33 posts tagged with "management"

An Illuminator is someone who has a significant and positive impact on the people around them through their interactions and communication style. Key characteristics of an illuminator include:

1. Persistent Curiosity about Others: Illuminators are genuinely interested in other people. They continuously seek to understand others more deeply.
2. Skilled in Understanding People: They have either innate talent or have developed the skill to understand others. This involves knowing what to look for in conversations and how to ask the right questions at the right time.
3. Making Others Feel Valued and Seen: Illuminators have the ability to shine their attention and care on people, making them feel respected, acknowledged, and important.
4. Bringing Out the Best in Others: Through their interactions, illuminators help people become better versions of themselves. They encourage others to be more honest, sharp, and to realize aspects of themselves they might not have articulated before.
5. Creating a Sense of Empowerment: Islluminators have the ability to make others feel clever and important. This contrasts with diminishers, who make people feel small and unseen.
6. Enhancing Productivity and Creativity: Illuminators can significantly boost the productivity and creativity of those around them, simply by being good listeners and engaging thoughtfully in conversations.

A Diminisher, in contrast to an Illuminator, is a person who negatively impacts those around them through their interactions and behaviors. They tend to make others feel small, unimportant, or unseen, often focusing self-centeredly on their own needs and interests.

How do illuminators have great conversations?​

To be an effective conversationalist or an "illuminator," one must focus on deeply engaging and understanding others. Here are key takeaways:

1. Mutual Engagement
   • Engagement is Key: Deep engagement in understanding others' thoughts and perspectives.
   • The Art of Conversation: Fostering two-way exchanges for mutual exploration and understanding. Being present and actively participating in conversations.
2. Active Listening and Seeking Depth
   • Developing listening skills like full attention and physical engagement (nodding, eye contact).
   • Encouraging free expression and supporting the sharing of stories and experiences.
   • Specificity and Depth: Good conversations involve asking specific questions that encourage others to share detailed stories and personal experiences, helping them articulate their feelings and thoughts more vividly.
3. Empathy and Understanding
   • Handling Pauses: Embracing pauses for thoughtful reflection and deeper understanding.
   • Looping for Clarity: Repeating or paraphrasing for clarity and confirmation of understanding.
   • Finding common ground in disagreements and prioritizing empathy over being right.
   • Keep the gem statement at the center, even though there are disagreements.
   • Don't be a Topper: Avoiding overshadowing others' experiences with your own.
4. Facilitating Self-Discovery and Expression
   • Midwife Model: Assisting in others' process of self-discovery and expression.
   • The Importance of Being Listened To: Ensuring interactions make individuals feel heard, understood, and valued.

Being a good conversationalist is about creating a mutual journey of exploration, understanding, and deep listening, where both parties feel heard and valued.

User interview is a comprehensive process to find out and understand users, their problems, and potential areas for product improvement.

• Objectives of User Interviews:
  • Refine hypotheses about the user: Understand their profile, motivations, and relationship with the product.
  • Clarify the user's problem: Grasp the problem in the user's words, its severity, and their current solutions or workarounds.
  • Identify potentially more valuable problems: Explore if other issues might be more critical to address.
• Focus of Interviews:
  • Interviews should center on understanding problems from the user's perspective.
  • Avoid exploring potential solutions to prevent bias and leading the user.
• Common Pitfalls:
  • Insufficient warm-up, leading to missed insights.
  • Leading questions that bias towards preconceived hypotheses.
  • Strict adherence to a script, missing new and valuable information.
• Interview Trail Guide Framework:
  • Warm-up Phase: Build rapport and foundational understanding of the user. Small talks to introduce the team and the research. Ask for approval for recording. Emphasize that there are no right or wrong answers.
  • Build Phase: Gradually approach the problem hypothesis, allowing users to express their views, from general experiences to specific experiences.
  • Peak Phase (2/3 of the time): Deep dive into specific problem-related questions. Are we disucssing the right problem? Are users approaching the problem with any alternative ways? How painful is the problem?
• Conducting the Interview:
  • Start with rapport-building questions.
  • Gradually narrow down to the specific problem.
  • Allow space for unexpected insights and follow up on them.
  • Spend substantial interview time in the peak phase, focusing on the hypothesized problem.
• Final Steps:
  • Prioritize emerging problems during the interview.
  • Structure interviews to adapt to new insights and user feedback.

Examples​

1. Doordash:

   • Warm-up Phase: Questions might start broadly, touching on general lifestyle and habits, such as weekend routines and eating habits.
   • Build Phase: Narrowing down to food delivery experiences, with questions like why and how users order food delivery, their typical order times, and their general experience with food delivery.
   • Peak Phase: Specific questions about Doordash’s service, such as frequency of use, user experience with Doordash’s delivery time, and alternatives they resort to when delivery times are long. The goal is to assess whether their hypothesis about delivery time being a pain point is accurate.

2. Rippling Employee Onboarding:

   • Build Phase: Questions might start with general feelings about onboarding new employees, tools or systems currently used, and issues faced with these tools.
   • Peak Phase: Focus on specific problems identified, like steps taken to onboard a new employee, tracking various requirements and deadlines, and the impact of current practices on the onboarding experience.

Ordinary people have few opportunities to make decisions in life and work, and it is also difficult to practice and improve their decision-making skills. Most people's decisions rely on intuition, while rational decisions depend on processes. The book "Decisive" proposes a four-step process for rational decision-making — to increase the probability of making the best decision, we need to 1. broaden options, 2. test assumptions with facts, 3. step outside ourselves to see ourselves, and 4. prepare for wrong decisions.

1. Broaden Options​

People mistakenly think that making a choice is as simple as answering multiple-choice questions on an exam, selecting one from three or five options. However, the world is vast, and options are not limited to just a few. For example, an advertising design company may develop multiple design proposals simultaneously and combine useful elements into the final design outcome after each round of feedback. This not only increases work efficiency but also saves time costs in decision-making. Additionally, one can refer to the base rates of others' choices in similar situations. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, closely monitored competitors throughout his career to adjust decisions in a timely manner. As decision-makers, we should find the best solutions by creating more options and referencing others' choices.

2. Test Assumptions with Facts​

If practice is the only criterion for testing truth, then conducting experiments before making final decisions can relatively accurately estimate whether an idea will work. Many companies have evolved from hiring employees solely through interviews to requiring them to go through short trial periods, precisely to avoid the limitations of interviews and increase decision accuracy. A friend of mine tried staying overnight in a house before buying it and discovered that he could hear the train's horn, thus avoiding a significant mistake at a low cost.

3. Step Outside Ourselves to See Ourselves​

When decision-makers become too immersed in their own viewpoints, they often overlook external perspectives. Therefore, to assess the potential outcomes of a decision, one should investigate the objective circumstances underlying the decision. Consider evaluating options from a broader temporal and spatial perspective, such as Andy Grove pretending to be the new CEO entering through the front door and cutting the memory chip business; Kai-Fu Lee hypothesizing that tomorrow's headlines will report on his two choices — one being emotional but unjust, the other just but unfeeling, and then choosing to be just as a leader; Jeff Bezos imagining himself at 80 looking back, using the "regret minimization framework."

4. Prepare for Wrong Decisions​

When considering the outcomes of decisions, you should contemplate both the best and worst-case scenarios to understand your position. If the situation approaches the worst outcome, you can respond in a timely manner. Additionally, you can establish signals that make you aware of your actions, thereby weakening the inertia of behavior and correcting decisions promptly. Notably, to increase the speed of decision-making, Bezos believes that decisions are inherently unequal and should never be treated equally — reversible decisions should use lightweight decision-making processes.

Research shows that individuals with mentors perform better, advance more quickly in their careers, and experience greater satisfaction in both work and life. Mentors also benefit from the relationship, gaining insights while teaching others. Despite the many advantages—76% of professionals believe mentors are important for growth—over 54% of people lack such relationships.

The issue often lies in people not knowing how to find a mentor or build a relationship. The following nine steps can help you.

1. Clarify Your Goals and Specific Needs​

Take out a pen and paper and write down your career goals. Ensure these goals are SMART. Then, list the biggest obstacles to achieving these goals. These specific needs will help you determine what kind of mentor you should seek. Perhaps you need to develop new skills, expand your network in a specific field, or build confidence for tough negotiations. Once you understand the person you want to become and the gaps and opportunities to get there, you can identify how a mentor can truly assist you.

2. Write Down the "Job Requirements" for Your Ideal Mentor​

Knowing your goals and how to achieve them, think about how a mentor can help you. Describe the type of mentor who can help you seize the greatest opportunities or navigate challenges. Specifically, you may need a mentor to help you complete a project, introduce you to someone at a certain level in a specific industry, or guide you through difficult negotiations. Be sure to include "why" in your job requirements—just as companies want potential candidates to understand their broader direction, explain why mentoring you will yield greater rewards. When you reach out to potential mentors, share your job requirements so they understand why you're seeking mentorship and are more willing to help (as mentioned in points four and five).

3. Look for Mentors Through Your Second-Degree Connections​

Mentors can come from anywhere. They might be part of your LinkedIn network, professional circles, or people you meet at conferences. Importantly, while people are undoubtedly busy, being invited to be a mentor is a tremendous compliment. People may decline, but it remains a positive interaction; be bold in trying and making requests, even if you think they might not have time for you. Let them decide whether to accept or decline.

4. Make Your Request (and Keep It Simple)​

Asking someone to be your mentor for the first, second, or even third time can feel a bit awkward. You likely have never been invited to be someone else's mentor or taught anyone how to make this request. Embrace that discomfort. There's nothing wrong with asking, but take it slow. Invite others for an initial conversation to learn about their work and interests. Once you both know each other better, and if there's mutual agreement, you can make more requests for them to be your mentor. Conversely, sending a long email asking a stranger to be your mentor is less likely to be accepted.

5. Conduct the First Conversation​

Your first conversation with a potential mentor has two goals. First, you want to determine if this person is the right mentor for you. Second, find out if they are open to mentoring you. How you conduct the conversation will depend on you, but generally, you’ll want to do the following:

• Make the other person feel at ease. Choose a convenient location for them, prepare coffee (or tea), and keep the meeting low-pressure.

• Spend time getting to know them. Ideally, let the mentor speak more, keeping your speaking time under 30%.

• It’s okay to ask for small help right from the start. In fact, it may even help build the relationship.

• Make a clear request: "I really enjoyed this conversation. If I make some progress on my goals within a month, could I follow up with you?"

• Express gratitude, then follow up via email to thank them again.

6. Start Simple​

For your next meeting, follow up on the previous one and keep it simple. Once they confirm a follow-up meeting, send an email outlining the agenda and hinting at building a long-term relationship. An example could be, "In our next chat, I’d like to quickly review what we discussed last time, and then I want to expand on that topic. I’ll prepare some specific questions that I think you can help me answer."

7. Establish a Structured Accountability Process and Draft a Mentor Agreement​

After having one or two simple conversations, try to make a more formal request: would this person be willing to sit down with you once a month for the next six months until you achieve your goals or solve your issues? If they agree, consider drafting a simple one-page document outlining the tasks you aim to complete during these six months. While this may seem a bit excessive, it will clarify the goals for both you and your mentor. It will also help you define clear meeting content for each session. You might suggest, "I really appreciate your time and help, and I want to ensure I make the most of it. I was thinking I could prepare a simple document outlining my goals, my commitments to you, and the milestones I hope to achieve in the next three months. I think this will help keep me accountable and prepared for our conversations. Do you agree?"

8. Keep Following Up and Say Thank You​

After each meeting, be sure to send a thank-you note. Additionally, when your mentoring relationship concludes, continue to express your gratitude. I once had a mentee email me two years after we worked together, and it made me very happy. In return, I helped her establish some new and interesting connections, and she did the same for me. So remember, asking for help is okay, but always ensure you express appropriate gratitude!

9. Use the Right Tools​

To efficiently implement the above steps, I created a dedicated tool for myself Guanxi.io - End-to-End Encrypted Personal CRM, Free Registration, now open source, welcome to star.

When you are talking non-stop, it can be hard to notice that you are being overly enthusiastic. You may not even realize that the other person is only responding out of politeness or hinting that they want to leave.

Talking to others happens in three stages. In the first stage, your goals are clear, targeted, and concise. But then you may unconsciously find that the more you talk, the easier it feels. It’s so wonderful for you, relieving your tension, but it may not be as interesting for the other person. This is the second stage—when you feel good talking, you don’t even notice that the other person is not listening.

In the third stage, you have lost control of what you are saying and start to realize you might need to pull the other person back in. At this point, your monologue is disguised as a conversation, and you subconsciously sense that the other person is a bit annoyed. Can you guess what happens next?

Unfortunately, the typical response at this point is to talk even more to gain the other person's attention, rather than finding ways to get them to speak and listening to regain their interest.

Why does this happen? First, the reason is simple: everyone has a desire to be heard. But secondly, talking about oneself releases dopamine, the pleasure hormone. One reason talkative people keep talking is that they become addicted to this feeling of pleasure.

There is a method that has helped me, and it may help you too. It’s called the traffic light method. It is effective when talking to most people, especially Type A personalities, who often have less patience.

In the first 20 seconds of a conversation, you are at a green light: as long as your comments are relevant to the topic and serve the other person, your audience will appreciate you. Unless you are an exceptionally gifted speaker, talking for more than about half a minute will generally be considered boring and too talkative. So, in the next 20 seconds, the light turns yellow—now the other person starts to lose interest or thinks you are too verbose. By the 40-second mark, you hit a red light. Occasionally, you might feel tempted to run the red light and keep chatting, but most of the time, it’s best to stop, or you’ll be in trouble.

The traffic light method is just the first step to preventing you from talking too much. It’s also important to understand the underlying motivations for why you talk so much. Are you talking more just to feel good? Are you explaining your thoughts? Or is it because you often have to listen to others, and when you find an opportunity to speak, you just unload?

Regardless of the reason, talking too much usually leads to interruptions in the conversation and may result in both of you talking at each other instead of having a dialogue. This does not help advance the conversation or your relationship.

One reason some people talk too much is that they want to show the other person how smart they are, even though deep down, they may not feel that way. If this is the case, you should know that continuing to talk will only diminish the other person's impression of you.

Of course, some people just talk too much because they "may not have a sense of time passing." If this is the case, the solution is not to introspect but to cultivate a sense of how long 20 seconds and 40 seconds are. For example, use a watch to time yourself while on a call. You will gradually develop the habit of stopping when your traffic light is still green or at least yellow.

Finally, remember that if you do not involve the other person in the conversation, even a 20-second monologue can be off-putting. To avoid this, you can ask questions, try to build on what the other person says, and find ways to engage them in the dialogue. This way, you can achieve a real conversation instead of an ineffective one.

How to define, design, and sell a product that people like to use? How to manage self and a team to deliver results effectively? Here are the answers from industry leaders and renowned professors.

Join us on Telegram or WeChat(id: onetptp) to discuss and upgrade your PM skills.

• Product Management
  • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products? - Habits make you do things like no brainers. Businesses that know how to cultivate customer habits have a significant competitive advantage over others. The Hook Model teaches us how to form a user habit in four steps: trigger, action, variable reward and investment.
  • Telemetry Product Management Framework - A key role of product management is to make sure product development efforts are focused. The telemetry spreadsheet helps you visualize the roadmap, balance resource allocation, and hence keeps the project on track.
  • The Hierarchy of Engagement - To maximize the chances of building an enduring non-transactional customer company, we should build enduring engagement in three levels - growing engaged users, retaining users, and self-perpetuating.
  • Elements of Value - When customers evaluate a product or a service, they weigh the perceived value against the asking price. Products and services deliver fundamental elements of value that address four kinds of needs: functional, emotional, life-changing, and social impact.
  • MMRs, neutralizers, differentiators - There are three types of product features: MMRs, neutralizers, and differentiators. Customers often provide feedback on MMRs and neutralizers. The product management team must take responsibility for reinforcing the startup’s differentiator.
  • The 9x Effect - Companies often overweight their new product by a factor of 3 while consumers overweight the old product’s benefits by a factor of 3. So you have to be 9x better than the existing alternatives to win their market, which is called The 9x Effect.
  • 4 Guidelines for Website User Experience - To deliver a better website user experience, we concluded four guidelines from the book Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited: start with simple navigation; make an impressive home page; use visual hierarchies to present information; improve mobile loading speed.
  • Change Aversion - People hate new changes in a product they are already familiar with. To avoid change aversion, you can let users understand in advance and afterward, allow them to switch, ask them to give feedback, and finally remember to follow-through.
• Strategy and Decision Making
  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy 1 - A good strategy is often surprising but reasonable. A bad strategy is a formalism. Here are four hallmarks to detect bad strategies: fluff; failure to face the challenge; mistaking goals for strategy; bad strategic objectives.
  • Good Strategy, Bad Strategy 2 - Bad strategies are easier to be made in terms of three facts: it’s painful to make a choice; people like to follow templates without thinking; people tend to misbelieve that a positive attitude and a strong desire can earn them everything they want.
  • The Second Curve - When you know where you should go, it is too late to go there; if you always keep your original path, you will miss the road to the future.
  • Case Study: Amazon acquiring Whole Foods - Driven by the goal to take a cut of all economic activity, Amazon decides to develop grocery services. However, its grocery business has no first-and-best customer due to cost disadvantage. By acquiring Whole Foods, Amazon is buying more than a retailer - it’s buying a customer.
• Marketing
  • What is a Market? - If two people buy the same product for the same reason but have no way they could reference each other, they are not part of the same market.
  • Diffusion of innovation - How does your product gain popularity? Answers from the model, the chasm, and the math.
  • TAL and the Chasm
  • Why take niche-and-next approach? - If the goal is to take over the mainstream market, why should we focus on the niche market in the beginning? First, You have to satisfy your customers so that they can be reference-able to others. Second, pragmatists favor market leaders. So be a big fish in a small pond.
  • Growth Phase 1: PMF - According to Ryan Holiday, to begin with PMF, we need to start with MVP and evolve with feedback, use data and information to back PMF, understand the needs of customers as early as possible and develop answers with the Socrates method.
  • Growth Phase 2: growth hack - How to find your growth hack? Ryan Holiday has some advice for you. Target a few hundred or a thousand key people, not millions. Do not target all people - target the right people. Focus on new user sign-ups instead of awareness. Use growth techniques.
  • Growth Team - A growth team is a team with the responsibility to measure and improve the flow of users. There are three mandatory skills of a growth leader: building growth models, developing experimentation models and creating customer acquisition channels.
  • AARRR Model - AARRR is a startup metrics developed by Dave McClure: Acquisition - how do users find you? Activation - do users have a great first experience? Retention - do users come back? Referral - do users tell others? Revenue - how do you make money?
  • Buyer Persona - To better sell products, you need to know your customers better. A generic buyer profile doesn’t help in knowing his buying decision. The most effective way to build buyer personas is to interview buyers who have weighed their options but finally made the decision you expect.
  • CAC / LTV / PBP - Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost to convert a customer to buy a product/service. Lifetime Value is the estimated net profit we can make from a customer. Payback Period refers to the period of time required to recoup the funds expended in an investment.
  • Lean Analytics: Simplified - Data and metrics play a vital role in business. The book Lean Analytics suggests some metrics for start-up founders to assess their success. By choosing the metrics more effectively, the entrepreneur can navigate through the unknown more effectively.
  • Lean Analytics: Slides
  • Mobile Analytics Metrics
  • How to run a tech community? - Why do people need the tech community? What is the value proposition of it? What are the interesting examples we can learn from? Why does it align with your blockchain company?
  • SaaS Sales Performance Metrics - David Schneider, ServiceNow's President of Customer Ops, shares his sales performance metrics for SaaS companies that are aiming for hyper-scale.
  • Persuasive Copywriting - Copywriting is the simplest and most direct way of impressing your customers. Persuasive copywriting = three means of persuasion + copywriting. Three means of persuasion are emotion, logic, and credibility.
  • 6 Elements to Create Sticky Ideas - Why some stories managed to spread quickly, live long and prosper? In Made to Stick, Heath brothers summarize six elements to create sticky ideas -- Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional, and Story, SUCCES for short.
• People Management
  • Tips for First-time Managers - Julie Zhuo, the vice president of product design at Facebook, based on her own experiences as a first-time manager, gives some useful advice on how to become a good manager in her book The Making of a Manager.
  • Managerial Leverage - Managerial leverages can maximize the output of an organization. Those leverages are information gathering, information-giving, decision-making, nudging and being a role model.
  • Task-Relevant Maturity - A manager’s most important responsibility is to elicit top performance from his subordinates. Unfortunately, one management style does not fit all. A fundamental variable to find the best management style is task-relevant maturity (TRM) of the subordinates.
  • Managers and Bozos - Steve Jobs coined the phrase “bozo management”. Bozos referred to the professional managers who know how to manage but don’t know how to DO anything. It turns out the best managers are great individual contributors who never ever want to be a manger but decide to be one.
  • Responsibilities with RACI and DACI - When the organization grows too big, it becomes unclear that who should do what and who should decide what to do. RACI and DACI are here to clarify those responsibilities.
  • 3 Skills to Boost Group Performance - It is a common misbelief that the performance of a group hinges on the average capacity of its members. The truth is, the interaction and communication among group members are much more impactful. From the book The Culture Code, we conclude three skills to improve group performance: creating a safe working environment, showing your vulnerabilities, establishing a common purpose.
  • Making progress 30km/day - The Amundsen team successfully reached the South Pole first and won the competition with the Scott team. The success of the Amundsen team lies in their abundant resources and making progress 30km per day no matter what the weather is.
  • Good to Great - Leading a company to leap from good to great is like pushing a giant flywheel to breakthrough. Disciplined people, disciplined thought and disciplined action are indispensable.
  • Bikeshedding - Bikeshedding refers to the fact that members of an organization give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. To overcome the bikeshedding, we should have a clear agenda of the meeting and not mix complex topics with easy ones.
  • Ownership - The authors of the book Extreme Ownership were once task unit leaders of US Navy SEAL in Iraq. They draw on their experiences in the battlefields and conclude five rules for successfully leading a Navy SEAL team, providing useful references for any organization.
  • Building momentum for startup - The acceleration of rockets takes a propeller, and the acceleration of startups take the similar. There are two propellers: 1. Listen to the customer. 2. fast execution. How to achieve these two? Here is the answer from Suhail Doshi.
• UX Research
  • How Dropbox scale its design research - Dropbox's design research team grew from 4 members to 30+ today. How do they scale the efforts healthily, even when the headcount for the team is limited? More researches usually mean more harm if they are done improperly.
• Communication
  • Nonviolent Communication - Judgments and violence are tragic expressions of unmet needs. Nonviolent communication can improve communication quality by valuing everyone’s needs. It is NOT about being nice or making others do what we want.
  • Tailoring the arguments for persuading the decision maker - To improve the chances of success in persuading decision-makers, the way of message delivering should be considered carefully. There are five decision-making categories and they should be treated with different strategies.
  • Bullshit Detector - North Americans bullshit the most. Develop your mental device to detect deception, dishonesty, corruption, fraud, insincerity, hypocrisy and falsity.
  • Small Talking - Initiating a conversation with strangers is the biggest social fear. Actually, people often appreciate it when you make an effort to speak with them. Here we provide some ideas on how to start a small talk, what we should talk about and how to end it in a courteous way.
  • Exactly What to Say: Keywords for Impacts - There are several keywords and templates of sentences that can help you influence people. For example, a sentence like “I’m not sure it’s for you, but” is a non-intrusive recommendation. Saying “are you open-minded to do something” can encourage people to do something.
• Managing Self
  • Time Management: Principles - It is very inspiring to learn time management from system admins (SAs) because we share the same challenges such as endless interruptions, simultaneous projects, and rush requests. SAs’ principles of time management may solve your problem of time management.
  • Time Management: Focus - Focus is the best friend of productivity. A fundamental work we can do to stay focused is to de-clutter our brain. Always be aware of stress and sleep level. Remember an un-distracting environment is necessary. Deal with interruptions effectively.
  • Time Management: Routines - Routines are useful tools in time management since they enable us to think once and do many. A routine can be anything in real life that has certain patterns. Try to develop your own routines!
  • Time Management: Cycle System - The key to perfect follow-through is the cycle system. It is called the cycle because it repeats every day and the output of one day is the input to the next. Three tools are used in the process - a to-do list, a calendar and a list of long-term goals.
  • Time Management: Cycle System in Action - The cycle system enables people to follow through. It suggests every day should start with your to-do list, hours needed and plans. The secrets also lie in writing down goals and scheduling things with the calendar, instead of your brain.
  • Work-life balance - Some job and career choices are fundamentally incompatible with being meaningfully engaged on a day-to-day basis with a young family. We should be careful with time frame and approach balance in a balanced way.
  • How to Get Rich? - How to get rich without getting lucky? Naval Ravikant summarized a few tips for you. Seek wealth instead of money or status. Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. Ignore people playing status games. You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity.
  • Taking truly restful breaks - People will burn out when having too much pressure. A truly restful break can help them to recover willpower and the power of attention. To take truly restful breaks, you need to fully switch off, take short breaks early and often and get out of the office.
  • Loving long with healthy diets - American Journal of Medicine says, disease, not age, is the most significant cause of death among over-100-year-old patients. And diets tend to the primary reason for disease. People often underestimate how food affects their physical and mental health.
  • Productivity Tips from Professionals - MIT surveyed nearly 20,000 professionals from around the world - 50% from North America, 21% from Europe, 19% from Asia, and the rest from Australia, South America, and Africa. Takeaways are ...
• Business Model
  • Stages of Company Building - Initial Product > PMF > GTM Scale & Consistency > Org Building > Enduring Public Company
  • Economic Moat - An economic moat is the ability to maintain advantages over its competitors. It can provide protection for business’ long-term profits and market share. Technology is not an economic moat as it will always be duplicated.
  • Why Startups Have to Innovate? - Why startups have to innovate? Anna Karenina principle answers this question. Each successful company earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem whereas all failed are the same. If a startup does not innovate but copy from the market leader, people will not buy it.
  • Intangible Economy - The intangible economy is rising. It has three characteristics: Intangible assets can expand rapidly. Intangible assets are high-risk and irrecoverable investments. Intangible assets are easy to be duplicated.
  • Infinite Game - Business can operate like an Infinite Game and the ultimate goal of participants is to stay in the game as long as possible. In order to achieve that, businesses should get back to long-term thinking. In the book The Infinite Game, the author suggests companies need to have a Just Cause, build trusting teams, be flexible to changes, and learn from worthy rivals so as to gain advantages in the game.
• Leadership
  • Definition of Technology Leadership - We engineers often boast about leadership without a clear definition of what we are saying. Here are the definitions to distill the clarity from those chaotic ramblings of the mass.
  • Technology Leadership Radar - How to evaluate the performance of a technology leader? Each company or individual has its own answer with engineering rubrics. And those rubrics usually focus on a specific role - IC (Software Engineer, Product Manager, Designer) or Engineering Manager. Is there a grand unified framework to evaluate the potential business impact that a technology leader could make?
  • Start with Why - People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it. Simon Sinek coined a phrase ‘Golden Circle’ which has three tiers, from core to exterior - why, how, and what. However, average leaders think from what, how, to why.
• Corporate Ladder
  • Sponsor - Successful Caucasian men receive more career guidance than women and multicultural professionals even though more women have mentors than men. The reason is mentors can not help with promotions but sponsors can.
  • 12 Habits that can Boost Women's Promotion - There are 12 habits American women think would be helpful to their promotions. For example, remember to claim your achievements often because others will not notice and reward your contributions unless you say it. Also, you need to be aware that expertise is not the only criteria.
• EP Doc Templates
  • EP Doc Templates - Templates make it easy to think and design clearly and rule out blind spots. (Though it may also introduce blind spots...) Here is a collection of templates that help you build better products.
  • PRFAQ - PRFAQ means press release and fequently asked questions. People at Amazon adopt it to write down requirements and important features of yet to be developed products.
  • ADR - ADR means Architectural Decision Record, a mini-doc to capture significant architectural changes that are not worth a full design doc.
  • OKR - A simple template for OKR with guiding policies.
  • Investment Memo - Template for writing an investment memo to capture the learning process before spending a large amount of money.

• Listen to customers

  • Continuously communicate with customers
    • Making friends with customers is the simplest strategy: once they become your friends, you can bother them for feedback frequently. To a certain extent, sending chat messages is easier than emails and meetings.
  • Pick customers you serve
    • Exclude customers who are not painful about the problem you are solving
    • Exclude customers who want features that you haven't made yet

• Fast execution

  • Define just the right scope
    • Usually, satisfy the simplest use case and wait to see what else people want. You will naturally know what to do next.
  • Develop an intuition for problem-solving
    • The product is a combination of art and science. Too data-driven products lack soul and surprise. How to practice intuition? Try to validate ideas without code.
  • Maximize autonomy and promote a culture of prioritization by persuasion. At the same time, allow teams to choose their work based on their emotions, lives, and interests. Use persuasiveness and dynamic adjustment to drive progress.

David Schneider, ServiceNow's President of Customer Ops, shares his sales performance metrics for SaaS companies that are aiming for hyper-scale. For the last 5 quarters:

• • Total Contract Value Attainment
  • Total Managed (ACV, Renewal, PS)
• • Net New ACV Attainment
  • Sales Quota Achievement
  • Q/Q Growth
  • Y/Y Growth
• • Cumulative Total New Customers
  • New Customers (incl. losses)
• • ACV Repeat Customers % to Net New
• • Cumulative Total Net Customers
  • New Customers
• • # Reps On-Board
  • Average Productivity per Sales Rep
  • Sales Rep Annualized Attrition Rate
  • Total Sales Annualized Attrition Rate

You need enough chips to play the game — hire a sufficient number of high-caliber talents who care about quality and are smart enough. You must repeatedly emphasize the company's culture of valuing quality, forming formal routines to check large pieces of work and fix what needs fixing.

Tactically, there is a best practice — reduce the difficulty of doing the right thing. The Stripe tech team makes various trade-offs to ensure that any engineer can improve any part of the system. Encourage a sense of ownership.

There are dedicated internal tools to check the level of internationalization, which may seem tedious but is worth the time. It goes back to the company's culture; when an individual contributor says, "I spent some time on i18n last week," they should assume that leadership values this enough to respond, "Of course, you took the time to do this, great job."

"Open a ticket for the relevant team, and someone will handle it" is a good practice, but if you can push this system to resolve tickets faster and better, you can motivate people to open tickets.

The company provides dedicated channels, such as mailing list aliases, to report product quality bugs. There are dedicated teams to triage these tasks or assign them to the appropriate groups for fixing, along with established routines to inform the entire company about the bug fix rate.

Before making significant API changes, both internal and external testing should be conducted. Regularly ask, "Who has a real Stripe account on hand? Can we update to the beta version and try it out?" People need to set aside dedicated time for this and document it thoroughly — imagine having a group of picky customers; while you may not be able to use your product as deeply and broadly as users do, this approach is much better than guessing.

Discovering that "a piece of payment code hasn't been touched in 5 years, and I don't know how it works, and there are no tests" is rare but valuable for the engineering team.

None of the above is high-tech, nor is it a sufficient condition to guarantee quality. Stripe never settles for the current level of quality and does not passively say, "Our standards are high," but rather maintains a proactive approach to continuously improve.

Julie Zhuo, Vice President of Product Design at Facebook, provides practical advice for those aspiring to be excellent managers based on her experiences from her first role as a manager in The Making of a Manager.

Focus on Improving Overall Team Output Rather Than Daily Activities​

When Julie first became the design director at Facebook, like many new managers, she thought her job was to hold meetings, check on progress, and provide feedback. Over nearly a decade, she gradually realized that a manager should enable the team to achieve better output and focus on broader issues like collaboration efficiency. Excellent managers should not be limited to daily activities but should lead their teams in pursuing outstanding results and progress.

Andy Grove's first lesson for managers states that a manager's output = the output of their own team under their influence + the output of adjacent teams.

Provide Feedback Objectively and Incorporate Multiple Perspectives for Reference​

Giving feedback to team members is an essential part of a manager's job. This can be challenging, as criticism can sometimes hurt feelings. To address this, Julie proposes two methods. The first is to provide timely feedback on recently completed tasks, ensuring that the focus is on the issue rather than the person, whether through email or face-to-face. The second is to introduce multiple perspectives, allowing team members to understand viewpoints from others beyond just the manager, which can often be objective and valuable.

Hold Meetings with Clear Goals and Expected Outcomes​

Meetings often come across as lengthy, unnecessary, and bureaucratic, especially when their purpose is unclear. To ensure efficiency, it is essential to have a structured process and clearly defined expected outcomes. Expected outcomes can include information presentation and sharing or making a specific decision. The latter is more complex and requires the participation of all individuals directly affected by that decision. Managers should ensure that relevant information is presented completely and objectively, and that everyone's opinions are heard and respected.

Plan Ahead for Hiring Decisions​

Recruitment is a significant responsibility for managers. It is not simply about quickly finding someone to fill a vacancy without considering the candidate's skills and experience; it requires planning ahead. At the beginning of each year, Julie analyzes and lists the positions that need to be filled. She summarizes the following questions for managers looking to create their own hiring plans to consider.

• Considering the team's primary tasks and budget, how many new employees can you realistically hire?
• What skills does the existing team need most? Which skills are already well represented?
• How many years of relevant work experience do new hires need?
• What personalities or traits can enhance the diversity of the existing team?