Ian McAllister: recommendation

Transcript context

…That's awesome. I feel like most PMs listening to this are going to be like, "I always start with a problem. I'm always problem focused so I'm working backwards. So I'm good." Other signs of just like, no, you're not. You think you are but you're probably not doing this well. Is there a symptom of you're not actually doing this correctly? The most common thing that I see that tips me off is when they talk about something, there's different pieces in the pantry and we have these ingredients, we could put them together, we could add these two things together and make a meal out of it. And so it might be a technology, it might be a service, it might be two different things or the building blocks are there and what's enabled if you add these two building blocks together is something. But that's not really working backwards. It may be true that there's some leverage or some benefit from the company having these technologies or assets, but that to me is often the first step that these two things look similar. We combine them and it's all goodness in this new thing. So if you start talking about those things or the technology, I think that's a likely case that you're not really working backwards as opposed to the opposite is if there's a customer problem that feels compelling even before the solution, yeah, that does feel compelling. And just like with every startup out there, probably a lot of the pitches are there's a big audience and a painful problem and it's the painkiller versus the vitamin thing. And then we have a novel way to solve that. That's kind of working backwards. But more often, especially in a big company, you'll have all these ideas because you have more ingredients in the pantry of ways you could combine them and try to feed it to someone but may not be working backwards. Awesome. We're reaching about an hour chatting and so I want to let you go. Before we get to our very exciting lightning round, is there anything else you want to share on anything we've chatted about?…

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