Tony Fadell: evaluation

Transcript context

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Visit workos.com to get started, or just hit up their Slack, where they have actual engineers waiting to answer your questions. WorkOS allows you to build faster with delightful APIs, comprehensive docs, and a smooth developer experience. Go to workos.com to make your app enterprise-ready today. One direction I want to get into here is this idea that you talk a lot about micromanaging being actually really important and powerful. So there's this image that's floating around Twitter that I don't know if you've seen. I'll show it on the screen as I'm describing it, and hopefully you can visualize it. It's a functional system versus a dysfunctional system. Basically, a company that's doing great versus not great. And there's this chart that goes up to more functional that is basically unkind truth, and then another unkind truth, another unkind truth creates more functional systems. Kind lie followed by kind lie, followed by kind lie, leads to dysfunctional systems. Something Steve Jobs is very famous for. In your book, you talk about mission-driven assholes are actually really... You want a mission-driven asshole. There's certain types of assholes that are great. Talk about just the importance of somebody being very direct in what it takes to build great products. When you're doing a 1.0 of anything, when you're doing... if you're doing anything that matters, and it's a 1.0, and it's a new category, or it's a new device the world hasn't seen before, you have very few analogs that you can use to make data-driven decisions. And so if most of your decisions are going to be opinion-based decisions for a 1.0, you have to have one or two or a very, very small set of people who are charged with making the opinion-based decisions and can actually get you from point A to... from a white paper or a white... bank sheet of white paper or whiteboard to an actual 1.0 spec. Because if you try to do data-driven decisions all the way along, you're either not doing a differentiated product because you're taking data from another thing, or you're just getting just bullshit data, right. So you're going to have to figure out how to get opinion-based decisions to happen, and that means you have to have, for lack of a better word, taste makers. This is what we are doing. We are the person or the team who is going to make those opinion-based decisions. Of course, some people aren't going to like it, and it's going to be like, "I'm sorry, this is a benevolent dictatorship. This is what's going to happen, and this is the vision." And we don't know what we don't know until we ship it and we get opinions from the users. Now it's very different when you do this in a B2B context versus a B2C context. And so the hardest environment to work with it when you have these opinion-based distinctions is in a B2C context because you have to see these decisions in the full light and you don't... a consumer does. They have to see it from the marketing, from how they discover it in the marketing, the key feature sets, the ability to use the product, all of these different things for them to actually come up with an opinion of what they like, and what they don't like and being able to critique it. And if you don't... And if you're doing a 1.0 and the world hasn't seen, you're not going to get that from consumers ever. You have to ship it, and you have to build the entire kind of ecosystem so those consumers see it in the fullness, so that when they do the evaluation, and they spend their own money, then you're getting real feedback. When it comes to consumer... atoms-based products with services or not, whatever it is, you have to build the entire thing and visualize the entire thing to be able to make those opinion-based decisions. And so you need a small team who's looking at the marketing angles, the engineering angles, the sales angles, all those different things to go, "Okay, that's the way we're going." And there's only so many ways you can do it because the rest of the team doesn't see this either. And so you have to be very articulate about how... what that opinion-based decision is made for, why, how it might affect market, how you do it, and make sure the team understands it. see this either. And so you have to be very articulate about how... what that opinion-based decision is made for, why, how it might affect market, how you do it, and make sure the team understands it. Now, if the team is just fully against it, well then maybe it has to be unkind, but hopefully if you've done a good job and you really have an informed gut and you can articulate that, you can get everybody moving in the same direction even if it is... And it's going to be risky. You're right. You got to know that you got to take risk because most people in those other functions, they don't want to take any risks. And so there's someone who's got to be the target, right. And today, in many contexts, people go and hire consultants, right. They go and hire, "Okay, we're going to do a user study, or we're going to do all this." And they don't have the user studies and have the full context like I was just describing. They don't go buy the product, and they don't what have you and then they get data, and that's because the leader or whoever's in there, board maybe, it's like, "We need data to make sure this 1.0 is going to be a success." And I saw this so many times at all these major corporations, so they're just kind of covering their with bullshit data and not really doing the hard work of saying, "I'm going to make this decision and we are going to select this, and yes, I might be wrong or we as the opinion based decision makers are wrong and we will correct it later and we'll take the heat for that." So that's the... a great product manager or a great person who's leading this thing has to understand that that's what they have to do if they're really doing something innovative.…

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