Jessica Fain: belief

Transcript context

…... have a very low risk and impact if it's not a good idea. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And I think what is the type of risk that they are most afraid of too? Is it wasting time? Is it time to market? Is it that they don't actually think this is going to work with customers? So if you can start to, and you can and should ask this, what are the outcomes you're most afraid of? What would a failure state be for you in this experiment? There's a concept of red teaming, which is originally a military tactic and now being applied to businesses. How do you take an outsider's perspective to your idea and not just be so obsessed with your own thinking, with your own concept? Because so often we get wrapped around the axle, especially ... I actually find this happens even more with prototyping. You build a prototype and you're like, "Oh, it looks so beautiful. I would've never been able to build that before." It's actually not a very good idea, but you get obsessed with it and you're unwilling to accept that it could fail. I think one of the biggest things you can do to build trust is kill things, deprioritize things. That is a very, very senior way of thinking, and it shows that you have the same aligned incentives as the executive who's thinking about the good of the company outcome, the user outcome, and not just your own. That is such a good one because everyone's always just trying to acquire more resources, more investment, just like more features and showing that, "Okay, this is a terrible idea. I know I spent months on this, but no, we should kill this because it's not working."…

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