The longer we work inside a system, the better we get at navigating it, and the worse we get at questioning it. To quote Wilson, "The first step for greatness is humbling yourself. Maybe you shouldn't try to have all the answers and instead ask more questions." #Leadership
Sometimes progress comes from stepping back and letting someone else see what I can’t.
I grew up watching reruns of Home Improvement with Tim Allen. I always enjoyed the conversations between Tim and his neighbor Wilson, whose face the audience never fully saw. #Collaboration
Let's say my job involves customer service workflows, and I have my lawyer colleague look them over. Lawyers are detail oriented and they ask great questions. They might immediately spot a bottleneck that I've learned to work around out of necessity. #Productivity
I have more thoughts on this, but I'll post them next week, because I'm headed to the bakery, which, to my knowledge, is not owned by a man named Glen. #AI
I woke up craving croissants, and I've had a thought as to why companies struggle to motivate employees to adopt AI. The two concepts have combined themselves into this post. Humor me.
Let's think about Glen, who owns a small bakery.
Do you get six hours back (which you would promptly use to bake croissants)? Or do you just get six hours of something else that maybe is more difficult or less pleasant than the original tasks? Given this information, can we really expect employees to adopt #AI?
Katrina Baker, a 988 counselor with Didi Hirsch and member of our Next Gen Council—who drafted the initial concept for AB 1988—testified today alongside @AsmGailPellerin in support of this initiative, and we are grateful for their leadership on this critical issue.
In honor of #PrideMonth... Did you know that #suicide is the second leading cause of death among young people aged 10 to 14, and the third leading cause of death among 15-24 year olds?
#LGBTQI young people are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers.
The 988 Suicide and Crisis Line offers support in the US to the LGBTQI+ community by call or text, 24/7, 365 days a year.
Your #grief is welcome here.
Your joy is welcome here.
Your #trauma is welcome here.
Your truth is welcome here.
You are welcome here!
Spread the word using this IG story: https://t.co/lQxLyscjva
Outside of the US, find support at: https://t.co/TqieKz8U0R
#LGBTQ #LGBT #pride #suicideprevention #mentalhealth @DidiHirsch@afspnational@AFSPLACenCoast
Validation is a mirage.
Spend enough time talking with entrepreneurs, product people, designers, and anyone charged with proving something, and you’ll bump into questions about validation and certainty.
“How do you validate if it’s going to work?”
“How do you know if people will buy it to not?”
“How do you validate product market fit?”
“How do you validate if a feature is worth building?”
“How do you validate a design?”
You can’t.
You can’t.
You can’t.
You can’t.
You can’t.
I mean you can, but not in spirit of the questions being asked.
What people are asking about is certainty ahead of time. But time doesn’t start when you start working on something, or when you have a piece of the whole ready. It starts when the whole thing hits the market.
How do you know if what you’re doing is right while you’re doing it? You can’t be. You can only have a hunch, a feeling, a belief. And if the only way to tell if you’ve completely missed the mark is to ask other people and wait for them to tell you, then you’re likely too far lost from the start. If you make products, you better have a sense of where you’re heading without having to ask for directions.
There’s really only one real way to get as close to certain as possible. That’s to build the actual thing and make it actually available for anyone to try, use, and buy. Real usage on real things on real days during the course of real work is the only way to validate anything. And even then, it’s barely validation since there are so many other variables at play. Timing, marketing, pricing, messaging, etc.
Truth is, you don’t know, you won’t know, you’ll never know until you know and reflect back on something real. And the best way to find out, is to believe in it, make it, and put it out there. You do your best, you promote it the best you can, you prepare yourself the best way you know how. And then you literally cross your fingers. I’m not kidding.
You can’t validate something that doesn’t exist. You can’t validate an idea. You can’t validate someone’s guess. You can’t validate an abstraction. You can’t validate a sketch, or a wireframe, or an MVP that isn’t the actual product.
When I hear MVP, I don’t think Minimum Viable Product. I think Minimum Viable Pie. The food kind.
A slice of pie is all you need to evaluate the whole pie. It’s homogenous. But that’s not how products work. Products are a collection of interwoven parts, one dependent on another, one leading to another, one integrating with another. You can’t take a slice a product, ask people how they like it, and deduce they’ll like the rest of the product once you’ve completed it. All you learn is that they like or don’t like the slice you gave them.
If you want to see if something works, make it. The whole thing. The simplest version of the whole thing – that’s what version 1.0 is supposed to be. But make that, put it out there, and learn. If you want answers, you have to ask the question, and the question is: Market, what do you think of this completed version 1.0 of our product?
Don’t mistake an impression of a piece of your product as a proxy for the whole truth. When you give someone a slice of something that isn’t homogenous, you’re asking them to guess. You can’t base certainty on that.
That said, there’s one common way to uncertainty: That’s to ask one more person their opinion. It’s easy to think the more opinions you have, the more certain you’ll be, but in practice it’s quite the opposite. If you ever want to be less sure of yourself, less confident in the outcome, just ask someone else what they think. It works every time.
You can hear the words «Green Needle» or «Brainstorm» only based on which one you think about.
This is an auditory illusion, or a false perception of a real sound
[explanation: https://t.co/cnq2xCRkvg]
The way that Jensen Huang runs Nvidia is wild:
40 direct reports, no 1:1s
- Believes that the flattest org is the most empowering one, and that starts with the top layer
- Does not conduct 1:1s - everything happens in a group setting
- Does not give career advice - "None of my management team is coming to me for career advice - they already made it, they're doing great"
No status reports, instead he "stochastically samples the system"
- Doesn't use status updates because he believes they are too refined by the time they get to him. They are not ground truth anymore.
- Instead, anyone in the company can email him their "top five things" with whatever is top of mind, and he will read it
- Estimates he reads 100 of these everyone morning
Everyone has all the context, all the time
- No meetings with just VPs or just Directors - anyone can join and contribute
- "If you have a strategic direction, why tell just one person?"
- "If there is something I don't like, I just say it publicly"
- "I do a lot of reasoning out loud"
No formal planning cycles
- No 5 year plan, no 1 year plan
- Always re-evaluating based on changing business and market conditions (helpful when AI is developing at the pace that it is)
This org is optimized for (1) attracting amazing people, (2) keeping the team as small as it can be, and (3) allowing information to travel as quickly as possible