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Notes

The book splits advice in 6 phases in ones life. These phases are generally gone through sequentially. 1. Starting and choosing a career - take risks in your 20s, find out what life is, how companies work and what they do. Get mentors. 2. Building that career - you work with good people, learn management vs IC, and how to make good decisions. 3. Building a good product - you find that you have something to offer and start to actually make something that solves a problem. 4. Building a business - you find that the company you work at is not doing it right, if you want to deliver a great product to the world, you are going to have to do it yourself. 5. Building a team - 6. Becoming a CEO -

1. Starting your career

When we are teens/early 20s we do not fully know who we are or what we want to do in the world. We do not have the world experience, we do not have the vision, we do not even know what is out there. We have come from an environment of everything being given to us, every test, project, match is lined up for us.

We need to work hard to find our place in the world.

Be risky

Be wild in your 20's. Join risky, fringe companies that are doing great things and pushing what is possible. The worst that can happen is that you move back in with your parents.

Find mentors

Find mentors/heroes in the trade and meet with them, work with them, rub shoulders with them. Learn from them. You become who you spend time with. Don't underestimate the importance of this.

Learn it all

Don't only look down. Don't only focus on your responsibilities. Learn how the company works, learn how finance works, learn about culture, about meetings and management. Get an integrated understanding of how business works. The areas he highlights: - Marketing - Engineering - Sales - Support - Manufacturing - Legal

2. Building your career

Individual Contributor (IC) or Manager?

There are two kinds of career paths one can follow: being an incredible individual contributor (IC) or moving into management (at the various different levels). Management is not the only path to a great career. It is a path. You can build career capital by being really good at what you do. And, management is a completely different ball game to what you were doing as an IC. He makes these great observations: - You do not have to go into management to be successful. - Once you become a manager, you stop doing what made you successful in the first place. - Becoming a manager is a discipline, it is learnt. Time management, task management, project planning etc. - Honesty is more important than management style. - Do not worry that your team outshines you. That is kind of the point. A great managers team will outshine them.

Make Slow Decisions

Data driven: acquiring facts, studies, collecting data and numbers. Decisions made like this are easy to defend. Opinion driven: following your gut and vision for what you do. There is not always the data to back it up. These are hard and often questioned by others (who have their opinion).

Always do your due diligence and research when making a decision. Making rash and fast decisions will hurt you. Data driven decisions are grounded and logical. BUT don't get stuck in an actionless acquisition of facts. - Know when to make a decision with the data you have. - Know when to make an opinion decision in contradiction with the data. - Know when decisions can't be made with data.

Quit right

There is no way that the first place you work at is the place you will work at forever. At some moment you will have to quit your first job. Do not just get up and leave the first moment you run into a difficult situation. Try resolve it, work with the person. If you cannot resolve deal-breaking shit or have lost a passion for what you do: quit. - do not burn bridges - do not throw anyone under the bus - make sure you give enough time for your replacement to be trained up - You want to work with these people in the future.

3. Building a good product.

Make the intangible tangible (in UX)

What you produce is a small part of the whole user experience. It is so important for the vision and passion to filter into the whole customer journey. Experience at each step determines whether they move forward, continue use and whether they return. - If they cannot log a support ticket, you have lost them. - If they cannot read a how-to, you have lost them. - If it is not reliable, you have lost them.

The customer journey: - Awareness - PR, search, social media, paid ads. - Education - website, email, blog, trial/demo - Acquisition - partners, payment model, up-sell/cross-sell, delivery. - Product - Design, UX, performance <- this is normally what we focus on - Onboarding - quick guide, account creation, how-to videos, tips - Usage - reliability, usability, updates, lifespan - Support - troubleshooting, knowledge base, call center, community - Loyalty - new products, newsletter, promotions, ratings/reviews

Tell a story

No one cares about the specs, what it can do, the technologies behind it, how long it took you to make it, how clever you are, how clever it is. The only thing people care about: Does it solve my problem.

Every product should have a story, a narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer's problems. A good product story has three elements: 1. It appeals to people's ration and emotional sides. 2. It takes complicated concepts and makes them simple. 3. It reminds people of the problem that's being solved - it focuses on the "why".

Be reasonably disruptive

For a product to be successful it must be disruptive. It must not be an improvement on something that has been before, it must be something new in the evolutionary tree. Particularly for V1 (version 1). It cannot be too disruptive (too different from what people are used to) otherwise they will not know what to do with it. V2 and V3 must be an evolution of V1.

Companies fail because: 1. They focus solely on the product and not the whole user journey. People won't know what your product does or what the problem is that it solves. 2. Conversely, you focus on the whole customer journey, you promise a great product, sell the journey exceptionally well but the technology is not there and your product does not deliver. 3. Your product changes too many things too quickly and people can't keep up with or even understand what you have made and how it will fit into their lives.

Version 1: Vision -> Customer insights -> Data - Start with strong vision. - Mostly opinion decisions. - Very little data to base your product on. Team: Mostly or all new players working together. It is loose and fast, responsive, you are still figuring everything out, figuring out processes etc.

Version 2: Data -> Customer insights -> Vision - Your product has been in the world, there are customer reviews, you have a model to improve on. - You can collect customer suggestions. Team: You can now take bigger risks, refine processes, there is more trust, the team can grow in the confines of your processes.

Follow the rhythms

Constraints and deadlines move a project/product forward. Do not force what doesn't need to be forced. Follow the natural rhythms that present themselves within the flow of the year. Team rhythms: regular checkins, fast, focussed, small. Project rhythms: semi-regular checkins, syncing between teams, improving process. Company rhythms: irregular, vision alignment, direction, partnerships.

Profit takes time

Version 1: - not remotely profitable. - essentially a prototype, testing the market. - outsource everything you can. Version 2: - making unit economics/gross margins. You can sell your product for more that you built it for, but your company is not making an overall profit. - Improving V1, you add all the things you couldn't do in V1 and all the things that failed you fix. - some things brought in house. Version 3: - making business economics/net margins. Now your product not only is selling for more than it costs but it is now contributing to company profit. - Refining V2. Now you make it world class. - lock in internal expertise, selective outsourcing.

4. Building a business.

Sometimes the current company you are working at cannot realise your product vision and you have to start the company yourself.

Spotting a great idea

  1. It solves for "why", you HAVE to have a problem that you are trying to solve. Why does your product need to exist?
  2. It solves a problem a lot of people have in their everyday lives.
  3. If follows you around. Even after you research how hard/improbable it will be, you can't stop thinking about it.

Getting ready

  1. Work at a startup
  2. Work at a big company
  3. Get a mentor to help navigate it all
  4. Find a cofounder to balance you out and share the load
  5. Convince people to join you (seed crystals)

Don't say yes to the first investor

  • Don't marry for money.
  • Investment is like marriage. It will stay with you for the life of the company.
  • Don't believe the too good to be true.
  • Only give 18-22 percent to the VC.
  • Don't let them rule your company.
  • Ask others who have worked with the VC if they are good.
  • Be clear with investors with what you need money for and how you will spend it.
  • Be clear on what problems still exist and how you plan on solving them (do not hide issues). Be upfront with risks and major challenges.
  • Do not change your why easily, hold onto your vision.
  • Finding funding can take 3-6 months.
  • Try and get two VCs to balance each other out.

You can only have one customer

  • You can either sell to businesses or to consumers, not both.
  • Your product can be used by the other but the whole customer journey must be clearly for one.

Find balance

I like his take on this (think Deep Work). Myth: "A magical, quasi-mystical state where you have time for everything: work, family, hobbies, seeing friends, exercising, vacationing. Work is just one part of your life that doesn't intrude on any other part. This kind of balance is impossible when you're starting a company, leading a team that's trying to create innovative products or services on a competitive timeline, or just experiencing crunch time at work." Reality: "Knowing you're going to be working or thinking about work most of the time and creating space to give your brain and body a break. To reach some level of personal balance, you need to design your schedule so you have time to ear well (Hopefully with family and friends, exercise or meditate, sleep, and briefly think about something other than the current crisis at the office."

Solve the crisis not the person

  1. Fix the problem first, don't find blame or look at why it went wrong, that comes later.
  2. Don't be scared to get into the weeds or worry about micromanagement during a crisis.
  3. Get advice from mentors, the board, investors.
  4. Over communicate - talk and listen A LOT with all stakeholders.
  5. Accept responsibility yourself (at least for your customers.)
  6. Then deal with how it happened and who caused it.

5. Building a team.

Design Marketing Product Management Sales Legal

6. Becoming a CEO.