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Otter Advisory Newsletter #5
July, 2021

Hello

This is the fifth edition of the newsletter. I spend a lot of time reading stuff, and I’ve experimented with a variety of tools to track interesting posts and links, I'll post a few of these. This month's version has a bit about M&A, large customer challenges for start-ups, and AI reality.

The newsletter is a miscellany of what I’ve read, written, watched or heard over the last little while. This may interest people who work in the world of HRTECH, SaaS, work tech etc, either as users, builders or investors. I’ll do this once a month or so at first, and see how it develops. Let me know what you would like to see here. Eventually I might even do some fancy formatting. Or not. 

Despite being double-vaxxed, I was down with Covid for a couple of weeks. Good thing is I‘m now back on my feet, and heading back to normality. The science works, people, the vaccine did what it was designed to do. Thanks for the many good wishes. 

In other news, I recently supported two M&A deals. Jubiwee was acquired by COYO, Venero the investment banker. This week Maguar made a majority investment in Ingentis, Drake Star the investment banker. Congratulations to all. 

Things I've written recently

• My thoughts on product presentations

• My Haufe column (in German) – the obligatory football-related post (June)

• My Unleash column – continuing my quest to challenge poor AI, I take on flight risk (June)

• Beware the mega deals – prompted by several clients trapped in long sales cycles

Things I've read

• Venero‘s latest M&A in HR TECH report – really useful M&A details 

•  Dr KellyAnn Fitzpatrick of Redmonk on documentation

• AI can‘t detect our emotions – links back to my plea for modest AI

• Strategic Narratives by Sloan Management Review – how you talk about strategy is important 

• New paper examining  predicting future protests and labor organizing activity across global supply chains based on various "publicly" accessible data such as social media posts  

• AI tools haven’t actually helped deal with COVID – this is pretty damning 

• Boston Consulting Group on the Innovation Gap –  gets to the challenges of large companies innovating 

• Aptitude Research report on Recruiting chat bots, conversational AI – thanks, Madeline

• Teresa Torres  (one of the best speakers and writers on product) – this talk is on Hypothesis Testing in PM

• When outside advice makes sense – I‘m biased…..

•  How do you audit algorithms? – one for my auditor friends. Yes, auditors do have friends 

Someone to follow on Twitter

• Corey Quinn – manages to be absolutely hilarious while teaching us all about AWS

A blog to subscribe to

 Diginomica – the go to blog / site for all things enterprise software

A book to read

How the Internet Really Works – great graphics, really insightful

Something to listen to

Has to be the Vaccines

Something to watch

• Me on enterprise product management  – I presented to the Heidelberg Mind the Product Product Tank

•  And the best dance routine, ever

Come and talk Enterprise Product Management

Dave Kellogg and I are doing Clubhouse Sessions on Product Management. Thursday mornings at 8 am Pacific for a series of Enterprise SaaS Product Power Breakfasts where we will talk among ourselves, with invited guests, and with the audience about all things product. It is also available as a podcast, finally. Podbean

Itunes/apple.

All episodes here.

If you would like to get in touch, click here to schedule a call or drop me a note. If you were forwarded this, and would like to subscribe, you can do so via the website.