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Assume that for much of your 20s, your choices will not work out and that the companies you join or start will go up in flames. Early adulthood is about watching your dreams go up in flames, and learning as much as you can from the ashes

Focus on truly understanding your field; and use that knowledge to forge connections with the best of the best

If you keep coming, keep engaging, keep sending your heroes fascinating and thoughtful ideas, they’ll start to recognise you and would like to get to know you better. The key is persistence and being helpful. Not just asking for something, but in offering something and being helpful

Management: 1) you don’t have to be a good manager to be successful, 2) your job is to communicate with your team and to improve them all the time, 3) management is a learned skill, you’ll get better at it over time, 4) being exacting and expecting great work is not micromanagement. Your job is to make sure the time Produces high quality work. Only turns into micromanagement if you control how they do it. Enforce standards, 5) honesty is more important than style, 6) your goal is to ensure your team outshines you

The outcome is your responsibility. How the team reaches the outcome is your responsibility

No one wants to follow someone who throws themselves at every windmill. You need to show them the why, and sometimes supplement it with the what’s in it for them

Stop taking pride in your individual accomplishments, and start taking pride in the accrued wins of your team

Kinds of decisions:

• data-driven (you have the data, it’s easy to get consensus in team)
• Opinion/gut-driven (always hard and always questioned)

If you don’t have data to back your opinion, use qualitative insights instead

A/B testing is not product design. It’s a tool. It can tell you that something is not working but it won’t tell you how to fix it. Or it can tell you how to solve one hyperlocal issue, but in a way that breaks something else downstream

Solving users’ problems take insight and knowledge of the entire customer journey. You need a hypothesis, and it should be part of a bigger product vision. You can a/b test where the buy button should be on a web page, but not whether a customer wants to buy online

If you’re testing the core of the product, if the basic functionality can flex and change depending on the whims of an a/b test, then there is no core. There is just a hole where the product vision should be, and you’re just shoveling data into the void

If a product is really new, there is nothing to compare it to. Nothing to optimise, and nothing to test. You should define your target customers clearly, talk to them, and figure out what problems they have. But then it’s your job to fix those problems. Get their opinions to deepen your insights, but then it’s your job to use those insights to actually build the product

To tell the team your thought process, walk them through all the data you’ve looked at, all the insights you’ve gathered, and why you’ve ultimately made this choice

When you’re making something new, there’s no way to definitively prove that people will like it or that there is a market for it. Just put it in front of people - and they can just be forgiving customers or internal users, and see what happens

To get buy in, you need to create a believable narrative that everyone can latch on to

“So-called smartphones are not so smart, and they’re not so easy to use” - Steve Jobs at iPhone launch

Use the virus of doubt. Get into people’s heads, remind them of their daily frustrations and get them annoyed about it all over again. If you can infect them with the virus of doubt, then you can prime them for your solution

Get them angry about how it works now so they can get excited about a new way of doing things

There is a competition for market share and mindshare. If your competitors are telling better stories than you — if they’re playing the game and you’re not — it doesn’t matter if their product is worse. They will get the attention. To customers doing a cursory search, they will appear to be the leaders. The more people talk about them, the greater their mindshare, and the more people will talk about them

A good story is an act of empathy. It recognises the needs of its audience. And it blends facts and feelings so the customer gets enough of both

Analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy lets a customer instantly grasp a difficult feature, and then describe that feature to others

Get good PR before reaching out to VCs and have good SEO, so you show up when they are looking on Google

True work life balance is mythical, where you have time for work, hobbies, sleep, exercise, social life, vacationing etc

But personal balance when you’re working is very much possible. Knowing you’re going to be working most of the time, and then creating spaces to give your brain and body a break

Design your schedule so you have some time to eat well (hopefully with family and friends), exercise or meditate; sleep, and briefly think about something other than work

You need to prioritise your tasks, manage and organise your thoughts, and generate a predictable schedule for your team to access your thoughts. And then take a break - a real break

Once you’ve prioritised your tasks; find a way to prioritise your physical and mental well being

Notice problems, don’t just take the status quo for granted. You can’t solve interesting problems if you don’t know they’re there

Marketing cannot be figured out at the very end. Use marketing to prototype the product narrative. The best marketing is just telling the truth — the true story about your product