Buffet Bows, Abel Ascends

Drink coffee? Make every sip count.

Good morning. Over the weekend, nearly 20,000 gathered for Warren Buffet’s final annual shareholder meeting as the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. At age 94, the “Oracle of Omaha” will go down in history as the greatest investor ever. Since taking control of Berkshire in 1965, he delivered a cumulative return of 5,502,284% through 2024. Not too shabby.

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BUSINESS PULSE

Economy: The Federal Reserve’s April 2025 Beige Book reports modest economic growth across most U.S. regions, with 8 of 12 districts noting slight expansion. However, 65% of businesses face rising input costs, squeezing margins. Entrepreneurs should negotiate supplier contracts or explore alternative sourcing to mitigate price pressures while capitalizing on steady demand.
Source: Federal Reserve

Berkshire Hathaway: Berkshire Hathaway’s Q1 2025 operating earnings fell 14% to $9.64 billion, missing forecasts due to tariff uncertainties and rising costs, as noted at the May 3 annual meeting. Warren Buffett, transitioning CEO duties to Greg Abel by year-end, warned of trade disruptions but emphasized a record $347 billion cash reserve. The company trimmed its Apple stake and boosted Japanese trading house investments above 10%, signaling confidence in Asia.

Entrepreneurs should note Berkshire’s cautious optimism, leveraging buybacks and dividends to stabilize markets. This resilience offers lessons in cash management and strategic diversification for business owners navigating volatility.
Source: Reuters

PRODUCT MANAGEMENT

What Founders Can Learn from Product Managers

Three field-tested habits that help entrepreneurs focus scarce resources, delight customers, and compound learning without a Silicon Valley budget.

By Adam Christophersen

Most Main Street companies are born from craft: a great recipe, a knack for service, a hard-won industry insight. Yet the day a business finds traction, its founders become jugglers: marketing, hiring, cash flow, and customer complaints. In the chaos, good ideas die on whiteboards while “urgent” work fills every hour.

In my career building product management organizations at Denim Social and Survey Loop, I’ve found that Product Managers (PMs) live in that chaos every day. They have created repeatable ways to cut through noise, decide what matters, and turn feedback into fuel. These principles are useful for all entrepreneurs. And even better: you don’t need to be a software company to borrow the playbook of product managers.

Below are three product manager (PM) habits any entrepreneur can apply. They are presented in plain English, with quick experiments you can run right away.

1. Obsess Over the Problem, Not the Solution

“Fall in love with the problem, not the solution.” - Marty Cagan, Inspired

Why it matters

Most founders launch with a flash of inspiration: a clever feature, a new flavor, a shiny app. When the market pushes back with low conversion or tepid reviews, the instinct is to add more stuff. PMs take the opposite approach: they dig until the underlying pain is unmistakable, then build the simplest fix. They’re relentlessly curious, asking “why” until the answer is abundantly clear.

How to put it into practice

• Map a customer journey step by step on a sheet of paper. Highlight moments of delay, confusion, or frustration.

• Use the Five Whys technique to drill past surface complaints until you hear a root cause you can solve permanently.

• Rewrite your value proposition in the form: When [situation] I want to [progress] so I can [benefit]. If you cannot complete that sentence crisply, keep researching.

Try this next week

1. Recruit five customers (recent buyers, churned clients, or prospects) who ghosted you.

2. Ask one open-ended prompt: “Walk me through the moment you realized you needed a solution.”

3. Listen for friction, such as time wasted, money lost, or embarrassment.

4. List the top two unmet pains on a whiteboard and sketch solutions that remove, not add, steps.

Word of caution: If every customer cites a different pain, you do not have a target market yet; narrow your audience before you build.

2. Define a North Star Metric and Let It Guide Every Decision

Why it matters

PMs herd designers, engineers, marketers, and executives with a single number that predicts long-term success. Spotify tracks “minutes listened per user”. Airbnb watches “nights booked”. A clear north star prevents teams from chasing vanity stats such as page views or social likes.

Founder translation

For many service businesses, reliable repeat revenue beats one-off spikes. A yoga studio might choose “active monthly memberships,” while a house cleaning service could track “homes cleaned before 5 pm on Friday” so clients begin their weekends free of stress. The metric should be:

• Actionable: your team can influence it weekly.

• Lagging enough to reflect real value, such as cash or retention, but not so lagging that you wait quarters for feedback.

• Visible everywhere: dashboard, Slack channel, morning stand-up.

Quick start

1. Pull the past 90 days of core metrics. Which one, if doubled, would make you celebrate, not just smile?

2. Declare it your north star for 12 weeks.

3. Review progress every Friday; stop or adjust initiatives that do not move the needle

3. Ship Small, Learn Fast

Why it matters

PMs treat every launch as an experiment. The goal is learning per dollar, not perfect features. Never sacrifice progress for the sake of perfection. By releasing a minimum lovable product in days or weeks, they gather data while risk and cost stay low.

A practical approach

• Break big ideas into hypotheses: We believe [customer segment] will [action] if we offer [feature].

• Choose the smallest test that could disprove the hypothesis: a pre-order page, a live workshop, a mock-up shared on social media.

• Decide up front what success looks like, for example, 20 paid sign-ups or 50% click-through. When the test ends, you will have clear go or no-go evidence.

Example experiments

After launch, track sign-ups, willingness to pay, and referrals. If results beat your threshold, invest; if not, pivot without regret.

Guardrail: Set an explicit exit criterion before you start. Otherwise, sunk cost bias will tempt you to keep polishing a dud.

Pulling It All Together

When these three habits work together, they create a flywheel that accelerates insight and execution. Problem interviews consistently expose the sharpest friction points in your customer’s journey. A single North Star Metric then channels every initiative toward relieving that pain, preventing “nice to have” detours. Finally, rapid, small‑scale launches convert ideas into evidence in weeks rather than quarters.

Each spin of the loop deposits fresh data into your knowledge bank, and after a year, this cadence produces a clear, data‑backed picture of what customers value while hard‑wiring a culture that acts on those truths.

Picture the flywheel when you combine these habits:

1. Problem interviews surface the sharpest pain.

2. North star focus directs everyone to solve that pain, not random requests.

3. Small, fast launches prove or disprove each idea in weeks, not quarters.

Each loop deposits new insight into your knowledge bank. Document these insights and learnings. After a year, your company has a data-backed map of what customers truly value and a culture that acts on it.

Common Pitfalls and How to Dodge Them

• Assuming surveys are enough: People say nice things, but their wallets tell the truth. Charge even a little during experiments.

• Metric overload: If your dashboard has 15 numbers, no one owns any of them. Stick to one north star plus two guardrails, such as quality and cost.

• Perfectionism: Customers remember speed and responsiveness more than pixel-perfect experiences.

Final Word

Entrepreneurship rewards curiosity and discipline in equal measure. Product managers have spent decades refining methods that blend both. Use these three habits, adapt them to your context, and you will spend less time guessing and more time delighting customers who pay, stay, and spread the word.

Adam Christophersen is a product management leader with more than a decade of experience shaping B2B SaaS and fintech products from concept to scale. He blends customer obsession with rigorous market strategy to translate feedback into profitable, human-centered solutions that delight users and drive measurable business impact. Reach out to Adam on LinkedIn.

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