Levers Quotes

“I believe the biggest risk founders take is the day they start their business. From then on, the best founders are the ones who out-execute the market by reducing waste and being faster than anyone else at figuring out what the market wants.”
― Amos Schwartzfarb, Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business

“Although strong conviction is essential to building your vision, until you have data, you shouldn’t go too far in any one direction. The sooner you realize that, the better chance you will have of identifying your real W3 quickly—at least in its first iteration—so that you can get to scaling your business.”
― Amos Schwartzfarb, Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business

“a great product person has assumptions about their customers’ needs, can hypothesize creative ways to satisfy these needs, and can prioritize which hypotheses to test in priority order.”
― Amos Schwartzfarb, Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business

“What if every member of the company were asked to create a daily learning goal and to report on what you learned during standup along with blockers and tasks? What if this learning goal is something that each person can do in fifteen minutes or less and could be achieved on their own without the help of another team member?”
― Amos Schwartzfarb, Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business

“In today’s interconnected world, we can get customer feedback in parallel with product development. This has led to a product development world where we can have deeper confidence that what we’re building today will resonate with customers but with much less fidelity on what exactly we may be building two quarters from now. And that’s okay. For some reason, our roadmapping process today still tends to be more of a waterfall-looking document, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather than defining arbitrary things we hope to ship two quarters from now, we can define what we hope to learn two quarters from now—what’s really important to know about our business in the future—and how we plan to learn it.”
― Amos Schwartzfarb, Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business

“The challenge with this is that when you course correct and shift plans according to market feedback, you have to reeducate your stakeholders on your new plan. This creates challenges in expectation setting and can start to create a perception that your plan is constantly changing, when in fact you are doing the right thing by reacting nimbly to what the market is saying. In this case, why go through the effort of the initial feature roadmap when it will end up just causing you more work? I’m a big believer in creating a “learning roadmap.” You have to communicate to your stakeholders where you’ll be spending your resources and where you are trying to go. But rather than being defined by features and dates, your learning roadmap defines the assumptions you want to validate and the dates by when you need to validate them. It’s a prioritized view of the things assumed to be most critical to the company, from subject to test.”
― Amos Schwartzfarb, Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business