Anthony writes an amazing newsletter called ‘The Product Person’, check it out!
For the people who would rather read than listen, there’s a transcript below. If you’d like to keep keyed in on more fun podcasts and general product stuff, subscribe to FoundIt!
Let’s begin with introductions!
I’m a Product Manager at Blissfully.com and student at New York University. For the last two years, I’ve launched some cool projects. I love building and launching products, and being able to create something and share with people is something I want to do forever. I also write a semi-weekly newsletter called the product person.
One cool thing I recently learned: An ultra marathoner tweeted, you can sprint, you can walk, you can crawl. But you can’t stop! That’s the concept I apply to my life, my products, and my newsletter.
On being the second PM in a startup
Every week I gain more responsibilities, and I get to work with the CPO/CTO and see strategy at play up close. You learn a lot working in that kind of environment. I’ve read lots of great stuff around product management, and when I actually got to do it, it was cool to see the patterns emerge and the theory actually panning out in practice. I had my moment of ‘holy crap, they were right!’. We’re growing fast at the startup and looking to double the team soon, so I expect for it to get more intense.
On having a STEM degree / coding experience
I’m now seeing the proper ways to do things, and I’ve worked on some large projects with experienced developers before, but this is different. I built a project called Chat Party with some developers I met on twitter. Attending zoom calls was getting tedious for me because of everyone talking, so I through, why not just focus on the chat and everyone’s facial expressions, and remove the audio altogether! It was silly, but we built it and it got traction.
Doing projects like these built a lot of experience with software engineering, and it got me working with experienced developers. This experience helped a lot with the startup I work with now.
On becoming a Product Manager
My experience building things on my own and my own projects helped me with being recognised as a Product Manager. There’s a bunch of functions with being a product manager that are not realised unless you’re part of a big team, but functions like UX design, product strategy, etc I definitely picked up with the projects I did. I could work these muscles out with my projects and then when I was in the startup, I wasn’t 100% new. Some things are still new, and since things are remote, having to gather knowledge with other departments is new and I’m working on the fly for these.
On what’s fun about product
I enjoy understanding problems and tinkering with different solutions that could work. Product design, tinkering with the design, and the entire process of coming up with a solution option, roadmapping, prototyping is fun. Things that involve users are especially enjoy.
It’s easier to work with small teams - everything is in your head, everyone’s close by and you can communicate quickly. With a larger team your brain isn’t always there, so you need to put things on paper.
On growing his newsletter, ‘The Product Person’
The initial traction I got was wild - I launched on Product Hunt and went from zero to 1600 in about 12 hours. At the end of the day it was 2000, and the end of the month it was 3600. I benefited a lot from the Product Hunt promotion.
That helped, but the downside was I didn’t really learn how to go after subscribers and how to keep that traction sustained. A lot of the time from 3600 to now was to learn that things don’t come easy, and you need to put in a lot of work to sustain subscribers.
Eventually I got to a good format where it’s a lot more sustainable, with short pro tips. There’s a lot of experimentation involved.I want to go into a growth phase where I promote it more once I land on a sustainable format. There was a point where I released an issue every Wednesday, and that meant pulling an all-nighter on Tuesday. My most popular issue, ‘how to write great microcopy’, took me about two weeks to write! Dropbox, Figma and the like now use it for their product teams, and that’s great! But that’s not sustainable - you can’t work for 2 weeks on an issue you need to write every week. So it’s been a learning experience in sustainability.
And then it somehow became more about me, and Anthony asked how I got into Machine Learning. Long story short, undergrad computer science, then postgrad economics, then startup in the ML space.
What tools do I use for ML? As a PM I don’t do much ML modeling. I spend most of my time understanding data and what it’s trying to tell us. My job is mostly to give requirements and understanding how to use it creatively (I did a post on it here).
Check out ‘The Product Person’ here.
If you’d like to keep keyed in on more podcasts and product stuff in general, subscribe to FoundIt!
Anthony Diké, student, serial product tinkerer and PM, in a generally fun podcast