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

by Ben Horowitz

In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective, and make a difference for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling. “In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.”

being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat.

Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.

A good product manager is the CEO of the product. Good product managers take full responsibility and measure themselves in terms of the success of the product.

Good product managers are the marketing counterparts to the engineering manager.