Best Of Product Roundup - May 4, 2024

The best expert-curated product content from the best product thinkers from around the Internet delivered twice a month.

Every two weeks we consume all the product content on the Internet (free and paid), analyze it, and then we round-up links and short excerpts from the best content to:

• Save you thousands of dollars per month in unnecessary subscriptions

• Help you avoid spending days per week just reading instead of doing

• And most importantly, we save you years spent trying the wrong advice.

• Finally, we promote thinkers in product who are doing great work whether well known or soon-to-be-known!

Top Long-Form Articles

7 fails of roadmap-making

• What we liked: A quick to understand critique of what’s wrong with most roadmaps from a brilliant mind in the field.

• Choice Quote: “If you decide to make parts of it “public,” then do so only in the very short term and only for select things. Customers do care about features as a language and understand them so that lines up quite nicely. Resist the urge to go beyond a few months at any cost, though.”

How Reddit grew to 1 billion monthly users

• What we liked: A thoughtful and yet not overly detailed analysis of some of the key phases and drivers in Reddit’s growth (the consummate community product) + a nice set of a lessons for Product at the end.

• Choice Quote: “This also meant that communities were being started on intent-basis (you create a community of interest and attract users globally) vs. geographically bound communities that were prominent on reddit in the past. The new phenomenon of “intention-based community” also helped Reddit since in modern times and specifically even more so during COVID-19 it became hard to form local communities.”

One "Canvas" to Rule Them All

• What we liked: Finally an attempt to break the death grip of outdated “canvas” styles for stress testing ideas! The author creates a new “startup canvas” that includes just enough boxes to be useful with none of the extraneous content.

• Choice Quote: “The Startup Canvas combines my refreshed Product Strategy Canvas with a business model. And it’s designed specifically for new products.”

Test automation for LLMs

• What we liked: A concise explanation of how engineering can tackle the challenge of LLM non-determinism without expending too many cycles and still having a reasonably consistent product.

• Choice Quote: “Unlike traditional software, where you can define a set of fixed inputs and expected outputs, LLMs are inherently non-deterministic. Feed the same input to an LLM multiple times, and you might get different outputs each time. This non-determinism makes traditional unit testing approaches ineffective for LLMs.”

Top Tweets

• 10 places for humor in your product