Resources for product teams from industry experts
Do not allow your supposed experience of life to transform you into a machine. Use that experience to listen always to ‘the voice of the heart’. Even if you do not agree with what that voice is saying, respect it and follow its advice: it knows when to act and when to avoid action.
— The Book of Manuals by Paulo Coelho
Breadth! Breadth! Breadth! The main idea is to open your mind and broaden your scope of knowledge. Creativity is a by-product of breadth. 10 × more than depth. Pulling ideas from arenas brand new to you and translating them into your sphere of interest is key. (This is not a mechanical act. I’m talking about subconscious novel connections that sneak in when you are, say, dealing with thorny issues.)
Read fiction. Fiction is all about people and relationships. This and that cause your mind to expand and productively wander in ways that are invaluable, but of which you are unaware. Subliminal impact. Your mind is broadened. And somehow or other, the new things you’ve been examining in your reading sneak into your way of being and impact your practical, and long-term strategic, actions.
— Excellence Now: Extreme Humanism by Tom Peters
The fundamental thing that I wish I’d known, is I underestimated the importance of simplicity and design. The first couple of years I really didn’t feel that, I didn’t have a good enough appreciation that the most important thing for consumer-facing software was that it was beautiful and simple, and people immediately and intuitively understood how to use it.
It really wasn’t about making it more powerful, it was about making it more natural. I think I’ve only internalized that in the past couple of years and it’ll take another lifetime to really master it.
— Startup Growth Engines: Case Studies of How Today’s Most Successful Startups Unlock Extraordinary Growth by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown
It may seem odd to talk about something as soft and fuzzy as “passion” as an integral part of a strategic framework. But throughout the good-to-great companies, passion became a key part of the Hedgehog Concept. You can’t manufacture passion or “motivate” people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.
The good-to-great companies did not say, “Okay, folks, let’s get passionate about what we do.” Sensibly, they went the other way entirely: We should only do those things that we can get passionate about.
— Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t by Jim Collins
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