Learning from Giants #54
Do GTM first to build better products, Overcoming mid-career stuckness, and a mental model to visualize SQL queries: don't start with SELECT.
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Shift left on go-to-market to build better products
"Go-to-market considerations are not extra. How your product is discovered and adopted is part of the product."
GTM is part of the product and part of the PM's job. And like other considerations, it shouldn't happen in a vacuum. Go-to-market must influence and be influenced by users, problems, opportunities, solutions, and execution.
But what's GTM, exactly? Many things.
Go to Market is a catch all term for the process of bringing a product to market and making it available to customers."
Distribution. How will I get the customer to benefit from the value? How will I communicate that value? How do I want customers to think about the product?
"Great PMs shift left on go to market, considering and developing their distribution strategy while they're still prioritizing problems to solve, long before a PRD is written, let alone a line of code. And they build better products because of it."
How do they build better products? By closing the feedback loop and using early learnings and GTM reflections to inform their product strategy.
You can do it too! Try the famous Working backwards Amazon method of writing your product's press release first. Write a FAQ. Or even simpler, the author suggests writing the website copy for that new product. These will force you to step into your customer's shoes and think about GTM.
"Once you begin acting as though GTM is your job (it is), you'll find that you have better ideas not only about how, where, and when to distribute your product, but actually about what to build."
📗 Frank Tisellano's Shift left on go-to-market to build better products goes deeper into why GTM is essential to the Product job. The author also gives the brilliant example of Airbnb to illustrate how embedding a distribution strategy into your product can make a huge difference.
Mid-career stuckness
Read about it before (or while) it strikes!
After a few years of career, it's easy to be caught in an existential crisis. Whatever you were hired to do as an individual, you now do ten times faster, and better. You feel as good technically, if not better than some Senior colleagues, yet they get paid twice as much as you and have a more prestigious title.
Relax–you're experiencing your first career stuckness, a first wall to hit and crawl over.
"The most common cause [...] is the lack of an understanding of their power, the power of others, and then not developing their sources of power and using those to influence others to get things done."
Still unclear? Let me develop the idea:
Your manager evaluates your impact. The impact is all that matters.
There is a smaller chance than when you started that you can do your job ten times faster now to have more impact.
The answer is others. One of the main traits of a Senior person, beyond autonomy, is their ability to have impact through and with others. Influence. Leadership.
“Leadership is a process of influencing a group of people to produce some common goals."
How do you build that influence? By exercising some power. While it can have a negative connotation when used against someone's will, power is broader and kinder than this! Learn to recognize your strengths and how to use them effectively.
Your powers can be:
Technical expertise. Not just ability but something greater that can benefit your organization and peers.
How you feel about others and others feel about you.
"When people see you as a role model, like working with you, want to be associated with you, or are drawn towards you for your charisma, you can influence them without formal authority."
Your role, title, and relationships in the company.
And, of course, your ability to give, reward, and punish.
But they can be many other things relative to your peers' needs.
📗 Subbu Allamaraju's Mid Career Stuckness is a must-read for all professionals. Beyond the "leadership is power" dogma, the author gives pragmatic advice on how to grow your understanding of leadership, influence, and power.
SQL queries don’t start with SELECT
When building queries involving multiple operators, we often ask the same questions. One is "Can you filter the result of a window function in a WHERE or HAVING or something?"
"This led me to a bigger question – what order do SQL queries actually run in?"
Julia Evans means in what order is the SQL expression evaluated, which will drive what you can and cannot do with SQL. The order is as follows:
That mental model can help you evaluate faster whether you can apply WHERE to data transformed by window functions.
🚨 Beware! This is just the SQL evaluation, not data processing.
"Database engines in practice don't actually run queries by joining, and then filtering, and then grouping, because they implement a bunch of optimizations reorder things to make the query run faster as long as reordering things won't change the results of the query."
📗 Julia Evans's SQL queries don't start with SELECT is an excellent diagram to keep in mind when writing SQL queries.