Top 10 in Tech - What to know for Week ending December 20, 2024

Welcome to the last Newsletter of the year. We will be taking a couple of weeks off - have a great Holiday Season, and see y'all in January!


1. SaaS METRIC OF THE WEEK:  Product KPIs: Check out Jason Cohen's playbook for Product KPIs, which maps out how to select KPIs that truly matter. This framework (with a great visualization here) focuses on aligning KPIs with roles, like adoption rates for execs, conversion paths for strategists, or churn for customer-facing teams. Tactical advice includes separating leading indicators (like sign-ups) from lagging ones (like LTV) and ensuring metrics align with business goals for actionability.


2. GO TO MARKET: Go-to-market motions can be quite specific and your GTM motions can impact your marketing strategy and your org chart.  In this article, Robert Kaminski has distilled GTM motions into five types based on a number of use cases. The summary diagram at the bottom is great.


3. ZERO-OPS: A new entry for your tech dictionary, ZeroOps is a set of practices that result in developers focusing solely on coding and creating, with 0% of their time spent on operations or infrastructure.


4. SCALE: The SAAS CFO has a great read and SaaS Metrics Playbook that outlines a Five Pillar framework for scaling confidently. TL;DR Growth (New ARR and Expansion ARR), Retention (GRR and NRR), Margins (gross margin by stream), Financial Profile (balancing growth and profitability), and Sales Efficiency. .https://www.thesaascfo.com/scaling-with-confidence-the-ultimate-saas-metrics-playbook


5. ASYNC CULTURE: Crack open your tech dictionaries again for this one - it's something we do at my day job that we are trying to get better at; I just wasn't aware there was a label for it. With 100% remote and distributed teams across different time zones, management and leadership can get very out of sync. So, this is a great Async playbook for those who need to practice this. It's actually on my wall.


6. FIRST PRINCIPLE THINKING: This phrase has been thrown around a lot in recent years, so do you want to be more like old-school Elon (the one without all the DOGE/Trump drama)? Read here on the concept of First Principles Thinking. In addition, here is a full guide/website.


7. AI CHIPS: Late last month, Amazon announced it's in the AI Chip race - the AI wars are taking on a new layer with the big Public cloud Players, Apple, Broadcom, and governments getting involved.


8. QUANTUM: Google is taking the high road with the AI Chip wars above by focusing on Quantum and has a new quantum chip, Willow, which marks a bonkers leap in compute power. It completed a computation in under five minutes that would have taken the world's fastest supercomputer 10 septillion years (that's 25 Zeros - older than the known universe).


9. GROWTH: Kyle Poyar's gives us "The Best Growth Advice of 2024" with a great end-of-year summary of practical tips. TL;DR takeaways include Jam's 18-month persistence to perfect retention, Rows' email validation boosting conversions, and Folk's white-glove onboarding driving a 4x increase in success rates.


10. CASE STUDY: Adding onto #6 above, here is how First Principle Thinking can be applied IRL - in this example, towards a Product Lead Growth business.


POD OF THE WEEK: Wrapping up 2024 with a Google notebook LLM Podcast version of this Newsletter. ​