Work continues to dominate my time and thoughts, which is why I blog so rarely. I'm approaching the end of my second year as a product manager after a year at Nextag and almost a year at JotSpot, and I thought I'd share a few of the learnings that keep popping up in my increasingly manic depressive mind...
- The only business lever with virtually unlimited potential is marketing. There are 6 billion people in the world, and unless they all know and deeply understand your product, there's still marketing to be done. The only reason marketers don't reach all 6 billion people is that marketing to wider audiences becomes increasingly expensive. The more money a business makes, the more it can afford marketing, and the more money it makes.
However, even though there's infinite marketing to done, infinite marketing is not going to win infinite customers. People know what they want -- and in many cases, there's no changing their minds. A vegetarian won't buy a cheeseburger no matter how many times he sees a McDonald's ad. - When building products, any improvement you make to a product has a finite maximum impact. And if you prioritize correctly, the work you do today will be less valuable than what you did yesterday. This is an example of one of my favorite economic laws, the law of diminishing marginal returns. For non-vegetarians like me, the second cheeseburger isn't nearly as delicious as the first.
As product builders, we need to build the optimal product and then move on. Growth becomes harder and harder, and after a certain point, all you can do is make a product worse.
There's certainly a lot more to share. And maybe someday I will blog all the great things I'm learning from life at JotSpot.
But right now, I'm off to NJ for a wedding and to Boston to see my sister and niece.
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