Alexandru Bleau

More happy than crazy, busy with product management, people and coffee

Category: Thoughts

Any youtube or vimeo channels for product managers?

I recently answered this question on Quora with 4 channels that I regularly follow.
Are there other channels with great content that focus on product management?
If not, are there channels with great content that focus on skills related to product management? (e.g. leadership, communication, decision making, business, etc.)

Here are my recommendations. Looking forward to yours in the comments:

Read Bleau Alexandru's answer to Is there a good YouTube channel for product managers? on Quora

You don’t need a title to lead and be a leader

There are so many actions and things you can do in any organization that can show you are a leader far before someone will even consider that you should bear the title.

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Not enjoying your Mondays should be your warning shot

You should love Mondays. It is a fresh start to do something new, to change something, to kick something into high gear. That is what Mondays are for.

You know what is even greater? You have about 50 every year. 50 chances to start, stop, grow, change something.

But Mondays are also for something else. Not enjoying your Monday should be your first warning shot. A warning that something needs to start, stop, grow or change… from your current status quo.

So if you currently don’t like your Monday, figure out why, and stop receiving those warnings.

Common sense shower thoughts

I happened to “tumble” over these 2 shower thoughts. Even though people are creating so many new products and services, there is still a lot of value slipping in between the cracks.

For example:

 

http://just-shower-thoughts.tumblr.com/post/147772056894/toilets-should-have-a-foot-pedal-to-lift-the-seat

http://just-shower-thoughts.tumblr.com/post/147936921804/atms-should-allow-for-a-panic-pin-number-so-that

What other similar gems have you found?

Can drone racing become a sport of the future?

I read an interesting piece about drone racing and people who want to make more of this type of events than just backyard fun. And that sounds cool.

From the disused locations to the fact that they decorate the location and encourage racers to be “aggressive”, it all adds up to an interesting racing experience that we have only seen in games or movies.

Here’s a quote from the article:

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Mobile Web vs. Native Apps. You might need both but question is when

One of the people that I constantly follow and read is Luke Wroblewski. If you don’t know him yet, do look him up. He recently wrote an article about Mobile Web vs. Native Apps where he does argue in the end that we might need both.

While native apps dominate the “time spent on your phone”, in reality, the dominate part is done by just a handful of apps… most likely not yours.

In the meantime, mobile web audience is growing both bigger and faster than native apps.

Unless your app is the service, there are three questions (at least) you should ask yourself before spending valuable time and resources building that app:

  1. What’s in it for the user? If there is no solid reason for him to keep your app on the phone versus accessing from the browser, your app will be deleted within a month. Good examples here would be Pocket and Google Maps giving the ability to save content offline.
  2. Can you afford the resources? We are not only talking about initial development time here. There’s maintenance, updates, bug fixes, compatibility for oh so many devices, customer support and the list goes on.
  3. Can you afford the time? It takes several months at least to deliver a high quality app. Months. That means a lot of time that you could use to deliver a lot of value to your users. It also means you are actively giving competitors time to copy or clone your service. It takes as little as 3 weeks for a successful app to be cloned.

So yes, native apps do serve their purpose and come with certain advantages both for the users and for the business, but it’s important to find the right timing and reasons for investing in building it.

The exciting road ahead towards autonomous robots and vehicles

I don’t know about you, but I’m quite excited after all the announcements from CES 2016, particularly those related to making cars, robots and other things autonomous.

NVIDIA’s super computer and all the other self-driving/autonomous initiatives are just the beginning. It is very likely that in 5 to 10 years there will be several open source autonomous solutions that will not be limited to cars.

This means brainpower for any type of vehicle or robot that we want to make autonomous accessible to anyone.

  • Do you need a robot that signs for your packages?
  • Did you buy a car and want to send it home or to be registered?
  • Need a robot to do the washing and cleaning? Or cooking?
  • Need some robots to fly ahead and start building on a new planet that we want to colonise?

One of the next revolutions will be the robot/machine revolution but I don’t believe that it will leave us without jobs. Just consider that most of the jobs today did not exist 2-3 decades ago. We will just have new titles and new jobs.

 

 

The platform lock-in myth

There has been a lot of talk regarding Twitter’s decision to go beyond the 140 character limit… by adding another 9860.

It doesn’t mean that you have to scroll through 10k character tweets as everything past the first 140 characters will be hidden. The other important thing to mention is that according to some, this is an attempt to lock-in users. More will stay on Twitter to read content instead of going to the linked website.

I would reword and say that it is an increasing myth. We have had and still have several companies that achieve a certain level of lock-in. But it is not a hard lock, more like a convenience lock.

Consider for example Apple’s app ecosystem. Buying a new phone is not a problem but losing hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of apps si not something a user will easily be determined to do.

Even in Apple’s case, they could only afford to impose or institute a platform lock in because of their initial “blue ocean” when the first iPhone came out.

The users’ expectations are changing to the point where they expect and demand and consider it as a given that they can port their data and settings when switching services and when it becomes a basic expectation of every service, that is when we will go from myth to impossible.

 

 

How would Quora monetize

A few ideas on how Quora could elegantly monetize its service

Quora at the moment is “very free” for its users. That is good and worrying at the same time.  I know they have raised funding so that they can remain that way, but sooner or later they do have to monetize in order to keep the service running.

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Connecting our mind to the internet in the future

Here’s an interesting quote:

To continue on his idea, in this age and probably the next to come, everyone needs and wants a phone. We have come to the point where not having one is a serious drawback to basically anything you want to do.

But here’s the thing: the internet, all the information, communication with others. Those are the things that are indispensable to us. Not the phone. The phone is just the input and output device.

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