Flummoxed and muddled
Reflecting on my journey to clarity in product building through frames, progress, and frameworks.
Reframing - Progress towards clarity
Product building mantra in complex domains:
Frames for context setting, progress for making changes, framework for tools to track status First tweeted
The last few issues have been about one of these topics used as crutch to present an idea.
Babasaheb on agriculture is revealing a frame on farming, as production function in agriculture ecosystem. This frame helps in identifying problems inhibiting agriculture to be economical on the whole.
In his paper on “Small Holding of agriculture” in 1918, he refutes the recommendation of Baroda committee on consolidating land holdings. I wrote about it at length in a post about making agriculture economical. The crux of the paper was that we should aim to make farms economical. So, not just consolidate but to enlarge the land holding …
While “finding a principle for growth” is about defining progress of a product via increased access to its core functionality.
Thus, the goal of a product in the long run should be increasing the access of its underlying function(value) to a larger set of people(customers).
Whereas the the one about triads is on frameworks for setting strategy, positioning and roadmap of product. Essentially defining the artefacts required for product building. Such artefacts help align the cross functional teams working on the product.
The mantra that I quoted at the start of this post comes from having lived with these thoughts before penning them down over here. The journey is not linear or sequential in nature. You get muddled in the middle and flummoxed by the questions when you are explaining it to others.
All this turmoil eventually leads to a sense of clarity. Similar to how I felt while writing tags as frames for my life’s work.
Visa has this famous tweet ayy lmao which talks about the basic tenet of philosophy.
When it comes to work and life, these frames help me stay steadfast even during the tumultuous times
My own progress over the course of this reframing exercise is internalising how management is a form of making prediction and seeking knowledge to make better ones.
As we come close to the end of the year which began with being more data driven. The progress made marks an important milestone in building rigour.
Round up
No single rate in Truckload Market
Chris Caplice of MIT wrote a newsletter back in 2015 that summarises that price of a transaction between two counter-parts is not universal.
Despite its widespread usage, however, the commonly accepted market TL rate does not actually exist. It misrepresents the true nature of TL transportation, and is not a true market rate as such. As a result, its application can be extremely misleading.
He takes the case of truckload market and postulates the futility of fixating on price of a lane when there is no such thing.
Savings on Spot
Value creation for procurement function is predicated on savings. The money we save by making better sourcing decisions, the better the supply chain functions downstream. This becomes even more pertinent when you are procuring in domains like agriculture(open market) and logistics(spot) … Savings in procurement is saved spend compared to market conditions. There are two possibilities basing on the market conditions, one can either buy cheap or expensive. The way one gets to know how successful they are is based on how others have faired at the same time.
Savings is hard concept to evaluate when we don’t have a sound benchmarking index. Like the previous post, there is no one number but a rough evaluation of the execution.
Links that resonated
Who turns software into money : GTM
Jess writes about the work of Go-To-Market strategy in making money out of software.
How hard can it to be buy software?
We revisit Jess again as she talks about the process of buying software. The cost of buying is an important rubric to grasp while thinking about sales and positioning of a product.
Sign off
This issue was delayed from its usual dispatch day because I started 4 versions of it and bailed out on all of them. None of those felt like what I should be writing after what transpired in the week.
So, I went back to reading my past work and then I finally realised what I learnt in the last week was culmination of year long’s endeavour of being more rigorous in my operations. I still need to work on the aspect of velocity but I gotten a hang of what rigour entails.
Signing off till the next time,
Vivek, seeking knowledge through product for perpetuity