Resources for product teams from industry experts
For “in all fair dealings,” Burke reminded his parliamentary colleagues in 1775, “the thing bought must bear some proportion to the purchase paid.” Proportionality comes from what grand strategy is: the alignment of potentially infinite aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities. And fairness? I’d say from bending the alignment toward freedom. Or, as Berlin would have put it, toward “negative” liberty.
— On Grand Strategy by John Lewis Gaddis
Epidemics are, at their root, about this very process of transformation. When we are trying to make an idea or attitude or product tip, we’re trying to change our audience in some small yet critical respect: we’re trying to infect them, sweep them up in our epidemic, and convert them from hostility to acceptance. That can be done through the influence of special kinds of people, people of extraordinary personal connection. That’s the Law of the Few. It can be done by changing the content of communication, by making a message so memorable that it sticks in someone’s mind and compels them to action. That is the Stickiness Factor. I think that both of those laws make intuitive sense. But we need to remember that small changes in context can be just as important in tipping epidemics, even though that fact appears to violate some of our most deeply held assumptions about human nature.
— The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell
Two inner forces can drive a person to use all of his capabilities. He can be competence-driven or achievement-driven. The former concerns itself with job or task mastery. A virtuoso violinist who continues to practice day after day is obviously moved by something other than a need for esteem and recognition. He works to sharpen his own skill, trying to do a little bit better this time than the time before, just as a teenager on a skateboard practices the same trick over and over again. The same teenager may not sit still for ten minutes to do homework, but on a skateboard he is relentless, driven by the self-actualization need, a need to get better that has no limit. The achievement-driven path to self-actualization is not quite like this. Some people—not the majority—are moved by an abstract need to achieve in all that they do.
— High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove
Trust begins to emerge when we have a sense that another person or organization is driven by things other than their own self-gain. With trust comes a sense of value—real value, not just value equated with money. Value, by definition, is the transference of trust. You can’t convince someone you have value, just as you can’t convince someone to trust you. You have to earn trust by communicating and demonstrating that you share the same values and beliefs. You have to talk about your WHY and prove it with WHAT you do. Again, a WHY is just a belief, HOWs are the actions we take to realize that belief, and WHATs are the results of those actions. When all three are in balance, trust is built and value is perceived.
— Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek
You don’t need all of the world on day one, and let’s take that one step further—you positively don’t want the attention of the whole world, because that means you’ve made something for everyone, not something that’s going to be loved by the people you want to matter to first. When we stop saying, ‘Look at the incredible wings we’ve made for you’ and begin with, ‘Can you see how amazing your wings are in this light?’ it changes everything. The trap we fall into is trying to tell people how life-changing our widget is. If it changes their lives, we won’t have to tell them.
— Meaningful: The Story of Ideas That Fly by Bernadette Jiwa
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