It’s easier than ever to start being a Creator, but what happens when Creators want to stop?

Like many traditional business owners, Creators will work extremely hard over many years to build up an asset (their following). But unlike traditional business owners, when Creators are ready to move onto something new, it’s extremely difficult for them to sell their asset. This is especially difficult for creators that have their personality deeply tied into the asset they’ve built (e.g. a YouTuber that appears in all of the videos on their channel).

Simply put, Creator assets suffer from a liquidity problem.

Beyond the financial disadvantage of suffering from liquidity risk, this reality also can lead to the suffocating feeling of having created a “job you can’t quit”.

How might we make it easier for creators to exit or pivot?

The topic of product documentation has been on my mind recently, and I did some digging and found this old write-up in my personal archive of startup ideas. I’ve gone through and made a few minor edits/additions - as always any thoughts/feedback/criticism is welcome!

Self Service Scalable CX

Customer documentation is broken, confusion is the default experience. Every time a customer needs to email, chat, or call represents a failure in customer experience. Yet, we all see the proliferation of live chat widgets across the web. This represents both the poor state of documentation as well as a fundamental misunderstanding of how scalable CX can be provided.

The problem that customer documentation seeks to solve is to fill gaps in product knowledge. A perfect solution would empower every user with the required product knowledge when and where they need it. There are a few levers that every product can utilise to reduce this problem:

• Better product design (e.g. more intuitive UI, automate/abstract away confusing steps)

• More guidance in-app (pop ups, modals, tooltips, etc.)

• Better documentation (relevant, accurate, discoverable)

• Product training

As you can see, documentation is only one part of the solution.

However, there are certain products where documentation is a proportionally larger lever. One such area is API products, due to the lack of UI removing the ability to add in-app guidance". Here, quality of documentation is paramount. As an example, Stripe is well-known for their stellar developer experience, and this is predominantly driven by the quality of their developer documentation. For Stripe, developer documentation is their customer documentation as developers are their target customer.

The benefit of quality documentation is that it is infinitely scalable, great synchronous customer service on the other hand isn’t. Great documentation can be enjoyed by your customers forever. This is an example of the power of scalable CX, markets susceptible to bottom-up (self-service) sales will be won by companies with scalable CX. As PLG / Modern GTM continues to spread, this is especially pertinent.

There are many players already offering documentation platforms, knowledge bases, and other CX offerings. Many of these already have widgets that embed into websites for ease of access. The bottom-up growth loop for these customer communication platforms is simple: A customer integrates the widget, this widget is seen by their customers, a proportion of their customers also run their own sites, a proportion of these customers then sign up and integrate thereby restarting the loop. To be clear, this likely isn’t the only growth loop that these companies have.

The pricing of Intercom, Drift, Zendesk, Help Scout, etc. represents either an intentional move into the enterprise market or a fundamental misunderstanding of their growth loops (at least in the SMB market). This leaves an opening in the market for a new player to progressively bite off slices of functionality (e.g. feedback, checklists, knowledge base, etc.).

Beyond the gap from pricing model inefficiency, I believe the feature bundle of most existing incumbents is bloated and sub-optimal. Live chat should not be the default, not only is it costly to maintain (quick response times require around the clock staffing), but a failure to respond quickly leads to a very poor CX. Instead of a positive or neutral experience, you create a negative experience. Scalable CX should be the default for most companies. The only incumbent that I think has got this right is Help Scout, however, they are support focused and they are still supporting email/live chat.

More specifically, documentation may be a gap in the market where there is no good off-the-shelf solution. The providers listed above (Intercom, Zendesk, etc.) tend to provide knowledge bases / help centers rather than documentation specifically and are targeted at Customer Success/Support functions rather than product teams. Yet, documentation is a part of the product (in all likelihood a large percentage of users of any B2B software will come to interact with the documentation). There are also a number of open source option targeted at technical documentation (e.g. Docusaurus) and are aimed at devs.

Documentation should be iterative, write, collect feedback, re-write (like the product development cycle).

What might a better documentation look like? It might look like a subset of the following enhancements:

• Top-class editor experience - this includes tables

• Top-class end user experience e.g. support variables (e.g. user can pass in the user’s name which can then be inserted)

• Support in-app experiences e.g. embed modal

• Recommend documentation articles based on fields passed into query parameters on embed modal

  • e.g. url=XYZ, membership=XYZ

  • Users that have already viewed an article are less likely to view it again

• AI to summarise support articles to enable easier browsing?

• Auto-trigger documentation on rage click or other signals?

• Track search results and where people end up to help users improve/write more support articles

• Deep analytics - track each page that a user has been on

• Use AI to generate documentation?

• Ability for end users to highlight and provide feedback (e.g. something is out of date / doesn’t make sense etc.)

• Hover preview like Wikipedia / Obsidian

• Reporting on time savings:

  • Meetings/support requests saved

  • Hours saved

• For more inspiration see: https://www.swyx.io/the-surprisingly-high-table-stakes-of-modern-blogs/

Documentation is just one part of the scalable CX equation and might not necessarily be the best place to start.

As an alternative approach, the initial product should be focused on kickstarting the growth loop. This means that having the lowest integration friction or time to value is paramount. This implies less customisation and setup. The other requirement is a use case that is broad in terms of appearing across websites e.g. feedback. This means the help docs functionality should be delayed in favour of a lower friction, broader use case of collecting feedback. The downside here is that feedback collection is less broken and our offering will be less differentiated.

Another low friction, broad use case is a link launcher for docs. Users can then leverage their existing docs and simply link to them in our widget. This is a more natural entry point for our vision, but is higher friction compared to a simple feedback widget.

Subsequent iterations of the growth loop can then focus on progressively deeper integrations / higher friction integrations.

An alternative approach is “soaking” in problem areas. The gist is basically to immerse yourself in the problem space (ideally as a customer) for a period of time. By loading your brain with the required facts and knowledge, the extended period of time gives your subconscious the opportunity to soak in the idea and unleash its creativity.

How long should you soak for? Until the number of ideas/discoveries that materially impact your solution begin to drop off. Basically wait until the point that actually putting the product in the hands on customers would help you learn faster versus further soaking. This period is likely to be quite different based on your pre-existing knowledge and depth of immersion or research. In general this is likely to be in the range of a few weeks.

The added benefit of delaying the building is that you are less attached to the idea and are more likely to judge it objectively.

Does a few weeks of time really matter? If your idea is any good, you’ll likely be working on it for the next 10 years…

This mirrors the double diamond prices in design - creativity needs time. Rushing to an output might be instantly gratifying but you might be overlooking better problems and solutions. We aren’t assessed on the number of problems/solutions we solve, but instead by the value of the problem and the quality of the solution.

It is interesting to see that even between the time the book was written (2016) and now, several of the themes highlighted in the book have already begun to play out.

It is also important to note that these are just predictions, and like everybody else, Kevin Kelly is likely to be wrong on some of these. I’ve extracted the points which resonated with me throughout his book below:

Becoming

• Even the intangible (e.g. software) requires additional energy and order to maintain itself.

• Machines are updating themselves, this happens gradually, so we don’t notice they are “becoming”.

• The accretion of tiny marvels can numb us to the arrival of the stupendous.

• The internet is still at the beginning of its beginning.

• Today truly is a wide-open frontier. We are all becoming. It is the best time ever in human history to begin.

• You are not late.

Cognifying

• Cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence is inevitable.

• The advantage gains from cognifying inert things would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than the transformations gained by industrialisation.

• Ideally, not just cheap but free, like the free commons of the web

• Built in the internet of multiple devices, rather than in a supercomputer as previously expected.

• When this emerging AI arrives, its very ubiquity will hide it.

• The arrival of artificial thinking accelerates all the other disruptions.

• Excellent example of the magic of adding AI to X can be seen in photography.

• 3 recent breakthroughs have unleashed the long-awaited arrival of artificial intelligence.

  • Cheap Parallel Computation (GPUs)

  • Big Data - the incredible avalanche of collected data about our world, which provides the schooling that AIs need

  • Better Algorithms

• Human/AI cyborgs are more effective than pure AI or pure Human.

• There is a vast range of potential minds. Might not be like human minds. New kinds of intelligences. We have preconceptions about how an intelligent robot should look and act, and these can blind us to what is already happening around us. To demand that artificial intelligence be humanlike is the same flawed logic as demanding that artificial flying be birdlike, with flapping wings. Robots, too, will think different.

• We need to let robots take over. It is inevitable. Let the robots take our jobs, and let them help us to dream up new work that matters.

Flowing

• The internet is the world’s largest copy machine.

• The digital economy runs on this river of freely flowing copies. Copies flow so freely we could think of the internet as a superconductor, where once a copy is introduced it will continue to flow through the network forever, much like electricity in a superconductive wire.

• The initial age of computing borrowed from the Industrial Age. As Marshall McLuhan observed the first version of a new medium imitates the medium it replaces. The first computers employed the metaphors of the office, folders, desktop, files, etc. The second digital age overturned the office metaphor and brought us the organising principle of the web. The basic unit was no longer files but “pages” organised in a networked web rather than folders. The desktop interface was replaced by a “browser,” a uniform window that looked into any and all pages. This web of links was flat. Now we are transitioning into the third age of computation. Pages and browsers are far less important. Today the prime units are flows and streams. We constantly monitor Twitter streams and the flows of posts. We stream photos, movies, and music.

• Flowing time has shifted as well. Initially tasks were done in batches e.g. monthly bills. Then with the web we expected everything same day. Now in the third age, we’ve moved from daily mode to real time. If we message someone, we expect them to reply instantly.

• When copies are free, you need to sell things that cannot be copied. Well, what can’t be copied? Trust, for instance. Trust cannot be reproduced in bulk. We call that branding.

• Eight generatives that are “better than free”

  • Immediacy e.g. going to theatres on opening night

  • Personalization e.g. sound file just for your setup

  • Interpretation - e.g. selling instructions to software

  • Authenticity

  • Accessibility - from all devices etc.

  • Embodiment - physical copies

  • Patronage - deep down, avid audiences and fans want to pay creators.

  • Discoverability e.g. Netflix’s recommendation engine

• Steady democratisation of arts - Fixity to flows - There are the Four Stages of Flowing that apply to all media:

  • Fixed. Rare - The starting norm - each product is an artisan work, sold in high-quality reproductions.

  • Free. Ubiquitous - commodity, cheap, perfect copies.

  • Flowing. Sharing. - Unbundling of the product into parts, each element flowing to find its own new users and to be remixed into new bundles.

  • Opening. Becoming  - enable amateurs with little expertise to create new products and brand-new categories of products. The status of creation is inverted so that the audience is now the artist. Output, selection, and quality skyrocket.

Screening

• In ancient times, culture revolved around the spoken word.

• By the means of cheap and perfect copies, printed text became the engine of change and the foundation of stability.

• Printing instilled in society a reverence for precision (of black ink on white paper), an appreciation for linear logic (in a string of sentences), a passion for objectivity (of printed fact), and an allegiance to authority (via authors), whose truth was as fixed and final as a book.

• Mass-produced books changed how people thought.

• We are now People of the Screen.

• This has set up the current culture clash between People of the Book and People of the Screen. 

• People of the Screen tend to ignore the classic logic of books or the reverence for copies; they prefer the dynamic flux of pixels. Half-baked ideas.

• Notions don’t stand alone but are massively interlinked to every thing else; truth is not delivered by authors and authorities but is assembled in real time piece by piece by the audience themselves. People of the Screen make their own content and construct their own truth.

• People of the Book favour solutions by laws, while People of the Screen favour technology as a solution to all problems. Truth is, we are in transition, and the clash between the cultures occurs within us as individuals as well.

• Despite fears that reading and writing were over, we know reading and write more than ever. Literacy rates have remained flat in the US over past 20 years.

• We should call this new activity “screening” rather than reading. Screening includes reading words, but also watching words and reading images.

• Are books dead? Some scholars of literature claim that a book is really that virtual place your mind goes to when you are reading. 

• A book is less an artefact and more a stream that flows into your view.

• This liquidity is just as true for the creation of books as for consumption.

• Dense hyperlinking among books would make every book a networked event. Wikipedia is the first networked book.

• The link and the tag may be two of the most important inventions of the last 50 years.

• So what happens when all the books in the world become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas? Four things:

  • Works on the margins of popularity will find a small audience larger than the near zero audience they usually have now.

  • The universal library will deepen our grasp of history, as every original document in the course of civilisation is scanned and cross-linked.

  • The universal networked library of all books will cultivate a new sense of authority. If you can truly incorporate all texts, then you can have a clearer sense fo what we as a civilisation, a species, do and don’t know. The empty white spaces of our collective ignorance are highlighted.

  • Becomes a platform for cultural life.

Accessing

• Possession is not as important as it once was. Accessing is more important than ever. 

• Instant borrowing gives you most of the benefits of owning with few of its disadvantages.

• Advanced technology has enabled this magical rental store.

• Five deep technological trends accelerate this long-term move toward accessing and away from ownership

  1. Dematerialization - trend over the past 30 years has been to make better stuff using fewer materials. Digital technology accelerates dematerialisation by hastening the migration from products to services. The liquid nature of services means they don’t have to be bound to materials. An automobile today is really a computer on wheels. The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we’ll treat these articles as social property. This has given rise to the “as a service” model.

  2. Real-time on demand - Access is also a way to deliver new things in close to real time. One reason so much money is flowing into the service frontier is that there are so many more ways to be a service than to be a product.

  3. Decentralization - We are at the midpoint in a hundred-year scramble toward greater decentralisation. The glue that holds together institutions and processes as they undergo massive decentering is cheap, ubiquitous communication. Without the ability to remain connected as things spread wide into networks, firms would collapse. The consequence of moving away from centralised organisation to the flatter worlds of networks is that everything - both tangible and intangible - must flow faster to keep the whole going together. Flows are hard to wool possession seems to just skip through your fingers. Access is a more appropriate stance for the fluid relations that govern a decentralised apparatus. Blockchain. Blockchains are public commons.

  4. Platform Synergy - historically two basic ways to organise human work: a firm and a marketplace. Recently, a third way has emerged: the platform. A platform is a foundation created by a firm that lets other firms build products and services upon it. A platform, like a department store, offers stuff it did not create. e.g. Microsoft OS. Levels of highly interdependent products and services form an “ecosystem” that rests upon the platform. Recently successful companies are all Multisite markets, run by a firm. Ecosystems are governed by coevolution, which is a type of biological codependence, a mixture of competition and cooperation.

  5. Clouds - A cloud is a colony of millions of computers that are braided together seamlessly to act as a single large computer. The web is hyperlinked documents the cloud is hyperlinked data.

Sharing

• Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide.

• Wikipedia is a notable example of an emerging collectivism. Wikis are a set of documents that are collaboratively produced; their text can easily be created, added, edited, or altered by anyone, and by everyone.

• Unlike older strains of red-flag socialism, this new digital socialism runs over a borderless internet, via network communications, generating intangible services throughout a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralisation. It is decentralisation extreme. 

• Primary currency in this new socialism is sharing (“sharing economy”)

• “Dot-communism” a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralised gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space.

• A hierarchy for sorting by the increasing degree of coordination employed

  1. Sharing - The mildest form of digital socialism, but foundational for all the higher levels of communal engagement. The online public has an incredible willingness to share.

  2. Cooperation - When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. For example, amateurs have shared billions of photos on Flickr and Tumblr, and they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Community sharing can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Reddit and Twitter can steer public conversation as much, and maybe more, than newspapers or TV networks. The sum outperforms the parts.

  3. Collaboration - Organised collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of adhoc cooperation. Just look at the hundreds of open source software projects. In these endeavours, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousand of members. The work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective - the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid - that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism. Adding to the economic dissonance, we’ve become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge.

  4. Collectivism - Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralised authority, technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximise both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom. Alternative to both state-based and market-based closed proprietary systems.

• Similar to free markets over the past century - every time we ask how close to a non capitalistic, open source peer-production society can this movement take us? The answer has been: closer than we thought

• Bottom up is not enough. We need a bit of top down as well. Every predominantly bottom-up organisation that lasts for more than a few years does so because it becomes a hybrid of bottom up plus some top down.

• If the hive mind is so dumb, why bother with it at all? Because as dumb as it is, it is smart enough for a lot of work. First, the bottom -up hive mind will always take us much further than we imagine. Second, even though a purely decentralised power won’t take us all of the way, it is almost always the best way to start. It’s fast, cheap, and out of control.

• Tens of millions which are micro-small, explosion of creator economy.

• The power of crowdsourcing - in funding, ideas, etc.

• We have barely begun to explore what kinds of amazing things a crowd can do. There must be two million different ways to crowdfund an idea, or to crowdorganize it, or to crowd make it. There must be a million more new ways to share unexpected things in unexpected ways. In the next three decades the greatest wealth - and most interesting cultural innovations - lie in this direction.

Filtering

• We now have countless choices. There is simply not enough time in any lifetime to review the potential of each choice, one by one. We need help to navigate. Our only choice is to get assistance in making choices

  • Filter by gatekeepers

  • Filter by intermediates

  • Filter by curators

  • Filter by brands

  • Filter by government

  • Filter by our cultural environment

  • Filter by our friends

  • Filter by ourselves

• None of these methods disappear in the rising superabundance.

• As they mature, filtering systems will be extended to other decentralised systems beyond media, to services like Uber and Airbnb. Your personal preferences in hotel style, status, etc. Heavily dignified, incredibly smart filters can be applied to any realm with a lot of choices - which will be more and more realms. Anywhere we want personalisation, filtering will follow.

• A filter focuses human attention. The more content expands, the more focused that attention needs to become. “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it comes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention”.

• Attention is the last scarcity. Wherever attention flows, money will follow.

• Yet for being so precious, our attention is relatively inexpensive. It is cheap, in part, because we have to give it away each day. We can’t save it up or hoard it. We have to spend it second by second, in real time.

• But not all attention is equal. In the advertising business, quantity of attention is reflected in CPM. 

• In the coming two decades the challenge and opportunity is to harness filtering technologies to cultivate higher quality attention at scale. Today, the bulk of the internet economy is fuelled by trillions of hours of low-grade commodity attention.

• Decentralizing ads - publishers could choose which ads to show. Copy ads from other sites, show them, and still get credit

• A fully decentralised peer-to-peer user-generated crowdsourced ad network would let users create ads, and then let user-publishers choose which ads they wanted to place on their site. Those user-generated ads that actually produced clicks would be kept and/or shared. Users would become ad agencies, as they have become everything else.

• We have not yet explored all the possible ways to exchange and massage attention and influence. A blank continent is opening up. Many of the most interesting possible modes - like getting paid for your attention or influence are still unborn. The future forms of attention will emerge from a choreography of streams of influence that are subject to tracking, filtering, sharing, and remixing. The scale of data needed to orchestrate this dance of attention reaches new heights of complexity.

• Our lives are already significantly more complex than even five years ago. We need to pay attention to far more sources in order to do our jobs, to learn, to parent, or even to be entertained.

• The price of commodities tends to being free. The only things that are increasing in cost while everything else heads to zero are human experiences - which cannot be copied. Everything else becomes commoditised and filterable. The value of experience is rising.

• More filtering is inevitable because we can’t stop making new things. 

Remixing

• Growth comes from remixing.

• Modern technologies are combinations of earlier primitive technologies that have been rearranged and remixed.

• The more new genres, the more possible newer ones that can be remixed from them - rate of possible combinations grows exponentially, expanding the culture and the economy.

• We live in a golden age of new mediums.

• The supreme fungibility of digital bits allows forms to morph easily, to mutate and hybridise.  The accelerating fluidity of bits will continue to overtake media for the next 30 years, furthering a great remixing.

• At the same time, the cheap and universal tools of creation (megapixel phone cameras, iMovie) are quickly reducing the effort needed to create moving images and upsetting a great asymmetry that has been inherent in all media.

• We tend to think the tiger represents the animal kingdom, but in truth a grasshopper is a truer statistical example of an animal. The hand-crafted holly wood film is a rare tiger. It won’t go away, but if we want to see the future of motion pictures, we need to study the swarming critters below.

• As moving images become easier to create, easier to store, easier to annotate, and easier to combine into complex narratives, they also become easier to be re-manipulated by the audience. This gives images a liquidity similar to words.

• In addition to findability, another ongoing revolution within media can be considered “rewind ability” In the oral age, when someone spoke, you needed to listen carefully. This “redo” function encourages creativity.

• Going forward, we are likely to get impatient with experiences that don’t have undo buttons, such as eating a meal.

• Remixing plays havoc with traditional notions of property and ownership.

Interacting

• Two benefits propel VR’s current rapid progress

  • Presence - this is what sells VR

  • interaction

• We are equipping our devices with sense - eyes, ears, motions - so that we can interact with them. The will not only know we are there, they will know who is there and whether than person is in a good mood

• Your body is your password. Your digital identity is you

• In the coming 30 years, anything that is not intensely interactive will be considered broken.

Tracking

• We are opaque to ourselves and need all the help we can get to decipher who we are. 

• Improvements to sensors has given rise to the Quantified Self movement, where people track various aspects of their life.

• Self-tracking is much broader than health. It is as big as our life itself.

• The flow of events is called a lifestream “diary of electronic life”. Strict chronological nature makes it easy to navigate

• Lifestream is still active tracking. There is a passive type of tracking sometimes called life logging. The point of life logging is to create total recall. 

• The internet is the world’s largest, fastest tracking machine, and any thing that touches it that can be tracked will be tracked. 

• The fastest-increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating

• Metadata is the new wealth because the value of bits increases when they are linked to other bits.

• The challenge is that the bulk of usable information today has been arranged in forms that only humans understand. But we are at our limits. Humans can no longer touch, let alone process, zillions of bits. To exploit the full potential of the zillion bytes of data that we are harvesting and creating, we need to be able to arrange bits in ways that machines and artificial intelligences can understand.  Entirely new industries have sprung up in the last two decades based on the idea of unbundling. Sort of like smashing information into ever smaller sub particles that can be recombined into a new chemistry.

Questioning

• Humans have long invested new social organisations,. These social instruments are what makes us human - and what makes our heavier “impossible” from the vantage point of animals.

• Our society is moving away from the rigid order of hierarchy towards the fluidity of decentralisation. And the value engine is moving from the certainties of answers to the uncertainties of questions.

• Questioning is simply more powerful than answering

Beginning

• It is just the Beginning.

Overall, Shape Up is a well-written book that delivers on it’s promise of explaining a shipping methodology. In terms of the methodology itself, the way it is presented in the book seems to promote “feature factory” type behaviour, where the “shaping” and “betting” activities are centralized. For example, the “shaping” and “betting” work is predominantly done by a small group of people/leaders (e.g. CEO, CTO, product strategist), although it can also be done by others. Following this, Individuals get assigned to projects (features) that they have decided to bet on. 

This means that individuals/teams are working on assigned projects or features, instead of being assigned problems or target customer outcomes and coming up with initiatives via a bottom-up process. This makes sense given the size of Basecamp (~50 people) and the founders are still heavily involved in the product.

That being said, I think there are a number of insights that are good practice or widely applicable for teams building products. Specifically:

• Working at the right level of fidelity in the “shaping” process

  • For example, fat marker drawings to prevent prescribing a solution to designers

• Scope projects in such a way that you can show meaningful progress incrementally

  • Resist the urge to scope by components (e.g. frontend, backend). Instead integrate vertically, so that you can complete and arrive at a functioning piece of work as quickly as possible.

  • This first piece should be the core of the new project, doesn’t need to be pretty or pixel perfect.

• Showing progress via a “hill chart”. This is based on the idea that it is hard to communicate progress in a meaningful or reliable way early on in the building process, as there is little clarity around the exact tasks and volume of work remaining. This phase is categorised as “going up to the hill”. Once you reach the top of the hill, you have clarity on the exact things that need to be done to complete the project. From here, it is easier to provide an accurate estimate on project timelines.

• Appetite instead of estimates (fixed time, variable scope). This refers to letting time limit determine scope instead of the other way around. I think this concept can be expanded beyond time, the scoping of features/products is one of the core responsibilities of a PM and necessarily requires balancing of business value, usability, technical feasibility, resourcing constraints etc. 

Further, I think Shape Up could definitely be tweaked in order to be more in line with the “empowered product team” behaviours espoused by Marty Cagan. Specifically, by decentralising the “shaping” and “betting” activities. By bringing the shaping process into the specific team that will be doing the work would allow for more bottom-up initiatives. Decentralising the “betting” activity into the teams that will actually be building.

For those that are interested, there also seem to be a number of parallels between Shape Up and the rituals at YouTube during their hypergrowth period:: https://coda.io/@shishir/rituals-for-hypergrowth-an-inside-look-at-how-youtube-scaled

"Growth" tends to be a term that leads to a lot of confusion, especially when brought up in the context of a role or job function. A lot of this confusion comes from the fact that growth is still relatively new as a field. For example, if you asked the question: "What's the difference between a growth marketer, growth hacker, or a growth product manager?", you'd probably get 20 different answers.

I view growth from a product perspective and define it as discovering and scaling profitable distribution channels through changes in acquisition all the way to retention. This not only includes internal changes within the product (e.g. referrals, viral loops) but almost always also includes external channels (e.g. paid ads).

The reason I want to work on my growth skills is because I've come to the realisation that as software becomes easier to build, the difference between success and failure in most software businesses isn’t the complexity or uniqueness of the software, but the effectiveness of growth or distribution channels.

This thinking is evident in recent trends, such as Product-led Growth. Ultimately, I believe that software companies without compounding growth loops will be beaten by those that do (Reforge has written a lot of great content on this point and growth loops more broadly).

How I plan to work on my Growth skills

To work on my growth skills, I want to launch a new product so I can practically apply, experiment, and learn in the real world. While I have existing products like Thumblytics, I had a number of specific criteria that I wanted for my growth project:

• Simple to build from technical standpoint so I can focus on the Growth side (e.g. building an UI for an API, simple CRUD app, etc.)

• Simple business model and self-service - many of my current products are creating new markets or have higher friction in onboarding. While I could  apply my growth skills to my existing products, I find that I tend to be distracted by other issues around needing to educate the market, pricing, etc instead of being able to focus on growth.

• Recurring revenue - I believe it's easier to build growth loops on more frequent or recurring use cases. Hopefully, this will allow for greater creativity in applying growth methods. This is also beneficial if I decide to sell in future.

• Inherent virality - It would be super interesting to work on a product that is inherently viral (has a compounding growth loop).

Taking these criteria into account, I've started to lean quite heavily towards building a product in the virtual group cards space, similar to Kudoboard or GroupGreeting. While this space is extremely crowded with tens if not hundreds of existing competitors, it meets all of my criteria above and is in a growing market. I'm still in the exploratory phase with this idea, but perhaps I will have some more concrete details to share in my next blog post!

A key driver for living reactively was my old job as a consultant. As a management consultant, you often have very little visibility into what your life will look like in even a few weeks time. It was quite conceivable I would walk into the office on a Monday and be staffed on a project in another country and immediately need to head to the airport. While this volatility was fun, it made it quite difficult to commit to anything more than a few weeks out, and this attitude extended towards my own life plans. I rarely put any serious thought into what my life would look like in 2, 5, or even 10 years time.

Another contributor to my attitude was that a mentor (that I still respect deeply) had told me earlier in my career that planning out your career/life for the next five years was impossible as so many factors are changing all the time. I still believe this to be true, but on reflection I may have over-indexed and used this as an excuse to not plan.

While trying to predict the future is a fool’s errand and living reactively is often unavoidable, I find that thinking through a plan or strategy gives purpose, motivation, confidence, and also provides a measuring stick.

“Plans are worthless, but planning is everything”
- Dwight Eisenhower

As part of this, I have started setting annual goals. In most years, I’ve used fairly standard frameworks around health, career, and side-projects. This year, I want to try something new and align all of my goals to one of the following four categories:

1. Body - This basically maps to physical health, an area I’ve begun to increasingly appreciate as foundational to all other goals (especially as I’ve grown older).

2. Mind - This maps to mental health, but also includes learning and self-improvement. I have a natural tendency to focus my time and efforts here, but am easily distracted by “shiny objects”, so setting goals in this area is essential for me.

3. Time - This basically covers any goal that relates to how I want to be spending my time. While this category overlaps with the others, my hope is that this area will cover approaches that either stretch across all aspects of my life or should be mentioned separately.

4. Money - This covers all my goals around my financial health. This will include most of my goals around my career and side-projects.

Body

Since the start of COVID-19, the volume of physical activity I’ve done has dropped dramatically. I’ve seen this impact my life in the form of lower energy and motivation levels. Instead of setting lofty targets, my goals here are really to get me to build healthy habits and consistency:

• Start a regular team sport - I find team sports socially enjoyable, but also inherently enforces consistency. You can’t just skip a scheduled game and let your team down unless you have a VERY good reason.

• It’s been years since I’ve hit the gym consistently. I’ve set a very achievable goal this year of reaching “baseline” levels on the big 3 lifts with good form: Bench 70kg; Squat 90kg; Deadlift 120kg

• Average 10,000 steps per day over the entire the year

Mind

I’ve found my mindset, mood, and motivation strongly drives the quality and volume of work I can do. I’m still very new to goal-setting in this area, so please bear with me:

• Try meditation for 30 days in a row - I’ve heard good things, but have never consistently tried it out. I’m hoping this year, I can have at least one 30 day streak of meditation.

• Publish 12 posts to yangsnotes.com - I find writing to be a great way to clarify my thinking, I hope that by regularly writing I will be able clear up my thinking.

• Read 12 books - High quality books can be life-changing. I bought a mountain-load of books at the end of 2021, I should read them.

Time

A change I’ve noticed in myself since moving from consulting to tech is that my ability to focus and my ability to do things that are not “fun” has declined significantly.

A symptom of this is that I often find myself spending my time in a fractured way, constantly switching between different contexts and tasks. This is something I want to reduce. I think this issue can be fixed with better habits, specifically, time block more exhaustively and use my calendar as a record of how I spend my time. While, this goal isn’t quantitative, when I look back on my calendar at the end of the year, it will be clear whether I have succeeded or failed in this goal.

A personal goal I have in this area is to spend more time talking to my parents. I won’t be tracking this, but I want to spend 5+ hours speaking with my parents every week.

Money

I have a lot of goals in this category, ranging from my personal finance, career, to side projects. In no particular order they are:

• Invest $XXXX in ETFs every single month. I’ve been slacking on this for the past year, not because I haven’t had the money, but just because I haven’t bothered. While I believing people should take on greater risk when they are young, this should be balanced with lower risk bets to prevent a complete wipeout. This is one of my “lower risk” bets.

• Regularly track personal finance. I am horrible at this, I have basically no visibility at the moment. This is a big one for me this year.

• Build product-led growth or growth skills at work. We spend a lot of time at work, it's good to align this time to a personal goal.

• Get 1+ new side project/product(s) to $5,000 MRR. I’ve been tinkering with Thumblytics intermittently for the last 2 years, and I’ve been changing my mind regularly on doubling down versus starting a new project. The heuristic I’m using to make a decision here is “Hell yeah, or no”. Doubling down on Thumblytics doesn’t elicit a “Hell Yeah” from me, so I will commit to getting a new project/product to $5,000 MRR.

• Get Blogmade to $10k+ MRR. Blogmade is a blog automation service I’m working on with another IndieHacker. I’ve never built an agency before, so this is definitely very new to me, but we’re seeing good initial traction!

Finally, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering why I’m writing my 2022 plan at the end of January (almost a full month into the new year). Well, there are two main reasons:

1. I find that the New Years period is usually quite busy, and I don’t have enough time to sit down and reflect properly.

2. I was in Hawaii on holidays for the past 3 weeks 🙈

p.s. Even in producing this plan, I’ve come to see how my writing is a convoluted mess of my thoughts. I hope that as I continue to write over the next year, the clarity and persuasiveness of my content will improve.