Over time I've learned, surprisingly , that it's tremendously hard to get teams to be super ambitious.
It's also true that many companies get comfortable doing what they have always done, with a few incremental changes. This kind of incrementalism leads to irrelevance over time, especially in technology, because change tends to be revolutionary not evolutionary.
Today, three factors of production have become cheaper—information, connectivity, and computing power.
It used to be that companies could turn poor products into winners by dint of overwhelming marketing or distribution strength. Create an adequate product, control the conversation with a big marketing budget, limit customer choice, and you could guarantee yourself a good return. Things are different today.
In the old world, you devoted 30 percent of your time to building a great service and 70 percent of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts. 16 The second reason product excellence is so critical is that the cost of experimentation and failure has dropped significantly.
The primary objective of any business today must be to increase the speed of the product development process and the quality of its output.
Business plans aren't nearly as important as the pillars upon which they are built.
But it wasn't Google's culture that turned those five engineers into problem-solving ninjas who changed the course of the company over the weekend. Rather it was the culture that attracted the ninjas to the company in the first place. This is why, when starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider. What do we care about? What do we believe? Who do we want to be? How do we want our company to act and make decisions? Then write down their responses.
Product managers need to find the technical insights that make products better. These derive from knowing how people use the products (and how those patterns will change as technology progresses), from understanding and analyzing data, and from looking at technology trends and anticipating how they will affect their industry. To do this well, product managers need to work, eat, and live with their engineers (or chemists, biologists, designers, or whichever other types of smart creatives the company employs to design and develop its products).
When it comes to the quality of decision-making, pay level is intrinsically irrelevant and experience is valuable only if it is used to frame a winning argument . Unfortunately , in most companies experience is the winning argument.
If someone thinks there is something wrong with an idea, they must raise that concern. If they don't, and if the subpar idea wins the day, then they are culpable.
"Your title makes you a manager. Your people make you a leader."
You should never be able to reverse engineer a company's organizational chart from the design of its product.
The best cultures invite and enable people to be overworked in a good way, with too many interesting things to do both at work and at home.
Burnout isn't caused by working too hard, but by resentment at having to give up what really matters to you.
Bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone.
Giving the customer what he wants is less important than giving him what he doesn't yet know he wants.
The best products had achieved their success based on technical factors, not business ones, whereas the less stellar ones lacked technical distinction.
With open, you trade control for scale and innovation.
Make it easy for customers to leave.
Start by asking what will be true in five years and work backward. Examine carefully the things you can assert will change quickly, especially factors of production where technology is exponentially driving down cost curves, or platforms that could emerge.
Spend the vast majority of your time thinking about product and platform.
Don't use market research and competitive analyses. Slides kill discussion. Get input from everyone in the room.
Favoring specialization over intelligence is exactly wrong, especially in high tech. The world is changing so fast across every industry and endeavor that it's a given the role for which you're hiring is going to change.
A smart generalist doesn't have bias, so is free to survey the wide range of solutions and gravitate to the best one.
You must work with people you don't like, because a workforce comprised of people who are all "best office buddies" can be homogeneous, and homogeneity in an organization breeds failure. A multiplicity of viewpoints— aka diversity— is your best defense against myopia.
Experience is important, but in most industries today technology has rendered the environment so dynamic that having the right experience is only a part of what it takes to succeed.
Interviewing
What was the low point in the project? Or why was it successful? You want to learn if the candidate was the hammer or the egg, someone who caused a change or went along with it.
"If I were to look at the web history section of your browser, what would I learn about you that isn't on your résumé?"
The only way to get good at interviewing is to practice.
Career
When people are right out of school, they tend to prioritize company first, then job, then industry. But at this point in their career that is exactly the wrong order.
Think about your ideal job, not today but five years from now. Where do you want to be? What do you want to do? How much do you want to make? Write down the job description. By the way, if your conclusion is that you are ready for your ideal job today, then you aren't thinking big enough. Start over and make that ideal job a stretch, not a gimme.
When it comes to making decisions, you can't just focus on making the right one. The process by which you reach the decision, the timing of when you reach it, and the way it is implemented are just as important as the decision itself.
Slides should not be used to run a meeting or argue a point. They should just contain the data.
Getting everyone to say yes in a meeting doesn't mean you have agreement, it means you have a bunch of bobbleheads.
To achieve true consensus, you need dissent.
The job is to make sure everyone's voice is heard, regardless of their functional role, which is harder to achieve when the top dog puts a stake in the ground.
The right decision is the best decision, not the lowest common denominator decision upon which everyone agrees.
This is the most important duty of the decision-maker: Set a deadline, run the process, and then enforce the deadline.
In a negotiation, for example, Eric's "PIA" rule can help get the best outcome: Have patience, information, and alternatives. P is especially important. You want to wait as long as possible before committing to a course of action.
You have to analyze data and orchestrate consensus by encouraging debate and then knowing, through some divine skill, exactly the right time to cut off that debate and make the decision.
When ending a debate and making a decision that doesn't have 100 percent support, remember these three words: "You're both right." To emotionally commit to a decision with which they don't agree, people have to know that their opinion was not only heard, but valued.
Meetings
Meetings should have a single decision-maker. The decision-maker should be hands on.
Any meeting should have a purpose, and if that purpose isn't well defined or if the meeting fails to achieve that purpose, maybe the meeting should go away.
Meetings should be manageable in size. No more then eight people.
Leadership teams often underestimate how long it takes for revenue from a new product area to ramp up.
It's not that the coach is better at playing the sport than the player, in fact that is almost never the case. But the coaches have a different skill: They can observe players in action and tell them how to be better.
In this [old] world, information is hoarded as a means of control and power. People were hired to work, in the Internet Century you hire people to think.
Leadership's purpose is to optimize the flow of information throughout the company, all the time, every day.
No one wants to be the bearer of bad news. Yet as a leader it is precisely the bad news that you most need to hear.
After a product or key feature launches, we ask teams to conduct "postmortem" sessions where everyone gets together to discuss what went right and what went wrong.
Open door works only when people walk through it.
Start all staff meetings with trip reports.
At least once per year, write a review of your own performance, then read it and see if you would work for you.
The manager should write down the top five things she wants to cover in the meeting, and the employee should do the same. When the separate lists are revealed, chances are that at least some of the items overlap.
The business should always be outrunning the processes, so chaos is right where you want to be.
For something to be innovative it needs to offer new functionality, but it also has to be surprising.
How do you think the technology in the space will evolve? What is different now, and what further change do you expect?
"Innovative people do not need to be told to do it, they need to be allowed to do it."
"The first follower is what transforms a lone nut into a leader." - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GA8z7f7a2Pk
Focus on the user... and the money will follow.
Big bets often have a greater chance for success by virtue of their size: The company can't afford to fail. On the other hand, when you make a bunch of smaller bets, none of which are life threatening, you can end up with mediocrity.
Set the objectives too low and you are obviously trying to make yourself look good by "miraculously" exceeding them at the end of the quarter.
70 percent of resources dedicated to the core business, 20 percent on emerging, and 10 percent on new.
Overinvestment can create a situation wherein willful confirmation bias— the tendency to see only the good things in projects in which a lot has been invested—obscures sound decision-making.
Creativity loves constraints. A lack of resources forces ingenuity.
It's also possible that being well funded might have hobbled the project before it could get started. Larry's scrappy digitizing system, built from parts purchased at Fry's, proved to be a lot more cost efficient than the more advanced systems he might have purchased if he had allotted the time and budget. When you want to spur innovation, the worst thing you can do is overfund it. As Frank Lloyd Wright once observed, "The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest."
And we have found that when you trust people with freedom, they generally do not waste it on extravagant pies in the sky. You don't get software engineers writing operas - they write code.
Getting a few of your colleagues to join your project and add their 20 percent time to your 20 percent time is a lot harder. This is where the Darwinian process begins.
The most valuable result of 20 percent time isn't the products and features that get created, it's the things that people learn when they try something new.
Forgetting sunk costs is a tough lesson to heed, so in a ship-and-iterate model, leadership's job must be to feed the winners and starve the losers, regardless of prior investment.
Any failed project should yield valuable technical, user, and market insights that can help inform the next effort.
If you are thinking big enough it is very hard to fail completely. There is usually something very valuable left over.
We say we're stubborn on vision and flexible on details.
So fail quickly, but with a very long time horizon? Huh? How does that work? (See, we told you this was the tricky part.) The key is to iterate very quickly and to establish metrics that help you judge if, with each iteration, you are getting closer to success.
The rate of technology-driven change outpaces our ability to train people in new skills, putting tremendous pressure on entire classes of workers and the economic structure of many nations.
In the twenty-first century, The Corporation as a hub of economic activity is being challenged by The Platform.
In contrast [to a corporation], a platform has a back-and-forth relationship with consumers and suppliers
In a lot of these incumbent businesses, technology is that interesting thing run by that slightly odd group in the other building ; it isn't something that anchors the CEO's agenda every week.
Technology progress follows an inexorable upward trend. Follow that trend to a logical point in the future and ask the question: What does that mean for us?
In ongoing companies there are always hard questions, and they often don't get asked because there aren't any good answers and that makes people uncomfortable. But this is precisely why they should be asked— to keep the team uncomfortable.
Most companies fail because they get too comfortable doing what they have always done, making only incremental changes.
Are decisions on new ideas based on product excellence, or profit?
They find that they can have a far greater impact from California than from their home country, and the allure of gathering with other smart creatives of the same ilk often outweighs that of staying close to home.
Regulations get created in anticipation of problems, but if you build a system that anticipates everything, there's no room to innovate.
We see most big problems as information problems, which means that with enough data and the ability to crunch it, virtually any challenge facing humanity today can be solved.