Celebrating good news

JC’s Newsletter #197

Dear friends,

Every week, I’m sharing an essay that relates to what we are building and learning at Alan. Those essays are fed by the article I’m lucky enough to read and capitalise on.

I’m going to try to be provocative in those essays to trigger a discussion with the community. Please answer, comment, and ping me!

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Celebrating good news 

Recently, we had situations that were celebrated at first (because it is an amazing outcome for the company), but then led to some uncomfortable product situations that we managed to solve. 

It happens that some in the team feel we jump the gun in committing to something without enough discussion about the impacts on the product roadmap. 

The business team should definitely have better communicated about the potential deal and the impacts. It is frustrating when a product team is working on a roadmap and they learn last minute they need to change it. 

It is also hard to anticipate the needs and requirements of every stakeholder on a topic, especially when you are working on something uncertain and you have many competing priorities like our sales team do. 

How do we bridge the gap?

On the receiving side, even if we are frustrated about learning it too late, start with the good: celebrate the news. 

My advice is always to spend your energy and focus on what you can control and manage: working together to make the magic happen and change the trajectory of the company. 

On the other hand, the above should not be an excuse not to go the extra-mile in terms of communication. I suggest that during enterprise deal reviews, we take 1 minute to ask ourselves: did we notify the product team on what we are discussing, in terms that make it easy for them to plan and compare priorities? 

Perfect communication is hard. That’s why mutual empathy is of the utmost importance when working together to understand the needs and constraints of every stakeholder.

Some articles I have read this week

👉 Disney Earnings, A Split Disney?, ESPN’s Advertising (Stratechery)

• “When it comes to subscriptions: lower prices are better for customer acquisition”

• “Probably the best way to solve these intractable riddles is through bundling: a bundle increases the perceived value of the offering, has more content to reduce churn, and at sufficient scale improves the average revenue per consumer”

• “the lower prices made possible by ads lead to decreased churn.”

• “the upside for advertising revenue is effectively infinite, given that increased prices-per-ad aren’t felt by consumers; if anything, it means they are getting better targeted and thus more valuable ads.”

👉 What Makes Uber Run (Fast Company)

• I encourage every Alaner to walk more (during 1on1s, pairing sessions, …)

• Should we also have a track in the office? 

👉 A Tweet from Gokul Rajaram on Partnership (Twitter)

• Why partnerships are really hard and excellent rules on how to make them work

👉 Unlock the Power of Money Words: How Founders Can Write Copy That Converts (First Round Review)

• I found this article incredibly helpful in terms of learning how to do copywriting

• We always underestimate the power of words and semantic 

• The use of “patient” vs. “survivor” in healthcare

• Use a lot more: YOU, make the consumer the grammatical subject of a sentence.

  • “people donate significantly more money to hurricane relief funds that have the same initials they do”

• Use a lot more: GET.

  • When the word “pay” appears on the screen, it produces anxiety.

• Only ask to remember one thing about a feature, avoid the use of “and”.

• The job of the headline is to move the reader to the next line.

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