Execution

“The vast majority of it was just hard work and finding ways to solve the real problems. One, make it easy to find the product. Number two, make it easy to get into the product. Three, stupid easy to find your friends. And then once you did that you were off the races and those were the things we were doing over and over again.”

“Strategy is super fun but customers don't care. Customers don't care about your fancy strategies and your five-year plan. They care about the product that's in their hands. Anything that distracts you from thinking about the product in your hands is a distraction.”

“Typically, you're bottlenecked where your ideas are not fitting in because they need to be made and they need to be made quickly. Now, you open up that bottleneck. So now actually making things is a lot easier. Actually, you become limited by how fast you can generate ideas.”

“There are only three reasons why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader. Either that person can't do, which is a capability issue, or they won't do, which is a motivation or an alignment issue, or they were not set up to do.”

“I think that where companies fail is that they're doing AI for AI's sake. They have a ton of projects that they're kicking off at the same time without a blueprint to understand how it actually worked and what their Stack looks like and they aren't treating it like a real investment, and so they don't have the measurement and the observability and the evals all set up.”

“It's not that you have to do everything yourself, it's that the person who you trust in the execution role, they have to become the expert. They can't stop until they hit the end. So much value is lost when the person in the execution role isn't really in command of all the details.”

“That is what I call the anti-pattern of what we want to do and I call that identify, justify, execute. Where you identify something, someone says, 'This would be great to build.' And you go pull data to go justify why that would be great to build and then you sink an ungodly amount of time working on it, but it ultimately doesn't succeed.”

“What I was trying to get out in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager, was the job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. Your actual job is to get a product into market that customers love that's better than anything that anybody else in the world puts in market. That's your job. And so you need to be the leader. You've got to get the thing done.”