Dear Reader,
Last week was amazing. The sun was shining in London 😊, and I did a lot of learning. I attended the Figma Config 2024 tech conference to learn about the latest in product design and development, and spent Saturday at the London Business School annual Africa Business Summit.
Here is the curated newsletter for this week. The best way to describe this version of Nero’s Weekly is ‘power packed’. I have also tried to use more images. Enjoy😊.
Nero’s Pick – My latest article on an event with the London product community: Shreyas Doshi. On Finding your Superpower, Building Products, and your Career has lots of lessons on discovering your superpower, product development, and advancing in your career. It’s a 5min read.
AI
Tomasz Tunguz - The Four Barriers to AI Adoption – The key message of this short article is that despite the popularity of AI, adoption is still low across industries due to barriers to adoption. These four main barriers are understanding the technology’s ability, security, legal, and procurement. AI Companies e.g. OpenAI would need to navigate and solve for these barriers.
Business
Business Notes by Nero Okwa – What I learned from Apple’s Developer Conference (WWDC 2024) - Apple Intelligence – Still on AI, I wrote this article to explore how Apple responded to the AI competition. I covered why Apple was prioritizing privacy and security, utilizing its software-hardware synergy, M1 chips, and personal data from 2bn+ devices for a personal AI experience.
London Business School – Uday Reddy on life, people and business – This was an exciting story from one of India’s most successful tech entrepreneurs on his experience. I found it interesting that he has never worked for anyone but himself, and has always backed himself to identify opportunities and scale them.
Technology & Product Management
Benedict Evans - Building AI products – Great analysis by Ben Evans; the legendary tech analyst, on how we can build mass-market products that change the world around models that gets things ‘wrong’. He expands on what wrong means, and how it could be useful.
Liam Bolling - The Technical, Business and UX Skills Every Product Manager Needs (VIDEO) – I enjoyed this video by Google PM Liam Bolling. In 13mins, he covers the different skills product managers would need, with examples. I particularly like these three recommendations:
Be able to break down (with some help from engineering team) a problem into smaller high-level solutions.
You can be opinionated on long term features but you do not push for specific technologies… Engineers will know best – your jobs is to determine the “why” and “what” we are doing. The “how” is for engineers.
For UX/Design skills he also recommends being able to design simple wireframes 😊. See below.
Product Growth - A PM's Guide to Wireframes – Aakash Gupta argues that product managers should be designing wireframes as it enables them explore more solutions in a low risk way, show executives consistent progress, and add value. I agree. Rather than write a lengthy PRD (Product Requirements Document), a wireframe can simply convey a feature idea to stakeholders. It is also useful for entrepreneurs. You can design a PRD with PowerPoint, Sketch, or Figma. I like the explainer image below by Aakash.
The Product Growth - A PM's Guide to Wireframes
Africa
The Flip – How Y Combinator & Microtraction are Investing in African Startups (VIDEO) - This was a great conversation between Michael Seibel; Group Partner of Y Combinator and Kwamena Afful; Founding Partner of Microtraction, on the opportunities of investing in African startups. It covered solving African problems, fintech deep dive, and software companies crossing borders. I enjoyed the section on how the model for growth in the US is different for what’s required across Africa.
AFDB - African Development Bank Broadens Urban Support to Include Six More Cities – AFDB has expanded the Urban and Municipal Development Fund (UMDF) for African cities to cover six new cities. The UMDF would provide funding, a detailed analysis of strengths and vulnerabilities especially regarding economic, social, climate, and gender issues, and identify transformative infrastructure projects. The six cities are Kolwezi (The Democratic Republic of Congo), Grand Nokoué (Benin), Buffalo City (South Africa), Joal (Senegal), Juba (South Sudan), and Nouakchott (Mauritania). This is really important because ten of the fastest growing cities in the world are in Africa.
RFI – Over US$1 billion pledged to create ‘African vaccine market’ - World leaders, health groups, and pharmaceutical companies announced $1.2 billion in funding to produce vaccines in Africa. Africa imports 99 percent of its vaccines at an exorbitant cost, and may not have access to vaccines when needed. This is due to global competition as was seen during the Covid-19 pandemic. Vaccine production in Africa would give the continent more control, and supply of affordable vaccines.
Career Development
Business Notes by Nero Okwa - Shreyas Doshi. On Finding your Superpower, Building Products, and your Career - My latest article has a lot of insights on discovering your superpower, that of your team members, and career growth. Shreyas advocates having career chats with your team members where the conversation is focused on them and what they want to do/learn… He advises asking them “What they want to do in 5years”’.
The Engineering Manager - Deltas to the Global Maxima: Better Career Conversations - This was the perfect sequel and deep dive from the conversation with Shreyas Doshi. James Stanier; Director of Engineering at Shopify, answers the question: what do we do as managers in order to help our reports grow in a way that is meaningful to them, and not just to the company? He advises we stop over indexing on the next step on their career track, and understand their unique long-term goals, desires, and motivations; the Global Maxima of their career. This is the point which we are at our most skilled, most impactful, and most satisfied. Once this is discovered, they can then plan towards closing the ‘delta’ between there and where they are now. Have you found the global maxima of your career?
The Engineering Manager - Deltas to the Global Maxima: Better Career Conversations
“People are always trying to add more stuff to life. Reduce it to simpler, pure moments.”
— Jerry Seinfeld
There you have it.
If you enjoyed this article I have written other career articles, product articles, and book reviews.
Would you like to read more career focused articles or something else? Is there a topic you currently struggle with? Let me know. You can message me at notesbynero@gmail.com.
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Thanks for reading and bye for now.
Nero
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