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Showing posts from July, 2023

The Journey of Product Management: From FMCG to Silicon Valley

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Product management, a role that is now pivotal in the tech industry, has a rich history that dates back to the early 20th century. It all started with a memo at Procter & Gamble (P&G), an FMCG company, and eventually found its way into tech giants like HP, Intuit, Microsoft, Google, and many others in Silicon Valley.  The Birth of Product Management at P&G In 1931, Neil H. McElroy, a junior executive at P&G, penned a memo that would lay the foundation for modern product management. Frustrated with the internal competition between P&G's soap brands, McElroy proposed a new role, the "Brand Man," who would take complete responsibility for a brand, including its promotion, sales, and even product wrapper revisions.  The "Brand Man" was not just a marketing or advertising role; it was a radical shift in management, moving decision-making closer to the customer. McElroy's idea was to have these "brand men" understand the problems of t

The Guiding Light of Business Success: Understanding North Star Metrics

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If you have ever wondered how businesses such as Spotify or Facebook maintain their focus amidst the chaos of numerous goals and continuously achieve growth, the answer lies in their utilisation of the North Star Metric (NSM). The NSM is a crucial metric that acts as a beacon, guiding a company's decisions by illustrating how effectively it is providing value to its customers. To better comprehend this idea, let's delve deeper into the essence of the NSM, and examine how it has played a vital role in the triumph of many thriving companies. What is a North Star Metric? The North Star Metric (NSM) is like the most important score in the game for your business. It's one special number that shows how well your company's product is helping its customers. If your NSM goes up (which is what you want!), it means your business is doing well. Imagine your favorite game is football, and the main target is to score more goals than the other team. In the same way, in business, your

Strings

Strings are a type of data in programming that represent textual data. They are sequences of characters that can include letters, numbers, symbols, and spaces. In most programming languages, you can identify a string because it's enclosed within quotation marks. String Concatenation: This refers to the operation of joining two or more strings together. For example, if we have two strings, str1 = "Hello" and str2 = "World" , we can concatenate them to create "Hello World" . String Slicing: This operation allows you to access a subset or a "slice" of a string. For example, if we have str = "Hello World" , and we want to access the first five characters, we can use slicing. The way you do this depends on the programming language. In Python, it would be str[0:5] . String Formatting: This allows you to insert and format data within a string. For example, in Python, you can use the format method: "Hello {}, welcome to the world of