Apple’s unique culture dismisses three commonly held beliefs of most other product builders:

1. Delivering high quality products always beat MVPs, even if it means launching late to the market. MVPs hurt your brand way more than they help. 2. Internal expert design reviews provide so much more value than external customer feedback. Signal to noise is so much higher from experts than from users.

Are you still relying on the Lean Startup as your playbook for launching a new product?

Learn why the most successful entrepreneurs have abandoned it in favor of a better approach👇 reforge.com/blog/lean-star… @peterthiel shared one of the earliest critiques of the Lean Startup in his book Zero to One. He particularly took issue with it encouraging endless experimentation in order to stumble upon something that customers like instead of starting with a thoughtful plan:

🧵 / Today begins the inaugural cohort of Mastering Product Management, a new program I created with @reforge and hosted by the incredible @sippey & @elylerner to help existing PMs learn what it takes to move from good to great. What's different about MPM is that we skip the PM fundamentals that you already know. We instead focus on a core insight we discovered: that the very best PMs differentiate themselves through leverage, enabling them to generate outsized product outcomes with similar effort.

@adachen and I accomplish this in 3 docs:

1) Sachin & Ada Manifesto: Captures our shared family values. Covers 4 categories of values:

· life, ex: "life’s most precious asset is time; optimize for spending it the way we want to"

https://twitter.com/DanielleMorrill/status/1431998481497935876

· relationship, ex: "always preserve our trust in one another; no secrets! tell each other everything"

· work, ex: "optimize for pursuing our passions, not financial gain or status"

The ability for Apple to create M1, for Tesla to create Model S, for Google to innovate on Google Workspace are all predicated on the fact that non-competes are not enforceable in California as each team is led by a previous leader at a top competitor (Intel, Mazda, Microsoft) Johny Srouji, Apple's Senior Vice President,
Hardware Technologies, and the man leading all of Apple's A Series and now M1 chips, previously hailed from Intel's Israel Design Center

One of the more interesting practices we have at @notejoyapp is progressive PRDs. Instead of the traditional process of just writing a spec right before we are about to implement a feature, our PRDs grow organically well before then Here is the process: Every time we have a feature idea ourselves or get a feature request from a customer, it goes into a roadmap ideas note in @notejoyapp.

I just refreshed my top resources for product managers post to include 10 exemplary vision narratives, covering 22 years of technology innovation from the industry's very best. /0 sachinrekhi.com/top-resources-… I'm still so impressed how @JeffBezos foretold in 1997 how Amazon would move from simply "saving customers money and precious time" to a place where "through
personalization, online commerce will accelerate the very process of discovery." /1 media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/ir…

I'm a firm believer that the best leaders don't simply delegate and get out the way. At the same time, they also don't micro-manage and make every decision. Instead, they develop a strong system of accountability as well as a system of inspection. /1 A strong system of accountability ensures that every team member clearly knows what they are responsible for and what success looks like for them. Over the years I've found OKRs to be one of the best ways to create such a system of accountability sachinrekhi.com/a-leaders-guid… /2

Was catching up with a buddy this afternoon and he thought that so many of my perspectives were contrarian to Silicon Valley practices these days. I told him that the way I see it, I'm really just SV OG, curmudgeonly, and constantly thinking kids/founders these days 😂 /1 First, I talked about how I think it's an absolutely terrible idea for founders to be angel investing. Starting a company is so freakin hard that you need ultimate focus to have any shot at success. Spending time angel investing is the very definition of not focusing! /2

I’ve become convinced that the very best founders don’t launch MVPs, but instead rely on conviction built through domain experience to commit to a main attack and put all their resources behind it. @hulu, @zoom_us, @joinHandshake all being great examples buff.ly/2yCMt9n The challenge I have with MVPs is that teams rarely give themselves enough time to iterate on their initial concept before demanding short-term metrics to build conviction that the current direction is worth continuing to pursue.

I first learned to appreciate the difference between navigational search and exploratory search @LinkedIn. Navigational is when you are trying to get to content that you already know exists. In the case of LinkedIn, that's usually typing a name of a person to get to their profile Exploratory search is when you are trying to find something new that you don't yet know what it is. @LinkedIn, this was often searching to find someone at a specific company with a specific title. We realized the bulk of searches sales professionals cared about were exploratory.

Excited to read the latest Amazon shareholder letter. Amazing the scale they are operating at: 100M prime members, $20B AWS business, >50% of products sold from third-party sellers. buff.ly/2HdSpMH Bezos seems intent on stressing the economic value Amazon creates for so many, including "560,000 employees, 2 million sellers, hundreds of thousands of authors, millions of AWS developers, and hundreds of millions of divinely discontent customers around the world"