Kevin Yien: belief

Transcript context

…I love this. There's two directions I want to go. So there's the drawing the perimeter, and then there's this paying attention to the final deliverable and keeping the borrow really high, which I love and I totally agree with both. In terms of this animation, people hearing this, that our PMs are going to be like, "How do you have time to spend a week on animation for one little product? I have so much to do. I get to hit some goals, drive some numbers. I have people waiting for me." Maybe because Square is like this, once you deploy, it's harder to change and it's like a big deal to ship. But I'm curious if you have any advice or things you've learned about how to create space for that sort of thing to create time to spend a week on this animation? Or was it just obvious to everyone, "We need to spend as much time as we can"? Top down, everyone knew. I definitely don't think it was obvious to everyone, and I can definitely say that because we were given a pretty strict deadline that we needed to launch by and I pushed it out three times. That's not because of this one animation, but it's because of a series of decisions where we said, "This is what we believe we need to ship, and this matters much more than hitting some artificial external GA date. " There's this other aspect that I think PMs like to feel good about how busy they are and they're like, "I'm involved in so many processes and I have to talk to this person and talk to that person." All that might be true, but I think there needs to be a calibration or at least a spring-cleaning of, "What's everything I'm doing?" and how much do these things actually matter to getting value to a customer. Because as a company gets bigger, as teams get more complex, it's very easy and natural to spend more time on things that are internally-focused and not externally-focused. I think we just all have to have sensitive antenna to that so that we don't fall prey to, "Well, the way that my job is described is to do these things," but really it's the outcome again of put something in a customer's hands that's also a problem, and it's amazing. Reminds me of your now colleague Jeff Weinstein's advice he got from one of the Coulsons where they came to him and they're like, "You're world-class at doing the second and third most important things and you're not focusing on the most important thing because it's so hard, and that's something you need to work on."…

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