🌱 5 new insights for product builders (#77)
Unhinged job applications; Why you need to force decontextualization; Intuition in strategy; Founder math; and The product engineer growth hack.
Jaryd here! 👋 You’re reading 5-Bit Fridays—your weekly ~5-minute roundup of 5 actionable insights that can help you build and grow your product.
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Friends, good morning and Happy Friday. ☕
I shared a letter on Wednesday letting you know I was having too much fun playing with Google’s new AI tool and turning my newsletters into mind-blowingly good and realistic AI-gen podcasts. If you missed the post, you can read it here. Or, just heck out this one I made from our Roblox deep dive!
Oh, and if you missed my latest essay…Do You Love The Game?…
“There’s unlimited content out there focused on “Accelerating your career!”. Unfortunately, there’s not enough around “Is your career worth accelerating?”. - Go deeper, read the full post.
Otherwise, today’s roundup covers:
The product engineer growth hack
Intuition is what makes a great strategist
The power (and importance) of forced decontextualization
How, and why, to try an unhinged job application
Founder math
5 big ideas; 5 calls to action
(#1) The product engineer growth hack
“My metaphor for product leadership is less chess player moving helpless pieces & more party host. “You really should talk to so-and-so! I think you’d really get along.” Keep a sense of the mood of the party, where & how to intervene.” —
🫰 Why it matters: Teams always want to move faster and ship better products. To get both of those outcomes, as a leader/PM/founder, go and enable more engineers to be product engineers. This works because when engineers understand the context and nuances of what users need, they can make decisions and tweaks that have large outcomes. Also, seeing the impact of their work and hearing it from customers gives them energy, and this energy turns into velocity. Also, it puts them in a position to spot small/quick opportunities for features in conversation with customers.
🔑 Bottom Line: As a PM, don’t be scared/protective of having engineers talk to customers and think through a product lens. It doesn’t negate your job and value. The opposite in fact. It’s you creating more leverage, which is your main job.
🥇 Applying it: Think about bringing engineers and customers together. Start small. Bring them into discovery conversations to observe and ask questions, and add the team who worked on a feature to post-release feedback calls.
Go deeper—Product is a Party, Not Chess
(#2) Intuition is what makes a great strategist
“You’re not trying to see many steps in the future. You’re just trying to get clarity on what is actually happening right now, so you can decide what to do next. And speed matters just as much as accuracy. You want to try to get these decisions right if you can, but you also want to give yourself as much time as possible to keep trying if you’re wrong. This means that the metric you are optimizing for needs to have both a direction and a velocity. It’s something like “good decisions per hour”. —
🫰 Why it matters: High-level strategy work (e.g: We should play in this space) that people idolize and want to make memos for is overrated—there’s just not that much of it to go around. But there are tons of smaller decisions that compound, and those small decisions (when fast and accurate) are what actually determine success.
🔑 Bottom Line: To be great at these decisions, there are 4 inputs (Intuition, Insight Generation, Solutioning, Synthesis). Intution is a key part of quick decision making because, as Dan put it, “It’s machine that takes in questions and outputs good hypotheses as to their answer.” Simply, intuition is your operating algorithm that helps you make sense of things.
🥇 Applying it: Intuition can be developed by improving your understanding of the problem space at three levels of fidelity: (1) Who the customer is and what they actually care about, (2) The market/industry structure and trajectory, and (3) the network of ideas and knowledge inside your own company.
Go deeper—How to be Strategic
(#3) The power (and importance) of forced decontextualization
“When we're in a routine, it's easy to ignore the things that are around us. Then, when they're disrupted, we feel a sudden need to reevaluate and reassess. As shocking as this process can be, it can also be freeing. It forces us to rethink the way we’ve done things and be intentional about how we do them moving forward.” —
🫰 Why it matters: Changing things around helps you see them for what they really are. When everything sits in the same place as it always has—in the same context—we can easily overlook ever getting rid of things, assessing what matters, changing what ought to be changed, and simplifying and/or repriortizing stuff around us. Decontextualizing is a forcing function that we can apply to our homes (i.e tidying up and reorganizing), relationships (i.e reinvigorating from a rut), and to our work/careers.
🔑 Bottom Line: Decontextualized from their normal places, things that once seemed perfectly fine where they were now may seem out of place. Once-useful things could look like clutter.
🥇 Applying it: Related to work, if you decontextualize and find that if given the chance, you wouldn’t take the same job you have today again, then reframe and think about whether there’s anything you can change about it. For example, find new ways to contribute or things you can add to or subtract from your job. As Deb says, “Rather than just continuing on and being dissatisfied with the job that you have, decontextualize it to make it into the job that you want.”
(#4) How, and why, to try an unhinged job application
“I believe there are 3 approaches to good applications:
Stellar resume: If you have Stanford/Ivy League and big tech on your resume, you’ll get pretty far with generic applications. If you don’t have a stellar resume (if just because the impressive things you’ve done don’t work well on resumes), it’ll be hard — especially because a ton of roles get filled via referrals, not applications from strangers.
15 extra minutes: This is the 80/20 version: Spend a few extra moments recording a Loom video about the company’s product, website, etc. If you’re an engineer, maybe find a bug and outline a fix. If you’re a marketer, review the copy on the landing page. etc. This will set you apart from 90% of people.
15 extra hours: This is what I did — it’s where you do something crazy and spend a ton of time on a great application. This will set you apart from literally everyone else.?”
—
P.S you can see Finn’s application here for inspiration. Consider me inspired!
🫰 Why it matters: Standing out in a pool of job applicants is incredibly and increasingly hard. Run-of-the-mill apps that take a few minutes just won’t cut it anymore in this market.
🔑 Bottom Line: If there’s a company, especially an earlier stage startup, that you really want to work for and see a great fit—go so much further than anyone else to stand out. You don’t need a network introduction, you need a jawdropping differentiator that shows the team your passion to work for them. Even if they don’t have an open role, they may even add one for you if you do this right.
🥇 Applying it: Finn’s advice is perfect: The best way to ensure your best shot at getting a job is to apply by just doing the job. Act as if you already got hired and produce something. In other words make something relevant just for that company.
(#5) Founder maths
Below is a quick simplification for startup building. The only thing missing from this is focus and execution. In other words, to win, you must also…
Prioritize the most important things.
Remain focused on those priorities.
4 bits of bonus content for the curious….🧑🎓
(1/4) Featured tools I’m currently using to grow 🛠️
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 Circeback as my new AI notetaking meeting buddy. I’ve never seen actionable summaries so good—neither has my team. 10/10. (Learn more)
I use Perplexity for everything. It’s my new Google search, my go-to AI tool, and my #1 research companion. A true game-changer for me. (Learn more)
(2/4) How I can help you grow 🤝
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 ↗
(3/4) Other interesting things I came across 🕳️🐇
Your boring data is actually marketing gold (here's how to mine it)
Let's evaluate Kamala Harris' entire economic policy program!
(4/4) Latest posts from the newsletter ✨
If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it…
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Otherwise, have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll see you next time. ✌️
—Jaryd
Just one comment on circleback. I used it in your recommendation and it's definitely better than the one I was using but if your login relies on an email code then that code needs to arrive now not 5 minutes later! We're not all so organised. Unfortunately
Loved this edition, and thanks for sharing my article 🤓