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iPhone Q1 Revenue Forecast
2019-04-17
This is my first crack at making a forecast as a part of what I’m calling the “Cassandra Project.” The gist of the motivation for the project is that product management and entrepreneurship requires smart bets on the future and that you can’t get good at making smart bets on the future without practice. You can read more here. The forecast I’m making relates to this question: Will the percent change in iPhone revenue growth from Q1 2018 to Q1 2019 be greater than the percent change in revenue growth from Q4 2017 to Q4 2018?…
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The Cassandra Project: Towards Better Product Management via Better Forecasting
2019-03-30
Product managers have to make bets on the future. If you think for a few seconds about the types of risk that product managers are charged with managing, this becomes obvious. Product managers — as Marty Cagan points out — must manage risk around: value risk (whether customers will buy it or users will choose to use it) usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it) feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills and technology we have) business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business) All of these require some betting on the future, but managing value risk and business viability risk in particular require forecasting that can be especially difficult to do.…
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Some problems with the impossibility of achieving OKRs
2019-03-01
In many ways, OKRs are a neat way of structuring goals for a company. According to Marty Cagan, product managers should be especially interested in OKRs as a goal setting framework since they are a better way of tracking product work than a “product roadmap.” I agree with Cagan. OKRs are often better than typical product road maps. However, there’s an aspect of OKRs that I think is morally and psychologically problematic: the idea that OKRs should be impossible to entirely achieve.…
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Business and the Cartesian Demon: How not to Study Business
2018-09-12
A few hundred years ago, Renè Descartes, the fella who brought us the Cartesian coordinate system 📉, isolated himself for a while to figure out (among other things) whether we can know anything for certain. The result of his retreat was his Meditations on First Philosophy, one of the most important philosophical texts of the modern era and one of my personal favorites. Early on in his Meditations, he decides that it’d be useful to engage in a thought experiment.…