Dave Pell—in the context of Facebook’s plan to host news sites’ content natively—explains what tech people are good at (and usually not good at) in Don’t Take a Flying Leap:

But building a really successful app or site does not mean you know more about education than educators. Disrupting the photo-sharing space does not qualify you to disrupt higher education. Or to understand the health system better than doctors. Or to understand the woes of urban poverty better than those who have spent a career on those corners. […]

This is not the time to give up and it’s not the time to give in to one of the most prevalent myths of the era: that people who can build technology know how to run your business better than you do.

I’m as fascinated with Slack’s rise to prominence as most people, so I really enjoyed From 0 to $1B - Slack’s Founder Shares Their Epic Launch Strategy (no byline). It’s full of fantastic product strategy advice, including on the importance of user feedback:

As much information as Slack put out to customers, they learned even more themselves. Butterfield and his cofounders are voracious readers of user feedback, and they attribute much of the company’s rapid traction to this skill. From the get-go, Slack made sure that users could respond to every email they received, and approached every help ticket as an opportunity to solidify loyalty and improve the service. As they listened to their ever-growing flock of users, the Slack team iterated accordingly.

And also remember that sometimes people are going to use a product differently than what you had in mind:

“Sometimes you will get feedback that is contrary to your vision,” Butterfield says. “You may be trying to drive in a particular direction that people don’t necessarily understand at first. In our case, we knew the users we had in mind for this product. So in the early days, we looked at our customers, really just testers at that point, and we paid extra attention to the teams we knew should be using Slack successfully.”

It’s worth reminding ourselves that @-mentions and hashtags on Twitter were user inventions, not something the company came up with themselves. Always follow your loyal users…

Putting the linkbait title aside, Steve Denning’s The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value1 is a really interesting article about the difference between “real markets” and “expectations markets”:

In today’s paradoxical world of maximizing shareholder value, which Jack Welch himself has called “the dumbest idea in the world”, CEOs and their top managers have massive incentives to focus most of their attentions on the expectations market, rather than the real job of running the company producing real products and services.

And that comes at the expense of customers. This sentence also stood out for me:

Unfortunately, as often happens with bad ideas that make some people a lot of money, the idea caught on and has even become the conventional wisdom.

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1. Link is to the print version because the Forbes site is so unreadable ↩

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I nodded along vigorously to Cap Watkins’s The Fight:

What I’ve come to realize in the past two years is how important it is to find a company and a product worth fighting for. To find a team that is dedicated to delivering the best product they can, despite the bumps, the frustrations, the exhausting moments along the way. Hurdles and failure are totally unavoidable. Having a resilient team around you working on a product you all believe in will make those hurdles easier to clear. They’ll turn failure into a learning opportunity. Great teams working on products they’re passionate about will back you up when you’re exhausted and cover for you when you’re frustrated.

When you find a team like this, hold on for dear life.

I don’t know if I’ve always wanted to write a book, but I do know that I’ve been writing the one I’m announcing today in my head for many, many years. It’s called Making It Right: Product Management For A Startup World, and it’s my attempt at putting together a practical framework for building great products:

The book came about because I saw a lot of people in organizations perform some of the activities that make up the role of product management. The problem is that very few people take a holistic view of the product, and this is not a role that should be split up into tiny pieces. So, you see marketing people doing some design and research, business analysts doing some spec writing, developers managing the product backlog, and so on.

All this without a person who is responsible for the overall vision, prioritization, and execution of the product. With this book I wanted to provide a complete product strategy that is agnostic to whatever development process people use (agile, etc.).

So here are a couple of links to check out more detail, if you’re interested:

• Smashing Magazine has a launch post up today.
• You can buy it directly from Smashing for $10 in their digital store.
• For the next couple of days, you’ll also be able to buy it for 99c on Amazon.

Smashing tells me that the Amazon thing, in particular, is important for the first couple of days after launch. So if you’re so inclined, please pick it up for 99c, and write a review. It will really, really help to give us a good launch.

Huge thanks to the Smashing Magazine team, and my technical editor Francisco Inchauste. They’re my heroes. And now I have to lie down.

Joel Spolsky:

Even though Fog Creek, Trello, and Stack Exchange are now three separate companies, they are all running basically the same operating system, based on the original microprocessor architecture known as “making a company where the best developers want to work,” or, in simpler terms, treating people well.

What a great post about a great product and a great outlook on corporate culture. I wish Joel would start blogging regularly again…

I’m not sure if I should really link to Kids Don’t Care About Cars because there are very few things more annoying than old people pontificating about what “youngsters” like and don’t like. Still, this part did get me thinking:

The basic premise is you’ve got to go. How you get there is irrelevant. Furthermore, the costs of car ownership… the insurance and the gas, never mind the maintenance, none of them appeal to a youngster who believes all costs should be baked in.

I’m not convinced the conclusion that car ownership is a thing of the past is accurate1, even though this is not the first time the argument has been made — see Zipcar, Uber And The Beginning Of Trouble For The Auto Industry. But as an old guy myself, I do see the product opportunities that are created by this idea that how you get places is irrelevant as long as you can get there.

One of my favorite examples of companies taking advantage of this right now is car2go. It’s a network of smart cars that you can pick up anywhere, drive anywhere, and leave anywhere when you’re done. And it’s all done through a smartphone app (or the web — if you’re old and lame of course). No matter how much I think about this, I can’t get over how magical this idea is. What a great way to fill an unmet user need.

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1. Try not having a car when you have kids… ↩

Jessica Pressler wrote an article called “Let’s, Like, Demolish Laundry”, and it’s a wickedly funny (and, unfortunately, very accurate) look at the tech world’s obsession with solving First World problems:

We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.

Or as Mike Monteiro said, slightly more succinctly:

We used to design ways to get to the moon; now we design ways to never have to get out of bed. You have the power to change that.

Related post on Elezea: Legacy

In The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies Rebekah Campbell looks at the problem with lying in the context of entrepreneurship and creating products:

Peter maintains that telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a client or a member of your team, you create a false reality and you start living in it.

And it’s extremely difficult to get out of that reality once you’ve created it.