Tom Verrilli: belief

Transcript context

…There's a concept that I heard come up a bunch when I talked to people who work with you. The phrase was play the accordion. Explain. So I mentioned earlier, I'm not huge on frameworks, but I do think there's a mental model which is quite useful that goes to the thing that you and I discussed earlier on like think through a problem. Do the mental work even if you're not shipping at all, which is like obviously the magic of code is that you can kind of ship things and iterate really quickly and get data as you go. And I think one of the trappings that comes with that is you're just iterating forward and throwing spaghetti at a wall and you don't really know what direction you're going in. I think there's a second failure mode, which is people sit down and write out these long roadmaps and strategic vision docs of what we'll do over the next two or three years that kind of loses the comparative advantage we have over every other industry, which is learning. AB tests mean that you can update your understanding of a problem and therefore change your direction as you should go. So the point of the analogy of play the accordion is if you think about a piano accordion, before you can play a note, you've got to stretch it all the way out, bring the air in. So what is it we're trying to get done here? But you don't make music until you press the key and push it all the way back into V1. And then when you go to play the next kind of progression, you pull it all the way out again. Okay, given what we just learned, what do we do? And then you go and build the next thing again. And you've got to get used to this motion that says this isn't creating value. Pulling it out doesn't actually do anything. All the value is created here. But until you are going through this motion constantly of saying, well, reevaluate what we understand. How does this change what we're doing? You're probably not playing the right thing. And I know I'm probably bastardizing. Somewhere in the comments, there's going to be a musician who points out to me that this is actually also one of the ways you make music. But I found it just a generally very valuable memory device for PMs to be like, you've got to constantly be zooming out and pushing back in and zooming out and pushing back in. Yeah, that is such a fun analogy because even though you make music expanding it, it's like inward or it's like learning from the compression.…

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