What’s the secret behind the world’s stickiest brands?
Notes:
Siebert explains that “It’s not at all about creating consistently good customer experiences, but about creating intentionally chaotic, maddening, and unpredictable ones.”
The first step is providing customers with “rapid entry.”
Lindridge adds, “It’s also not about making services convenient, easy, or satisfying, but instead about making them challenging, suspenseful, and thrilling.”
These brands don’t bore customers with a lot of information. They don’t ask too many questions. And they don’t pressure customers to sign up for a monthly subscription, at least not at the beginning.
The second step is providing customers with “endless variation” along the user experience journey.
the only way to keep customers excited is by creating unpredictable experiences.
The third step is sparking new customer journeys as soon as the current ones begin to run out of steam.
Even the most exciting adventures can become familiar, exhausting, or boring after a while. Eventually, brands must offer their customers new journeys,” adds Simões.
How a Google Product Manager Manages Time
Notes:
the value of time management is actually about doing more of the right things.
Working on the right stuff is like Archimedes’ lever. You can move much larger things with less effort.
- Keep a weekly top priorities doc
- Have one place to organize to-do items by projects
- Prioritize every to-do item
- Schedule every part of you day, first thing that day
The Financial Crisis, Then and Now: Ancient Rome and 2008 CE
Notes:
Amid the outpouring of ten-year retrospectives on the economic crisis of 2008, historian Charles Bartlett asks what a crisis that occurred almost 2000 years ago can tell us about the enduring relationships between legislative agendas, financial crises, and policy responses.
In 33 CE, the Roman empire experienced a severe economic crisis.
A large part of Augustus’s expenditures went to installing the veterans who had fought for him on farms of their own. Agriculture was far and away the most important sector of the ancient economy, but it was also crucial to the Roman ethos. The effects of this can be seen not only in the soldiers’ desire for land, but also in the self-stylization and indeed the conduct of the Roman elite. Senators wrote treatises on farming, and even passed a law forbidding themselves from owning large transport ships, so that they would not be drawn into long-distance trade and away from the farm.1 And within this environment, land in Italy was most prized.
Publishers Are Investing in a Second Generation of Audio Articles
Notes:
“We conducted user research and learned that users want to stay informed but are busy, so they appreciate an option to get up to speed on the latest news developments while cooking dinner, running errands or exercising,”
Unlike podcasts, which are often free and include advertising, publishers tend to keep most of their audio articles ad-free and behind a paywall. They are also cheaper to make than podcasts because the reporting has already been done and they don’t need production add-ons such as music.
Best Quote on Twitter so far:
“The best thing about entrepreneurship is that you can do whatever you want… The worst thing about entrepreneurship is you have to decide and live with the consequences of 100% of your decisions!”
