Guillaume Forget

As a product guy, Instacart's foray into restaurant delivery piqued my interest. While it echoes the "everything-to-your-door" playbook pioneered by Doordash and copied across globe, two key questions emerge: (a) Is MVP enough in a commoditized space? Do we need built-in differentiation for commoditized features, even at launch? Should we focus on launching MLP (Minimum Lovable Product) vs a MVP in first go itself assuming users may not give us a second chance (in terms of perception built for a standard experience) for a commoditized product or a feature? And if answer to that is yes for a MLP, next ques to answer is does your org have patience - Are your business leaders ready to wait / to invest in features that may take time to pay off but could become strategic differentiators? (b) When prioritizing inputs for our product and feature pipeline, should competitor analysis hold equal weight alongside problem discovery methodologies like 'Job-To-Be-Done' or an 'Opportunity Solution Tree'? Are these frameworks overly theoretical, suggesting a more pragmatic approach of mirroring competitors, or is there inherent value in diverging from the pack? While it's unlikely that Instacart's approach solely relied on competitor benchmarking, these questions remain interesting, for consideration. Would love to understand what have been your experiences in similar situations and what have worked for you as a Product Leader :) Happy to connect and learn! #ecommerce #productleadership #productmanagement

8

1 Comment

Join me for a round table discussion with restaurant leaders to talk about the math behind 3rd party advertising. If you're running promos or ads on 3PD, you need to hear this. CMOs, CFOs, CEOs.

10

Want to get better at working with others to solve problems collaboratively? Use the 4 D's framework for systematic thinking. Go one step at a time. 1. Data - What do you (collectively) know about the problem? 2. Diagnosis - Why is this problem happening? What are the underlying causes? 3. Direction - What should be done in general? 4. Do Next - What specific actions should be taken? Who? When? Where? How? Credit to Roger Fisher and Alan Sharp's book "Getting it Done." Read this because it was recommended by the late and great Charlie Munger.

4

When we talk about AI-powered go-to-market, what we’re really talking about is intelligent automation. You can break it down into 3 buckets: 1. Prospect: Automatically find, qualify, and prioritize buyers. 2. Personalize: Automatically create personalized, relevant messaging for buyers. 3. Engage: Automatically reach out to buyers at the right time (and in the right place!). Automating these processes isn’t the hard part. Doing it intelligently is. That’s where AI SDRs often fall short. They can blast off messages all day and all night, but it doesn’t matter if those messages don’t convert. There’s no difference between 0% of 100 and 0% of 10,000. Unless you have access to the full spectrum of buying signals and person- and account-level context, you don’t get a GTM silver bullet. You get an automated spam cannon. Our customers show us what *actually* works every day: personalization based on real signals and real buyer context. Product usage. Website visits. Social engagements. Job changes. Hiring trends. News events. Spam-the-TAM automation tools don’t deliver. So we decided to build the real thing. And we built it so that you can choose exactly how much of your pipe gen is automated or human-led based on your business needs: ✨ Prospect beyond known accounts, intelligently: Explore any company or prospect based on your bespoke criteria for ideal customer profile and contact persona. Tap into a proprietary, constantly refreshed database of more than 200 million B2B orgs and contacts. Or let Common Room do it for you. ✨ Outbound more, with better messaging and less effort: Use the signals that matter most to your GTM motion to generate and sequence personalized message snippets. Or let Common Room take you from signal to send automatically. ✨ Build LinkedIn relationships at scale: Soon, send LinkedIn connection requests and direct messages from Common Room to reach buyers where they are. Or let Common Room automate outreach entirely. Do the same across dozens of natively built and fully managed action end points, including Salesforce campaigns, HubSpot workflows, and leading sales execution platforms (much more to come on our action partners soon!). You don’t have to settle for faux personalization that’s more concerned with surface-level data points (alma maters, regional sports teams, local celebrities—you know what I’m talking about) than business priorities. With Common Room, you can find an AI copilot (or AI autopilot) built with intelligent automation in mind. Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gEswugPk

21

1 Comment

Does anyone else remember sitting in class thinking, "Am I ever going to actually use this?" 🤦‍♂️ I still ask myself this weekly when reading blog posts, listening to podcasts, catching up on massive Slack threads, or diving into documentation and feature listings. I don't always use the info, but it feels great when a memory from six months ago suddenly becomes relevant. I always think of that original Jurassic Park Unix scene. This often happens when discussing DevOps and Serverless, where boundaries blur already. Trying to keep all of the AWS documentation in my head while discussing the design of new features and optimizations feels like a superhuman task. What are some things you wish you had remembered when solving an issue or problem? For me, we designed a Lambda function to fail purposefully instead of attempting to recover for efficiency. Unfortunately, the Lambda control plane self-throttles a function once a failure threshold is reached... slowing our processing to a crawl and forcing some quick code changes. 😅 #AWS #lambda #serverless #learninginpublic #hugops

13

1 Comment

This is something I really want to celebrate! Both the outcome with a seriously improved, modern and great looking new app, as well as the people who made it happen! It’s been a truly massive undertaking during which many teams and individuals have been put to the test. I’m immensely proud of our teams and how everyone has stepped up and delivered time and time again during this journey. I have two main takeaways from this project: 1. Always strive to make sure everyone involved understands the why. Deep understanding of the desired result from a particular change enables many more brain cells to think through the implications, potential problems and opportunities. Even the most brilliant minds will have trouble understanding every aspect, implication, or even opportunity stemming from a change or introduction of something new. 2. Technical architecture needs to be an integral part of the change process in any project of this size. I firmly believe that we would not have succeeded in delivering a successful outcome at the speed at which this was delivered without a very well thought out technical architecture that support such a high pace of change while still also supporting consistency and stability across the experience. To everyone involved in this project: Thank you! I feel privileged to be working with so many brilliant minds.

39

2 Comments

For those of you focused on building high performing teams, our (virtual) Culture First conference is back again in May with some great speakers lined up! Here's one: Do high performers benefit from making time for play? Ben Crowe, professional mentor and leadership coach, will lead a session at Culture First Global exploring what it takes to truly transform your mindset and become more resilient. To join this session, be sure to follow this link to register.

19