📚 Amazon WBR, Lessons from Zombie Run, Friction and Documentation, Toilet Paper Rule

Fabulous Next Billion, Varanasi's Street Food Scene and more

Jul 15, 2024

Hi, this is post #167.

Welcome to the folks who joined us this week, thanks Alex Morris for your kind mention.

I just finished listening to Lessons in Chemistry. What a beautiful piece of storytelling! I was glued to Elizabeth Zott’s world. Elizabeth’s struggles, idealism and undying spirit are so beautifully portrayed. And amidst all that she is able to shine as a loving companion, mother and friend. Her relation with Calvin, Harriet, Dr. Mason, Pine are all so beautifully described without forcing them to fit into a preconceived notion. I used the audible version and am super happy with the experience. I highly recommend this one.

I have been told that Apple TV’s adoption has done a fairly good job. If you’ve seen it, let me know if it’s worth watching?

I’ve picked up two new books now: Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and What I Learned About Investing from Darwin. Both have been great so far. More on these in the coming editions.

Know anyone who will enjoy this post? Show some love and share this post with a friend or two.

Here’s a quick outline of today’s post:

Let’s get going…

📊 Amazon WBR Deep Dive

Cedric Chin recently shared a detailed post covering the Amazon Weekly Business Review (WBR) process.

Amazon WBR has been spoken / written about extensively. Still, most of the stories just touch the surface. Cedric Chin has gone in depth based on his experience of directly working with the folks who have evolved it and applying it further in his org. This is the most comprehensive view that I’ve found on this subject.

I highly recommend this to anyone in operating roles. You may not use the WBR format in your function, but you will still find a lot of actionable inputs to do things better.

Some snippets:

A better way of thinking about the WBR is that it is a process control tool — that is, a tool designed to uncover and disseminate the causal structure of a business, so that you may execute with knowledge.

But the overarching goal here is that your metrics must be laid out in a logical, causal way: controllable input metrics at the start of the deck, corresponding output metrics immediately after; and then rinse and repeat your input and output metrics for each major initiative or department, ending with financial metrics at the end.

🎮 Lessons from Zombie Run

I work in a gaming company, on a digital entertainment product. So, understanding gamification is an area of interest. As I’ve spent time trying to understand it, one thing has become clear is that most people don’t understand gamification or are thinking about it at fairly superficial levels. I get reminded of it often when I read / watch the work of those who have been successful practitioners in this field for long.

Adrian Hon’s blog has been one such source of useful inputs. His latest post “A thousand primers, not just one” is a great example. He tries to explain why gamification isn’t the silver bullet for education.

His argument: effective gamification must be highly specific to the subject in question.

He uses his learning from designing Zombie Run to explain this. Some interesting tidbits:

No matter how much fun it sounds to work out with friends, there’s a reason why most runners you see are on their own. Part of running’s appeal is how little it demands—throw on a T-shirt and shorts, slip on your shoes, walk out the door, and you’re off. Having to negotiate with three other friends on where and when to meet raises the barrier to entry considerably.

And…

It’s one thing for video games to bend players to their will with interminable cutscenes and tedious gameplay; at least you can soldier on in the comfort of your home, glancing at your phone or listening to a podcast as you play. But expecting people to change their real-world behaviour is entirely different. The risk of a badly placed treasure in a location-based running game isn’t just a couple of lost minutes, but returning home with muddy shoes, venturing down a scary alleyway, or worse. The reward better be worth it, and Cache & Seek’s generic treasure icons didn’t make the grade. Another location-based smartphone spy game once asked me to walk just a hundred metres down my road to get started, and I balked even at that. It was raining!

And one more…

The advantage of media oversaturation was that everyone already knew how zombies behaved. Zombies couldn’t be reasoned with, they were almost impossible to stop, and so the only smart way to survive was to run.

Brilliant read all along! Just go for it.

✅ Friction and Documentation as a Productivity Hack

John Cutler claims many teams should use static, low-tech documents and manual repetition instead of specialized work-tracking tools and goal-setting products.

Sounds counterintuitive, right? But he has a sound logic to support this claim. He takes cue from bullet journaling.

You see? New age digital tools may take away this burden of migration & forget the state history. These two tasks make you more objective about every item in your todo list. By getting rid of these, the digital tools are doing a disservice to you.

But why should we plan for the unhappy scenario here? If the task was already done, we won’t need the migration & state history.

That would be true if we have a super high say/do ratio (whatever is planned, is done). But, you already know the truth about planning & goal settings.

So, at least, give John’s inputs on reading and then decide if it is worth trying. If nothing else, you will become more aware of the trap that could be lurking around your planning rituals.

🧻 The Toilet Paper Rule

This one has nothing to do with your morning rituals.

Alex Smith has some suggestions for brand owners who are looking for smart ways to position their brands in association with existing references. Think “Uber of X” kind of examples. How should you go about this approach of positioning?

And here’s what Alex has to say:

He uses an example of Toilet Paper to expand his point (he should, he named the rule as such). A fairly sound logic, I must say. There are some counter arguments, and he has not shied away from covering them as well.

I found this in the Demand Curve newsletter; it has more examples (including Oatly & Liquid Death) for your reference.

🛗 Elevators & American Housing Costs

Stephen Smith’s piece for NY Times talks about how the American elevator explains why housing costs have skyrocketed.

A good example to see how real economic systems work. Smith explains:

The problem with elevators is a microcosm of the challenges of the broader construction industry — from labor to building codes to a sheer lack of political will. [...]
Elevators in North America have become over-engineered, bespoke, handcrafted and expensive pieces of equipment that are unaffordable in all the places where they are most needed. Special interests here have run wild with an outdated, inefficient, overregulated system. Accessibility rules miss the forest for the trees. Our broken immigration system cannot supply the labor that the construction industry desperately needs. Regulators distrust global best practices and our construction rules are so heavily oriented toward single-family housing that we’ve forgotten the basics of how a city should work.

A sample observation:

The first thing to notice about our elevators is that, like many things in America, they are huge. New elevators outside the U.S. are typically sized to accommodate a person in a large wheelchair plus somebody standing behind it. American elevators have ballooned to about twice that size, driven by a drip-drip-drip of regulations, each motivated by a slightly different concern — first accessibility, then accommodation for ambulance stretchers, then even bigger stretchers.

So many things interact - knowingly or unknowingly - to result in such a systematic failure. Read this one to expand your scope of thinking when you think about public policies & infrastructure.

(via Marginal REVOLUTION)

🍪 Perfectly Flawed Democracy

Check this one if you’re up for some high level intellectual stimulation.

Nir Zicherman shows how we have a perfectly flawed democracy and how science can fix broken elections.

Here’s his introduction to the post:

The solution I put forth in the article below is a thought experiment. It’s also intended to be partly satirical. But whether you agree with the conclusion or not, I should note that both the data and the science I explore are real.

The post starts with an experiment around cookies & election, jumps to explain gradients and impact of adding some noise to finally making a proposal.

Zicherman delivers on his promise as stated in the introduction. You can take the risk of reading this one.

🇮🇳 The Fabulous Next Billion

The Hard Copy & Obvious attempt to demystify The Next Billion.

For the uninitiated, ‘the next billion’ are  first-time users thronging to the Internet, on the back of accessible mobile data. Often young and non-English speaking, they are now being seen as a massive opportunity to drive consumption (and profits) in emerging economies and around the globe.

Most marketiers face a challenge that there is no easy way to understand this customer due to non-homogeneity in every aspect of their life & interaction. And so it becomes difficult to design for them.

While specific needs will demand specific solutions, this team recommends thinking about offering fabulousness as a common denominator in every solution. There are at least four distinct ways to create this fabulousness: Possibilities, Power and Control, Gratification, Self & Identity.

I’ve built products for part of this audience and found this articulation fairly useful. If you’re building anything for this demography, do give this one a read.

✨ Everything else

Hard and round. An essay on not-knowing, and a recipe for kala chana. Beautiful piece of writing, and a recipe from the Indian Subcontinent.
7 gems from Varanasi's street food scene from the enthucutlet folks. They are doing some yummy food-newslettering. I love the vibe of this newsletter.
Rajesh Vora photographs the unique Punjabi tradition of adorning homes with sculptural water tanks. Finally I found something that can be a worthy challenger to Australian silo art. (via Colossal)