The Snippet is a Product Management Newsletter for aspiring Product Leaders.
For the past several months, I have been trying to improve my 5K timings. The good thing is, there are tons of FREE videos on YouTube by top running pros offering tips on how to run a fast 5K.
I sat down and watched lots of videos to improve my 5K speed. but guess what happened? Just watching youtube videos didn’t get me anywhere.
To run a fast 5K (or a marathon for that matter), one has to actually practice running faster each day. As you try running faster, your body learns & slowly transforms itself to deliver the aerobic performance needed on race day.
All that Content
Just like running videos, there is a lot of Product advice on the internet—Newsletters, Twitter threads, Blog posts, Free and Paid courses, you name it. And some of this content comes from the best in business, people who’ve built products in the top companies of the world.
We love to read their experiences, listen to them talking about the amazing products they’ve built. Of how they turned an epiphany into a multi-million dollar business.
With all this amazing content, I think you’ll agree that one doesn’t need a degree to learn about building Products anymore —all you need is the willingness to learn. It’s all out there!
If you’ve never built & shipped a single product in your life, this content is a great place to start. And yet, all this content is just half the recipe.
Much like getting faster, the only way to really learn to build products is to actually be actively engaged in the process of building a real product.
Internet Content vs. IRL
You see, the thing with most product content on the internet is that it’s highly opinionated — and ridden with survivorship bias. It is also artificially cleaned & structured—written & timed to maximize readership and retweets.
But In Real Life — the process of building products is anything but structured.
Very few product gurus out there talk about what one really experiences when you build a real product that other people will use.
Even fewer reveal the pauses & stops, the pains & failures, and the trials & tribulations involved in building something that perhaps ultimately did not work.
Much like world history, most Product content is written from a winner’s point of view.
Excuse my slightly gloomy tone here, but the reality is, building a Product is a heap of unstructured mess— full of unknowns & rife with trials and error.
When you build, you realize that there is no one size fits all concept, no canned path to success. In fact, the odds of product success are actually stacked against you.
Don’t get me wrong, knowing what worked for winners is great, but at the same time, one must realize that every product has its own unique trajectory.
The quandary is that you only realize it when you jump right into this unstructured mess, actually launch a product in the wild, and experience it.
The learning happens as you see your product take a life of its own.
3 Kinds of Learners
When it comes to learning anything you’ll typically find 3 kinds of approaches.
The First approach is for people that love to learn new things, concepts, ideas, but don’t necessarily plan to apply that learning or create anything with that knowledge. This is typically the case with academically curious individuals interested in the theory of everything—or with individuals looking to “project a persona”, perhaps to land a job in that field.
From a Product standpoint, the First approach does provide you with an understanding of the theory and gets your product vocabulary to a place where you sound like you know things —but never moving past this stage is like knowing the rules of the game, but never actually playing the game.
Not fun, right?
The Second Approach is typically adopted by people that eventually want to build something— but before they start, they are hardwired to anticipate, identify and find answers to every single question that think they might come across during the build.
Its a little bit like before you play your first ever soccer game, you’re trying to learn and predict the physics of how a soccer ball moves when you kick it.
In other words, These are structured learners. They must start at step 0, and then carefully build upon concepts step by step until they are comfortable getting their hands dirty in the actual building part.
Turns out, most of us fall in this second category —an evolutionary consequence of all that conditioning in our schools and universities, to first learn (and cram) the complete theory behind things—and then if we still have some juice left, to try and apply that theory in practice.
The problem with the second approach is that it is impossible to anticipate every single edge case that one might encounter during the build. Moreover, Why troubleshoot a problem that has not yet occurred?
Taking the second approach at best gives us a feeling of quasi-preparedness, and at worst, is an inefficient use of one’s time and resources.
This brings me to the Third, and my favorite kind of learning approach. This is where I personally strive to be when learning something new. It’s called Learning by doing, or more specifically Learning by Shipping.
Learning by Shipping
This approach is for people that learn in bite-sized, but useful chunks — and then immediately turn around and apply that learning to build something small, but meaningful.
These people have a bias for action. They “Consumption Drive” their learning— which means they get started with the building part first, experience a hurdle or a problem, go learn and figure out how to solve that problem and continue building until the next problem shows up.
This is also how humans are designed to learn. We learn by doing. A baby learns to walk by taking baby steps. We learn a new language not by reading every single piece of literature available in that language, but by regularly speaking the language, a few words and broken sentences at a time. We learn to play the piano little by little, a few notes and finger exercise at a time.
In the same way, we learn to build products, not simply by reading blogs and newsletters but actually building and shipping something real—even if it’s small, funny, sometimes plain ridiculous.
My Own Experiences
I’ll be honest, my own learnings on building products started with reading stuff on the internet, subscribing to newsletters, listening to podcasts, attending product workshops, and interacting with the product community.
Fresh from MBA school & preparing for PM interviews, I was reading a ton about concepts, how to build things, how to work with product teams, etc. Thankfully, all that reading did help me do well in interviews and land my first Product role.
But after close to a decade of working with real teams, building and shipping real products. I can say that the only real concept that works is Build ➡️ Test ➡️ Ship ➡️ Iterate.…AND that success takes disciplined effort over long periods of time.
I personally like to test out and learn new things through small side projects.
For example, most recently I built this simple “task manager” called Taskwillow to identify which work emails (amidst a sea of emails that I am copied on every day) should receive my time & attention. I was frustrated by how much time I spend managing my outlook emails each day.
Taskwillow took me 8-10 months to build, and in the process of building it — I learnt machine learning concepts (to extract tasks specifically for me from emails), learnt about building and distributing Microsoft Outlook add-ins, Stripe payment integrations and much more. When I got started I had no practical knowledge of any of the above technologies.
And the best part? I didn’t think anybody would be interested in my side project and that my use case was unique — but I keep receiving emails from people interested in “acquiring” my side project!! Clearly, Of emails are a real problem to manage for many people.
In case you are wondering —NO, I haven’t sold Taskwillow yet. It’s still very much my side project. Frankly, I am too busy with my day job and a 4-year old to find time for it. But if you are interested in learning more about Taskwillow reach out to me on Twitter.
Just Get Started
You don’t have to work in Product to build & Ship something. All it takes is for somebody to be interested in creating things and solving a problem that either they themselves or many other people care about.
Interestingly, the best products are built by people that are not experts in either the problem or the solution. Think about AWS — the world’s biggest Cloud Computing Service company was built by an e-commerce retailer.
Another thing about the most successful products out there is that they are often built by people and companies that were simply trying to scratch a personal itch, to solve a problem that got too nagging until they decided to do something about it.
Take Slack for example— Butterfield and team didn’t intentionally set out to create a collaboration tool for the workplace. They built a tool for themselves. They only realized its commercial potential later on.
A great way to get started building something is to identify a problem that you’ve personally experienced — and haven’t found any solution that works for you. Once you’ve found that problem, get started in trying to solve it, just for yourself.
Learn what you have to learn from the amazing internet, all that brilliant content, but then come back —and apply those learnings to build and ship your solution to yourself, little by little.
You’ll be surprised by where you end up, and just how much more you learn by shipping a real product.
Thanks for reading!