Gems from around the (PM) world - template - Vol 14
The 4th Industrial Revolution, where PLG does not make sense
Hey PMs
Happy Friday. Here are some things I found of immense value about product management. Hope you find them useful too.
In this post:
Gem #1: The 4th Industrial Revolution - AI in manufacturing by McKinsey
Gem #2: Failure of Product Led Growth - by Evan Armstrong
Gem #3: Economics of Everyday Things - Podcast
Gem #1: The 4th Industrial Revolution - AI in manufacturing
AI has brought the Fourth Industrial Revolution to an inflection point, and manufacturers must choose a path forward: innovate, accelerate, or follow fast. A great article by McKinsey highlights how manufacturing will evolve using AI.
As PMs, we can learn from this application in manufacturing and get inspiration for our own domains.
Gem #2: Failure of Product Led Growth - by Evan Armstrong
This article is a bit dated but actually more timely today. We are all talking about Product Led Growth and of course many have been successful from Zoom to Calendly to Slack.
In this article, Evan talks about another such popular company, SurveyMonkey and how they lost to Qualtrics. There is a lot to unpack such as when PLG may not make sense, when solution is bigger than feature etc.
Here is the article.
Gem #3: Economics of Everyday Things
As PMs, we should have a good understanding of the markets and customers we operate in. It also useful to understand the economics of our industry such as money flows, pricing power etc.
I found this interesting podcast by Freakonomics (in case you haven’t, the book by the same name is a good read).
They break down the economics of industries like bowling alleys, dinosaur skeletons (yep, T rex fossils sold for $ 7 Mn)
The idea is to learn about different industries so that you can understand your own industry better.
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