Bob Baxley: evaluation

Transcript context

…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? The thing I would say is that you should wait as long as possible to draw a picture. I think that pushes against all the gen AI tools that help you create prototypes. And there's obviously a lot of excitement around that. I can just give a prompt and the AI, they're going to crank out of UI for me. So I don't think I'm using the term right, but I had this idea from art that I call the primal mark, and that's the first mark that you make on the canvas. And once you make that mark on the canvas, everything you do after that is in response to that mark. It sort of sets your baseline. And so for me, I always felt that as soon as we drew a picture that looked even remotely real, everybody gravitated towards that and said, oh, that's the thing. And people were so uncomfortable with ambiguity that they can't really deal with the tension of, well, that might not be the thing. And so as soon as you draw a picture that looks even slightly realistic, much less something that comes out of one of these gen AI tools, everybody kind of goes, oh, that's the thing. You just keep doubling down on that thing. And what's happened is you've taken the possibilities from this big broad thing down to this tiny little thing from an AI system that's trained on existing solutions and existing ideas and is maybe not even thinking about it the right way, because all you've really given it is your first-order of thinking. I think there's a way you can stay in these things conceptually and conversationally, where you can get to your second, third, fourth idea. And that's where stuff gets really interesting. And again, I don't think that has to take a lot of time. That can be over the course of a single meeting, you could get to a second, third, fourth idea. You just have to be willing to not jump at the first thing that looks like a possibility. You get that possibility, you go, okay, well that's interesting, let's table that. What else have we got? There's one story that kind of related that's useful. In one of my previous jobs, I was responsible for the public website. I remember coming across one of the product managers one day and she's like, "Hey, this link on the home page, we have to make it blue." I was like, "Well, we don't use blue links anywhere." And she said, "Yeah, yeah, but we just have to make it blue." I was like, "Well, we're not making it blue." And a couple of days go by and I saw the home page and the link had been made blue, because she had got around me and she'd gone to engineering and just made it blue. And I saw her in the hallway again. I was like, "What the hell's up with that?" And she goes, "Well, people couldn't see it." And I'm like, "Oh, they couldn't see it, so it wasn't prominent enough, right?" She's like, "Yeah, it wasn't prominent enough." I'm like, "Well, great. ?" And she goes, "Well, people couldn't see it." And I'm like, "Oh, they couldn't see it, so it wasn't prominent enough, right?" She's like, "Yeah, it wasn't prominent enough." I'm like, "Well, great. There's a 100 different things we could do to make it more prominent, one of which is making it blue, which is the thing that came to you first because you're not a designer, it's naturally... Because it's the most obvious thing, but it actually doesn't fit in with these larger things we're trying to do." So I've often... I try to encourage the product managers to what's the problem with the thing? And then let us solve it. Don't jump to it and tell us... Don't tell us this is just exactly what we're supposed to do. And again, I do the same thing on the roadmap. You decide the roadmap, tell us what we're supposed to do, I will ask you about it, and I may push back and we may have some back and forth, but that's your responsibility. I'm going to trust that you are trained and you know what you're doing and you're going to make the right call. And I just want you to give me the same level of respect.…

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