The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

by Ben Horowitz

Good product managers don’t give direction informally. Good product managers gather information informally.

Good product managers create collateral, FAQs, presentations, and white papers that can be leveraged by salespeople, marketing people, and executives.

Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers.

Bad product managers focus the team on how many features competitors are building. Good product managers define good products that can be executed

with a strong effort. Bad product managers define good products that can’t be executed or let engineering build whatever they want ...

the differences among delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing, and ubiquity.

Good product managers decompose problems.

Good product managers ask the press questions.

Good product managers define their job and their success.

Good product managers send their status reports in on time every week, because they are disciplined.

In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to

Running a large organization

When you run a large organization, you tend to become very good at tasks such

as complex decision-making, prioritization, organizational design, process improvement, and o...

high-quality hiring process, have terrific domain expertise (you are personally responsible for quality control), know how to create process from scratch, and be extremely creative about initiating new directions and tasks.

Beware of answers that overemphasize learning.

This may indicate that the candidate thinks there is more to learn about

your organization than there ...

interrupt-driven rather than setting the pace personally.

Look for candidates who come in with more new initiatives than you think are possible. This is a good sign.

Beware of equity being the primary motivation.

It’s much better if they want to be more creative. The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running versus creating.

desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your company.

executive must understand the product, the technology, the customers, and the market. Force

If in thirty days you don’t feel that they are coming up to speed, definitely fire them.

Make sure that they initiate contact and interaction with their peers and other key people in the organization.

acting is really the only way to get all the knowledge that you need to make the hire, because you are looking for the right executive for your

Write down the strengths you want and the weaknesses

that you are willing to tolerate.

I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and

retention. This

overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience.

Some things that you want to encourage will be quantifiable, and some will not. If you report on

the quantitative goals and ignore the qualitative ones, you won’t get the qualitative goals, which may be the most important ones.

squeaky wheel gets the grease,

what skills he must demonstrate in order to

As we saw above, things change when you deal with highly ambitious, seasoned professionals.

careful about what you say, because everything that you say can be turned into

political cannon fodder.

members of your team will from time to time complain about each other.

Do not attempt to address behavioral issues without both executives in the room.

Do not let an accusation of this magnitude fester.

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition.

As with any complex character trait, there is no way to perfectly screen for the right kind of

“me” prism or the “team” prism.

They will tend to be far more interested in how your company will win than

in how they will be compensated or what their career path will be.

Disagree as inan interiew you sel your self

standoffish

bristled

metastasize.