Should you do one thing incredibly well, or build a platform with multiple bets?
Experts
Do one thing and do it better than anyone. Say no to almost everything.
Build a platform. Multiple products create moats and compounding value.
Feeling stuck? Here's how to know when it's time to leave your job | Ada Chen Rekhi
One thing was really telling, no one out of everyone we asked said 18. So that really dragged my partner up. And then the other thing that was really interesting was that we learned a little bit about executive function and the research around it.
I'm looking at my values a little bit, and one of them is choose adventure, which you would think would be just do stuff, just try stuff out. But I feel like maybe it's just a missing bullet point here of, I just want to do less. I'm trying to take on less and do less and cut out and-
The ultimate guide to Martech | Austin Hay (Reforge, Ramp, Runway)
Totally. That's exactly right. And I have this adage I always say, which is tools are just meant to solve problems. And the problem set for marketing technologists and business technologists is you focus on the tools.
And then you get to a really big scale at Walmart where your problem isn't even. How do we consolidate the stack and make it so tools that are helpful for people, but how do we prevent from getting back to that state? How do we put safeguards in place to make sure people actually have access to the tools that they want and can solve their problems?...
The ultimate guide to JTBD | Bob Moesta (co-creator of the framework)
Christina Cacioppo Sure. So we started Vanta in 2018, focused on founders helping them start to build out their security programs and get credit for all of that hard security work with compliance certifications like SOC II or ISO 2701.
Go wide and find what many different industries that can do it. Go talk to friends, people who have these jobs and start to realize what they are and narrow down to one area that you really feel like you can actually go to that's going to give you the outcomes that you want.
Why AI evals are the hottest new skill for product builders | Hamel Husain & Shreya Shankar
And the AI says, "You're welcome. If you have any more questions, feel free to reach out." Now, this is an example of a trace, and we're looking at one specific data point. And so one thing that's really important to do when you're doing data analysis of your LLM application is to look at data. Now, you might wonder, "There's a lot of these logs.
So that's the idea behind benevolent dictator, is, "Hey, you need to simplify this across as many dimensions as you can." Another thing that we'll talk about later is when it goes to building an LLM as a judge, you need a binary score. You don't want to think about, "Is this like a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5?" Like, assign a score to it. You can't.
Be fundamentally different, not incrementally better | Jag Duggal (Nubank, Facebook, Google)
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A guide to difficult conversations, building high-trust teams, and designing a life you love
Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's vulnerable to seek help, but I think your audience, I know to be incredibly committed to growth. I hear of people who come on your podcast and they've spent decades focused on self-improvement. And I actually want to tell you a story about one of my clients who loves your podcast, and I was talking to him last week.
I started working with him when he was a frontline engineering manager at Coinbase, and we talked about who he is, what his strengths are, and his bigger picture why. And he talked about this dream of creating a global movement one day.
Making an impact through authenticity and curiosity | Ami Vora (CPO at Faire, ex-WhatsApp, FB, IG)
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Exactly, very similar. And I think the thing that was helpful for me there is that really unlocked what I was looking for from my managers because otherwise I wanted them to be exactly like me. If I assume that I need to bring them information and then they would come to the same conclusion that I would come to, that's very narrow.
Behind the founder | Drew Houston (Dropbox)
When you look at something like iCloud, it's like, "Yeah. When you turn on your iPhone for the first time, it's probably not going to give you an ad for Dropbox." So we're like, "Hey, we need to address some of these issues," and expanded to some new areas to diversify.
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How to build trust and grow as a product leader | Fareed Mosavat (Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Pixar)
That's why it has not been attractive to me personally, I will say. I like being focused on a singular problem for some amount of time. I do a lot of portfolio-type stuff outside. I advise casually. I do some coaching. Not coaching exactly, but mentorship for a couple of different up and coming product leaders.
With that, we support, I believe, now 19 total cohort-based programs across product, engineering, marketing, and growth-related topics as well as a bunch of new experiences that we're working on for the coming future here in the next year.
Growth tactics from OpenAI and Stripe’s first marketer | Krithika Shankarraman
And then it was about starting to think through the multi-product ecosystem. So Stripe went from a single-threaded payments processing company to one that had multiple different products and features for the audience and the user base.
You still have to do something a little bit different. I recall a very specific example at Stripe where our product, Stripe Connect, which was made for marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb, where not only are you accepting money as a platform, you're also paying out people on the seller side of the marketplace.
Hard-won lessons building 0 to 1 inside Atlassian | Tanguy Crusson (Head of Jira Product Discovery)
Go big. But it was really a go big, lots of new developers, lots of new product managers, designers, the full company behind this product kind of thing. We tried to grow it very aggressively for a product that did not change that fast before it had reached good product market fit already, hundreds of thousands of users on a daily basis, and all of ...
Yeah, so the main one that I personally got from this, and it's back to the hypothesis that you talked about, which we have all these successful products, we can expand into this one which is, and I quote it, but it's just myself, don't eat your own bullshit, which is a mix of two things.
Unorthodox frameworks for growing your product, career, and impact | Bangaly Kaba (YT, IG, FB)
And so build a portfolio of work to do every sprint or every roadmap, some of which should be low effort, high impact, some of which should be medium effort, high impact. And sometimes understand work actually looks like doing a cheap test, doing a test that's going to help us to learn as fast as possible that we think is a good enough experience t...
But another part that goes unspoken, still critical to this day was the celebrity partnerships was critical, because basically they had this wonderful partnerships team that basically took Instagram and taught celebrities how to use it, how to make it work for them, how to tell their own story and be their own brand, and that was a critical growth ...
Making Meta | Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth (CTO)
He also built the original Facebook mobile ads platform, which he then ran for another four years. He also helped build and scale the Facebook messaging system, the profile, the timeline, Facebook groups, and even the internal engineering boot camp.
If the lifeblood of any company are the people inside of it who collectively commit to some kind of a goal and a mission and work together, then you want to maximize that potential. And creating this really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that.
Brian Chesky’s new playbook
When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved most was our experimentation platform where could set up experiments easily, troubleshoot issues, and analyze performance all on my own. Eppo does all that and more with advanced statistical methods that can help you shave weeks off experiment time, an accessible UI for diving deeper into perform...
Before Y Combinator, there was a person named Michael Seibel. He's in Y Combinator. And he used to meet with me and give me advice. And he wasn't an official advisor, he wasn't an investor. I didn't hire him or anything like that. He wasn't on my board.
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The hardest part of focus is saying no to good ideas. We killed 3 promising features to nail our core — and it was the best decision we made.