Why Product Playbooks?

Why should you care?

Why this? Why now?

I’ve been working in tech in Southeast Asia (Singapore) all my professional life. After getting out my golden hand-cuffs at Google, I went onto build, launch and scale software products for 4 different startups. About two decades of building, launching, selling and scaling products, have taught me many lessons. In these endeavours, I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve failed more often than I’ve succeeded. While there’s no single recipe for success, there are many golden nuggets and existential truths I learnt along the way.

1. Isn’t there plenty of blogs talking about product out there?

What I found is most of the thought leadership out there on technology, products, growth and startups is mostly coming out of Silicon Valley (and to some small extent other parts of US and Europe). While there are plenty of universal truths that these thought leaders share generously, I know from personal experience, it’s not entirely applicable when working in our part of the world. So I’ll be using practical examples on how to take the best practices out there and adapt them to our market more precisely.

I wish I knew this when I started building products in this region though. Most of the knowledge out there on building and growing Products in this region sits within a select few people’s heads. I’ve decided to share what I know, and hopefully this will inspire a few others to share more openly well.

2. What kind of community are we looking to build here

This community has one main goal - Help more people adopt a “product mindset” in SEA. My personal belief is that anyone involved in building and selling a technology product - be it a founder, product manager, designer, engineer, sales, marketing (and definitely VCs) needs to adopt a “product mindset” to build impactful businesses. This is especially true in our part of the world where we are still building up the know-how of building products from both successful and unsuccessful companies.

3. What can you expect?

I’ll be sharing a post almost every week (sometimes multiple times a week).

• Posts will range from talking to customers, prioritising product ideas, working with engineers and positioning your products and the full life cycle of building products. Most of them will be about some day-to-day dilemmas that people building products face and what I’ve learnt from them.

• I’ll also be creating easy-to-follow playbooks that founders, product managers and engineers can use to build, launch and grow different types of products (especially with a focus on Southeast Asia).

• The content is going to be mostly free (although we might add paid content later on depending on what makes sense). But the main goal (at least for me) here is to start a community and kick-start dialogue. Not to make money.

• I also plan to invite founders and other product leaders to come share their journeys and playbooks via podcasts or videos. Stay tuned! If you know of someone I should invite and share, please let me know!

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