WN#21: Looking for Profits, Finding Passion and Purpose, and Delivering Happiness
This week is about Tony Hsieh, last-mile deliveries in shipadgeddon, applications to stay connected remotely, tips for making decisions, metrics stack, and many others. I hope you like it. 🙏
Hello! Glad to see you another week, in this issue number 21 with a new milestone ongoing, starting the road to the 30th issue.
This week has been a combination of up and downs. We were enjoying Back Friday or maybe better, saying Black Week (or even better, Black November). The week was ending the best possible, enjoying the Tarugoconf, an online event. Mental Note: I don’t use to attend conferences and I should do it more often.
But then the passing away of Tony Hsieh changed the mood. If you don’t know about him, I recommend reading his book Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose. As you could see, the title of this issue is related to it. It is my humble way to dedicate today’s newsletter to him.
So, summarizing, I will share articles related to Tony Hsieh, another article about kast-mile deliveries in Walmart, some learnings from the conference about staying connected with teams remotely, tips about making decisions by Jeff Bezos, applications to help track metrics, and a few tweets more.
This is another week that I feel like I am introducing fewer topics, but the reason is that I am reaching the newsletter length limit.
If you celebrated Thanksgiving, I hope you had a blast with your family&friends, if possible. For those who were selling during Black Friday, I hope you achieved goals or at least survived it!
As I always end this introduction, please, do not hesitate to add your comments or share your feedback. One of my goals is to learn from you. And if you like it, please share it. The more we are, the more we will share and have fun.
See you next week. Thanks for reading it, and stay safe!
😔 Remembering Tony Hsieh
Last Friday, Tony Hsieh, former Zappos and LinkExchange CEO and Co-founder, and investor, passed away. Tony was a person who I profoundly admired.
Several years ago, in my early experiences in e-commerce, I knew about Tony because of the Zappos sale to Amazon, and I had read about its focus on customer experience. But it was on my honeymoon roundtrip in 2011 when I bought his book’s first edition. Late that year, I read it for the first time.
The book quickly got me hooked. I was highly attracted by the story, the person, and the lessons from the knowledge and insights he shared in each chapter. You could find insights from his early look for profits, passion, purpose, happiness, and serial entrepreneurship from school to college, startups, and investments.
I could write several newsletters with it, and that was my first idea for this newsletter to prepare a wrap-up. But I finally decided no to do it and address you to read his book. You could also find excerpts of it in many of my blog posts.
It is curious how the dots tend to connect. It was also this week when Twitter showed me Clay Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life, and I remembered his words:
Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people.
The best way to honor his memory is to remember how he impacted others’ life. You could easily find tons of reactions on social media, but also that’s what Alex Konrad did in the following Forbes article with a few of them.
Before moving to another topic, and if you’re interested in his experiences, let me share two videos. The first one is a Google Talk presented by Google’s former Jolly Fellow Chade-Meng Tan, from his book presentation and 10 years of experience in Zappos.
And the second video is a short update of 20 years of experience featuring Simon Sinek talking about company culture.
And again, I would like to recommend you read Delivering Happiness strongly. I am thinking seriously about rereading his book. And If somebody asks, I will be happy to lend it.
🚚 The Antidote to Holiday Shipping Delays: the Last-mile Fulfillment Centers
Well, Amazon probably has more pros than cons compared to anybody. But, indeed, the biggest strength that brick and mortar have against pure players are their stores, a differential factor.
Stores concentrate the customer relations, seller’s magic (cross-sell, up-sell, etc.), the possibility to offer experiences, and the wide range of services that are crucial nowadays.
But during the pandemic, especially during the lockdown, this traditional model had to be evolved quickly. In some cases, it was vital to adapt brick and mortar stores to be fulfillment centers, to be able to sell their goods. And by extension, to keep their workers partially and deliver last-mile orders offering a better delivery promise than the central warehouses.
Store pick-up and last-mile deliveries avoid some of the congestion from the carrier supply chain, the shipageddon that refers to in the article, in a market that has been forced to grow online since April.
🌐 Keeping Your Team Connected Remotely
As I said before, this week, I attended an online event, the Tarugoconf, and I had the opportunity to join an open space where people exchanged experiences and applications that they used when they work with their teams remotely.
As you know, because I shared in the previous newsletter, fostering collaboration is key to keep motivation high.
Many tools and practices could help you to be connected with remote colleagues. Maybe you’re using different video tools and schedule meetings, but I found that the following applications offered an added value and many interesting possibilities:
Icebreaker: The conference started with some ice-breaking sessions based on this fantastic tool. An application that matches people and lets them break the ice using question cards.
Donut: Adding it to slack will give you the chance to introduce teammates to virtual coffees. This application is not suitable only for team members, but people from other departments across the organization.
Discord: Your place to talk. An application with topic-based channels where you can collaborate, share, and just talk. No matter how: write, voice, video.
Miro: Powerful online collaborative whiteboard. It can be useful for many purposes, from post-it boards to mind maps.
Mural: Visual collaboration tool, using whiteboards with color post-its.
Google Jamboard: Maybe you’ll know about it, but I didn’t. If you’re mainly using google tools and not using Jamboard’s whiteboard, you should think about giving it an opportunity.
Jamm App: Video collaboration for remote teams, or as it says, “Virtual Workplace”. The application allows sharing video, screen, whiteboard, etc.
💡 Jeff Bezos Tips about Making Decisions
The following article is an excerpt from Jeff Bezos's latest book, Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos, With an Introduction by Walter Isaacson.
It is nothing really astonishing, but a reminder to have clear priorities, put sleep at the top, and includes some tips about making decisions.
Because he shares, there are two types of decisions, the fast-paced and the slow and careful. This point reminded me about the "thinking fast and thinking slow" idea that we also saw in newsletter number six.
Also, shares that we might disagree and commit when discussing a topic with someone with more ground truth and judgment.
🧮 The Founder’s Metrics Stack
It all began with a Twitter thread started by Lenny Rachitsky, asking for the founders' analytics or metrics stack.
Independent of the amount of money for licensing and engineers that you should spend to include to build your stack, I was surprised by the number of applications used to track different metrics.
My idea was to wrap-up all of them, but then I saw that Arpit Choudhury did it. Please, check it out, maybe you’ll find something useful on it.
Customer Data Platform: @segment, @mParticle, @hull, @RudderStack
Product Analytics tool: @mixpanel, @Amplitude_HQ, or @getindicative
Engagement tool: @intercom, @CustomerIO
Data integration tool (ELT): @fivetran, @stitch_data
Data warehouse: BigQuery by @googlecloud, @SnowflakeDB
Warehouse-native data integration tool: @hightouch, @getcensus, @grouparoo
BI tool: @LookerData, @ModeAnalytics, @Sisense
Tool for smart tracking plans: @iteratively, @avohq
Subscription analytics tool: @ChartMogul, @Baremetrics
Get quick answers to questions about user behavior (different from Product Analytics): @innertrends
Gather qualitative data: @hotjar, @fullstory
Web Analytics tool: @googleanalytics, @PiwikPro, @Woopra
Event-streaming: @snowplowdata, @keen_io
🐦 Some Tweets that Deserve Attention
I could have included only Wolfie's tweet, but then you would have lost DHH's beautiful language. But the important topic here is the MS 365 metrics, productivity score, and I recommend you to check the entire thread.
A little big lesson about leadership in these uncertain times. As he also summarized: They are all seven about empathy.
In the following tweet, you’ll find a list of people who publish content online to follow. You’ll probably find some very well-known journalists and writers. It is unfinished, so keep the link.
Today I started with sad news, but let’s finish with some humor from @Dilbert_Daily via @drtcp.
Thanks for reading. I hope you liked it!
Please, do not hesitate to add any comments. I am open to any suggestions, so if you want to add a comment or contact me, I encourage you to do it.
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