🌱 5-Bit Fridays: Why the interface layer rules the world, the dark side of your superpowers, why you need insight databases, a pricing & packaging playbook, the why you should write
#41
👋 Welcome to this week’s edition of 5-Bit Fridays. Your weekly roundup of 5 snackable—and actionable—insights from the best-in-tech, bringing you concrete advice on how to build and grow a product.
To get better at product, growth, and strategy, drop your email here and join 9K+ others:
Happy Friday, friends 🍻
In case you missed it this week, I published what I found to be one of the most fascinating deep dives to write. We unpacked How Nvidia Grows: The Engine for AI and The Catalyst Of The Future
I learned so much, and I think you will too. It’s a pure strategic masterclass from Nvidia's trillion-dollar accelerated computing empire. If you haven’t read it yet—all bias aside—I definitely suggest bookmarking this analysis into one of the most important companies on the planet. 👇
Otherwise, let’s get cracking. We have a weekend to get to.
Here’s what we’ve got this week:
The power of Real-Time Discovery Databases
Bottom-up Pricing & Packaging: A playbook
Why you should write
The interface layer rules the world
Open doors in your career by unlocking the dark side of your superpower
Small ask: 👉 If you enjoy reading this post, feel free to share it with friends! Or feel free to click the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack 🙏
(#1) The power of Real-Time Discovery Databases
Back in 2022, my team's customer research was scattered throughout Notion, Google Docs, and other random places—including in people's heads sometimes.
We had a good cadence of speaking with customers and documenting notes, but going and looking up conversations other PMs or designers were having was tricky because there was no central repo for our findings.
You can see the problems that creates.
Instead of gaining net new learnings in discovery, you might be doing research that’s been done already (a wasted cycle)
Trending and pattern spotting become harder
It slows the ramp-up speed for new hires
And related to the above, insights can get lost on a team
So, I created a Notion base called “Ongoing Insights” for anyone doing research to drop in key findings—making them indexable and searchable.
I broke it up into 4 key sections: Customer, Market, Competitive, and Data.
Whenever we spoke to a customer, performed an analysis, dug into a competitor product, or were doing big-picture market research—in the doc it went. The dashboard looks like this:
From small problems and ideas to larger opportunities, we now had a single, reliable, place to go for data. It’s served my team super well, and when I saw Aakash Gupta write about it a few weeks back, I made a note to myself to circle back and share the concept.
Unlike me who just plodded along without a name, he succinctly dubs it a Real-Time Discovery Database. And I’m sure his RTDD is better than mine, so here’s how he explains it:
It’s great to talk to customers, but if you don’t capture the learnings, the conversations can be useless. I highly recommend a shared Real-Time Discovery Database for your whole product team.
This can be a simple Notion database, or whatever else you would like to use. But the idea is to have the product members - the PM, designer, engineering manager, and 5-10 engineers - quickly document all the insights they have from customer chats.
No one will use this form if it has a bunch of required fields. I recommend just making the title required. But by getting people to get in the practice of logging their insights, you’ll have a much deeper repository to go back to.
I myself find that I will forget insights from conversations 6-12 months back. But if you have them in a database, a quick search can let you go very far.
With all the new tools out there, like automatic meeting recording, the advanced level here is to include either automatic meeting transcriptions or recordings with the database. I personally prefer transcripts because you can go through them way faster and they are easy to search.
This is also a really great way, both as a product leader and product manager, to show the team how much work you are doing to try to put the user first.
I 100% agree on minimizing the required fields. The easier it is to just jot down, the more data you’ll have. The sweet spot I’ve found though is:
Date (helpful to know if things are new or may have been addressed already)
Title/Headline (this is the nugget of the insight)
Details (allows people to add any extra context)
Reference/Source (optional, but if there’s a link to an Amplitude chart, raw interview transcript, etc., it can be great for digging deeper)
Also—in case you don’t have one—a great free tool for transcribing interviews and sending summaries and your full convo (text and video) to a Notion (or other tool) page is Fathom. It plugs into Zoom, and it’s perfect.
How to Implement RTDD
Choose the platform: Select or build a database system that supports real-time access. e.g. Notion, Airtable.
Setup your base: As the leader implementing this, remove all the friction by setting it up and kicking it off with a few entries as examples
Establish and communicate a process: Determine how and who will record entries, and then loop them into the new process and why it’s important
Train the team: Educate the team on how to add insights. The best approach is to have a README at the top of your page so you do this once. Consider recording a Loom video as well.
Review regularly: Set up monthly reviews of the RTDD specifically to hold each other accountable for doing the chats, and learn from each other’s insights. You can use this time to tag insights, making themes easier to search.
This is an excellent and advanced technique that Aakash calls out as part of continuous customer discovery. And there’s been a lot written about continuous discovery recently for good reason:
It’s literally the bedrock of building good products
Yet, PMs and teams drop the ball on this regularly.
That being said, one product in this space that I’ve been ogling over recently is Sprig. Simply, Sprig is bringing top-shelf discovery habits to teams of all sizes, accelerating how quickly—and how much—product teams are learning from their users.
Sprig has a bunch of features like Replays to watch real user behavior, Prototype Testing to test assumptions with your customers, and my personal favorite—targeted Surveys to capture user insights right inside your product.
To Aakash’s point above, you can see how that ongoing feedback collection can funnel into your RTDD—helping your team make better decisions. And what makes Sprig even more powerful is their new AI Analysis for Surveys feature.
With AI Analysis, you can get instant answers about your Sprig survey data and automatically uncover insights to improve your product experience. No more patching together filters, sifting through responses, and peeling out survey observations for the team. Nope, you get instant, actionable, AI-generated summaries that identify common themes and provide you with the top takeaways. 🪄
Plus, their recent release comes with Sprig AI, your co-pilot survey analyst that answers your custom survey questions, and even suggests follow-up analysis questions that can help you uncover hidden trends and insights in your survey data.
Honestly, it’s a game-changer.
To see how powerful this can be, and to build a product people love, why not give it a try? Head over to Sprig and try AI Analysis for Surveys, free for 2 weeks. ✨
Oh, and later this year, AI Analysis will also work across Surveys, Replays, and Prototype Tests — analyzing all your data and learnings inside Sprig.
*Sponsored
(#2) Bottom-up Pricing & Packaging: A playbook
Pricing & Packaging is the function that drives how SaaS products bundle and charge for their product. In the field, it looks like this:
For product-led companies, it’s one of the most important teams. Their decisions directly impact acquisition, growth, top line, margins, and churn.
But, it’s not as simple as coming up with a few plan names, slapping on a price and just adding more features the more you pay, and tagging a “Most popular” label on the one you want everyone to pick.
Hopefully, you’re thinking…”Of course not”…but that approach is more common than you’d think.
P&P is complex, and it’s heavily product, customer, and market-dependent. Take the example of Apollo’s page above. I know first-hand how big of a surface area this is for them, and how much testing and thought goes into every piece of that page. Everything is intentional.
So, how should a bottom-up, PLG, company think about (and get started with) pricing and packaging?
I don’t have first-hand experience working in this area, so I found this post by a16z really insightful and full of practical advice. It feels like a playbook for understanding and mapping the user journey to figure out the right product tiers, how to differentiate them, and how to price them.
Here’s a quick rundown of the principles and mental frameworks that can make it easier and faster to get to the optimal pricing and packaging.
1. Start with the user journey
It is critical to be clear about what the user journey is for your product before thinking about pricing and packaging because the optimum pricing and packaging is derived from and maps to the user journey.
The user journey refers to the stages from first touching the product (typically without paying for it) to that product being used across the user’s organization.
This journey can generally be broken into 4 tiers:
1: Casual Organic Use 🙍
Target a broad audience, including students, hobbyists, and professionals.
Aim for awareness, community building, market education, and refining qualified candidates.
2: Individual Professional Use 👨🎨
Some users transition from casual to professional use.
This tier can be the primary monetization channel for companies targeting professionals.
For B2B enterprises, it's more about qualifying for the next tiers.
3: Team Use 👩🎨 👨🎨
Address advanced feature needs of teams, such as real-time collaboration and version control.
Monetize SMBs and qualify leads for larger organizations.
Expand usage to adjacent teams and consider a direct sales approach for the next tier.
4: Organizational Use: 🏢
Cater to unique enterprise requirements like security and compliance.
Monetize larger organizations, primarily through direct sales.
This tier often becomes the main revenue source for many bottom-up companies.
2. Figure out where the money comes from
The goal of the user journey is to track and cultivate product usage from casual users to buyers. A prime example of this is Notion.
I was the first initial user who used I personally
I then used it as a prosumer for work
I then had a team workspace with some designers and PMs
Now Notion is used across my company and all our portfolio of companies
The further along I progressed, the more obvious it is that the budget to pay for Notion comes from somewhere else in the company. As a16z note:
Deciding what tiers to have, and which to charge for, depends largely on where you expect the bulk of the money to come from. If it’ll ultimately be the enterprise, then lower tiers are generally free, or priced to aid qualification. On the other hand, a company focused on the prosumer should think very clearly about how it prices its professional tier because that’ll directly impact top line and margin.
3. Start simple and expand over time
Many companies want to have tiers that address all constituencies — freemium, prosumer, SMB, mid-market, enterprise, and all from day 1.
This approach is a mistake, because as the authors note, “It’s nearly impossible for a single R&D team, and GTM team to pull this off.”
The solution: Start with a simple model and fewer tiers. This could be as basic as Free and Pro. With simple GTM pricing, it allows you to watch user engagement, what features are being used, what organizations are adopting the product, and where the budget is coming from.
Now you have interesting data on how, and if at all, to add more plans.
You can always add tiers as you learn more about the user journey, but it is difficult to remove tiers without stranding users.
And importantly, don’t think that just because you’re learning more about the user journey you need to add more tiers. There’s nothing wrong with keeping your tiers lean.
4. Avoid a discontinuous user journey
This advice is super interesting. Simply, you’re far better off working to grow the self-service base, and then applying sales to qualified users within it (i.e. Product-qualified leads), rather than building a separate direct sales motion that’s largely independent of it.
This idea was totally new to me, so here’s how the authors explain it:
The failure to map to organic user behavior can lead to a discontinuous journey, one of the most common pitfalls of bottom up pricing and packaging. Generally, this is how it happens: A startup has a vibrant community of users, but bottom up monetization is early and anemic. To “learn from the market,” the startup spins up a direct enterprise sales effort. After some initial success, they decide to invest more into that motion.
While on the surface this sounds like a good idea, too often it creates two entirely separate GTM motions — one to the buyer, the other to the user. The power of the bottom up GTM model is that the bottom up motion reduces customer acquisition cost (CAC) and provides a qualified funnel for a sales team. But this requires that the bottom up motion actually bridge the user/buyer gap. Spinning up direct sales will find the buyer, but rarely provides any insight into how to direct the user journey to the buyer. In the worst case scenario, the top down motion erodes the organic adoption and causes pushback from the users.
5. Know when to monetize
If you have a strong product-led engine driving those consumer and prosumer users into your funnel, you’ll have many more shots on goal. A mistake a16z points out is that founders often spoil that by charging aggressively, and too early.
This stunts essential user growth into the top of your PLG machine
This surprised me somewhat: many successful bottom-up companies wait years before monetizing.
So, what’s a startup to do here when they need to bring in revenue?
We recommend turning on monetization when you see repeatable usage patterns among a core customer group through concrete data gathering, or when there is a clear delineation of free product features that customers are willing to pay for, and iterate from there.
6. Use pricing for qualification (not just monetization)
Pricing isn’t just a means to monetize. But—especially earlier in the user journey— it’s also a great way to qualify inbounds.
At the very least, it’s an indicator of interest. More specifically, it can be used to generate a qualified list of accounts for an inside or direct sales team, establish a formal relationship with the user, and provide insight into what aspects of the product they are willing to pay for.
In this playbook, the last two points (Figuring out your price, Price testing, and iteration) have plenty of writing on them, so I’ll just drop these resources here if interested
I’ll leave you with a neat visual recap of this playbook that a16z put together. For more of their in-depth thoughts, I recommend joining their newsletter.
(#3) Why you should write
This third bit today isn’t the usual 5-Bit Friday share.
But, I read this piece by David Perell on Monday, and the way he spoke about why everybody should write really stood out to me. It’s worth the 30-second read. Perhaps it inspires you :)
Words are the atomic unit of the internet.
With the stroke of a pen, you can build your network, improve your thinking, and create opportunities for yourself.
Until now, the internet has connected us with people in our past. But writing online connects you with the people in your future. As Derek Sivers once wrote: “The coolest people I meet are the ones who find me through something I’ve written.”
Writing online is a guaranteed way to shrink the world. A well-written article can change your life because the internet rewards people who think well. Each post is an advertisement for the kinds of people and opportunities you want to attract, and if you have a voice, you can build a platform.
In any field, the most successful people double as writers. Chefs write recipes, comedians write jokes, and entrepreneurs write business plans. The examples are endless.
Writing is like weightlifting for the brain. Just as you’ll improve your food diet if you start cooking, you’ll improve your information diet if you start writing. Testing the limits of your ideas is the fastest way to improve them and raise your intelligence. Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Jeff Bezos:
“People who write a lot, also listen a lot. They also change their mind a lot. Not necessarily with new data, but sometimes re-analyzing the same data. They also work hard to disconfirm fundamental biases.”
I couldn’t agree more. We all write already in some capacity, and I think with platforms like Substack and Medium, independent writing and the ability to create an audience have never been easier.
You no longer need to depend on an institution for a platform. You can build your own audience. now. In the pre-Subtack era, online publishing was limited to authors, journalists, and media moguls.
Now, here we are. It’s Friday morning and I’m about to hit publish to almost 10K of you guys who graciously read my work.
What a world.
Writing is free. You don’t need anything to get started. And writing something occasionally can only be better than writing nothing at all.
Learn to write.
Go deeper: 🧠
(#4) The interface layer rules the world
I absolutely love Scott Belsky ’s nuggets of wisdom—like his recent take on interface layers.
I first wrote about interface layers back in 2014, and I have long said (and ruffled the feathers of my engineer friends) that a technology succeeds because of a user’s experience of the technology MORE than the quality of the technology itself. Fighting words, I know. But I say this because I’ve seen many examples of suboptimal tech winning based on a superior user experience but rarely the opposite, and I believe we’re living in the battle of the interface layers. Ultimately, whether it is natural language experiences or reduced and radically simplified mobile (and soon spatial) interfaces, every company will fight to be included in the interface you see every day — if not be the default.
Considering we’re at the point now where people expect products to meet them where they are, having a website isn’t really enough. Your product must be integrated into other products, available on the go as an app, and perhaps soon available as plug-ins to AI-first experiences.
So, as Scott (CPO at Adobe) points out:
The need to centrally build APIs that are consumed by many “client” teams will grow. Building APIs centrally and allowing your “client” teams to focus on the interfaces that surface these capabilities is the ideal approach these days. But what should these other “client” teams look like? If the APIs are the core tech, and every other team is working like hell to nail the interface, shouldn’t designers be driving these many “client” teams? The role of a “product leader,” a “designer,” a “product marketer,” and “customer research” should all be reimagined in a world of APIs, product-led-growth, and the battle to win the interface. In my view, product and product marketing should be one role, should scope work with engineering, and should look to leadership from design. Design should plant the flag and have final approval of anything that ships.
And if it’s the interface layer—the UI and UX—that matters most, then products need to consider what story and design-driven development looks like.
Brian Chesky has talked about storytelling being the most valuable skill of product leaders. A super interesting opinion.
So, what’s your product story? Who’s the main character, what problem do they have to overcome, who/what’s the antagonist that could prevent them from reaching their goal, what’s the climax, and what does a happy ending look like for them?
Why a story? As Scott says, “Because the reasons we use a product - and are drawn to a product - are driven by natural tendencies (aka the kindling for our human dramas). Our hopes and fears inform the product experience as much as the product’s promise and marketing (true for consumer AND enterprise products!). Make every product one grand story, starting with the flag you plant for the way you believe the world should be. Once you plant the flag, start building the road and course-correcting your decisions every step of the way via empathy with customers.”
For more by Scott, follow his writing over at Implications.
This post was brought to you by: Sprig.
If you want to level up your product and customer research, save time wading through tons of survey results, and ultimately make sure you’re build a product people love, head over to Sprig and try AI Analysis for Surveys for free. 🪄✨
(#5) Open doors in your career by unlocking the dark side of your superpower
Not to have saved the best for last here, but this is probably my favorite bit of the week: The shadows of superpowers, and how finding your weakness that’s masked by your strength is key to personal and career growth.
Essentially, it’s about finding and fixing your Achilles’ heel.
It’s from a post written by legendary product leader, Nikhyl Singhal . He writes:
When successful people get stuck in their career, the cause can be a mystery. But the results are very real. Promotion is perpetually a year away. Feedback is a mix of, “This person is one of our top performers,” and the occasional (often whispered), “These glaring weaknesses require immediate attention.” Switching companies may not help. And it’s possible that the person has an abrupt ending, either being asked to leave the company or quitting in frustration.
Perhaps your boss, an executive, or even someone you manage is excellent in many regards, perhaps even world class. But this person might also suffer from very real development areas. Maybe this is even you. At first, it’s easy to ignore these concerns, as nobody is perfect. But as the years go on, these subtle issues only grow and become increasingly elusive.
Often I preach to the folks I coach, “What gets you here isn’t what gets you there.” But it’s hard to turn this adage into action. They ask, what do I need to change? Well, the first place to look is your superpowers. Though it may feel really counterintuitive, your strengths could be the source of your struggles. It’s possible for a superpower to shine so brightly that it obscures a challenge, or weakness, intrinsic to your strength. So you are not only not gaining other skills, you’re also not fixing the hidden shortcomings that will inevitably hold you back.
Here are Nikhyl's examples of superpowers, and their dark side.
Here’s an example of one of mine, which I’m thankful my manager called out to me early on:
I am design-obsessed and have valuable hard design skills 🦸
But, I was overstepping with my design partners, which was hurting our relationship 🦹
As you can see, career skills live in a balance. Every strength, most likely, has a sneaky shadow that creates an opportunity for development. So, why are they so hard to find?
When you have a superpower, you receive tremendous praise that feeds your superpower. Your strengths create such an aura that your colleagues, your peers, and even your boss will look past any shortcomings or bad habits that need development.
To find these development points, and to successfully change, you need:
Desire to always change
Humility when getting feedback
Self-awareness around your own shortcomings
And on that last point, working to understand this relationship between your superpowers and shadows is essential to making those meaningful leaps in your career.
Here’s a tactical question/exercise to leave you with: What are your top three strengths, and what’s a potential opposite for each? 🤔
🌱 And now, byte on this 🧠
One of my new favorite newsletters is Zeitgsty.
Perfectly named—it’s all about the cultural zeitgeist, and it explores patterns, trends, and the beats of culture through an analytical lens.
I love thought pieces where you walk away thinking, ”Hmm, so true!”. And you go about the rest of your day knowing a little more about society. For me, two of those from Zeitgsty this week have been:
If this sounds like your cup of tea, drop your email below to keep a finger on the pulse of culture:
And that’s a wrap, folks. 🫡
If you learned something new, or just enjoyed the read, the best way to support this newsletter is to give this post a like or share. It helps other folks on Substack discover my writing.
Or, if you’re a writer on Substack, enjoy my work, and think your own audience would find value in my various series (How They Grow, Why They Died, 5-Bit Fridays, The HTG Show), I’d love it if you would consider adding HTG to your recommendations.
Until next time.
— Jaryd✌️
RTDD is a game changer! Look forward to learning from more folks on how they implement.