🎾 82 Tips To Build Rapport, Improve Team Performance, Find Your Starving Crowd, Nail Interviews & Cutler's Roadmap Shapes
🎾 82 Tips To Build Rapport, Improve Team Performance, Find Your Starving Crowd, Nail Interviews & Cutler's Roadmap Shapes
+ The Best Midjourney Tutorials Last Week
Estimated read time: 1 minute 16 seconds.
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This is Sunday 1-1-2-3 with George.
Welcome to the 85th edition.
Today we have:
82 Ways How to Build Rapport With Anyone You Work With
A Framework for Improving Product Team Performance + Shreyas’s Learning Stack
4 Ways to Find the Starving Crowd for Your Product
9 Interview Tips to Make You Stand Out From the Crowd
12 Roadmap Shapes From John Cutler
+ The Best Midjourney Tutorials Last Week
💾 82 Ways How to Build Rapport With Anyone You Work With
Alright, all you introverts and grumps, it’s time to build bridges and relationships.
Skip the SEO part that explains why rapport is good (or, maybe you need to read it?), and go to these questions to build rapport:
What are your hobbies or interests outside work?
What do you like to do when not working?
What is your resentment? (A great concept courtesy Marissa Mayer)
Where did you grow up? Do you ever go back to visit there?
Where did you go to college?
What's your favorite place you've ever visited? Why?
If they have children: ask how old they are and anything they want to talk about them.
What did you do for fun in the past that you haven't had as much time for lately?
What are your favorite kinds of tasks at work? Why do you like it?
What is your least favorite kind of work? Why?
What's something you'd like the chance to work on you haven't before?
Is there anything you're interested in learning more about at our company?
What have been your favorite parts of past jobs you'd love to incorporate here?
This massive posts has a lot of other goodies:
☕️ A Framework for Improving Product Team Performance + Shreyas’s Learning Stack
Ok, we all love John Cutler. Here’s a video (with only 1k views) from last year that uses Fintech as an example. It goes into how to connect the strategy to experiments and evolve the models that you’re working with.
Share it with your execs, use it to build your own.
Or save it for later (to never watch), knowing that you’ve got the mental upper hand on the silly upper management now. I’m kidding.
A few days ago, I shared a video about strategy from an influencer on TikTok.
It is brilliant in its simplicity. (Check it out.)
You might laugh - but if companies or product teams were able to get to such clarity on what matters, and use that to decide what to do (and what not to do), we’d have a lot more coherent products out there.
Meanwhile, your sales team likely has a robust simple dashboard with a projected number of closed sales in a month (current vs. plan). That’s the most predictable model in the business. That’s what ends up driving your product strategy.
You owe it to yourself not to fight these nasty sales people, but to develop your own model that plugs into their model.
Ok, enough preaching. Check out this video from Shreyas on his learning stack:
🍪 Quick Bites
🤖 AI Corner
The Best Midjourney Tutorials Last Week
I know some PMs who also play around with Midjourney.
I’ve been using it to generate unique images for this newsletter (every week, I find a trending topic on Google Trends, and weave in the avatar of this newsletter: the tennis ball 🎾).
I also find myself playing around with Midjourney prompts for creative relaxation. It’s so fun, and such low stakes.
Here are a few tutorials I’ve been using this week:
That's a wrap for today. Stay focused and see you next week! If you want more, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@nurijanian)
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Who's George?
I’m an underdog product manager.
Product management in New Zealand (where I live) is still a relatively immature discipline. I also came into it late via data science and UX. I may be older than others, but I often feel like a rookie.
To become better at my craft, I learn and explore new ideas relentlessly.
Then I share high-quality, tried-and-true ideas that can be used right away.
How I can help you:
If you want to feel smarter, I’ve compiled my best actionable finds in prodmgmt.world.
If you need to figure out prioritization in your role, get The Big Book of Prioritization.
See you next week.
— George.