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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Scott Belsky
Read between
October 24 - November 11, 2018
People tend to dislike solutions until they feel like they understand the problem itself. Proposals must come after personally postulating the problem and the consequences of not solving it. Simple truths resonate; they stick in your mind, whether you like it or not. And that’s all the more reason to seek them and state them.
By attempting to engage with too broad a customer base, you fail to engage with any one customer base deeply.
In the early stages of articulating a product vision, don’t shy away from being explicit about who you serve and who you don’t. What are you doing and what aren’t you doing? Don’t hedge—you must choose.
There is power in brevity.
organizational debt is the accumulation of changes that leaders should have made but didn’t.
Former CEO of American Express, Ken Chenault, once shared what he considers one of the secrets to a fast career progression and reputation as an innovator in a large bureaucracy. “I would make my bosses make decisions,” he said. “You can’t just sit around and let people think about stuff, you must make them make decisions.”
Be the person who asks the persistent, and often annoying, questions. Don’t try to get everyone to agree. Instead, put people on the spot to share their objections. When there is ambiguity about the next step, call it out. Ambiguity kills great ideas, and great leaders kill ambiguity.
If you have conviction in your own ideas and approach, then you should be the most competitive with yourself. Your past personal best—your most productive week, your most efficient sprint, your best-executed event—is what you need to beat. Competing with your past is the purest and surest way to make faster progress without compromising your vision. The greatest successes are the aggregate of persistent optimizations of personal bests.
Zuckerberg: “It’s easier to tell Zuck that he’s wrong than to tell the average noob [new] founder. He’s not threatened by it. If he’s wrong, he wants to know.” Paul goes on to say, “What distinguishes great founders is not their adherence to some vision, but their humility in the face of the truth.”
Be open, humble, and eager to learn that you’re wrong—before someone else does.
But for all the benefits of rapidly testing ideas, iterating quickly, and optimizing for efficiency, sometimes you need to force yourself to slow down. The creative aspects of some projects are best cooked slowly.
“We can look ahead to our retirement or to a dental appointment, and we can take action today to save for retirement or to floss so that we don’t get bad news six months down the line. But we’re just learning this trick,” he says. “It’s really a very new adaptation in the animal kingdom and we don’t do it all that well. We don’t respond to long-term threats with nearly as much vigor and venom as we do to clear and present dangers.”
“Ask for forgiveness, not permission”
Ultimately, the knowledge around you is greater than the knowledge within you, and your job as a leader is to tap your team’s knowledge as best you can.
The vast majority of human beings dislike and even actually dread all notions with which they are not familiar. Hence it comes about that at their first appearance innovators have generally been persecuted, and always derided as fools and madmen.”
No answers are obvious or everybody would be doing these things.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that founders should seek lots of input. Then they need to take all the input they received, mix it up, apply a framework for how the information affects your decision and decide. All advice you receive is too generic to help you—you need to decide for yourself in your exact situation.
Your competitive advantage is a conscious admission and acceptance of your weaknesses as well as a recognition of your strengths; it’s as much about what you focus on as it is about what you choose to let go.
The paradox of product success is that when you focus on pleasing your most engaged users, you stop engaging new ones. The sad reality—and the opportunity for start-ups—is that most established products take their large user bases for granted and fail to maintain simplicity over time. In
“The question that I find most helpful to ask is, ‘if you had to keep 10 percent, which 10 percent would you keep, and if you had to, absolutely had to, cut 10 percent, which 10 percent would you cut?’
If you don’t think it’s awesome, stop making it.
“To make everyone happy with the decision, you’ll make no one happy with the outcome.”
It’s easier to disrupt the norm by being familiar.
What’s more, studies conducted at Swarthmore College examined the psychological effects experienced by “maximizers” as compared to “satisficers.” These studies build on the term “satisficer” that economist Herbert Simon coined in 1956 to describe the decision-making style that “prioritizes an adequate solution over an optimal solution.” While satisficers make a decision once their criteria is met, “maximizers” want to make the best possible decision, and so they scrutinize every option even if they’ve found one that’s good enough. In the Swarthmore studies, as journalist Becky Kane summarizes
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Rather than seeking more options, remind yourself that you make progress only once a decision is made, and you can always backtrack or adjust as you learn along the way. Don’t fall into the vortex of navel-gazing; keep moving.
Your challenge is to create product experiences for two different mind-sets, one for your potential customers and one for your engaged customers. Initially, if you want your prospective customers to engage, think of them as lazy, vain, and selfish. Then for the customers who survive the first 30 seconds and actually come through the door, build a meaningful experience and relationship that lasts a lifetime.
If you feel the need to explain how to use your product rather than empowering new customers to jump in and feel successful on their own, you’ve either failed to design a sufficient first-mile experience or your product is too complicated.
The key to breaking incrementalism and escaping your local maxima is to swap out your underlying assumptions. For example, if your product was founded in the age of social media and mobile apps, what assumptions did you have then that you would now question as voice-activated devices enter our homes and augmented reality transforms our mobile devices?
Old assumptions don’t get questioned enough because we’re used to them, and new ideas get dismissed too quickly because they are foreign and challenge conventions. Engaging and empowering new talent is a reliable way to break old patterns. As the leader of a team with new and old talent, your challenge is to balance the need to incrementally optimize alongside the need to change and question everything. Knowing the tendency to be limited by a local maxima, challenge yourself to welcome disruptive forces when you find yourself defensive. Strong denial is a signal for a hard truth.
When pursuing a new idea or solution to a problem, run it through three filters: 1. Empathy with a Need and Frustration: You have to understand the struggle of your users. Are you empathizing with customers who will benefit from your idea? What is their frustration and where is it coming from? Since you are often a customer of your own product, pay special attention to what frustrates you. As Jerry Seinfeld once explained in an interview with Harvard Business Review when he was asked where his best ideas come from, “It’s very important to know what you don’t like,” he explained. “A big part of
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The narrative is not a description of what your product is or does, it is the story of how and why it must exist.
“If you’re joining a company as head of sales, would you rather be scott@spot.com or scott@discoveraspot.com? The brand matters for the team identity as well, and too many people downplay its importance.”
Most journalists I know prefer talking to passionate founders rather than people whose job is to get press. PR is very helpful when a company needs to explain itself. Otherwise, it just gets in the way, especially for early-stage teams. The best press comes when you’re ready for customers to judge your product, and tells the story of how your product came about.
I call these features interest drivers because their intention is not to spur ongoing product engagement or even be actively used, but rather to pique interest.
“The fact that curiosity increases with uncertainty (up to a point) suggests that a small amount of knowledge can pique curiosity and prime the hunger for knowledge, much as an olfactory or visual stimulus can prime a hunger for food.”
It is frustrating but true that, in most cases, companies and products should change only in careful increments. Pacing is very important. But sometimes your team and product are at an inflection, and a trigger must be pulled quickly and all the way.
Therefore, forecasts for the future, while good mental exercises, should be grounded with a deep and accurate understanding of present-day problems and humanity. Otherwise, you may be betting on a future that is off by an order of magnitude.
“If I didn’t have this, how much effort would I put in to obtain it?” As he explains, “more often than not I throw it away, concluding that if I didn’t have it, I wouldn’t want this.” Vetting the true value of what you are afraid to lose is the first step to letting it go. Value is best measured by the resources you’d be willing to spend to do it again, knowing all that you know now.
I am struck by how great advice in one context is horrible advice in another.
I recall Andrew Wilkinson and Jeremy Giffon, partners at Canadian tech and design studio Tiny, summarizing the idea of successful entrepreneurs giving advice to others as the equivalent of someone saying, “Here’s the numbers I used to win the lottery.”
That’s because the problem with “best practices” is that they are entirely context dependent.
Likewise, many new ideas are distinctly unpopular before they become popular. So when you’re bearing the brunt of naysayers, it’s normally a good sign. When everyone thinks you’re crazy, you’re either crazy … or really onto something.
Don’t start to question your gut solely because it is different. Nothing should resonate more loudly than your own intuition. The truly differentiating factors of your project are the ones most likely to be different, misunderstood, or underestimated by everyone else.
Avoid too many measures, because the more numbers you’re tracking, the less attention you pay to any of them.
Data is only as good as its source, and doesn’t replace intuition.
if you know the answer you’re looking for, you’ll be able to find data somewhere to support it.
One frequent example I observe is the “people don’t use this” proclamation. While the raw number of customers using a particular feature can be easily measured, it is a meaningless stat without the context of how many total customers have the need for the feature, what percentage of them know about the feature, and what the usage patterns look like for other features.
We love data. It answers questions. But the definitive nature of data means you must use it with caution.
Common sense and near-term metrics help you optimize your product incrementally and reliably—but iconic and breakthrough product insights are not the result of trying to improve a metric. In contrast, great inflections are the result of instincts for what will serve your long-term goals; they’re about feeling, not thinking. In some ways, instincts precede awareness and help you make a decision months or years before that data prove it obvious.
Build a culture that values alternative viewpoints rather than seeks and rewards those that support your own.
