Retro: What I have learned this year to try to improve this
I took a bit of time to reflect on the year in this blog/newsletter, and I thought of sharing some of that broadly in my last post for the year (followed by a gap of a couple of weeks when I will be taking some time off). It was an insightful exercise, and I believe I have surfaced a couple of different topics I can act upon in the future.
First, it is pretty clear this is to be considered mostly a newsletter; by far the most viewing comes from e-mail, so subscription is the main driver for viewing. That brings me to my little pitch: if you find anything useful or insightful in what I write here or on my LinkedIn page and are not a subscriber yet, it would be an honor to me for you to consider doing so.
Now, and to be clear, as I already mentioned several times in different contexts, I do this primarily for my own sake, as I have gained so much clarity on my thinking by sharing it in the best spirit of "thinking out loud". While I would probably insist in any case, it is still nice to see that some people out there see some value. It's a validation and a sense of being headed in a reasonable direction – that's more than I could ask for, really!
I am a data guy, in case you didn't know, that's the context in which I've pretty much built my professional career, so here are some insights that made me proud:
Number of subscribers has increased by nearly 4x this year. Now, it is true that from a not-so-high base, it is still significant.
Number of weekly views has increased by 64% on average if I compare the first half of the year with the second.
Interesting enough, despite my deliberate choice to write this in English, not my native language, the vast majority (65%) of my subscribers are from my home country, Brazil. And no, it's not like all of those are old friends and family; I assure you, more often than not, I don't know them in person.
Apparently, about half of all the subscribers are here because of the direct effect of Substack features (or so Substack claims, at least).
More on the interplay of content and quantity, my four most viewed posts are:
‘The House of Excellence’ – this is my first kind of hit. Driven by the mentioning of L. David Marquet's book, and the fact that he reposted via Twitter after I made him aware.
What is PRIORITY and VALUE anyway? – this is my most-viewed post so far. Amplified by the mentioning in a newsletter from the Kanban University, as I made a reference to content from them.
You don't have a PRIORITY problem, rather a CLARITY one – another kind of hit. I have shared this one work Slack channel because it related to some topic under discussion.
Getting (product) work defined and done: a common pattern and options – this is the real hit where views were driven from the existing audience; there was no other network effect by sharing differently or being shared by someone else.
So, to summarize, my key learnings for the year about this are:
E-mail is the "bread and butter", it's what maintains the views at a certain level.
Network effect is a thing, it's the way to drive more views.
Substack seems to help drive more subscriptions.
Hypothesis: the practical implications judged by the title seem to bring more views
Now, looking at the last point of my hypothesis, maybe some could argue that "so long for the conceptual leader" as the underlying theme. Well, not quite, as I have in fact argued in a previous post: To be practical, be conceptual.
Based on the findings, I feel like there are a couple of things I should commit to and see that will further corroborate the learnings as I have interpreted them:
Figure out ways to tap into the network effect more.
Focus on aspects with more practical implications and have titles that properly reflect that.
If you have followed my posts for a while and have a different view, or any view at all, you would like to share, feel free to do so in any way you feel suited (LinkedIn DM, via Substack, commenting in this post, etc.). And once again, I wish you a great Christmas (if you do celebrate it) and end of the year. I hope to ‘see’ you back here next year!
P.S.: On a side note, I felt like a couple of posts were counterintuitively less viewed, so I thought of resharing them here:
Interactions: what your customers don't care about, but you should care about… – I explored the bit of contradiction of so much focus on team-level ways of working when that is not what drives an organization's effectiveness (as a system).
Flow enables efficacy – I make the case that there's no dichotomy or contradiction between focusing on efficacy (what matters in the end) and efficiency. But rather that the latter helps to enable the former.
by Rodrigo Sperb, feel free to connect (I only refuse invites from people clearly with an agenda to ‘coldly’ sell something to me), happy to engage and interact