William Gill

CNBC posted an article last week that really resonated with me. From their article: A recent study from Stripe and Harris Poll found that 61 percent of C-suite executives believe access to developer talent is a threat to the success of their business. Perhaps more surprisingly — as we mark a decade after the financial…

From TechCrunch: Branch, the deep-linking startup backed by Andy Rubin’s Playground Ventures, will enter the unicorn club with an upcoming funding round. The four-year-old company, which helps brands create links between websites and mobile apps, has authorized the sale of $129 million in Series D shares, according to sources and confirmed by PitchBook, which tracks…

From ZDNEt: A team of security researchers behind a popular mobile firewall app say they’ve identified tens of iOS apps that are collecting location data from iPhone users, data they later pass on to monetization firms. In all cases, researchers say, the collection occurs via packaged tracking code monetization firms provide to developers to embed…

I came across this quote in a fantasy novel* I was reading: “Strategy is just a fancy word for a special kind of common sense, the ability to see options, to make them where there were none. It’s not about knowing the rules. It’s about knowing how to break them.” When it comes to building…

There is a lot of gold in this interview with Marc Andreessen. The key insight for me was the notion that a superior product can easily be beaten by an inferior product with superior distribution. “The general model for successful tech companies, contrary to myth and legend, is that they become distribution-centric rather than product-centric…

If you have time to leave a review, you have time to respond to the developer when they reach out to you to try to solve your problem. Behind every app in the App Store, behind every game, sticker pack and camera filter, is an app developer. These individuals, or most likely team of individuals…

On Friday, I did something I nearly never do. I took the day off, and spent the day outside in a Kayak. The simple act of being outside, alone on the water, was not only fun, but it was refreshing and energising. I relaxed. I had nothing to do, nowhere to be, no emails or…

There is a new way to embed beautiful 3D Maps into your website. Meet the new Map Embed from FATMAP. There is no better way to embed a high-resolution 3D map onto your website. Chamonix, France The map is fully interactive: use your mouse or trackpad to move around, and hold the SHIFT key to…

I came across this quote from Keith Rabois: If you think about people, there are two categories of high-quality people: there is the ammunition, and then there are the barrels. You can add all the ammunition you want, but if you have only five barrels in your company, you can literally do only five things…

I really like Medium’s new ‘applause’ feature for ‘liking’ articles. The idea is that the extent to which you like something is not binary… it’s not either “I like it” or “I don’t”. It’s a spectrum. There are other ways they could have done it. They could have made it a star rating, a rating…

A little while ago I ran a retrospective with a product team where we focussed specifically on the product process. We invited a cross-section of the company: engineering, design, marketing, operations and the founders. Everyone present in the retrospective had the opportunity to give feedback on what was working and what wasn’t with regards to the way product…

I recently finished training a new Product Manager and on-boarding him onto a project. After his first week alone on the job full-time, he came to me on a Friday afternoon with a frazzled look on his face and asked me: “How do you cope with the continual and immense demands for my time as…

There are many characteristics of great product teams. But when I think about what the very best teams have in common, there are a few common core elements that I think tend to lead naturally to many other great attributes. Characteristics like high levels of trust and motivation, proactive attitude, open communication and knowledge sharing…

For any product startup, prioritisation is everything. Spend time working on the wrong things, and you’ll waste both time and money – two things you have in very limited supply as a startup. Lots has been written about prioritisation in product teams, and it’s often cited as one of the biggest challenges facing startups and…

I spent about 4 hours last week conducting usability tests. No matter how often I do this, it always amazes me how incredibly valuable it is. Every test reveals something new about the product. As a coincidence just this week I also came across this article talking about how many Product Managers lament that they…

Sometimes there’s a perception of Product Managers that the best ones are product geniuses who always and immediately have the right answers for every product problem: PMs whose product instincts are so sharp they can arrive at the best solution at a moment’s glance; who can look within themselves and find the solution deep down…

The Exponent podcast this week on the history of messaging apps talked a lot about copying. They referenced a previous piece from Ben called “The Audacity of Copying Well”, where he talked about Snapchat stories, and how this was so obviously and shamelessly copied by Instagram to make Instagram Stories. They argued that in business…

It’s normal when building and optimising a product to take a look at how others have solved similar problems in the past. In fact, this is a critical part of the design and product research phase. But be careful with assumptions like “Company XYZ does it this way, and they know their shit: they wouldn’t…

I recently wrote about why Speed is not the same as Velocity. Speed is just moving fast, whereas velocity is moving fast in the right direction. Fred Wilson also posted this week on Urgency, and how in his role as a board member and advisor he presses startups to foster a healthy Sense of Urgency…

There is a lot of day-to-day grind as a PM. Tickets to write, bugs to triage, meetings to facilitate. Maybe the QA team needs help. Maybe the marketing manager is sick and you need to help run an acquisition campaign. There is always something urgent that needs your attention, your time and your focus. Indeed…