Aswath Krishnan

The majority of us get our news and along with it, our world view, morality, opinions, and daily furies, from scrolling the social feeds across Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Google, and others. Given the amount of exposure, we think media reflects reality. I'm convinced that is absolutely not true.  There were a couple of recent stories that made me realize how lopsided and low-quality social media is.  Recently, Eric Adams got nominated for mayor of New York City. If you are on Twitter, you may have not even heard of him because of his nearly absent social media presence and measly sub-100K following. You'd have assumed that Andrew Yang, who ended up fourth in the election with just a fraction of the votes, is going to be the obvious nominee because of the #yanggang fame with 2M fervent followers.  Another recent study revealed that just 12 people were responsible for the majority of COVID-19 vaccine-related misinformation! If you are looking to get a ba...

The main role of a product manager to identify and prioritize product investments within your area that'd have the most impact on the overall business goals (aka roadmap).  Usually, you don't make just one investment. You make a portfolio of bets. You can place bets across multiple core pillars or themes as I have suggested in a previous post on product strategy .  It's also helpful to assess your portfolio mix across the type of product improvements:  1. Ah, finally improvements (bugs, annoyances)  These are fixes for obvious annoyances or broken parts of the experience. Users know it and product teams usually know it. These experiences can cause casual users to churn immediately and fans to churn eventually.  Regularly identifying and fixing these before they snowball is a good defense and good for building trust, pride, and quality (reduce broken windows!).  2. Yeah, that's better  improvements (iterative improvements) Products aren't perfect out ...

Often times products and features are doomed to fail even before you start working on them because the customer, problem, their evaluation criteria, usefulness and usability of the solution, go-to-market and customer acquisition mechanisms, and business model are not understood or well defined.  This mad lib forces you to research, articulate and iterate on all of those questions before you start implementation.  People like [specific segments, demographics]  Who are faced with [specific problems]   and care about [key criteria] Will use [solution]  To do [steps to use solution]  and it would help them [impact on problem and satisfaction].  They'd discover this solution through [acquisition channels]  And they'd use it whenever [need] Which happens once every [need frequency]  And they'd pay [price, payment or revenue model] As the old adage goes, if you had 1 hour to solve a problem, then spend 40 mins thinking about the problem and 20 ...