Ash Maurya's Blog, page 3

Demonstrate Versus Pitch Value

I often get asked for selling points for lean –

usually by an internal corporate employee

seeking permission from management.

Instead of pitching the merits of the methodology,

and/or buying books and/or training for everyone,

Go find an “ideal” project instead and demonstrate results.

When you quietly deliver value to customers

in 4 weeks versus 4 months,

Your management and peers can’t help but notice

which is the first battle.

Minimum Success Criteria

Instead of thinking in terms of your business model’s

maximum upside potential (like the 1% market share goal),

it’s more helpful to think in terms of time-boxed minimum success criteria.

Your minimum success criteria is the smallest outcome that would deem the project a success for you X years from now.

Growth As a Series of Steps

We often draw the hockey stick curve as a smooth curve

but if you zoom in you’ll find that

it isn’t so smooth after all.

It is made up of a series of steps.

Think of these steps as firing rockets

that get you from one stable orbit to the next.

Each of these firing rockets or growth hacks eventually burn out

and need to constantly replaced with new ones.

Each step or firing rocket represents a sub-strategy

that got the business model from some initial customer throughput rate (point A)

to a new customer throughput rate (point B).

90 Day Writing Milestone

On writing well:

“Examine every word you put on paper. You’ll find a surprising number that don’t serve any purpose.”

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it’s because it is hard.”

“The only way to learn to write is to force yourself to produce a certain number of words on a regular basis.”

“Thinking clearly is a conscious act that writers must force on themselves.”

“The reader is someone with an attention span of about 30 seconds.”

Credits: William Zinsser, On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction

Semi-autonomous Teams

On the one hand, your team needs to be empowered.

To do whatever is needed to achieve the goal.

If they have to constantly get permission

to test ideas, that will affect their speed of implementation.

But the other extreme of granting them full autonomy is dangerous too.

Left unchecked, our passion (or bias) for the solution

always finds a way to rear it’s ugly head.

Time

I am about to cross the international dateline

which means I’m about to lose a day

just like that.

Not to worry, I’ll get it back

much the same way.

It’s only fitting to share a few of my favorite time quotes:

===

“I am time, the destroyer of all.”

– Krishna

“To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.”

– Leonard Bernstein

“There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.”

― Bill Watterson

“The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.”

― Albert Einstein

“It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

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Leave your favorite time quotes in the comments below.

The Curse of Specialization

We have been trained to build products

by organizing ourselves into specialized teams or departments

for the sake of efficiency and scale.

But when operating under conditions of extreme uncertainty,

this kind of specialization can be a curse.

The work flow in an organization is a system of interconnected steps.

When this work is done in silos and/or

under different sets of departmental KPIs (key performance indicators),

you run the risk of falling into the local optima trap at the expense of the global goal

The Two Pizza Team Rule

“The value of a communication system grows at approximately the square of the number of users of the system.”

– Metcalfe’s Law

Metcalfe’s Law has a corollary when it comes to project teams:

The efficiency of a team is approximately the inverse of the square of the number of members in the team.

—Marc Hedlund

As a team grows in size, communication breaks down and devolves into group think.

A good rule of thumb on the right team size is instituting a two pizza team rule:

The two pizza team rule: Any team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas.

– Jeff Bezos, Amazon

The Deep Space Intrapreneurship Analogy

Think of intrapreneurship as launching an exploratory probe into space.

If you shoot out too far,

you will get lost, eventually run out of resources,

and die a quiet death.

Even if you do manage to return,

you will probably bring back something

so unrecognizable to the core business

that you will be killed off by some Vice President.

The key to success is not aiming for deep space,

but aiming to orbit a specific target (albeit fuzzy)

AND maintaining regular communication

with an executive sponsor on the home planet.

The target establishes a goal worth pursuing.

External accountability manages expectations

and safeguards your return.

Credits: Manish Mehta

(Re)Organize for Speed, Learning, and Focus

We have been trained to build products a certain way.

We organize ourselves into specialized teams (or departments)

that focus on different aspects of the innovation process.

On the one hand, such specialization is required for the efficiency of work.

But this kind of specialization can also be a curse.

Especially when deliverables are created in silos and

under different sets of KPIs (or key performance indicators).

I am not going to weigh in on

the merits of remote versus distributed teams,

or open versus closed workspaces.

What follows instead is my distillation of

the minimum set of attributes needed to organize a team

to maximize for speed, learning, and focus.

Small (no more five people per team)

Multi-disciplinary

Semi-autonomous

With your team built, the next step is

Charging them with a big goal under tight constraints.