A collection of 5 things from the week that I found interesting, am enjoying, or am working on.

This week:

  • The Competitive Advantage of Design (Philip Fierlinger)
  • How to get rich (without getting lucky)
  • Startups that are hiring remotely in 2019
  • 15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers
  • How website builders can differentiate themselves in a heavily commoditised market

The Competitive Advantage of Design

I don't think Xero would have been design led if a designer wasn't part of the founding team.

— Philip Fierlinger

Philip Fierlinger is one of the founders of Xero, and talked at StartupGrind Wellington back in October 2018.

I bought tickets for this event, but was unfortunately unable to attend. Fortunately, StartupGrind recorded the entire talk, and posted the video online.

Philip is a great storyteller. In his talk, he gives a great insights into starting a business, what it means for an organisation to be “design led”, and describes some of the challenges in founding Xero.

Here’s a video of the entire 1 hour talk:

How to get rich (without getting lucky)

Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable.

— Naval Ravikant

Naval’s twitter thread with timeless advice on building real wealth:

Startups that are hiring remotely in 2019

I mostly worked remotely between 2011 and 2014, and loved it. Since then, remote work has become easier than ever, and much more common.

If you’re interested in working remotely in 2019, I highly recommend taking a look at this list of companies that are hiring remotelin 2019

5 companies that you might recognise:

  • Auth0 - a universal authentication & authorization platform for web, mobile and legacy applications
  • Balsamiq - a company with a mission to help rid the world of bad user interfaces
  • Buffer - making it easy for businesses and marketing teams to schedule posts, analyze performance, and manage all their accounts in one place
  • ConvertKit - Email marketing made by creators, for creators
  • Stripe - a software platform for running an internet business
  • Zapier - connect your apps, and automate your workflows

Click here to view the list

15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers

Product Managers are at the center of a tornado. In a single week, even a "front-line" PM (think Senior PM) can have interactions with the CEO, customers, sales leaders, front-line engineers, engineering leadership, customer success, marketing, support, users (if distinct from customers), and business partners. [...] This breadth is one of the joys of the job, but it can also be incredibly difficult to handle and master.

— John Cutler

John Cutler is a prolific writer on product development, and gives great insight his article on 15 Things You Should Know About Product Managers.

How website builders can differentiate themselves in a heavily commoditised market

Do not sell undifferentiated web design but rather find the business problem that web design is one approach to solving (e.g. “Your insurance agency doesn’t get enough leads”) and then sell yourself as the expert on fixing that business problem.

— Patrick McKenzie (patio11)

A great thread on Hacker News: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

Thanks for reading!

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