Business

• Assumptions get you killed

• Focus or die

• “Focus is about saying no” — Steve Jobs

• Startup = Growth

• ROI is measured per unit time

• Companies are valued at a discount to sum of future cashflows

• Risk requires Accountability

• One key to success is establishing clear lines of blame

• Establish KPIs Today (you make what you measure)

• Sufficiently Powerful Optimization Of Any Known Target Destroys All Value

• Validated Learning requires data

• “Never Lose Money” — Warren Buffet

Product Management

• Engineering is done with numbers. Analysis without numbers is only an opinion

• intuition and reason are opposites (it can be counterintuitive)

• “distinction between real and fake startup progress”

• MVP = build-measure-learn feedback loop

• The Build Trap / “If you build it they will come”

• Throughline: the thinnest complete end to end slice through your product that proves you understand all the work

• Vision – What does success look like

• Lindy's Law – the longer things take, the longer they’re going to take

• WIP is the silent killer — Phoenix Project

  • Gaining Control of WIP: The Operational Freeze

• Wait times depend on resource utilization levels

  • 50% Busy / 50% Idle = 1 unit of delay

  • 99% Busy / 1% Idle =  99 units of delay

Org dynamics

• It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

• You Can’t Tell People Anything (you have to show them)

• Conway’s Law – Don’t ship the org chart

• Brook’s Law – Communication overhead increases rapidly as the number of people increases

• Two Pizza Rule

• Principal Agent Problem

• Groups never admit failure, you get a schism instead

• Wiio’s Laws – ​​"In mass communication, the important thing is not how things are but how they seem to be." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiio%27s_laws