Writing well - properties of content

Today, let's embark on a journey to explore the transformative power of content. Whether you're a seasoned writer, a budding blogger, or anyone in between, understanding the key properties of content and their effects on the audience is essential for crafting compelling and impactful material.

When we sit down to create content, our ultimate goal is often to inspire change, to spark a shift in perspective, or to encourage personal growth. We want our audience not just to consume our words but to be transformed by them—to emerge on the other side with newfound insights, knowledge, or motivation.

Now, let's delve into the art of crafting content that has the power to transform.

• Novel + Useful = Enlighten Me:

Begin by brainstorming ideas that are fresh, innovative, and original—something your audience hasn't seen before. However, novelty alone is not enough; your content must also provide practical value, offering insights, solutions, or guidance that your audience can apply to their lives or work. Whether it's sharing personal anecdotes, presenting groundbreaking research, or offering actionable tips, strive to enlighten your audience with content that is both novel and useful.

Example: Share a unique perspective on a familiar topic, backed by research or personal experience, to shed new light on the subject and provide actionable takeaways for your audience.

• Novel + Memorable = Engage Me:

To truly captivate your audience, your content must be memorable—it should linger in their minds long after they've finished reading or watching. Incorporate storytelling techniques, vivid imagery, or striking visuals to make your content stand out. Combine novelty with memorability to create an immersive experience that sparks curiosity and leaves a lasting impression.

Example: Craft a compelling narrative that transports your audience into a different world, evoking emotions and sparking their imagination. Use vivid descriptions and sensory details to create a memorable experience that resonates with your readers.

• Useful + Memorable = Empower Me:

Content that empowers your audience is not only informative but also empowering—it equips them with the tools, knowledge, or inspiration they need to take action and make a difference. Combine practical advice with memorable storytelling to create content that empowers your audience to overcome challenges, achieve their goals, or enact positive change in their lives.

Example: Provide actionable steps, real-life examples, or success stories that inspire and empower your audience to take control of their lives, pursue their passions, or overcome obstacles.

• Useful + Memorable + Novel = Transform Me:

Finally, aim to create content that encompasses all three key properties—novelty, usefulness, and memorability—to achieve the ultimate goal of transformation. By delivering content that is fresh, practical, and unforgettable, you have the power to transform your audience's thoughts, beliefs, or actions, leaving a lasting impact that extends far beyond the page.

Example: Present groundbreaking ideas or insights in a format that is accessible, actionable, and memorable. Use storytelling, visual elements, and interactive features to engage your audience on a deeper level and facilitate meaningful transformation.

Conclusion:

As content creators, we have the opportunity to shape hearts, minds, and lives through the power of our words. By understanding the key properties of content and their effects on the audience, we can craft content that not only informs and entertains but also inspires and transforms. So, let's embrace the challenge of creating content that empowers, enlightens, and engages—content that has the power to change the world, one reader at a time.

Microsoft vs Google : Strategy wars

With the launch of ChatGPT and open declaration of war on Google from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, we are living in one of the most exciting duels in most recent tech history. Lets analyze relative positioning and odds of who will come out on top in this epic Satya vs Sundar. Behind this lies a fascinating tale of the careers of these 2 Indian American executives who rose up the ranks to head these behemoths in Mountainview and Redmond.

Declaration of war

Microsoft has been making steady progress in the Deep Learning space through its investment in Open AI and the release of Dalle-2 and ChatGPT. While that is regular part of innovation and other companies like META has also been making steady progress in this field, Microsoft went a step ahead with product integration with Bing and open declaration of war. Here is what Satya said : 

Google is the 800 pound Gorilla in the room. This new Bing will make Google come out and want to show they can dance, and I want people to know that we made them dance

With that let us revisit how things go to here.

Google and its search monopoly

While Google is often credited for its technology, Google is able to retain its market share and monopoly in search due to its product strategy. The average user doesn't have much incentive to go and change the default search engine from settings. Google has successfully gated the entry points to search via Android OS for mobile, Chrome browser on desktops and by paying $20B to Apple for staying as the default search option on MacOS. No wonder Sundar Pichai (and not some engineer) became the CEO of Google because he was the Product Lead(read gatekeeper) of two of this products(read gates) : Chrome and Android. This virtually sealed Google's monopoly status on search. 

Monopoly and culture

What happened after Google became the monopoly it is today is exactly what a monopoly would need to do to stay a monopoly : lower profits so that they are not perceived as a monopoly. What better way to do it while stiffling competition by raising costs for competition by hiring developers at premium prices thus increasing cost and reducing supply of engineers. While the strategy was sound and paid off in the last decade, the recent ad recession of 2022-23 has exposed the flaws. Overhiring engineers, paying exhorbitant RSUs, lack of any need to deliver anything at all, delusions of exceptionalism, leads to a level of entitlement and lack of self awareness in engineers unseen in a while in Silicon valley. There are 2 high level problems with this

• [Financial Mismanagement]As pointed out by investors/hedge funds TCI and Altimeter
• Rapid headcount growth has led to reckless empire building. Managers reporting to Managers reporting to Managers..... Bloated org structures, title inflation, redundant levels - basically investors in Wall Street paying for the Sushi bar in Mountainview
• The median compensation at Alphabet was 67% higher than Microsoft and 153% higher than the 20 largest technology companies and there is no justification behind this enormous disparity
• [Cultural Trainwreck] Google engineers lost the ability to ship because for the last 10 years they didnt really need to. As pointed out in Mice in a Maze Google has 4 cultural problems : 

The way I see it, Google has four core cultural problems. They are all the natural consequences of having a money-printing machine called “Ads” that has kept growing relentlessly every year, hiding all other sins.

(1) no mission, (2) no urgency, (3) delusions of exceptionalism, (4) mismanagement.

Challenge from Microsoft - surprise ?  

In the meantime Satya Nadella has been playing 4D chess. Nadella was the boss of Bing before he got elevated to CEO in Redmond. So Bing vs Google is close to his heart. While Sundar has been enjoying his Sushi in Mountainview financed by monopoly taxes, Nadella has been plotting Bing revival one step at a time. Key milestones being investing in Open AI, Integrating it to Azure and then Launching Bing+Edge+ChatGPT in a bid to reinvest search. 

Microsoft CEO not only did the product announcements in Redmond, but also openly launched war on Google Search with its ChatGPT + Bing integration : 

“There is such margin in search, which for us is incremental. For Google it’s not, they have to defend it all,” he added, referring to the competition against Google as “asymmetric”.

Microsoft says for every point of share gain in the search advertising market, it’s a $2 billion revenue opportunity. 

There are several upsides of this strategic play from Microsoft. 

Microsoft Strategic Upsides

• Asymmetric battle : This is all for Google to defend and any incremental market share win for Microsoft has a huge revenue upside as Amy Hood (Microsoft CFO pointed out)
• Microsoft doesn't need to gain any market share at all to make Google lose. If it can change customer behavior to expect Search results from 10 link clicks(legacy search) to some mix of legacy search and some mix of conversational AI through ChatGPT(10-20% of the queries), it will be a big win. Conversational AI queries wont be monetized and the change in the mix of the search queries means, Google would also have to serve the unmonetized queries through Bard in order to stay competitive. Even if Google maintains its market share, it will put further margin pressure on Google and thus exacerbate the financial mismanagement and the cultural trainwreck issues highlighted above. This point is very important. It is not a matter of which AI is better, what matters is how will the user behavior and expectation change with the new form of search. Any deviation will hurt Google.
• Here is rough math to prove the point
• Google search queries : 300k queries per second
• Revenue : 160B in 2022, 1.6cents per query
• Cost : Apple 20B, 24% services margin, roughly 1.06cents per query
• So Google has 50 cents margin per query which can go to inference costs of an LLM

• Deploying current ChatGPT into every search done by Google would require 512,820.51 A100 HGX servers with a total of 4,102,568 A100 GPUs. The total cost of these servers and networking exceeds $100 billion of Capex alone

• Essentially 30B $GOOGL profit could evaporate overnight

• Looks like Microsoft knows how to flip a monopoly if not beat it
• Flipping Search monopoly is beneficial for Microsoft because it reduces competition for Azure as Google cannot funnel its monopoly riches to money losing Google Cloud investments any more. 
• What Google is facing is classic innovators dilemna

how large incumbent companies lose market share by listening to their customers and providing what appears to be the highest-value products, but new companies that serve low-value customers with poorly developed technology can improve that technology incrementally until it is good enough to quickly take market share from established business.

• ChatGPT is doing free marketing for Azure AI Services which hosts ChatGPT thus increasing cloud adoption
• Satya Nadella looks like a mastermind wartime CEO who looks like a peacetime CEO

Google Strategic Upside

• Yes you read that right, Google has an upside here too. While Google bungled its latest Bard announcement and the picture looks bleak right now, the biggest upside is that it could get support that it is not a monopoly in its latest department of justice lawsuit due to this competition from Microsoft. 
• Google has investments in Cloud hardware and TPUs could get more investments in the future to compete with Nvidia GPUs. So essentially the battle of search could be won or lost on the hardware front which could lead to significant value capture and also change the winners and losers of search

The next 1 year will be an interesting battleground for these two companies in Tech and how the personal lives, successes, failures and tales of two Indian American CEOs influence how they carve out the tech future for their companies. 

Market Outlook 2023

As we step into the new year, it's essential to gain insights into the market outlook for 2023. Understanding the forecasts and predictions from reputable financial institutions can provide valuable guidance for investors, businesses, and individuals navigating the ever-changing landscape of the global economy.

Feel free to refer to this table for easy access to the market outlooks provided by these leading financial institutions.

Financial Institution	Market Outlook for 2023
Goldman Sachs	Link
J.P. Morgan	Link
Morgan Stanley	Link
Bank of America	Link
BlackRock	Link
HSBC	Link
Barclays	Link
NatWest	Link
Citi	Link
UBS	Link
Credit Suisse	Link
BNP Paribas	Link
Deutsche Bank	Link
ING	Link
Apollo Global Management, Inc.	Link
Wells Fargo	Link
BNY Mellon	Link
Fidelity International	Link
Lazard	Link

Demystifying layoffs

With layoffs being more frequent in the tech industry, here's a post demystifying layoffs. This is based on my experience working in various companies and hearing stories from friends and colleagues. This post doesn't talk about any particular company/scenario specifically. 

1. The way most layoffs go is like this:

Scenario 1 : Startup with reduction in revenue growth rates needs to cut costs to preserve runway

Scenario 2 : Big company with reduction in revenue growth rates is seeing margin pressure as costs(OPEX + CAPEX) are now a higher percentage of the revenue leading to loss in investor confidence and stock price decline

CEO: “how much do we need to pay off?”

CFO: “we need to cut our burn by 20%. To be safe, we should reduce headcount expenses by 20%. We can do 18% but that’s risky and means we need to save harder on OPEX.”

CEO: “Ok, 20% it is.”

2. CEO tells all C-levels to send him a list with names to layoff that reduce  headcount expenses by 20%. Deadline: a week.

C-levels look through their orgs and pass down mandates to VPs to reduce HC expense by X%: so it all adds up to the target 20%. 

• Contractors, food expenses, etc are cut first so that layoffs is a measure of last resort. 
• Key orgs can see less cuts. Orgs that are part of core revenue generating products, core infrastructure will get less targets as cutting them will disrupt core business. Experimental bets get chopped first. Companies internally close their venture capital and startup arms and consolidate key aspects of the business.
• VPs in different functions get different targets. Recruiters, sales & marketing in b2c companies, QA, TPMs, Solutions engineers, PMs, Engineers - is the order of priority for layoffs. Engineering is touched last as engineers build. A product company doing massive engineering cut is a red flag as the company will be building less in the future. 

3. VPs usually involve directors, but NOT below. Senior managers, managers usually not in the loop.

Ok, so now the list needs to be built. Now, at this point there’s usually still a $ target, not a headcount target. So how is this list built?

4. Directors don’t reach out to managers but identify people to fired based on:

• Poor performance reviews recently
• People working on strategic priorities vs ones that dont align
• Platforms easy to hire vs harder to hire 
• Highest costs in redundant roles / ones less needed
• People working in cost centers / long-term-bets

5. This is where a good director can do better for the team than random selection. Lot of directors who are checked out and dont have good level of understanding of their orgs current performance standing, will have a spray gun approach. A good director will know nuances of who is well respected, who has more spillover impact, etc.

6. HR will take a look at diversity, maternity, paternity leaves - legal challenges and prune the list accordingly. 

7. The selection will really depend on what the directors and VPs prioritise and it *will* feel random. The director has incomplete information, and need to have a list by a deadline. 

8. In some scenarios managers/snr managers are asked for the list by the director. Junior manager who may botch the layoff by leaking are skipped. After getting the list the director makes the call on whether to include the name of the manager in the list or not. Same goes with the director where the VP makes the call and goes up recursively to the CEO. 

9. This is the overall high level way this process works. Offcourse reality is a lot more messier, there are horse trading games directors and managers have to play to protect their teams. There are several contentious meetings where things can get very heated where some of these decisions are made. 

Fremont vs Los Gatos vs Palo Alto high schools

•  Mission San Jose and Irvington's dominance holds over Los Gatos and Palo Alto high schools. Mission and Irvington average 50+ kids to Berkeley, a number which none of the Los Gatos, Saratoga or Palo Alto schools come close to
• Mission's dominance in one statement : over the last 5 years, Mission San Jose kids got 292 admission offers from Berkeley which is close to Los Gatos + Saratoga combined(308). Irvington is not far behind with 244. 
• In 2018, Irvington high alone got similar admits to Berkeley(57) than entire Los Gatos Saratoga Union high school district (58) (Los Gatos high and Saratoga high combined)
• In 2020, Irvington high alone got more admits to Berkeley than entire Palo Alto unified school district (Palo Alto high and Henry Gunn high combined)
• Among Henry Gunn, Palo Alto high, LG High and Saratoga high, only Henry Gunn crosses the 5 year average 40 mark
• Los Gatos and American high numbers are very similar over the last 5 years
• Saratoga and Palo Alto high numbers are very similar over the last 5 years 

Fremont vs San Jose public high schools

• Irvington and Mission - Fremont's top 2 seem to be in a different league compared to San Jose public high schools - averaging almost 50 kids to Berkeley every year
• Mission San Jose's dominance is clear as it got similar kids accepted to Berkeley as Evergreen and Leland combined did
• Irvington's dominance is clear as it got similar kids accepted to Berkeley as Evergreen, Leigh and Branham combined did

• Evergreen(26.2) and Leland(29) are top 2 in San Jose and average close to American High(27.6) in Fremont
• Washington(Fremont) and Milpitas High are the up and coming schools closing on the 20 mark
• Other public schools in San Jose are around the 10 mark. This includes Leigh high, Piedmont and Santa Teressa high which have 7+ great schools rating and median home prices above 1.5m. This shows that a lot of the new buyers in those neighborhoords will probably send kids to private schools or will move to better high schools in the future. 
• Kennedy (Fremont), Silver Creek, Willow Glen, Branham are all below the 10 mark

Fremont vs Los Altos schools

• Mountainview - Los altos union high has 2 high schools - Mountain view and Los Altos high
• Neither of them cross the 35 mark on the 5 year average admissions rate to Berkeley
• Fremont's top 2 - Mission and Irvington seem to be in a different league. Mission San Jose alone seems to be sending similar number of kids to Berkeley as both Mountainview and Los Altos high combined
• In 2020, Irvington high alone got more admits to Berkeley than entire Los Altos school district (Mountain view high and Los Altos high combined)
• Median home prices in Mountain view / Los altos are in the 3-4m range while median home prices in Mission are in the 2-3m range and Irvington in the 1.8-2.5 range. 

 

Fremont vs Cupertino high schools to Berkeley

• Mission San Jose has the highest 5 year Berkeley admission numbers among all the top Fremont and Cupertino school
• Monta Vista is a close second and crossed the 50 per year mark comfortably
• Both Irvington high (Fremont) and Lynbrook high (San Jose) are very close to the 50 per year mark 
• For the last 2 consecutive years, Irvington has sent more kids to Berkeley than Mission San Jose
• Lynbrook numbers fell to the 20s in 2020 and 2021 which could also be linked to removing of SAT as a criterion in admissions
• The top Fremont and Cupertino public high schools handily beat the top bay area private schools on the 5 year average admissions to Berkeley criterion

Fremont public vs private bay area high schools

• Harker and Basis cross the 15% mark when it comes to admission rates to Berkeley
• Fremont's top 2 public high schools(Mission San Jose and Irvington) have higher 5 year average admission rates to Berkeley compared to all the other private schools listed in this study except Harker and Basis Independent
• Mission San Jose and Irvington high cross the coveted ~50 kids per year to Berkeley mark
• Based on percentage of class size, the top 5 are Basis Independent, Harker, Mission San Jose, Irvington and Nueva. This is the right metric as it normalizes by class size as the public schools have much larger batch size compared to Harker and Basis
• Harker tuition fees is 50k per year while the Fremont public schools are free. The percentage admissions show that private schools dont have lot of additional delta edge compared to the top public schools
• Bellarmine, Mitty and Valley Christian severely underperform in college admissions compared to their other top public and private peers

Irvington high school 2017-2021 College admissions

IHS Berkeley Admissions

• Irvington high is the second best high school in Fremont behind Mission San Jose
• Last 5 years, Irvington has sent a whopping 8%+ of its class to Berkeley every year on average. Acceptance rates from Irvington high to Berkeley range between 20-25% - meaning almost 1 out of every 4-5 applicants get accepted into the top UC
• Another 4% on average go to UCLA and 12% on 5 year average go to UCSD
• So total 25% of the class size has offers from UCB, UCLA and UCSD
• Irvington high school has relatively small class sizes of less than 600 as of 2021 - this makes it easier to get electives compared to other high schools with larger class sizes
• The 5 year % of class is using the class size of 600 to compute what percent of class gets admits from which university irrespective of how many are applying
• Irvington high has been beating arch rivals Mission San Jose in 2021 and 2020 - two consecutive years
• Irvington high sent similar number of kids to Berkeley as Evergreen, Branham and Leigh combined over the last 5 years
• Irvington got more admits to Berkeley as Harker + Bellarmine combined over the last 5 years
• In 2020, Irvington high got more admits to Berkeley than entire Los Altos school district (Mountain view high and Los Altos high combined)
• In 2018, Irvington high got similar admits to Berkeley(57) than entire Los Gatos Saratoga Union high school district (58) (Los Gatos high and Saratoga high combined)
• In 2020, Irvington high got more admits to Berkeley than entire Palo Alto unified school district (Palo Alto high and Henry Gunn high combined)

Fremont's most prestigious schools - 30 year history

TLDR

• MSJHS, Joshua Chadbourne, Mission San Jose Elem, William Hopkins Jnr high have received 5+ California Distinguished school award
• Hirsch, Weibel, Irvington, Grimmer, Warm Springs elementary, Ardenwood elem, forest park elem, John Gomes elementary have won 3+ California distinguished awards 
• William Hopkins Junior high has received 3 National Blue Ribbon School awards (only school to get it multiple times)
• The highest concentration of awards are in the Mission San Jose and Irvington high feeder schools. Their dominance over a 30 year time frame is clearly visible

Goal

The goal of this post is to dig deeper and look at some of Fremont's most storied schools and their 30 year history of receiving California's top school awards. Great schools has reduced schools ratings to a yelp like review. This kind of research and awards from California Department of Education will help parents make more informed decision about the school district before buying a home. 

Overview

We will be covering 3 awards

• California Distinguished school award
• National Blue ribbon school award
• California Gold ribbon school award

Recession proof Bay Area SFH school districts

Over the last 10 years, zero interest rates and reduced housing supply has led to indiscriminate rise in home prices. However as interest rates rise, some pockets of real estate will hold their prices while others wont. As has been noticeable in the 2008 crash, good school district SFHs retain value through recessions and price drops are minimal. The goal of this post is to illustrate why and also look at what good school district mean. Hang in there as 8+ greatschool rating doesnt mean anything and lot of shitty schools are rated 8 on greatschools based on equity scores. 

Why do good school districts go for premium ? 

• SFH
• The regular factors that go behind SFH are still at play
• Own and independent lot
• Ability to extend the home in future
• Inflation
• Raw material Inflation
• Homebuilding prices like lumber, copper, raw materials and labor increase with inflation
• Cost of building a brand new home goes up
• Tuition inflation
• Private school tuitions go up with inflation. For example : Challenger tuition fees in 2007-08 were 10k per year. In 2022, Challenger tuition is 23k per year. 
• At 2022 prices, cost of private school education for a kid is 250k and for 2 kids is 500k. 
• If you chose to go the public school route, then you pay the 500k into the mortgage which is an investment without compromising on education quality or outcome. More on the quality and outcome later. 
• As inflation rises, private school tuition will only increase from here and the SFHs with top public schools will be indexed to inflation
• This is why condos/townhomes in top school districts like Cupertino and Mission San Jose sell higher than SFHs in poor school districts
• Wage inflation
• This is applicable to all homes. Home prices rise with wage growth and inflation will lead to wage growth. 
• Supply constrained
• SFHs are lesser in supply. SFHs in good school districts are further lesser. 
• During downturns, this works to the advantage as the restricted supply still ensures there is enough demand
• During downturns, home values in these neighbourhoods generally go down last and are the first to come back up when the market improves
• This is what supply constraint looks like irrespective of school district
• During periods of inflation, prices of anything with limited supply goes up
  
  
  
  
• Upgrade demand from surrounding areas
• During sellers markets, lot of buyers get stuck in homes in poor school districts. Due to bidding wars, they dont get choice. A lot of them also have equity. For eg : somebody in Newark or Washington high school will always try to upgrade to Irvington or American high in Fremont. Somebody stuck in Leigh high/San Jose will try to upgrade to Cupertino/Mission when they realize that some kids in Leigh high also end up in community colleges. 
• Security
• Good school districts generally come with families which leads to area with better security
• Rental demand
• Homes in good school districts generally attract good strong renters reducing vacancy rate and increasing rental yield
• During rising rate environment, lot of people get priced out of the market. This leads to increased rising rental demand
• Stocks vs real estate
• During stock markets declines people panic sell and buy real estate because housing never goes to zero. Also if you are able to buy and hold the house then you are guaranteed to have that standard of living in the future, while with stocks you can be underwater for the next 10 years

What does good school district look like ?

Before answering that question, 7-8 rating on great school doesnt mean anything and doesnt mean a good school district. Great school ratings factor in equity scores by 40% which a lot of the buyers are not aware of. While whether this is the right methodology or not is a subject of another post, I like to use a different metric to evaluate good school district which is more consistent with home value retention during recessions and the actual value a buyer will derive out of the home. 

I use Berkeley admission rates and compute the 5 year, 10 year and 15 year average. 

Bay area has 13 schools which are in the top 100 US STEM schools. Out of these, Mission San Jose (Fremont), Irvington high(Fremont), Monta Vista(Cupertino) and Lynbrook(Cupertino) send 50 kids per year to Berkeley on Average. SFHs and condos in these schools tend to hold value in buyers markets because of the above reasons mentioned. 

Pleasanton and San Ramon also have amazing schools as linkedin above. But they have another factor which is distance from bay area which adversely affects them in recessions. The price drops are largest the further you move out of bay area. 

Bay area Top 100 US STEM High Schools

TLDR

Dougherty High(San Ramon), Mission San Jose High(Fremont), Irvington High(Fremont), Lynbrook(Cupertino), Monta Vista(Cupertino) send ~50 kids to Berkeley every year on average over the last 5 years and also rank in the Top 100 US STEM High Schools. This makes homes feeding to any of these high schools attractive investment. 

Context

Bay area is a great place with amazing public high schools. Among the top 100 US STEM high schools, 13 are from bay area making the region a centre for amazing education. Cherry on top, some of the best school districts in the bay area boast of multiple high schools in the top 100. Being in california, bay area schools feed directly into UC Berkeley. 

Goal

• Review bay area high schools in the top 100 US News STEM Rankings
• Review historical 14 year, 10 year and 5 year admission rates to Berkeley
• Review school districts with multiple presence at the top

Here is the list of the 13 bay area schools making it into top 13 US STEM Rankings. Also included is the 14, 10, 5 year berkeley admission rates from these schools.

As you can see, some of the well known school districts Cupertino, Fremont, Pleasant contribute multiple entries to this list. Cupertino leads with 4 entries : Cupertino high, Homestead, Lynbrook and Monta Vista. Fremont follows with Mission, Irvington and American high - all well known schools. 

There is a surprise winner if we look at the 5 year average Berkeley admits

We are using averages to remove yearly variance and to get a better measure of consistency. Dougherty valley from San Ramon leads the Berkeley admits race with 76.2 kids being admitted to Berkeley every year. Mission and Monta vista both sent >50 kids per year over the last 5 years and Lynbrook and Irvington came in a close to the 50 mark too. 

Hopefully this post helps readers look deeper than the superficial great schools ratings available on zillow as they pay for their homes. 

Pitfalls of Poorly Designed PM Roles

In my decade-long journey navigating the realms of FAAMG giants and pre-IPO startups, I've encountered a multitude of Product Managers (PMs) ensnared in a web of stress, dissatisfaction, and an overwhelming urge to seek new horizons due to challenges with their current roles.

But what exactly delineates a great PM job? Let's delve into the intricacies of what constitutes an exemplary PM role and how companies can endeavor to retain their prized PM talent.

1. Dedicated eng team with frontend (app + web engineers)

Being a PM without an eng team is a farce. These roles are highly ambiguous, without no line of direct impact/delivery in sight and no way of attributing success back. Often times there are competing PMs with engineering teams who are actually delivering value. These roles tend to feel more like Program or initiative management. These roles can be high visibility, high accountability roles without much power in the organization to move the needle. Often times, these roles tend to be on the chopping block first and lead to the greatest frustrations.

Yet, these positions are everywhere. These positions tend to have the highest attrition.

PMs need to build and deliver features that impact users. This is impossible without engineers (or “ops” or “tech design” - people who release features). A magical ratio is 7:1 engineers to a PM.

2. Dedicated design analytics, & user research team members

Although lack of design works for certain backend teams, most those PMs end up in the position of needing to ask other teams for support to make impact. They end up in the same position as PMs without dedicated eng.

Similarly, analytics are critical for good prioritization and experiment analysis. PMs who are shipping lots of features don’t have time to write SQL queries and build dashboards.

Finally, working to do user research (UXR) on your own as a PM is time traded off with other activities. Discovery and usability testing are sciences best performed by experts. Also easy to lose credibility even after going the extra mile the experimental feature fails, its easy to say that the hypothesis was incorrectly built because of lack of thorough user research. 

Most PMs need at least half a resource of design, analytics, & user research. PMs doing these jobs trades off with driving execution, developing strategy, and bringing along the company. This causes PMs to either underperform or work long hours - driving attrition.

3. PMing a backend team or ML/AI team

While PMs can be successful in backend and AI teams, but these roles can be very hard to deliver on. Backend and AI teams generally have a lot of technical complexity and have Staff/Senior engineers for technical direction and strategy. Most of big tech companies hire/promote high agency engineers with direction/strategy sense to Staff roles. It becomes very hard for PMs to demonstrate value in those scenarios that engineers cannot bring to the table making the role less essential compared to user facing frontend teams. Backend teams can be user facing too and the users can be other developers. These kind of PM roles are platform PM roles. Generally engineer to PM converts in the team are happier in these roles compared to external PM hires for whom the rampup curve can be steep. 

4. Lack of clear charter and ownership

Often times teams have overlapping charter. For eg : retention can be part of growth and also engagement. Lack of proper org structure is far too common leading to lack of clarity of goals, collaboration nightmares, resourcing prioritization, unpredictability of roadmap, leading to lots of frustration. 

5. PM can be a lonely role

A PM role is all about bringing everyone together : engineering, design, user research, partner teams, etc. Yet the PM role can be lonely as no one role has this full view and at the same time shares all the frustrations described above. 

6. Working for a great line of product leadership

There is no formal training for product management. (The few that exist are not to standard.) Most PMs have to learn on the job.

As a result, leadership matters. Great product leaders teach specifically via feedback, 1:1s, and career sessions. They also teach by example. Decisions aren’t made by gut, but by discovery. Features aren’t graduated just because, but due to metrics.

Bad product leadership, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. It’s not uncommon to find product leaders who haven’t even been individual contributor PMs. They can rarely coach how to execute and influence. They don’t have the context.

7. Empowered to determine your own roadmap and strategy

Product managers who are glorified project managers rarely stay. Yet, this is all too common. PMs are handed roadmap and strategy by execs.

On the other hand, there are few thrills quite like leading an empowered product team. These PMs feel empowered to make an impact and change the world.

8. Collaborate with supportive cross-functional colleagues

Often, it’s an influential sales team blaming the product team. Other times, it’s marketing, partnerships, finance, analytics, design, or legal. Whomever the culprit, once other functions point the finger, PMs leave.

If you are a PM struggling with some of these issues, feel free to drop me a note with your story. Happy to advice.