📚 Communities of Practice, Product-Market Fit Game, Pedestrian Experience, What It’s Like To Be

Ben Graham, Karnad, Prismatic Panels and more

Aug 12, 2024

Hi, this is post #171.

I’ve a longish post today. It contains a lot of snippets from the pieces I curated for you. I have done it as I don’t want anyone to miss the goodness these pieces offer. I felt satiated reading these, and I am sure you will too.

Here’s a quick lineup:

Looks exciting, right? Why waste anytime, let’s jump straight to it.…

🎮 Product-Market Fit Game

In “the product-market fit game,” James Hawkins summarizes his learnings from taking Posthog through 6 pivots and ultimately reaching the product market fit. Here is how he describes his experience:

To me, finding product-market fit is a bit like playing snakes and ladders. There are numerous traps, winning takes a little luck, and the only certainty is it's never a straight line to the finish.

Here is the game he talks about:

Finding product-market fit is a game, and games have levels. My product-market fit game has five levels:
Find a significant problem to work on
Validate the problem by talking to users
Get users to use your product
Keep users coming back
Onboard your first 5 reference customers
You need to complete all five levels to win. All but the first have multiple failure modes, which I've listed – go through them sequentially. You might find you cannot complete a level. This is a sign you need to pivot your entire company.

I liked this one for three reasons:

There is a lot of emphasis on the execution steps. The tactical inputs on how to go about critical tasks are fairly useful.
It lists out the failure modes for every step and potential ways to avoid/recover from them.
James has shared candid inputs on tricky topics like finding co-founder and pivoting.

(via Sajith Pai’s feed)

🖨️ Communities of Practice

If you’re up to read a beautiful case study on human behaviour, then I highly recommend giving “the soul of maintaining a new machine” a try.

It’s from an online draft of Stewart Brand’s book “Maintenance: Of Everything”. He is running an experiment of writing in public and has put this draft out as a “books in progress” piece.

Here’s the premise of this chapter:

The piece goes on to cover the technicians, their work, the challenges, their innovative solutions, the community they developed to do better, the way corporations reacted and more.

There are so many nuances in all interactions in such a thriving ecosystem. The piece does a fantastic job touching those and highlights how human behavior shapes such an environment.

Xerox’s world is no different from our workplaces today. There is so much relatability to all the issues raised & resolved in this piece. It’s packed with insightful ‘aha’ moments in every paragraph.

Let me share a couple of snippets to entice you:

Ethnographer Orr had a sharp eye for detail. He noticed when a technician on a call began by examining copies that had been thrown in the trash and deduced from them that the problem with the machine was different from what the customer had reported. “The trashcan is a filter between good copies and bad,” one technician explained “Just go to the trashcan to find the bad copies and then… interpret what connects them all.”

Thanks to his training, Orr could blend in with the technicians as a colleague and decipher the cryptic technical language of their war stories, which were always told with extreme brevity. “This brevity,” he explains, “is a matter of cultural propriety and competent practice; it would be inappropriate to waste everyone’s time with the superfluous.”15 Specialists talking to fellow specialists speak in dense jargon, not to exclude outsiders but to honor their listeners’ expertise and engage it. “Story-telling is an interactive practice,” Orr adds. “You tell the story concisely, but if you notice one of your listeners looking confused, you back up and provide as much detail as necessary so they understand.”

Orr… studied what reps actually did, not what they were assumed to do…. They succeed primarily by departing from formal processes…. Orr found that a quick breakfast can be worth hours of training. While eating, playing cribbage, and gossiping, the reps talked work, and talked it continually. They posed questions, raised problems, offered solutions, constructed answers, laughed at mistakes, and discussed changes in their work, the machines, and customer relations.

If you can read only one piece this week, let this one be the one! I cannot recommend this enough.

🚶Improving Pedestrian Experience

Why does walking feel so intuitive when we’re in a city built before cars, yet as soon as we return home, walking feels like an unpleasant chore that immediately drives us into a car?
A lot contributes to this dilemma, like the density of the city, or the relative cheapness and convenience of driving. But there’s a bigger factor here: We don’t design the pedestrian experience for dignity.

Sean Hayford Oleary explores the challenges that are prevalent in our street design in his short piece - “If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity”.

It captures real world insights based on Sean’s work as a city council member. He describes a pyramid with three layers – compliance, safety and dignity. First two are easy to understand and he has good examples to expand them more.

The exploration around dignity (could be termed experience also, IMO) has a lot of food for thought. Here’re the 4 key themes that he touches.

Shade and light
Convenience
Enclosure and proportions
Engagement

These are great observations; they are highly relatable and can be worked upon. A good read if you are interested in the theme of public spaces.

(via YC Newsletter)

🎧 What It’s Like To Be…

I am loving Dan Heath’s podcast “What it’s like to be…”. It helps me walk in someone else’s (work) shoes!

In each episode, Dan talks to one professional, exploring their work world with a great bunch of questions. His choice of professions – secret service agent, crisis PR manager, dog trainer, forensic accountant, professional santa claus to recall a few – is unlike what you would expect and he keeps upping the game in every season.

The conversations are fun, Dan putting his best curious foot forward and the guest bringing their most cherished experiences to answer those. This makes these 30-35 minutes conversations super fun & enjoyable. It’s hearty to see people talk about things they love to do.

And, tidbits like this are a big bonus (they are sprinkled generously in most episodes).

Dan Heath: Mm, so it sounds like you've just gotten incredibly good at detecting dangerous conditions in the ocean. What have you learned about detecting potentially problematic swimmers? Like, what are the early warning signs that certain people might get themselves in trouble?
Ed Vodrazka: Sure, well, you know, so this is kind of right out of rookie school, teaching the young lifeguards. But basically, the first thing is a victim is usually facing to shore. You know, people that are struggling very rarely are not, you know, are facing out to sea. They usually know that they're in some kind of trouble. So facing to shore is one. Hair in the face is the second one. When you're struggling to keep yourself afloat, you don't have the energy to keep your hair out of your face. So when you get hair in the face, that's another, kind of, warning sign.
From the episode with An Ocean Lifeguard

A Stadium Beer Vendor is my favorite episode, in case you need any starting point.

📚 Memoirs as a Portal

Should you read history? I expect to hear a loud “yes” in the room, no matter where I ask this question. However your reasons could be different from each other. There has been a lot of good exploration on this topic.

I read memoirs and historical accounts to understand the past to know more about today. Those events happened in a context - there were people, humans that face challenges and were driven by their values and circumstances to act in a certain way. And these events shaped who we are today. It's like collecting dots and clues to our present.

I came across two good memoirs in recent times, and found both super interesting and worth sharing here.

The Karnad-Benegal-Dubey trinity that transformed theatre and cinema. Bombay & Pune in 1970, Girish Karnad, Shyam Benegal, Satyadeb Dubey and many other characters you would have seen in Indian cinema since then, happen to be at the same place. They drank, quarreled, and created a new style in cinema and on stage. I was surprised to see so many familiar names!
How Benjamin Graham survived world panic on Wall street. Investing and Buffet nerds will know who Ben Graham was. For the uninitiated (like me), he was the father of ‘value investing’ and the professor who shaped Buffet’s journey as his boss, mentor and friend. This piece is based on material that Ben’s granddaughter collected, and covers his early days in school, work and the world of investing.

(via FoundFuel & History Investor Newsletters)

🥰 Humor as a Mirror

Combine sharp observations of life with vivid, even absurd metaphors and a touch of subtle life lessons, and you've got fantastic humor.

The beauty of great humor lies in acting like a mirror without being offensive. It also allows your creativity to shape into a form that’s easy to consume.

Here are a couple of good pieces that worked this magic for me in recent times:

Do you have a toddler or is your house haunted by the ghost of the widow of an 1800s sea captain? McSweeney’s never disappoints.

Don't date a man who reads. Your favorite book can tell a lot about you. Cammi Pham proves it in a super fun way. She has read a lot and has collected an even greater mix of dating stories. And then finds the connection between the two.

Don’t date a man who reads. Because he is a storyteller. Everything through his eyes will look magical. One day he might tell your children The Greatest Story Never Told.

(via Readwise)

✨ Everything else

I’ve a thing for stained glass work. When Colossal shared this beautiful curation about 4 artists doing their own take of this art form, I had to check it out. And, I am glad I did that.

You’ve the visuals below, and links here in case you’re also a big fan!