Founder Bombs - when someone high up gives ideas to others and they have no idea how to deal with this thing that came out of the blue and seems to be a request, but it isn't clear. One person realized that a founder bomb only matters if in a seven day period it is mentioned three times
The solution to founder bombs has been for founders to be more mindful and also to find someone who can handle that kind of input. The challenge is to effectively balance all the forces.
What are you working on? Why are you working on it? - ask these questions to a lot of people and you'll learn a lot about the company culture. What's most important is to watch how they articulate what should often be the same message for everyone. It's important that people understand why the company exists and what they are doing and how it fits in.
Closed door decisions - you shouldn't hear "they walked out of the room with a decision about what we are going to do". You should be sure everyone on the team understands the goal.
"Build products people want" - Paul Graham
Shipping continuously is not enough. You have to ship the right things. Great products are created by people for people. Don't ship shit. Make the right product.
"Hire the most amazing people you can. Communicate goals. Turn them loose. Profit." - Sam Schillace, Box
Amazon's Two-pizza teams (2PT) - 6 to 10 people - this is the maximum size of a team. This reduces communication barriers and group think. Kahn likes the one pizza rule of 3 to 5 people.
At Apple they have cauldrons, 3 to 5 people. During a 2 to 3 hour meeting you put all of the ideas into the cauldron. The idea of it is that the best ideas can bubble up from the cauldron without people thinking about who had the idea since all of the ideas go in blank into the cauldron. Don't worry about who's idea it is, value the idea on its own merit.
"The ultimate goal of building a company is to have the right product thesis at the right time." - Josh Elman
A product thesis is problems, use cases, and examples
Working backwards - "We try to work backwards from the customer rather than starting with an idea for a product and trying to bolt customers into it." - Ian McAllister Amazon
Amazon will create a fake press release first. KISSmetrics will write an internal blog post in the same sort of way. It forces you to really focus on what you want to build and why. It gets everyone on the same page about the project.
Cust Dev + Research + Metrics = Thesis -> solution team review (cauldron) -> Q&A on thesis -> plan solution -> defend the solution (iterate where necessary)
Golden motion - pick one metric or goal and build around that - happens with the solution team review
Seek feedback from your team. Have a postmortem.
Send a survey to employees - ask who hit it out of the ballpark last month, what feedback do you have. They are anonymous and optional. Find ways to get feedback.
KISSmetrics recently hired a happiness manager - half of her job is like an office admin/ executive assistant - the other half was helping the whole company be happy. She handles the monthly anonymous surveys, when is someone's birthday, what is someone's favorite beer. Someone focused internally and on the whole team.
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