PRODUCTHEAD: Moats and bridges
PRODUCTHEAD is a regular newsletter of product management goodness,
curated by Jock Busuttil.
productcollider #
every PRODUCTHEAD edition is online for you to refer back to
tl;dr
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Product, market, model and channel must all fit together to be successful
hello
This week’s edition of PRODUCTHEAD is loosely themed around ‘moats’, the aspects of your product that make it particularly hard for someone else to copy. Ironically, building a good moat often means building bridges.
It’s always been possible to clone pretty much any software product with sufficient time and effort. Many products have survived simply by dwelling just beyond the cloning threshold; what they had was never a moat. Thanks to generative AI, which has dragged that threshold much lower than before, some people are fretting that their product can now be cloned trivially. They should be worried.
Meanwhile others are not. They know that the bits of their product people could copy are not what make their product special or popular. They understand that their product is a means to an end, not the end in itself. People don’t use their product (usually) because they want to use the product, they use it because the product happens to enable them to do or feel something that matters to them, and in a way that aligns with their values.
The relationship a user or customer has with the product’s creator, the community that builds up around users of a product, the initiatives the creator or company undertakes (which may not even have anything to do with the product), all influence that relationship. These are the aspects that are much harder both to establish in the first place, and for others to copy. Generative AI may be able to copy a user interface, but it can’t copy a community of fans of the original.
For you this week #
I read plenty of well-written articles and demolish podcasts and videos on 1.5x speed before selecting the ones that I think will resonate most with you lovely people. Occasionally I come across an article that stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Not in any way because the other articles are poor quality – quite the reverse – but because it is written thoughtfully, broadens my horizons and was a joy to read. If you read nothing else this week, read Chris Hillman’s heartfelt article. The title suggests the article is about competitive moats, which is true, but really the article is about the value of human interaction.
On a related topic, Reforge’s Brian Balfour updates his earlier work on ‘the four fits’ (of which product-market fit is just one) to take into account how AI is changing things. We can probably all agree that AI is accelerating the pace of change of technology markets; it is a different question whether the change is question is for better or worse. Nevertheless, this increase in pace leaves companies less time to react.
However, a professional tennis player doesn’t win because they can run supernaturally fast; they win because they use their skill to reduce the play options available to their opponent, and so can anticipate where the other player is probably going to send the ball. They also need to have the expertise to execute the return under pressure, and the stamina to keep going ideally for longer than their opponent.
Even if your opponent is moving quickly, raw speed and quick reaction times are nothing without strategy and consistent, good execution.
Speak to you soon,
Jock
what to think about this week
The Competitive Moat That AI Can’t Replicate
Let me tell you a story about a restaurant owner who became obsessed with human connection.
Trust compounds, but the compounding is invisible for a long time
[Chris Hillman / Ghost in the data]
The Four Fits: A Growth Framework for the AI Era
It’s been 10 years since I first wrote about the Four Fits. It’s the most popular piece I’ve ever written and something I refer back to in almost every strategy conversation I have.
In this post, I’m going to run through the Four Fits. I’ll summarize the framework, look at how some of the best companies of the AI era lean into the model, and talk through a few important ways that AI alters it.
Where there’s risk, there’s also opportunity
[Brian Balfour / Reforge]
recent posts
We’re all addicted to AI, but it’s going to be okay
We seem to stuck in a contradiction in which we worry about AI’s effect on our critical thinking, while finding it equally hard to resist using. Why is that?
[I Manage Products]
Canary in the mine: AAA game developers are unionising
Product management has had its own fair share of problems over the last few years. Nevertheless, there are early warning signs from AAA game studios that there may be another storm brewing in tech for us to weather.
Union-busting just isn’t a good look
[I Manage Products]
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Helping people build better products, more successfully, since 2012.
PRODUCTHEAD is a newsletter for product people of all varieties, and is lovingly crafted from electronic devices torched by the heatwave.
Read more from Jock
The Practitioner's Guide To Product Management
by Jock Busuttil
“I wish this book was published when I started out in product management. It gives a really wonderful overview of what product management is and involves on a day to day basis.”
— Keji Adedeji, product leader & coach
Jock Busuttil is a product management and leadership coach, product leader and author. He has spent over two decades working with technology companies to improve their product management practices, from startups to multinationals. In 2012 Jock founded Product People Limited, which provides product management consultancy, coaching and training. Its clients include BBC, University of Cambridge, Ometria, Prolific and the UK’s Ministry of Justice and Government Digital Service (GDS). Jock holds a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the popular book The Practitioner’s Guide To Product Management, which was published in January 2015 by Grand Central Publishing in the US and Piatkus in the UK. He writes the blog I Manage Products and weekly product management newsletter PRODUCTHEAD. You can find him on Mastodon, X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.