Happy Sunday 👋 Welcome to all the new readers and those already tuning in every week. As a reminder, TTS is a twice-weekly email:

1. Friday: Curated list of new features and products from the week

2. Sunday: Breakdown of a new product launch + other good finds

I'm always looking for ways to improve the experience, so please hit reply and let me how the newsletter could be better!

One Big Ship

Verizon launched +Play, a subscription aggregation platform.

Details: The beta launch gives Verizon customers a consolidated hub to purchase and manage 20+ subscription services. Highlights include:

• Streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, HBO Max, NFL+

• Other services such as Peloton, Calm, Duolingo

• Temporary offer of 12 months Netflix Premium incl. with any purchase

Why it matters: In the midst of macro headwinds, distribution is top of mind for consumer subscription services. As a result, many are willing to take a haircut on unit-economics and product control to unlock growth.

With ~150 million subs, Verizon is one of the largest D2C distributors in the US. On certain plans, customers get the likes of Apple Music and Disney for free. +Play lays the foundations to go a step further.

If Verizon executes well, +Play can become a destination that the entire subscription ecosystem has to buy into, while also creating a meaningful reason for consumers to choose Verizon over its competitors.

Verizon's not the only one hopping on the aggregation trend. Last month, YouTube shipped Primetime Channels, letting users subscribe and watch content from streaming partners directly within the YouTube app.

Be smart: +Play has serious potential, but there's a ways to go before the offering becomes truly compelling for merchants and customers. 

Unlike Primetime Channels where streaming content is surfaced natively across YouTube, +Play's discovery benefits are limited by Verizon customers having to go out of their way to sign-up and view the hub.

Prices for services are the same as merchant's direct pricing. Once the Netflix offer expires, there's no economic incentive for customers to use +Play. Verizon will need to offer price discounts or major new offers to gain the attention of its customers at scale.

What to watch: How will the +Play hub evolve as it moves from beta to eventually becoming a mature offering?

Good finds

Madhavan Ramanujam - The art and science of pricing

20% of what you build drives 80% of willingness to pay. Price is a measure of value, and willingness to pay is a proxy for "do people actually care".

Having the willingness to pay conversation early on (pre user research):

• 1) Start off in sales mode by highlighting benefits and value prop

• 2) Ask users to benchmark your product's value against the value they get from other products they use

• 3) Assess whether there are psychological or budget constraints:

  • "What's an acceptable price? "

  • "What's an expensive price?"

  • "What's a prohibitively expensive price?"

• 4) Ask additional questions to get clearer signal on willingness to pay

  • "On a scale of 1-5, how likely would you be to buy this product?"

  • "What is the product's most important and least important feature?"

Ami Vora - Learning to make decisions in a new space

Every decision has three parts:

• 1) Listen

• 2) Decide

• 3) Document & execute

In a new role, jumping into decision-making mode without proper context will result in lots of hasty decisions that you'll later regret.

Instead, first focus on (1) listening to gain both context and an insight how specific people feel about the problem.

While ramping, shift to (3) documenting and executing. This will give valuable insights into how people with more context are thinking through decisions, and what principles they're using to make decisions.

As you become familiar with the principles being used to make decisions, start to gradually switch to (2) making decisions yourself.

Shreyas Doshi - Aligning on quality of expected work

Delegation fails when managers and ICs aren't aligned on the expected quality of the output of a delegated task.

A solution as the manager is to clarify expected quality on a scale:

• 9-10: Take time to make it perfect

• 5-6: Done is better than perfect

Avoid 7 and 8 on the scale to give ICs clarity on what quality level is really being requested.

Twitter shennanigans

And that’s a wrap for today. Stay tuned for more!

-  Amol