5-Bit Fridays: Where To Play/How To Win, taking bolder bets, the name trick, and more

Plus an idea around retaining some value during self-cancellations

Jaryd here! You’re reading 5-Bit Fridays—your weekly ~5-minute morning roundup of 5 actionable insights that can help you build and grow your product. You can read my main How They Grow deep dives here, or my Why They Died failure breakdowns here.

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Happy Friday, everyone! ☕

ICYMI, I wrote about CommandBar earlier this week. I’ve been experimenting with formats recently and think I’ve found the sweet spot that has a short version at the top for everyone who just wants the headline lessons, and the main (context-rich) deep dive below. Personally, I’m super happy with where it’s landed style-wise and I actually think this latest deep dive is the best one I’ve written.

I’d love to know if you think I’m crazy or if you agree :)

How CommandBar Grows: Owning the PLG-as-a-Service Layer

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5 actionable insights from this week

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(I) Where to Play, How to Win

There are only ever 5 choices anyone or any company ever needs to make to have a strategy. Just 5.

It’s a model I’ve been learning more about, and it’s called Strategic Choice Cascade which is built on the premise that strategy is a series of choices that take you from ambition into a go-to-market strategy that can be operationalized.

At its heart, Playing to Win relies on five pillars: the winning aspiration, where to play (i.e the part of the market to compete in), how to win (i.e the unique right to win), the core capabilities needed to win, and management systems required to support said capabilities. The idea is each answer must integrate. If you can’t clearly answer one of the five questions, you must go back to the last question you can answer.

Your call to action: 🏃 No company can be all things to everyone, so narrowing down the strategic playing field is a must. Ask yourself, what choices have you made that narrows your competitive field across markets, segments, channels, categories, and ICPs in which you want to compete?

[Go deeper: How Strategy Really Works, by Roger Martin]

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(II) A brilliant trick to use whenever you forget someone’s name

We’ve all forgotten somebody’s name before that we ought to have remembered. You know, when you’ve met someone more than once and it’s got the point where it’s too late to just plainly say you forgot their name?

I certainly have. That’s why I loved this advice by Peter Mukherjee. I told it to a coworker yesterday at drinks and they thought it was brilliant, so here I am passing it along to you.

You say to them, looking straight into their eyes and with a smile: “‘I’m really sorry, but I can’t remember your name?”.

“Ben”, they say.

Then, you say: “I know it's Ben! It’s your second name I can’t quite recall…”

“Carlton”

“Carlton!! Yes of course. I’m sorry Ben, just had a complete mental block for a moment!”

Your call to action: 🏃 The next time you’re awkwardly forgetting someones name, just remember that it’s perfectly plausible (and forgivable) to have forgotten their second name.

[Go deeper: Whenever I Forget Someone’s Name, I Always Use This Brilliant Hack, by Peter Mukherjee]

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(III) Signals you're playing the wrong game

As we saw in the CommandBar deep dive, it's easy to get caught up doing something that only sort of works. Fortunately, James knew they were not playing the right game and repositioned them.

So, how do you know if you’re playing the right or wrong game?

Michael Houck

shares 10 signs, but here’s one: Competitors dying doesn’t boost growth. In short, that’s really bad because it means some large pool of customers who are looking for a replacement are not finding or choosing you.

Your call to action: 🏃 It’s an important exercise stepping back, pausing, and asking yourself if you’re building towards a local maxima rather than a global one. False summits in the journey to PMF are real.

[Go deeper: 10 Signals You're Playing the Wrong Game, by

Michael Houck

]

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(IV) Taking bigger and bolder product bets.

You can’t experiment your way out of every product problem.

It’s become fashionable to say that everything can be empirically answered by data. The ethos, especially in product, is unless you are doing everything as an experiment, then you are doing it wrong. And I disagree with that.

— Slack’s CPO, Noah Desai Weiss

The issue with testing is that it can easily become a crutch for good product prioritization. When everything can or will be tested, Noah notes that “teams stop thinking about ‘the why’ behind what you’re doing and start focusing more on experimenting without thought. The hope is that you end up in a better place than where you started.”

Your call to action: 🏃 Be careful of the addiction to the velocity of experimentation. You need to know the difference between when to experiment on something, rather than running tests willy-nilly.

[Go deeper: How to Take Bigger, Bolder Product Bets — Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer, by FirstRound Review]

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(V) This might be slowing down your career growth

Getting things done is an important part of leveling up and getting promoted.

It’s easy to think if we just move things forward and do a great job that we’re having impact. But, getting things done matters much more at the team level that at the individual level. Career growth, particularly as a PM, is tied to how much of a multiplier effect you bring to the team. So, be careful of the solo contributor mindset, and focus on driving and championing team impact.

Your call to action: 🏃 Prioritize getting things done with others, not just by yourself.

[Go deeper: 7 Mindsets That Are Slowing Down Your Career Growth, by

Irina Stanescu

]

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1 tactical idea worth thinking about

Offer users a lower cost “maintenance” mode plan during self-cancellation of a subscription.

I saw this on Riverside a while ago and I thought it was very smart. I was cancelling my $29 a month subscription, and they presented me with a $5 a month plan (80% less) which would only keep my recording history and data.

No functionality, but they sold me on some lower-level value that was worth at least something to me, and it’s allowed them to keep at least some of my business.

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1 How They Grow lesson

This was one of the first deep dives I wrote. We covered the gaming industry and one of the most strategic and prominent players within it…Epic Games.

🧩 Own value creation and value distribution.

Epic have mastered the chess board that is the gaming industry. Their strategy is one of vertical and horizontal integration, and they basically have a finger on all the pieces on the board.

To summarize, Epic develops, publishes, and distributes games. They have their own game engine empowering others to develop games, while they also develop and publish their own titles like Fortnite mostly following a free-to-play model with in-app upselling. And from a distribution standpoint — they also own an important pipeline with their own online games store, where developers (who probably made their game on Unreal Engine) can now reach customers and sell their games.

From the deep dive…👇

How Epic Games Grows

Before we say goodbye…

Here’s what I use to grow 🛠️

• I use Attio as my go-to CRM to manage all my newsletter sponsorships deal flow and learn more about my email network. (Learn more)

• I use Sidebar as a leadership program to accelerate my growth as a product leader. An excellent community for founders and senior leaders. (Learn more)

• I use Dovetail as our team’s customer insight hub, helping us spot patterns in feedback across channels. (Learn more)

👉 View my full stack.

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How I can help you 🤝

Are you a founder looking to grow your business without breaking the bank? If so, I’ve invested in a company (Athyna) that can help you find incredible talent and build out your global team in less than 5 days. Their product, service, and worldwide talent pool are just amazing (and so affordable). Learn more here ↗

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And that’s everything for this week’s edition.

If you enjoyed reading today’s email, feel free to forward it to someone! Or you can hit the ❤️ button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. 🙏

Until next time.
—Jaryd

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