Daniel Schmidt: Why business intelligence falls flat. It wasn't that people didn't care about the story the data was telling. They did care, and they were worried that the numbers were flat. The problem was they had no idea what they could do about it. The metrics in the dashboard were divorced from the actual work happening on the ground. (more)

a business metric that's a leading indicator, an input, which you believe you can improve, and believe that will lead to a positive outcome. (actionable) (more)

Daniel Schmidt: Input metrics are so hard that most product teams give up. Teams can’t usually launch a product or marketing update and immediately see the business impact. They need input metrics to measure the results of their efforts. (more)

product management tool with emphasis on north-star metric and other metrics https://doubleloop.app/ aka DoubleLoop.app. See CEO Daniel Schmidt. (more)

Daniel Schmidt: Customer focus isn't enough. To thrive long-term, companies must be customer-focused and business-oriented at the same time. It might seem that these two ways of operating are in tension with each other. They are not. (more)

Southwest Airlines Co., or simply Southwest, is a major airline in the United States that formerly[citation needed] operated on a low-cost carrier model. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines

Steve Blank model for Customer Development. (more)

The Mom Test: how to talk to customers and learn if your business is a good idea when everybody is lying to you - Rob Fitzpatrick (more)

customer discovery interviewing, see esp Problem Interview and Solution Interview

Daniel Schmidt: Metrics-driven product development is hard. (Data-Informed Product Management) The way that the FAANG companies use metrics to build products is vital to their success. They invest an army of people and homegrown tools to pull it off. My last article, Balancing short-term and long-term product bets, describes Google's process. While the very top companies are great at using metrics, after talking to the hundreds of PMs who signed up for DoubleLoop.com, I’ve learned that almost everyone else is struggling. (more)

Itamar Gilad: Why Impact/Effort Prioritization Doesn’t Work. Effort can be stated in man/weeks or simply has high/medium/low. Impact can be graded on a scale, for example 1–5, 5 being the highest, or again as high/medium/low. Once you have the numbers in place, it’s a matter of picking the features that give you the best bang for the buck (more)

Lynn Parramore: Private Equity is Out of Control and Looting America. This Prosecutor Says We Can Fix It.Price hikes, deteriorating conditions, and poor service — along with a certain slickness of marketing — could be signs that ownership of a business you count on has transferred to one or more firms in a rapidly-expanding Wall Street industry. (more)

Brendan Ballou Opinion: Private Equity Is Gutting America — and Getting Away With It. Companies bought by private equity firms are far more likely to go bankrupt than companies that aren’t. Over the last decade, private equity firms were responsible for nearly 600,000 job losses in the retail sector alone. In nursing homes, where the firms have been particularly active, private equity ownership is responsible for an estimated — and astounding — 20,000 premature deaths over a 12-year period. Why do private equity firms succeed when the companies they buy so often fail? In part, it’s because firms are generally insulated from the consequences of their actions (more)

Colin Matthews: A guide to AI prototyping for product managers (vibe prototyping). tools like Cursor, Replit Agent, v0, Bolt, and other new cutting-edge AI tools that allow you to build working apps in minutes (more)

Itamar Gilad: The Three True-North Metrics that Your Product and Business Need. In practice companies struggle with settling for just one top KPI, and with good reason. The terms are not very clear either — North Star Metric, One Metric, top business KPI — are these all the same? Are they different? (more)

The Appeal: Locked In, Priced Out: How Prison Commissary Price-Gouging Preys on the Incarcerated. Today, The Appeal published Locked In, Priced Out, a project that includes a first-of-its-kind database of prison commissary lists from 46 states. This project also examines the availability, prices, and markups of products across several categories, including food, hygiene, and religious items. (more)

Lenny Rachitsky interviews Guillermo Rauch (founder & CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js): Everyone’s an engineer now: Inside v0’s mission to create a hundred million builders. (more)

Itamar GIlad: Why Is Product So Hard? Building great products — ones that deliver high value to the customers and to the company — is extremely hard. This is evident from discussions I hold with product people, who regularly report not being able to create impact. (more)

Ben Hunt: It's the Smart Move. No one starts off intending to run a Ponzi scheme like Madoff or SBF. No one starts off intending to falsify test results like Elizabeth Holmes. No one starts off intending to double-pledge collateral like Tricolor... dozens of senior and subordinated lenders, none of whom were aware of the full extent of the lending web, like First Brands. (more)

Itamar Gilad: The Total Impact Matrix - Beyond Blind Bets. Impact is a central concept in product development, but it’s often unerdused or misused. In this article I want to suggest a thinking tool, The Total Impact Matrix, to help you use it better. (more)