Really interesting approach! I can see this being useful. How are you dealing with short/medium-term changes in consumer sentiment, I assume your model is currently fairly static? For example, the results to "Would you buy an e-bike?" might change over time as cities add charge-points or additional bike paths, prices for e-bikes go down, etc. And as a more extreme example, the answer to typical YouGov questions like "Who will you vote for in the next presidential election" will obviously change daily based on a multitude of factors that aren't present in your training data.
The data we trained on has year, so we can specify the year you ask the question (the default is 2023). You can also see how answers change over time. [1] shows how the distribution for "Do you support the President" changes from 2000 to 2023 (see the 9/11 spike, end of Bush era, Obama era, Trump era, etc.)
It might not matter to users in the sense that they ask themselves what rendering engine Chrome on iOS is using under the hood, but the effects do matter. I get a lot of support requests saying "Your [web] app is broken on my iPhone!", "Right, Safari doesn't support feature XYZ", "I'm not using Safari, I'm using Chrome", "..."
How does the developer story get better if you're required to support many web rendering engines on iOS instead of one? Or is the endgame that you'd just point people to Chrome/Blink and extend the web monoculture to Apple devices too?
The endgame is that Apple is forced to actually make a working browser, rather than intentionally starve it of resources to benefit the App Store. Everyone wins.
Just wait until Google has Chrome running natively on iOS and introduces nonstandard behaviors to break Safari rendering intentionally.
Then at least you’ll be able to tell all your customers that you recommend switching to Chrome for all browsing. What a great victory for browser diversity and the open web!
I don't think that necessarily contradicts what the author is saying. Even you describe how these top 10% performers are often underpaid, so in some areas (getting noticed, managing office politics, switching companies to get pay rises) they seemingly "don't know what they're doing". A lot of people are brilliant in one particular area and at the same time fail basic life tasks, even though to someone from the outside it looks as if they've got everything figured out.
By turning it into a nearly-useless system. You can only engage Mercedes' system if a number of conditions are all met:
- The route has to have been pre-mapped by Mercedes
- Only works on highways
- Only in traffic jam-like conditions, i.e. traffic moving slower than 60 kmh (37 mph)
- No construction sites (even a single orange cone left over from prior road works will mean that you can't turn on the system / it will turn off)
Under these conditions, 10 seconds doesn't sound too difficult.
I still think that this is the "saner" approach than calling your product Autopilot and letting the general public beta test it (and driving in traffic jams is annoying so I wouldn't mind using the Merc system), but overall it feels mostly like a PR move to be able to say "we have a Level 3 product on the road". I read an article where Mercedes wanted to demonstrate the system to a journalist and they had to have a second car drive in front of them to artificially create a traffic jam because otherwise it wouldn't activate.
It would be interesting to estimate what dollar value can be ascribed to a x-hour FB outage, both in terms of lost ad revenue for FB itself as well missed conversions/revenue for businesses running ads on FB/IG.
Does anyone know if FB's advertisement contracts even have an SLA ?
I can completely picture a world in which many people bought some ads yesterday morning (say, to promote an event that occured yesterday evening), the ads were never displayed to anyone, and FB will keep the money, thank you.
That's super interesting! I can see their study included asking to what extent the participants are experiencing certain negative/positive feelings (which may give some more context), but isn't their core measure of happiness also capped? They use a continuous response scale, but in terms of being capped, it shouldn't matter if it's measured on a 0-100 or 1-5 scale, no? The participants can't be happier than "extremely happy" in their study design as far as I can tell.
During such an early stage, I would do it in an "inofficial capacity" - do you have friends at other companies who work in a similar role as you? I would reach out to them and gauge their reaction, from "sounds like a neat idea" to "oh my god, I literally spend 1 hour a day on this and I've been looking for a solution to this since forever. I (or my boss) would pay for this in a heartbeat!". I've found "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick to be great for guiding you along this process step by step. When asking friends, there's the risk of running into something called "interviewer bias", where they will rate your idea more positively simply because they like you (and would have dismissed it if some random stranger had proposed the same idea), so that's something to watch out for if you go down this route. Good luck!
I'd also consider https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast somewhat related to product management. In general, it depends on what you are looking for. If you want to go deeper into any of the areas that PMs deal with, I would look for podcasts in that specific area (e.g. UX, design, marketing, development, ...) rather than a PM podcast.
It really depends on the niche and the type of the business you're planning (e.g. B2C vs. B2B, mostly service-based vs. product-based).
Some of the things that have worked for me:
- Using the Google Ads Keyword Research Tool to get an estimate of search interest for your product/keyword.
- Trying to find people in your network who work in the niche and may have experienced the problem you're aiming to tackle. Search on LinkedIn and sort the results by "in my network". Ask your connection for an intro if you're not directly connected to the target.
- Cold-emailing potential customers and asking for feedback. The response rate for such "what do you think about..." emails is really low, so be prepared to send at least 100 emails to get some meaningful conversations out of it. Spend some time to personalize each email to increase your chances of getting a reply and keep the message short.
- Create a survey where you try to gauge the relevance of the problem you're addressing and whether your solution would actually be helpful. Don't send it out to your family and friends - you need the opinion of your target audience.
I run IdeaCheck.io, where we basically automate the third option - we design a survey based on your idea and send it out to respondents, so you get an impression of whether you're "on to something". We also benchmark your results with all ideas that have gone through our service so far and the respondents provide comments/feedback on your idea.
