Discovery Digest Volume V
A list Interesting Posts, Articles, & Tools the P2P Team Discovered This Week
Part of the job of a Product Manager is to keep their ears to the ground. You must be aware of innovations, changes, and new tools in the technological landscape to avoid falling.
Every week I find myself bookmarking tweets, saving articles, and exploring new methods to do my job.
Discovery Digest has become the new P2P series to spread wealth. In it, we'll share the best or most interesting news, developments, and tools that have captivated our attention.
Remote Work - Currently at a Disadvantage
https://twitter.com/randomrecruiter/status/1761753817333301419
It can be helpful to look at your career as an investment. Your spend/invest in order to maximize your return in the for of earning.
You want to sell high and leave a job when it’s upside, in the form of future promotions and salary increases, dissipates.
You should buy, or consider a job if the company is in a vertical to which you are bullish.
You want to book your gains when they are on the table. Wait too long, and you may the opportunity may disappear. Nowhere was that more clear than with the explosion of remote work in 2021.
In the last throes of the ZIRP1 era, before the FEB raised rates to combat inflation companies were FORCED to hire remotely. They did so to remain competitive in hiring top-end talent.
Some companies embraced the phenomenon. They converted to a remote-first culture, embracing asynchronous communications, dropping their physical footprint, and establishing ways to connect digitally.
Other companies begrudgingly offered to go remote. They did so to bide time until the marketplace shifted in favor of the employer.
Well, those times are upon us. Companies are twisting the screws on remote workers to get them back in the office. RTO2 Mandates achieve 2 goals:
Get people to quit before you have to lay them, pay severance, and avoid nasty press
When times are tough, leadership wants to be seen trying to do something. Anything really. Even if useless, the C-Suite can sell the board that we’ll get everyone back in office to turn things around!
All companies that never wanted remote work in the first place ceased to offer it.
Remote-friendly companies have also slowed hiring. With the macro focus on efficiency - corporate code for spending less - there exist fewer remote first roles.
The takeaway: The top-end talent being called back to the office is flooding applications into an ever-shrinking list of remote-friendly roles. If you are trying to get one of these jobs, it’s going to be extra competitive
The time to lock in a remote-friendly role in 2020-2022 before the great wave of layoffs began
This meant seeking out companies with no major physical real estate footprint, rendering RTO non-viable. In 2021 I worked at a company where all the webcams were off and the entire C-Suite was older and located in a major city. Every city had a 10-year-plus lease. It was inevitable they would want people back.
I moved to a company with young, distributed executives who also loved to travel. They would incur major costs to RTO.
When times are good, you innoculate against when times turn. Thinking like an investor, I locked remote terms I maintain today. I would struggle to land my today role if I were applying in 2024.
If I needed a job today, I would use geography and be willing to go into ofice as an advantage. Despite my remote status, I maintain an apartment commutable for a major tech hub. This opens me up to well-paying hybrid roles.
I do this to keep using the job market to my advantage. If laid off, I would get a hybrid role. I’d make peace with hybrid status until remote first roles started to gain more steam.
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Data Security Is No Joke
A costly Data Security fail played out in public recently with Carta - a cap table3 management platform, where an employee went rogue with client proprietary data.
Carta organizes and stores all the terms of equity ownership for startups. In what was sound product thinking, they decided Hey, we have all this proprietary ownership data. Let’s profit from it!
They introduced a secondary sales business for the equity managed in their platform. If you opted in, a shareholder of your company could make available their equity on a marketplace managed by Carta. Carta then takes a slice of every transaction. Should be great
Wrong.
https://twitter.com/karrisaarinen/status/1743398553500971331?lang=en
One of Carta’s customers, Linear, had their equity holders receive solicitation emails to sell their stake.
As you can from the tweet above, Linear CEO Karri Saarinen was not a happy camper.
Linear had not opted into secondary sales services. This meant the Carta used their proprietary data to undermine Linear’s ownership structure.
For Carta, this was a 5-alarm fire.
What proceeded was an entirely public contentious conversation between Kaari, and Carta CEO Henry Ward
So what happened?
Let me put Data Product Manager hat on. There was flagrantly an access control issue at Carta.
Whoever was responsible for sales had access to the entire Carta Book of Business cap table database, including Linear. Incentivized by transactions, I could imagine this employee having a buyer approach them interested in Linear equity. Wanting to hit their numbers, they bypassed red tape to solicit Carta shareholders to get that bag.
Word got back to the Linear CEO and he was, rightfully, pissed.
So pissed was he, he went public on X.
This is an absolute nightmare scenario for Carta CEO Henry Ward. It’s worse than just an inappropriate exposure of data. Startups care deeply about who is on their cap table. They want individuals who bring value to the ambitious enterprise. It’s a representation of who has a voice in a room.
Sales from equity holders are also a signal to the market on the health of the business. If private equity holders start selling it - others question the health of said business.
Carta undermined the business of one of the clients by engaging in the conduct above.
No bueno.
The ordeal made clients question if they could trust Carta’s core business of managing equity data.
Carta, and Henry Ward, made the only rational decision and shut down their secondary sales business.
How Carta could have fixed this issue from a Data PM perspective.
As a Data PM, this entire situation made me laugh. I could totally see how this situation would occur in a startup environment.
Carta messed up the principle: Won’t do wrong vs. Can’t do wrong.
Every employee has operating procedures they are expected to abide by. We yell at those employees when they fail to adhere to said policy.
When a behavior can threaten the core business, you must make the behavior impossible to act on.
Every company that opted into secondary sales should have had its equity data migrated to a segregated database. Everyone who works on secondary sales then would only have access to that database. They could not access the non-opted-in client data even if they wanted to.
Carta did not do this. Goodbye, secondary sales business!
P2P Insider Take
The following is what the P2P team is seeing day to day on the product job
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