Insights from Others

• What are the differences between our customers and our competitor\'s customers?
• No organisation design is perfect. You are optimising for what is the biggest problem you have right now.
• MAU growth is only important in a winner takes all market
• Knowing where to cut features requires a deep understanding of the market
• Without clarity dev. teams won't get things done
• Build knowledge to plunder, rather than research a problem
• CompanyX is the authority on ____
• When selling vision, tell a good story: theme (not too preachy), plot (conflict/struggle/resolution), characters
• Don't put a logo on t-shirts, put the value proposition
• Public bug hunt on Google Hangouts
• Software encapsulates knowledge about a customer's requirements in a domain. E.G. a CAD codebase knows things about 3D Models, and what customers can do to them
• Support calls are an opportunity for customer interaction. Tag people and link them to backlog items.
• Skype calls are better than customer visits (sometimes) because you can do many more of them per day
• Stop buggering about and get some stuff done
• Leadership: Make the call. Believe it. Sell it.
• Thinking vs dot-voting: which did I do more of today?
• The hard bit about strategy is like that pretty girl in the bar. It looks tempting and will be great in the short term, but will lead to long term pain.
• If the field and map don't agree: believe the field
• If the CEO watched this meeting through a mirror wall, would he be impressed?
• Management: what to change, how to change it, how to effect that change.
• It is a prototype until it is proven
• Finishing is hard, slow down to go fast. Be deliberate.
• If you can't name it, you don't know what it is
• Proximity is very important: if you move the dart board from upstarts to the living room you'll play it way way more.
• Good experiments are at the intersection of interesting and cheap
• Impose structure on data at the start (e.g. by randomising) and get valuable data at the end
• What facts do I have to refute the hypothesis 'this business/product is doomed'? If we are going wrong, what would be see?
• Figure out the common thread among things that are going well, and do more of it
• If you don't know why you are doing something, stop until you know why
• Attack! Attack! Attack!
• Is the thing I'm being asked to do stupid, or is it my inexperience?
• Stop making plans and predicting the future and make stuff now
• Learning a skill goes through: Boundless optimism (committed, incapable), Crushing Reality (incapable, low engagement), Grim Determination (capable, low engagement) and finally tedious acceptance (capable, committed)
• They constantly discuss complex systems as though errors can be eradicated instead of asking how quickly errors are adapted to and learned from
• Extreme focus on important things you can control will repay far far more than time spent reading speculation about things you can't control.
• Bias toward standards rather than rules. Why? With rules folks focus on playing rule games. With standards there's a fair amount less consistency, but the incentives to do the work rather than play the rules leads to better outcomes.
• Good plans (in a competitive environment) don't have names. Names for things come late in the process, once practitioners know what it is and have done several already. If you start something and it has a name, then you are too late.