As a Product Manager: You set the priorities and scope. Engineers set the date.
If you have a fixed date you need to hit, then you must de-scope until engineers feel comfortable they can hit the date.
Product & Startup Builder
Capital NOT Revenue
High growth startups are about raising capital & burning it. Not making revenue & earning it.
How Did Uber Scale So Fast?
My friend just asked me how Uber scaled so fast. My off-the-cuff answer:
Huge ambition/vision/appetite - this animates and motivates everyone and everything
First principles thinking - this leads to ignoring legacy constraints and encourages new innovative thinking/solutions
Fearless execution with ownership/accountability at the edge - which allows everyone to move fast without waiting for permission
I’d also add...
Bias towards action - move fast. Have the meeting this week, not next week
Hire strong operators that, in-turn, hire strong operators.
Of course, these are some of the same things that got it in trouble too.
Ask For The Right Amount Of Funding
Investors have limited bandwidth and a chunk of capital they need to put to work.
Don’t try to minimize your funding ask thinking it will be easier to get a “Yes”. You need to be asking for the right amount of money to put you on a trajectory to win your category and get a 100x return on their bet.
Anything less than that is uninteresting and comes across as naive.
You Can’t Be Everything To Everyone
You must choose a minimum viable customer and build a killer, habit forming product for them. Then, and only then, can you incrementally expand to other use-cases and market segments.
Unbundling Consensus From Legacy
The world is built on consensus.
Concepts like ownership, law, money, monarchy, governance etc - they are merely constructs built on this fundamental mechanism.
Said another way: the only reason we can own a piece of land or money has value or the queen is the queen is because a sufficient number of people agree that those things are true. All the mechanisms and norms of society only exist because the majority basically agree they exist.
In an era where our most senior business and political leaders are explicitly calling into question our fundamental institutions of operationalized consensus - or manipulating them for their own greedy and corrupt ends - a new kind of consensus needs to emerge.
That’s why Blockchain technology is so very important.
Being able to turn human consensus into running code and an immutable distributed dataset (e.g a ledger) transforms our implicit rules operated by central authorities into distributed, peer-to-peer operations.
We can now unbundle consensus from legacy, centralized institutions and put it at the edge.
The implications are profoundly disruptive. For both good and ill.
Executing The Mundane Is Innovation
Executing the mundane better than anyone else is, in and of itself, innovation.
A Reminder For Platforms
Reminder: Platforms need killer apps first.
What Are Your System Emails Set To?
Your system emails shouldn't be 'no-reply'. Make it easy for your customers to reach you.
Avoid Propping Up Incumbents
Propping up incumbents is often a fools errand. Disrupt w/ software.