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A friend of a friend started his first job as a product manager, he asked me what would be my advice to him, I decided to share it here 

• Meet everyone you can. Make friends. 
• Start with why?
• Too much data will kill you. Signal vs noise.
• Drive new insights continuously, by them you will shall make great products.
• Question everything. Take nothing for granted.
• Know when to say no stakeholders, team, and customers (hardest part of the job). 
• “How do you know?” A powerful question. Helps many times.
• Manage expectations.
• Do your best, plan for the worst.
• Above all, know more about the product and customers than everyone else.

I deleted Instagram from my phone. Few days later they sent me an email with photos from my news feed and a link to download the app.  

I wonder if they are able to track users who uninstalled the app, or the email is triggered based on lack of activity for long.

I am always impressed by Facebook’s engagement loops. They never miss an opportunity to engage or reengage users.

When I visited Germany for the first time coming from Amsterdam, I told my friend while walking in Dusseldorf why does it smell like sewage? My friend couldn’t smell the odor although he lived there. 

Now that I live in Berlin, I smell this more often. Especially on warm days.

Doing some research it turned to be a well known problem. One of the main reasons is German water saving habits. Water saving technology is becoming mainstream in every household that Germans now consume much less water (for example modern showerheads insert more air into the water to make you consume less). 

This results in not enough water running through the sewage system to flush all the waste, which results in that smell that gets stronger in summer.

I wonder what’s the effect of this bad smell and the bacteria in the air molecules on people’s health. If by saving more water more people are getting sick, then we need to reconsider this decision.

This morning a friend sent me this link to a Jim Cramer CNBC interview with the CEO of a company called Talend. I told my friend this is what I consider “Brain Junk”.

I first heard the phrase from Naval of AngelList on the knowledge project podcast. I really like it because for long, I didn’t have a term to describe such things.

My friend asked why I consider this as brain junk?

Because it focuses on what’s on the surface vs the underlying truth and complexities behind the topic of the discussion. When you look at the questions he asked and the answers the other guy replied, you can’t derive any conclusion on whether this company is good or bad.

“[Rephrasing] How do you win against Microsoft and Oracle? We are more agile, better technically, and have better pricing” what does this mean? Do they have technology that the other folks can’t compete with? Maybe they just didn’t go after him yet, or the pie is too small, or maybe he is right and after a great opportunity. But this 5 minutes interview doesn’t tell you anything beyond what you can read in a tweet summarizing the earnings.

The second reason I consider this brain junk is that it is almost never contrarian to the public sentiment. It is called mainstream media because it is “mainstream” and everyone knows it. Sometimes it is insightful, but my heuristic is if it is insightful enough, one of my information sources will get it in front of me.

Interesting things and ideas are in places where there is less noise. Where nobody is paying attention, and no one cares.

That’s why I try to avoid brain junk and focus on getting more “brain nutrition”. I have some rules and heuristics for doing this. It took me years to build these filters and it is an always evolving process. That’s why I am currently happy with my information diet, that’s a topic for another post.

Finding good engineers is generally hard and competitive. But I don’t know why I am getting the feeling that finding front end engineers is even harder.

Few signs to this is the time it takes to fill front end positions vs back end even that front end positions are generally less. Another sign I see is some companies increasing employees referral bonuses for front end positions than back end.

I think part of this problem is that students are generally taught that back end is the real engineering, while front end is a work of designers.

I don’t know what other reasons might lead to this and I am not sure if the industry should work actively to close this gap. I am just writing this as food for thought.

In the 80s there was a popular Egyptian movie called “Ya Rab Walad”. “Dear God, a boy please”. The story is about a wood merchant who has three girls and going through the challenges of being the father of the girls within the Egyptian society.

One of my favorite quotes in the movie is Farid Shawky’s business slogan 

Profit a little, sell more, profit much more

اكسب قليل تبيع كتير تكسب أكتر

I remembered this today as I was discussing what’s the best way to achieve some revenue targets, given you don’t control pricing on the marketplace. 

I think it is very hard to sell the more expensive stuff on the internet. If customers are buying the cheapest, sell them more of it, or sell to more customers. Of course you can highlight the more expensive items to price insensitive customers, but those are not the majority.

One thing I noticed with my teenage sister is that when she wants to take a photo, she doesn’t open the camera app on her iPhone. She opens Snapchat. 

Even if she won’t post the picture, she snaps it with Snapchat and saves it to the phone memory.

This isn’t the case with Instagram where the default when you open the app is content consumption. 

This gave me an eureka moment on what it means to truly be “a camera company”.

Yesterday I was on a flight from Cairo to Berlin. Half way through I wanted to know how long until we land. The information screen was frozen, telling us we are still in Cairo and heading somewhere else. 

What most people don’t know is that the GPS chip on your phone needs no network/internet to get your location. So I opened Google maps, waited a bit, and successfully found we are above Czech republic.

Finding your location using the phone GPS should always work without a connection/sim card as long as you turn off the airplane mode. What needs a connection is the map details (as long as you didn’t store it offline) to tell you exactly where you are.

Luckily my phone cached this part of the world since I use it a lot, which made me able to know we are in Czech republic. For example in the screenshot below, it only cached the eastern half of Germany, that’s why you see city names only on the eastern part.

If you want to know how satellite navigation on your phone works, you can watch this five minutes video. Next time you are stuck without a connection and want to know your location, just use your phone.

When people ask what I do, I just say software. I don’t specify what I do unless the person I am talking to also does software. 

Few days ago my mother asked a surprising question, what is software? While it sounds trivial, I was surprised and it took me a while to answer. 

Software is the part that tells this lifeless piece of silicon what to do when certain things happen. It is called soft because there is nothing tangible about it.

This was my explanation. Not the best, but given I was caught by surprise, this is good enough.

What’s your definition of software?

Fred Wilson’s today post is about how change creates information. It is too short so I am quoting all of it here.

My partner Albert likes to say that “change creates information.”

I have seen this a lot recently in our portfolio.

A change in leadership, a change in strategy, a change in cost structure.

Doesn’t really matter what it is, it can tell you a lot about what is going on in your company.

Making changes is painful and so it’s understandable that we all avoid change.

But if you can’t understand what is going on and you want some more visibility, make some changes.

You will learn a lot.

This is so true. When I reflect on the Egyptian political events and how things ended, I keep telling my friends, on the bright side, we learned how things are run, we lost hope, and decided to move with our lives. If we didn’t try this change, we would’ve had fake hope thinking that things could be better and ended up wasting our lives.

Don’t mistake this with lack of optimism. I am very optimistic and believe nothing stays the same. It is just as Omar Soliman said “Of course, but hwhen?”.

Yes, change creates information.