A couple of weeks ago, one of my good friends, a Product Manager at Groupon, recommended me to read a Book he just finished, Swipe to Unlock, and believe is a good primer on the intersection between Technology and Business Strategy. Since I love this area in particular, he got my attention straight away. After finishing the book pretty fast, I decided to share with you my insights and opinions about it.
The book authors Neel Mehta, Aditya Agashe, Parth Detroja (PMs at Google, Microsoft and Facebook), structured it in a way that will connect with any reader and simplify their “on-boarding” into the the tech world which is the mission of the book from the authors perspective. Gladly, the authors bring their “PM mindset” to their writing and try to delight their customers by creating a flowing, easy and fun reading experience that does not require any prior knowledge from the reader and by that making the book a tool to make the technology industry much more inclusive and diverse..
To simplify the topic as much as possible, the authors thought thoroughly about the book’s structure. As any good technologists, they decided to structure the book in a stack approach starting with technology fundamentals and concepts and proceeding to the applications of these technologies later on. Then, once the tech foundations and key innovations are covered they elaborate more on additional business models, regulatory considerations and future trends to provide the full picture about this fascinating industry.
As time goes by, we see how this exciting junction of business, technology and innovation becomes a larger piece of our everyday life and for my opinion the importance of this book is its delivery of relatively complex concepts and business decisions through simple terms and explanations that make them much more accessible for the every-day user. A cool approach to do so is by providing a lot of analogies and examples of decisions and strategies of leading tech giants (such as: Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Uber, Netflix and others) on pretty much every concept (including adoption strategies, failures, acquisitions and more) that is described in the book which makes the reading fun and engaging.
From a content perspective, I was hoping to read a bit more about blockchain and its implications, as I believe that it will be central to the future of business and will impact multiple industries around us. However, at the end of the book there is a reference to the next book that the authors are working on which will be all about this innovative, exciting, foundational technology. So I guess that the reason for their approach to blockchain is all part of building the suspense towards the trio’s next book!
To ensure that the more advanced readers are satisfied with the book as well, the book is full with references to additional resources for further reading and insights about the latest events in the tech space. Also, to ensure an easy understanding and browsing through the book, there is a comprehensive glossary for important tech terms and an index with all the technology concepts and companies mentioned in the book.
To summarize, as someone who spends most of his time in this intersection for the past couple of years and pretty much aligned his career with these industries, I enjoyed reading this booking and reinforcing my understanding on some of the large movements in the technology industry. Therefore, I will definitely recommend it to my friends and family as it provides a great overview on the industry, exactly as it describes in its title: “A primer on technology and business strategy”, to any type of reader will it be a completely newcomer to the space, a job seeker or a technology enthusiast.
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