Someone on your team says: “Our goal should be to move Metric X up Y% this half.” Your inclination is to nod, say “Cool” and get on with the actual building.

But pause!

The goals you agree to determine what you build. So consider them carefully and ask the following: 1) If we were wildly successful this half, what’s the ideal outcome for customers using our product?

The point of target metrics is to keep ourselves accountable to doing our best for customers, and in turn, the business.

Any metric will be a proxy; THIS is the real goal.

40 things I wish I knew when I was 20

1. For whatever action scares you (and isn’t life-threatening), remember this surefire way to eliminate the fear: do it 100 times. 2. Taking advantage of youthful invulnerability is like taking out a loan. Over decades, your body eventually comes to call the debt.

7 Questions to Impress your Boss
(if you respect them)

1. What do you think are the 3 biggest issues for our team right now?

⇒ Shows big-picture thinking and caring about the team’s success 2. My top 3 priorities are X, Y and Z — do you feel they’re the most impactful way for me to spend my time?

⇒ Shows desire to have impact and work on the most important things

The only way I know of to develop better product intuition for your own product is to:

1) constantly use your product as a real user would
2) constantly research your target customer

12 ways to make this practical in your week-to-week 👇 1. Use the product daily as a real user would [15 minutes / day]

2. Watch one or two user research or replay sessions [10 minutes / day]

3. Check your key usage metrics dashboard [5 minutes / day]

THE MAKING OF A MANAGER is 4 years old today!

As someone who works in data, I always joke to my friends that I have incredibly poor data visibility on how my book is doing. I don't know how many copies have sold, for example. I don't know how many people have read it. Most importantly, I don't know how many people found it *useful* and what is the ratio of readers who found it useful versus not, which are the metrics I most care about!

(And if not useful, I'd like to know why, so I can learn something in the process.)

The loudest way to lead is by example.

If you care about putting forth a quality product, then you should be the biggest dogfooder.

If you expect members of your team to be on call on weekends, then you too should be available and responsive at that time. If want your team to focus on their top priorities, then you shouldn’t schedule a wall of recurring meetings.

If you expect others to care about excellence, then you need to be the first to call out sloppy work.

They say prioritize until it hurts.

That's what great product people do.

But how does it hurt?

A thread 👇 You need to pick favorites between your users.

Are you going to care more about Abbey who runs the mom-and-pop shop, or Dwight the CMO of a large enterprise?

You can't solve for everyone right away. Be extremely specific about the type of person and their problem to target.

In 2023 I want to aim for more honesty and transparency.

It starts with me first: honesty towards myself. We all have self-deceptions. These defense mechanisms provide us comfort.

It struck me that true self-acceptance can't come without true self-honesty. Examples where I am not fully honest with myself:

1. Brushing aside, judging or justifying my feelings
2. Self-censoring opinions
3. Not proactively asking for feedback
4. Externalizing problems rather than seeing my role in them
5. Avoiding watching myself talk

Start-up life = hard won insights. Here are my top 10 for this year.

1. Doing well at a start-up is not simply about skill, it is about mentality.

A start-up mentality values action over correctness, results over process. It suits those that value autonomy over clarity. 2. Start-ups operate in wartime, not peace.

Founders must therefore lead from the front -- charge into the mud, make decisive calls, and survive to battle another day.

Devotion to any single value has a price and trades off against other values.

If you want to deeply understand any person or entity, you must seek to understand how they think about the exchange rate.

5 examples below 👇 (1/9) 2/9 Excellence trades off against comfort.

If you want to be comfortable, spend time with people who don't ask anything more of you.

If you want to pursue excellence, get ready to push yourself and be pushed.

With the layoffs in the tech industry right now, the natural thing to focus on are the losses:

Loss of a job
Loss of income
Loss of certainty
Loss of a shared mission
Loss of cherished colleagues
Loss of a dream, purpose or identity

These losses hurt, like a fresh-cut wound ↓ But remember the hero's journey: in the long arc of life, your career is defined by your skills and how you’ve used them.

Your career is NOT:
your company
your level
how much money you make
your title
whether you were included in some list

Using data well is hard.

It's easier to talk up the latest tech or wrap ourselves up in its pretty promises, but those things don't make for better decisions.

Being truly data-informed comes down to internalizing a set of 5 simple yet exceedingly powerful values: 👇 1. Conviction around a purpose, rather than searching for meaning in numbers

Data does not give you a strategy, mission, or values.

“Increasing Metric X” is not a reason for being; a true purpose must relate in some way to creating value for other humans.

Metrics are proxies.

Want to get someone's help?

If you don't know them well, vague asks like these are doomed to fail:

1. Will you chat with me about my career?
2. Will you be my mentor?
3. Will you give me advice on how to improve my work?

Instead, make the asks *specific*... ↓ Better asks (though still not amazing):

1. Can I walk through my thinking on a big career decision?
2. Can you connect me with some folks who are experts in XYZ?
3. Will you do a portfolio review with me?

Just experienced an upgraded @Tesla Model X and wowza it's been a long time since I was this delighted in my exploration of an interface.

So many surprises and bold choices I simply had to start documenting… The live-feed back and side cameras that automatically pop up when you are switching lanes — how did we ever live without this?

Every disappointment is a failure to set expectations.

4 common examples below with problems and solutions 👇 You expect a promotion at your performance review and don't get it.

The problem: you and your manager are not aligned on what 'being at the next level' means.

The solution: ask for promo criteria asap. Check in every month with your manager on how they see your progress.

Two completely different ways to influence someone on a decision:

Advisor mindset: Influence their frameworks / principles for decision making

Solver mindset: Prove to them the positive impact of making a particular decision

More Advisor mindset looks at influence through:

* Primarily words
* Sharing past stories
* Providing alternative frameworks

The goal is empowering the decision-maker with the best frame of mind to make a key decision

How designers push back against PMs:

1) Moving metrics is not the point; actually solving problems is
2) Let's not just throw spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks
3) Why don't we innovate instead of copying?
4) Don't you care about quality?

...and how PMs can respond 👇 "Moving metrics is not the point" -> said when the designer feels (or fears) something tests well against goal metrics but is actually a bad user experience.

Root causes:
a) goal metrics don't capture what's bad
b) for most people it's fine, but for some folks it's bad

2/14

How PMs push back against designers:

"That's not the priority right now"
"We don't have the eng resources for that"
"This design is not going to work"
"The data shows that metrics dropped with this design change"

Here's how you can respond 👇 (1/10) "That's not the priority right now" or "We don't have the eng resources for that" => usually a response to a proposal that:

1) doesn't directly tackle the team's specified problem (though may tackle a real, different problem)

OR

2) addresses the problem but is too ambitious

True experts and secret masters have experience:

1) studying the problem
2) proposing solutions
3) implementing solutions
4) experiencing the impact of their solutions
5) owning that impact
6) learning from and iterating on solutions

Armchair Influencers stop at 1 or 2. The difference between true experts and secret masters is that the former is influential and recognized by others.

Secret masters have the same substantive knowledge, but don't have the desire or ability to influence.

🧘 A compilation of my top threads this year about managing.

1/5: The top management trust killers

https://twitter.com/joulee/status/1415328586207174661

2/5: My favorite interview questions

https://twitter.com/joulee/status/1392504865352417284

⚒️ A compilation of my top threads this year about design.

1/9: The 5 most common product designer mistakes:

https://twitter.com/joulee/status/1402462968290308097

2/9: How to do an excellent design critique:

https://twitter.com/joulee/status/1407902488838119431