our old codes in App component, like this:
500: Internal Server Error
How about the current code? Isn’t it beautiful without any repetitions and duplicate API call handling things?
Let’s continue our journey from the current code. We can make App component more elegant. Now it knows a lot of details about the underlying library for the API call. It shouldn’t know that. So, here’s the next step…
Step 2: One Component Should Take Just One Responsibility
Our App component knows too much about the API calling mechanism. Its responsibility should just request the data. How the data will be requested under the hood, it shouldn’t care about that.
We will extract the API client-related codes from the App component. Also, we will group all the API request-related codes based on the API resource. Now, this is our API client:
import axios from "axios";
const apiClient = axios.create({
// Later read this URL from an environment variable
baseURL: "https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com"
});
export default apiClient;
All API calls for comments resource will be in the following file:
import client from "./client";
const getComments = () => client.get("/comments");
export default {
getComments
};
All API calls for posts resource are placed in the following file:
import client from "./client";
const getPosts = () => client.get("/posts");
export default {
getPosts
};
Finally, the App component looks like the following:
import "./styles.css";
import React, { useEffect } from "react";
import commentsApi from "./api/comments";
import postsApi from "./api/posts";
import useApi from "./hooks/useApi";
export default function App() {
const getPostsApi = useApi(postsApi.getPosts);
const getCommentsApi = useApi(commentsApi.getComments);
useEffect(() => {
getPostsApi.request();
getCommentsApi.request();
}, []);
return (
<div className="App">
{/* Post List */}
<div>
<h1>Posts</h1>
{getPostsApi.loading && <p>Posts are loading!</p>}
{getPostsApi.error && <p>{getPostsApi.error}</p>}
<ul>
{getPostsApi.data?.map((post) => (
<li key={post.id}>{post.title}</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
{/* Comment List */}
<div>
<h1>Comments</h1>
{getCommentsApi.loading && <p>Comments are loading!</p>}
{getCommentsApi.error && <p>{getCommentsApi.error}</p>}
<ul>
{getCommentsApi.data?.map((comment) => (
<li key={comment.id}>{comment.name}</li>
))}
</ul>
</div>
</div>
);
}
Now it doesn’t know anything about how the APIs get called. Tomorrow if we want to change the API calling library from axios to fetch or anything else, our App component code will not get affected. We can just change the codes form client.js This is the beauty of abstraction.
Apart from the abstraction of API calls, Appcomponent isn’t right the place to show the list of the posts and comments. It’s a high-level component. It shouldn’t handle such low-level data interpolation things.
So we should move this data display-related things to another low-level component. Here I placed those directly in the App component just for the demonstration purpose and not to distract with component composition-related things.
Final Thoughts
The React library gives the flexibility for using any kind of third-party library based on the application’s needs. As it doesn’t have any predefined architecture so different teams/developers adopted different approaches to developing applications with React. There’s nothing good or bad. We choose the development practice based on our needs/choices. One thing that is there beyond any choices is writing clean and maintainable codes.
Looi Qin En
3 years ago
I polled 52 product managers to find out what qualities make a great Product Manager
Great technology opens up an universe of possibilities.
Need a friend? WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, etc.
Traveling? AirBnB, Expedia, Google Flights, etc.
Money transfer? Use digital banking, e-wallet, or crypto applications
Products inspire us. How do we become great?
I asked product managers in my network:
What does it take to be a great product manager?
52 product managers from 40+ prominent IT businesses in Southeast Asia responded passionately. Many of the PMs I've worked with have built fantastic products, from unicorns (Lazada, Tokopedia, Ovo) to incumbents (Google, PayPal, Experian, WarnerMedia) to growing (etaily, Nium, Shipper).
TL;DR:
Soft talents are more important than hard skills. Technical expertise was hardly ever stressed by product managers, and empathy was mentioned more than ten times. Janani from Xendit expertly recorded the moment. A superb PM must comprehend that their empathy for the feelings of their users must surpass all logic and data.
Constant attention to the needs of the user. Many people concur that the closer a PM gets to their customer/user, the more likely it is that the conclusion will be better. There were almost 30 references to customers and users. Focusing on customers has the advantage because it is hard to overshoot, as Rajesh from Lazada puts it best.
Setting priorities is invaluable. Prioritization is essential because there are so many problems that a PM must deal with every day. My favorite quotation on this is from Rakuten user Yee Jie. Viki, A competent product manager extinguishes fires. A good product manager lets things burn and then prioritizes.
This summary isn't enough to capture what excellent PMs claim it requires. Read below!
What qualities make a successful product manager?
Themed quotes are alphabetized by author.
Embrace your user/customer
Aeriel Dela Paz, Rainmaking Venture Architect, ex-GCash Product Head
Great PMs know what customers need even when they don’t say it directly. It’s about reading between the lines and going through the numbers to address that need.
Anders Nordahl, OrkestraSCS's Product Manager
Understanding the vision of your customer is as important as to get the customer to buy your vision
Angel Mendoza, MetaverseGo's Product Head
Most people think that to be a great product manager, you must have technical know-how. It’s textbook and I do think it is helpful to some extent, but for me the secret sauce is EMPATHY — the ability to see and feel things from someone else’s perspective. You can’t create a solution without deeply understanding the problem.
Senior Product Manager, Tokopedia
Focus on delivering value and helping people (consumer as well as colleague) and everything else will follow
Darren Lau, Deloitte Digital's Head of Customer Experience
Start with the users, and work backwards. Don’t have a solution looking for a problem
Darryl Tan, Grab Product Manager
I would say that a great product manager is able to identify the crucial problems to solve through strong user empathy and synthesis of insights
Diego Perdana, Kitalulus Senior Product Manager
I think to be a great product manager you need to be obsessed with customer problems and most important is solve the right problem with the right solution
Senior Product Manager, AirAsia
Lot of common sense + Customer Obsession. The most important role of a Product manager is to bring clarity of a solution. Your product is good if it solves customer problems. Your product is great if it solves an eco-system problem and disrupts the business in a positive way.
Edward Xie, Mastercard Managing Consultant, ex-Shopee Product Manager
Perfect your product, but be prepared to compromise for right users
AVP Product, Shipper
For me, a great product manager need to be rational enough to find the business opportunities while obsessing the customers.
Janani Gopalakrishnan is a senior product manager of a stealth firm.
While as a good PM it’s important to be data-driven, to be a great PM one needs to understand that their empathy for their users’ emotions must exceed all logic and data. Great PMs also make these product discussions thrive within the team by intently listening to all the members thoughts and influence the team’s skin in the game positively.
Director, Product Management, Indeed
Great product managers put their users first. They discover problems that matter most to their users and inspire their team to find creative solutions.
Grab's Senior Product Manager Lakshay Kalra
Product management is all about finding and solving most important user problems
Quipper's Mega Puji Saraswati
First of all, always remember the value of “user first” to solve what user really needs (the main problem) for guidance to arrange the task priority and develop new ideas. Second, ownership. Treat the product as your “2nd baby”, and the team as your “2nd family”. Third, maintain a good communication, both horizontally and vertically. But on top of those, always remember to have a work — life balance, and know exactly the priority in life :)
Senior Product Manager, Prosa.AI Miswanto Miswanto
A great Product Manager is someone who can be the link between customer needs with the readiness and flexibility of the team. So that it can provide, build, and produce a product that is useful and helps the community to carry out their daily activities. And He/She can improve product quality ongoing basis or continuous to help provide solutions for users or our customer.
Lead Product Manager, Tokopedia, Oriza Wahyu Utami
Be a great listener, be curious and be determined. every great product manager have the ability to listen the pain points and understand the problems, they are always curious on the users feedback, and they also very determined to look for the solutions that benefited users and the business.
99 Group CPO Rajesh Sangati
The advantage of focusing on customers: it’s impossible to overshoot
Ray Jang, founder of Scenius, formerly of ByteDance
The difference between good and great product managers is that great product managers are willing to go the unsexy and unglamorous extra mile by rolling up their sleeves and ironing out all minutiae details of the product such that when the user uses the product, they can’t help but say “This was made for me.”
BCG Digital Ventures' Sid Narayanan
Great product managers ensure that what gets built and shipped is at the intersection of what creates value for the customer and for the business that’s building the product…often times, especially in today’s highly liquid funding environment, the unit economics, aka ensuring that what gets shipped creates value for the business and is sustainable, gets overlooked
Stephanie Brownlee, BCG Digital Ventures Product Manager
There is software in the world that does more harm than good to people and society. Great Product Managers build products that solve problems not create problems
Experiment constantly
Delivery Hero's Abhishek Muralidharan
Embracing your failure is the key to become a great Product Manager
DeliveryHero's Anuraag Burman
Product Managers should be thick skinned to deal with criticism and the stomach to take risk and face failures.
DataSpark Product Head Apurva Lawale
Great product managers enjoy the creative process with their team to deliver intuitive user experiences to benefit users.
Dexter Zhuang, Xendit Product Manager
The key to creating winning products is building what customers want as quickly as you can — testing and learning along the way.
PayPal's Jay Ko
To me, great product managers always remain relentlessly curious. They are empathetic leaders and problem solvers that glean customer insights into building impactful products
Home Credit Philippines' Jedd Flores
Great Product Managers are the best dreamers; they think of what can be possible for the customers, for the company and the positive impact that it will have in the industry that they’re part of
Set priorities first, foremost, foremost.
HBO Go Product Manager Akshay Ishwar
Good product managers strive to balance the signal to noise ratio, Great product managers know when to turn the dials for each up exactly
Zuellig Pharma's Guojie Su
Have the courage to say no. Managing egos and request is never easy and rejecting them makes it harder but necessary to deliver the best value for the customers.
Ninja Van's John Prawira
(1) PMs should be able to ruthlessly prioritize. In order to be effective, PMs should anchor their product development process with their north stars (success metrics) and always communicate with a purpose. (2) User-first when validating assumptions. PMs should validate assumptions early and often to manage risk when leading initiatives with a focus on generating the highest impact to solving a particular user pain-point. We can’t expect a product/feature launch to be perfect (there might be bugs or we might not achieve our success metric — which is where iteration comes in), but we should try our best to optimize on user-experience earlier on.
Nium Product Manager Keika Sugiyama
I’d say a great PM holds the ability to balance ruthlessness and empathy at the same time. It’s easier said than done for sure!
ShopBack product manager Li Cai
Great product managers are like great Directors of movies. They do not create great products/movies by themselves. They deliver it by Defining, Prioritising, Energising the team to deliver what customers love.
Quincus' Michael Lim
A great product manager, keeps a pulse on the company’s big picture, identifies key problems, and discerns its rightful prioritization, is able to switch between the macro perspective to micro specifics, and communicates concisely with humility that influences naturally for execution
Mathieu François-Barseghian, SVP, Citi Ventures
“You ship your org chart”. This is Conway’s Law short version (1967!): the fundamental socio-technical driver behind innovation successes (Netflix) and failures (your typical bank). The hype behind micro-services is just another reflection of Conway’s Law
Mastercard's Regional Product Manager Nikhil Moorthy
A great PM should always look to build products which are scalable & viable , always keep the end consumer journey in mind. Keeping things simple & having a MVP based approach helps roll out products faster. One has to test & learn & then accordingly enhance / adapt, these are key to success
Rendy Andi, Tokopedia Product Manager
Articulate a clear vision and the path to get there, Create a process that delivers the best results and Be serious about customers.
Senior Product Manager, DANA Indonesia
Own the problem, not the solution — Great PMs are outstanding problem preventers. Great PMs are discerning about which problems to prevent, which problems to solve, and which problems not to solve
Tat Leong Seah, LionsBot International Senior UX Engineer, ex-ViSenze Product Manager
Prioritize outcomes for your users, not outputs of your system” or more succinctly “be agile in delivering value; not features”
Senior Product Manager, Rakuten Viki
A good product manager puts out fires. A great product manager lets fires burn and prioritize from there
acquire fundamental soft skills
Oracle NetSuite's Astrid April Dominguez
Personally, i believe that it takes grit, empathy, and optimistic mindset to become a great PM
Ovo Lead Product Manager Boy Al Idrus
Contrary to popular beliefs, being a great product manager doesn’t have anything to do with technicals, it sure plays a part but most important weapons are: understanding pain points of users, project management, sympathy in leadership and business critical skills; these 4 aspects would definitely help you to become a great product manager.
PwC Product Manager Eric Koh
Product managers need to be courageous to be successful. Courage is required to dive deep, solving big problems at its root and also to think far and dream big to achieve bold visions for your product
Ninja Van's Product Director
In my opinion the two most important ingredients to become a successful product manager is: 1. Strong critical thinking 2. Strong passion for the work. As product managers, we typically need to solve very complex problems where the answers are often very ambiguous. The work is tough and at times can be really frustrating. The 2 ingredients I mentioned earlier will be critical towards helping you to slowly discover the solution that may become a game changer.
PayPal's Lead Product Manager
A great PM has an eye of a designer, the brain of an engineer and the tongue of a diplomat
Product Manager Irene Chan
A great Product Manager is able to think like a CEO of the company. Visionary with Agile Execution in mind
Isabella Yamin, Rakuten Viki Product Manager
There is no one model of being a great product person but what I’ve observed from people I’ve had the privilege working with is an overflowing passion for the user problem, sprinkled with a knack for data and negotiation
Google product manager Jachin Cheng
Great product managers start with abundant intellectual curiosity and grow into a classic T-shape. Horizontally: generalists who range widely, communicate fluidly and collaborate easily cross-functionally, connect unexpected dots, and have the pulse both internally and externally across users, stakeholders, and ecosystem players. Vertically: deep product craftsmanship comes from connecting relentless user obsession with storytelling, business strategy with detailed features and execution, inspiring leadership with risk mitigation, and applying the most relevant tools to solving the right problems.
Jene Lim, Experian's Product Manager
3 Cs and 3 Rs. Critical thinking , Customer empathy, Creativity. Resourcefulness, Resilience, Results orientation.
Nirenj George, Envision Digital's Security Product Manager
A great product manager is someone who can lead, collaborate and influence different stakeholders around the product vision, and should be able to execute the product strategy based on customer insights, as well as take ownership of the product roadmap to create a greater impact on customers.
Grab's Lead Product Manager
Product Management is a multi-dimensional role that looks very different across each product team so each product manager has different challenges to deal with but what I have found common among great product managers is ability to create leverage through their efforts to drive outsized impacts for their products. This leverage is built using data with intuition, building consensus with stakeholders, empowering their teams and focussed efforts on needle moving work.
NCS Product Manager Umar Masagos
To be a great product manager, one must master both the science and art of Product Management. On one hand, you need have a strong understanding of the tools, metrics and data you need to drive your product. On the other hand, you need an in-depth understanding of your organization, your target market and target users, which is often the more challenging aspect to master.
M1 product manager Wei Jiao Keong
A great product manager is multi-faceted. First, you need to have the ability to see the bigger picture, yet have a keen eye for detail. Secondly, you are empathetic and is able to deliver products with exceptional user experience while being analytical enough to achieve business outcomes. Lastly, you are highly resourceful and independent yet comfortable working cross-functionally.
Yudha Utomo, ex-Senior Product Manager, Tokopedia
A great Product Manager is essentially an effective note-taker. In order to achieve the product goals, It is PM’s job to ensure objective has been clearly conveyed, efforts are assessed, and tasks are properly tracked and managed. PM can do this by having top-notch documentation skills.