5-BIT FRIDAYS
🌱 5-Bit Fridays: Working backward, the
Peak-End Rule in UX, what leadership
isn't about, 6 PM superpowers, and
passing 1st round interviews
#34
JARYD HERMANN
JUL 14, 2023
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👋 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.
Happy Friday, friends
🍻
Welcome to another edition of 5-Bit Fridays! To the 942 people who’ve joined us
since the last one, you don’t yet know that I like to start our weekly round-up off with
some random news you never asked for. Such as…3 things you might need to know
about the Twitter/Threads debacle, ranked by descending priority.
Twitter has started paying out users a share of ad revenue to retain high-quality
creators
The Threads team says they’re shipping improvements this week, like an edit
button you can use for free. Shot’s fired.
In retaliation, Elon challenged Zuck to a dick-measuring contest. A real one.
Gotta love the banter, if nothing else. But more seriously…this 15s video captures it
perfectly
…Lol….
Well, in more local news…about 2 weeks ago How They Grow was a featured Substack
publication! Coming from a company I admire so much, with a pool of incredible
writers and content to choose from, it was a massive honor. And while we’re talking
about my newsletter, if you missed this week’s deep dive, here’s a link.
👇
How Roku Grows: The Platform For Streaming
Platforms
What we can learn about Trojan horses, popcorn strategy, thinking in
layers, and the power of defaults
Alrighty. Onto today’s post…
Here’s what we’ve got this week:
Working backward: The 5-5 method
The Peak-End Rule, and how it affects user experience
How to pass any first-round interview (even in a terrible talent market)
Six superpowers to seek out as a product manager to level up
What leadership isn’t about
Small ask: If you learn something new today, consider
❤️ ’ing this post or giving it a share. I’d
be incredibly grateful, as it helps more people like you discover my writing.
(#1) Working backward: The 5-5
method
When it comes to building products and operating a business, Amazon is known for
their frameworks and systemized approaches to getting things done.
One of which is the “working backward method”.
Simply, it works like this. Before building or doing anything, the team imagines that
the product is ready to ship. Practically, they actually draft a press release with the
intended customer as the hypothetical audience. Of course, they don’t share this
publicly, but as an internal doc, it serves as a foundational artifact for product
development.
Now, just because Amazon does it definitely doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.
So let’s look at a few reasons why they lobby for it, and perhaps why you should
consider “mock releases” as a tool:
It’s a useful gut check about a product’s viability. Before even going down the
route of surveying and building MVPs, this mock press release helps you figure
out if there’s enthusiasm to pursue the idea further. If you find yourself
uninspired by the draft, that’s a decent indicator that the product idea lacks
something or that the problem/solution hasn’t had enough thought.
They become a useful strategic guide during development. Similarly to the
roadmap, it can help keep you and the team on track and aligned around the big
ideas and plans for the product. If anyone in an adjacent team needs to know
what you’re doing…send the mock release.
It drives customer-centricity. “Customer obsession” is one of Amazon’s guiding
principles, and using this method forces you to think through all of the reasons
you’ve built the hypothetical product for your customer, and how you anticipate
selling it to them in a compelling way.
And now that you know why it’s used, let’s bring it to the more practical: How to use it.
First, you ask these 5 questions
1. Who is the customer?
2. What is the customer problem or opportunity?
3. What is the most important customer benefit?
4. How do you know what customers need or want?
5. What does the customer experience look like?
Then, you follow these 5 steps
1. Start with the customer and draft/mock press release
2. Evaluate the opportunity. Is it compelling enough? Should we build it?
3. Discover solutions and get stakeholder approval
4. Build the high-level roadmap and identify themes
5. Create the backlog and assign tasks
To bring it all together here’s Ian McAllister (Former VP at Amazon) giving us
some advice on how to apply it, as well as an example outline and a few things to be
mindful of:
There is an approach called "working backward" that is widely used at Amazon.
We try to work backward from the customer, rather than starting with an idea for
a product and trying to bolt customers onto it. While working backward can be
applied to any specific product decision, using this approach is especially
important when developing new products or features.
For new initiatives, a product manager typically starts by writing an internal press
release announcing the finished product. The target audience for the press release
is the new/updated product's customers, which can be retail customers or internal
users of a tool or technology. Internal press releases are centered around the
customer problem, how current solutions (internal or external) fail, and how the
new product will blow away existing solutions.
If the benefits listed don't sound very interesting or exciting to customers, then
perhaps they're not (and shouldn't be built). Instead, the product manager should
keep iterating on the press release until they've come up with benefits that
actually sound like benefits. Iterating on a press release is a lot less expensive
than iterating on the product itself (and quicker!).
Here's an example outline for the press release:
Heading - Name the product in a way the reader (i.e. your target customers)
will understand.
Sub-Heading - Describe who the market for the product is and what benefit
they get. One sentence only underneath the title.
Summary - Give a summary of the product and the benefit. Assume the
reader will not read anything else so make this paragraph good.
Problem - Describe the problem your product solves.
Solution - Describe how your product elegantly solves the problem.
Quote from You - A quote from a spokesperson in your company.
How to Get Started - Describe how easy it is to get started.
Customer Quote - Provide a quote from a hypothetical customer that
describes how they experienced the benefit.
Closing and Call to Action - Wrap it up and give pointers where the reader
should go next.
If the press release is more than a page and a half, it is probably too long. Keep it
simple. 3-4 sentences for most paragraphs. Cut out the fat. Don't make it into a
spec. You can accompany the press release with a FAQ that answers all of the
other business or execution questions so the press release can stay focused on
what the customer gets. My rule of thumb is that if the press release is hard to
write, then the product is probably going to suck. Keep working at it until the
outline for each paragraph flows.
Oh, and I also like to write press releases in what I call "Oprah-speak" for
mainstream consumer products. Imagine you're sitting on Oprah's couch and
have just explained the product to her, and then you listen as she explains it to her
audience. That's "Oprah-speak", not "Geek-speak".
Once the project moves into development, the press release can be used as a
touchstone; a guiding light. The product team can ask themselves, "Are we
building what is in the press release?" If they find they're spending time building
things that aren't in the press release (overbuilding), they need to ask themselves
why. This keeps product development focused on achieving the customer benefits
and not building extraneous stuff that takes longer to build, takes resources to
maintain, and doesn't provide real customer benefit (at least not enough to
warrant inclusion in the press release).
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(#2)The Peak-End Rule, and how it
affects user experience
One of my favorite writers in the field of psychology is Daniel Kahneman. Among
several other home runs, you most likely know him for his book, Thinking, Fast And
Slow.
Well, in 1993, he ran a study that found that—surprise surprise—our memory is
rarely a perfectly accurate record of events. In fact, it’s really bad.
And in this study, he coined a now popular psychological heuristic: The Peak-End
Rule.
In short, he discovered that we’re most likely to judge an experience largely based on
how we felt at two distinct points, regardless of how great or bad the average of
everything else around them is— at the most intense point, and at the end.
If you’re interested in a deeper and more “advanced” understanding of this rule,
listen to Daniel’s arguments for the “experiencing self” and the “remembering self.”
Otherwise, for us lazy folks, let’s just visualize it…
So, large bodies of evidence tell us that whatever we do, our memories are
disproportionately influenced by the most emotionally intense point and its end, not
the total sum or average of the experience.
Okay…let’s bring that to the world of product
1. Identify the peaks in a customer journey:
Use journey mapping to understand the customer's experience and how they
flow from 0 to 1 across your product
Find moments of delight and frustration in the customer journey. Where are
your aha! moments and most tangible points of product value?
Identify opportunities to address pain points in your map
Here’s a rough example of a journey map for a B2B SaaS:
Source: PIKTOCHART
2) Create memorable and positive peaks:
Address low points
Identify moments of user frustration/friction (visual dips in the journey
map)
Brainstorm solutions to improve these pain points
Amplify high points
Identify moments of user satisfaction in the journey
Enhance these positive experiences and replicate them in other parts of the
journey
Use elements like convenience, comfort, and delightful design to make
experiences memorable and highlight successful actions toward completing
a customer's job-to-be-done.
3. End on a good note
Make the end of the customer journey as delightful as possible. Think big, and
don’t be afraid to push some limits. Like we saw with Roku and Roku City—
pushing design philosophies for the sake of fun and delight can be worth it.
Outside of design, think about added value you can bring the customer, like
follow-up calls, useful resources, and just generally providing folks with a sense
of success and accomplishment (thanks to your product).
As a closing thought here, this reminds me of Brian Chesky’s idea of a 7-star
customer experience. Read: How to Scale a Magical Experience: 4 Lessons from Airbnb’s
Brian Chesky
(#3) How to pass any first-round
interview (even in a terrible talent
market)
In the last 3 years, Coach Erika has coached 200+ job seekers on how to land their
dream jobs. In a recent guest post on Lenny’s Newsletter, she shares her step-by-step
guide for passing the essential first-round interview—with practical tactics, Q&A
examples, and even a breakdown to help you make the most of your available prep
time. As Lenny says, “If you’re currently interviewing, or plan to, this will change
your life.”
So, after you’ve done the general recruiter/screening call and you now have that first
round scheduled, Erika suggests you prepare with what she calls the Minimum
Viable Interview Prep (MVIP) framework.
Here’s a summary…
First, get your career story straight
Know your digital footprint
Know what’s out there (about you or authored by you)
Assess whether it fits how you’d like to present yourself
Modify as needed to represent yourself as you’d prefer
Know your (strategic and compelling) reasons for wanting this role
Convey what you bring to the role (the compelling ones for the employer)
Explain how this role will accelerate your career (the strategic reasons)
Avoid reasons that sound like complaints about your current or past
employer
Know the role (map it), and “mirror” job description words back to
interviewers
Paste the job description into a doc, then highlight keywords and concepts.
Put the keywords into a table (one row per keyword or concept). Then add a
column to the right. Here’s a template to get you started.
In the right column, write down parts of your experience that map to that
concept.
Read this before your interview.
In the interview, when you talk about your experience (right column), use
their language (left column) to explain what you did.
Here’s Erika’s handy example of job description keywords mapped to your experience
Source: Coach Erika via Lenny’s Newsletter
Recalling your past experiences, and how to answer
behavioral questions
The vast majority of interview questions will ask you to dive into your past
experiences and describe how you handled a specific situation. When you’ve been
working for five or more years, it can be really tough to index your memory and
pull out the perfect example on a dime.
(By the way: It’s not you. It’s everyone. We all struggle with this. It’s a neurobiological
limitation with the way our brains store memories.)
Writing down the answers to hundreds of behavioral questions is a common way I
see candidates try to remember all the things they’ve accomplished. This is
exhausting and can actually overload your brain and cause you to freeze up or
even “blackout” in an interview.
To avoid burnout and get better results, I instead coach candidates to pick three
to five recent major projects in their careers, and then remember every single detail
they can recall about those projects, for example:
Example prompts to walk down memory lane and reposition memories for better
interview storytelling. See the references section at the end for a detailed
walkthrough and example.
With that great framework in mind, you’re set up to answer behavioral questions
(~70% of first-round interviews) using what Erika calls the STAR++ method.
Situation: Explain what was happening at the time so the interviewer
understands the context of the example (they don’t need all the details)
Task: Next, talk about the task or problem you were responsible for
Action: Describe what you personally did to solve the problem and deliver
outcomes
Result: Explain the impact of your actions. Highlight numbers where you can.
+ (learnings): Expose what you learned
+ (future improvements): Share how you’ve adapted your approach for future
projects (given the learnings)
For an example of that in action
→ STAR++ example
And to cap this bit off, here’s a super tactical checklist and schedule Erik put
together
The first-round interview prep cheatsheet
Some timing guidelines:
Cleaning up your resume, LinkedIn, and online presence: 1-2 hours
Crafting a strategic, compelling career story: 1-1.5 hours
Mining the job description: 30 minutes
Walking down memory lane: 1-2 hours the first time; 30 minutes to refresh
for any additional interviews
Mastering behavioral questions: 4-6 hours
Formulating high-signal questions for interviewers: 1-2 hours
A one-time task for your entire job search, not for every single interview
If you use MVIP, you can prepare for a first-round interview in three or four days
(with about four hours per day of prep). If you’re working full-time, you can do it
in a week with two to three hours a day. Much of what you learn with this MVIP
interview prep system is reusable across interviews, so you will quickly see the
effect of your preparation in later interviews.
— Coach Erika
To go deeper on this, check out this excellent deep dive (paywall): How to Win at Remote
Interviews
💼
Speaking of getting a job…
(#4) Six superpowers to seek out as a
product manager to level up
Forget titles for a second. What, at the heart of it, actually makes someone senior over
another?
🤔
To answer that question, Nikhyl Singhal (VP of Product at Meta) gives us another
one: What’s the biggest problem I can give you?
As he goes on to brilliantly put it:
Regardless of title or level, the bigger the problem you can own with minimal
supervision, the more senior you are. And in organizations, there are many
challenges that exist, not just those that require big teams to solve. Individual
contributors are proving themselves as leaders by tackling these bigger, harder, and
more complex – and ambiguous (a key word here) – challenges.
In an excellent essay, Nikhyl writes that leaders in product management don’t really
face a single big problem, but rather, ambiguities across six categories: product,
growth, domain, market, organizational, and team. And he notes that, realistically,
if you want to be elite you should aim to master 2 of them.
So, to help us all get there, here’s a brief summary Nikhyl put together of the six skill
sets and the type of interview questions an expert would crush. Because most PMs
don’t start their careers as PMs, he also notes the common functions that produce
the different types of category experts.
Source: The Skip
Climbing the ladder is no longer only about tenure or simply “managing.” Career
opportunity and growth will instead stem from building skills in each of the six
areas I’ve discussed above: product, growth, domain, market, organizational, and
team. I suggest becoming an expert in one or two of these areas, while becoming
proficient across the board. Ultimately, you want to be able to take on those larger
and more complex problems, and then grow into roles that allow you to hire or
guide folks who can also do that. Understanding all of the components and having
the right vocabulary will equip you with the vision, the motivation, and the
practical skills to make this happen.
— Nikhyl Singhal via The Skip
To deeper into those 6 skills:
👉 Continue reading his essay.
(#5) What leadership isn’t about
To send you into the weekend, here are some words of wisdom from the GOAT,
Aakash Gupta .
In my years as a product leader, I've learned that leadership is not about:
Merely discussing project status during 1 on 1s
Only dealing with the tactical aspects of a project
Focusing solely on blockers that are hindering progress
Giving feedback only about the content of work done
Ignoring the holistic growth of your team
That's a limited perspective. Anyone can do that.
True leadership is about:
Delving into the context during 1 on 1s, not just the content
Understanding how team members feel about their work
Helping them shape their career growth
Fostering a growth-oriented mindset within the team
Providing support to deal with setbacks and helping them bounce back
Start with these questions:
How do you feel about the work you're doing?
Are you facing any challenges or roadblocks?
How can I assist you in overcoming them?
What are your career growth aspirations?
How can I help you achieve them?
How has your mindset shaped your work?
Have recent setbacks affected your motivation or performance?
How can we address them to ensure your wellbeing and productivity?
Inculcate curiosity. Learn and adapt. Push for a wholesome approach to
leadership.
Remember that being a product leader is about creating a "team that excels in
their work, yet also grows personally and professionally," not about merely driving
projects to completion.
For more by Aakash, check out his newsletter (which is quickly becoming one of my
hottest recommendations), Product Growth .
🌱 And now, byte on this if you have time 🧠
6 years ago, Jerry Chen of Greylock Partners published “The New Moats: Why
Systems of Intelligence are the next defensible business model.” In his essay, he
posited that startups would be able to build defensible moats using AI.
Well, in 6 years a lot has changed as you know. So, a few weeks ago Jerry revisit his
framework to see what still holds true and what’s changed.
TL;DR: Systems of Intelligence are still the next defensible business model.
Read: The New New Moats, by Jerry Chen
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, share, or a restack. 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.
🫶
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, and I’ll see you same time and place next
week.
Until next time.
— Jaryd
✌️
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Aakash Gupta
Writes Product Growth 8 hr ago
Another great one! Thanks Jaryd.
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