Welcome to all those who are receiving an issue from SIP for the first time. And, if you are already subscribed, thank you for sticking around and taking out 5 mins from your day for this email.

And we are in 2022!

New year means a new quarter and that undoubtedly means a new roadmap 😂

As a PM, we are constantly iterating on our roadmaps. With multiple stakeholders involved it can feel like we are constantly negotiating timelines and priorities.

This week's highlights:

📂 How to Free Yourself from the Tyranny of Timelines
🎨 How Netflix’s Choice Engine Drives Its Business
🤖 How to lead your company into the AI era
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​and more.

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📂 How to Free Yourself from the Tyranny of Timelines​

Timelines are top in the list of a PM's enemies.

Somehow, all conversations find its way to timelines. A lot of the times as a PM, we are required to map out our initiatives across a timeline. This ends up hindering our ability to think more strategically and long term.

In this post, Johnson talks about how to create true long term value, we’d need to move away from timelines and towards outcomes.

Timeline roadmaps suggest that, as a product manager, you are completely aware of what it takes to build and deliver the project. Stakeholders rely heavily on timelines presented by the product manager, which makes it tougher for one to ditch the timeline process.

Product strategy should be independent of how you are doing something, but should mostly focus on the why.

Check out the post to read more.

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🎨 How Netflix’s Choice Engine Drives Its Business​

Netflix’s landing page is a great case study of choice‑architecture tools.

Netflix's entire existence depends on finding content that fits the viewers taste and ideal watchlist. Keeping you engaged, thereby, making you willing to pay Netflix, is its major source of revenue.

Some of the key principles in play are:

1. Smart Defaults
2. Ordered Lists
3. Number of Options

and so much more.

Check out the blog post to read more on how the different choice architecture elements are implemented by Netflix.

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🤖 How to lead your company into the AI era​

As a product manager, understanding of AI/ML is becoming more and more necessary. As we move into a more data driven world, being able to leverage AI in the product strategy becomes increasingly important.

This AI Transformation Playbook draws on insights gleaned from leading the Google Brain team and the Baidu AI Group, which played leading roles in transforming both Google and Baidu into great AI companies.

Andrew Ng shares 5 steps in his playbook for helping integrate AI into the organization's key priorities.

1. Execute pilot projects to gain momentum
2. Build an in-house AI team
3. Provide broad AI training
4. Develop an AI strategy
5. Develop internal and external communications

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Book of the Week:

​How to Change by Katy Milkman

Behavior change is a fascinating field, and this book does a fantastic job of nailing down some key concepts in a very easy to understand manner. It's a great book if someone is looking to get into behavioral science and psychology.

While the book is aimed at helping one inculcate habit change in their lives, the theories and concepts shared are completely applicable to designing behavior change products.

In the book, Milkman talks about research in the habit change space ranging from topics such as the fresh start effect, to overconfidence bias, and many more. The book is definitely worth checking out if you are interested in the field.

In fact, I even recently tweeted about the book.

Parv @ParvSondhi @MoneyMindMerle A very good introductory primer would be ‘How to Change’ by @katy_milkman. A fantastic and accessible dive into behavior change and certain principles of behavioral science. Dr. Merle van den Akker @MoneyMindMerle Questions for my #behavioralscience nuts and those part of #AcademicTwitter : 1. What's the best book to start your journey into behavioural science/Econ? 2. What's the best paper to reflect core research in BeSci/BE? Sharing is caring, all thoughts and answers appreciated! ❤️ January 2nd 2022 0 Retweets 1 Likes

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Job Board:

Entry - ​Associate Product Manager, 2022 Graduate @ Atlassian​
Intermediate - Product Manager, Community Experience @ Twitch​
Advanced - Group Product Manager @ Instacart​

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