Bob Baxley: recommendation

Transcript context

…This begs the question then, you don't want to give designers here exactly. Here's the thing we're designing, make it really great and pretty. There's always this balance of just give designers space to think and be creative and explore. Advice there of just how to navigate that. Well, if you go back to my example of the script and storyboard, scripts don't contain pictures, there's still a lot of opportunity to think differently and to come up with original things and to have a lot of creative input in the storyboarding process. So the script is living mostly in words, which is largely how PMs function. The thing that I will say, to keep in mind for PMs, there's always a tendency on PMs to want to draw something and then try to give a sketch to a designer. And I would caution them against that. Sometimes they have to draw themselves so they can think it out. But if a PM came to me with something that was drawn and kind of fully baked, my response was like, thanks for giving me that. Now I know exactly what we're not going to do. Because as a point of pride, there's no way I'm going to go execute that exact thing. So you're right, PMs have to give you the space to operate. And I think a lot of what they're trying to achieve could be done in more informal ways, conversationally and whiteboards, things like that. But yet you need to narrow the problem for the designers, they need constraints. They don't need a tiny little box, but they need constraints. Think in terms of, you don't give them an airport tarmac and you don't even give them a football field. You give them something more like a basketball court, a sort of scale at which they can do their design thing. I want to talk about basketball later, but not yet. You've shared a lot of counterintuitive lessons on building product, designing, building teams, leadership. Is there another very counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building products, hiring leading teams that goes against common startup wisdom?…

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