Valuable insights for product builders

Here's a summary of the book:

If you don’t have Product-Market Fit, your goal should be to reach PMF, not boost up vanity metrics to fool yourselves. For example, Gross Merchandise Value is a vanity metric created by e-commerce startups where they’d sell a ₹100 item for ₹80 but count it as ₹100.

If your ARR is below $1m, you don’t have PMF. When you don’t have PMF, don’t blitzscale. Blitzscaling a product that doesn’t work results in a big failure, not success.

Enterprises have budgets just to test technology.

Adopt the OKR system to track the Objectives of each person, or the Outcomes they’re working towards. Every company beyond a certain scale requires this system.

The way the company runs should be documented, shared, and the documents kept up to date. Otherwise, when a manager leaves, his way of working leaves with him, resulting in the company never working efficiently, like Twitter, unlike Facebook, where Sheryl put that system in place.

Negativity
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We can look at any situation and ask, “What’s right?” or “What’s wrong?” From our childhood, our parents and teachers train us to ask the latter question. This causes objectively highly successful people to feel dissatisfied. To counter this, ask yourself, “What’s good about this situation?”

“Our company?”

“Our team?”

“My life?”

Don’t wait for a problem to start positive self-talk. Say to yourself every day, “I’m grateful for ________”.

Similarly, when you catch yourself feeling good about someone, tell them. If you hear something good said about someone, pass it on to them.

Perform an energy audit by listing out all the tasks you did in the past month and labeling in green work that energizes you, and in red, work that drains you. There are no neutrals. For example, interviewing candidates drains me. Eliminate, delegate or outsource the reds. Repeat this energy audit every month till 75% of your time is green.

Productivity
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Many people are so immersed in their day to day tasks that they forget the goal these tasks are supposed to add up to. To prevent this, always track your top goal.

Start meetings on time. Otherwise, it’s disrespectful, and wastes productivity. And causes attendees’ next meetings to be delayed, creating a domino effect. If the attendee is a customer, investor or recruit, they won’t join, or if you’re the boss, they’ll join and resent you. To start each meeting on time (say 11:00), you need to end the previous one not at 11:00 but at 10:50 or :55. Google Calendar has an option for this. Turn it on.

Don’t check your inbox (or Slack or…) more than twice a day.

There are four zones:

Zone of incompetence, things others can do better, like fixing your car.

Zone of competence, which you can do well, but others can do just as well, like cleaning your bathroom.

Zone of excellence, which you do excellently, but dislike.

Zone of genius, which you do excellently and love.

Outsource the first two unless you love doing them. Do the fourth. The third is dangerous. If you try to stop doing them, people will ask you to do them since they add a lot of value to the company, and you’re doing them excellently. To overcome this, ask everyone in their company to list their zones. If you hate interviewing candidates, someone else might love it, so hand it over to them, which is a win/win.

Productivity requires good physical health: exercise daily. Or at least multiple times a week. If you’re having trouble motivating yourself, get a partner or trainer. Get a full night of sleep. Otherwise, you’ll feel your body is wearing down, reducing your ability to get work done.

Productivity also requires good mental health: get a therapist even if you feel you don’t need one. Let the emotions flow out. Otherwise, you’ll bottle up anger, sadness and fear, breaking you. Meditate. Get a subscription to an app like Calm. See if you can set aside a meditation room in your office, and set aside a meditation time for group meditation.

If you keep thinking of some work-related issue in your personal time, create a task in your task tracker and note down a few bullet points about it. This will get the task off your mind and thus quiet your mind.

Play is important at work. You shouldn’t demand a justification for every hour of time spent. From others, or especially from yourself. We need to explore and play with things to learn. This creates joy. And increases productivity, contrary to what some people think. Imposing a nose to the grindstone culture leads to higher stress, guilt and employee turnover. Nobody wants to work in a bad work environment.

Conscious Leadership
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Many companies look down on emotions. They think emotions are bad. They’re shameful. We’re not supposed to show them at work. When we feel emotions, we’re supposed to suppress them.

Conscious leaders are the opposite. They’re not free of negative emotions like defensiveness. They feel these emotions like everyone else. The difference is that they accept them. They realize that an emotion is an indication of something. If you’re feeling angry towards someone, instead of telling yourself, “You should be professional. You should be better than this”, accept the anger. Feel it. Take a deep breath. Then ask yourself what the emotion is trying to tell you. Maybe it’s telling you that this person has not kept up commitments they made in the past. Take a walk, think about why you’re feeling angry, and you’ll be able to hear the message the emotion is trying to send to you. Then you can take up the problem with the other person in a calm manner, rather than shouting angrily at them.

There are three centers of intelligence:

Head (logic)

Heart (emotion)

Gut (you feel something but can’t explain why)

Conscious leaders access all three centers.

Conflict Prevention
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Interpersonal conflicts arise due to two reasons:

People don’t share their feelings and thoughts.

They share but feel that they haven’t been heard.

As an example of (1), they might ask, “Is there an update on this project?” but what they’re really feeling in their mind is frustration at the delays, powerlessness at being able to influence it, and distrust of the engineering team. As the listener, draw these feelings out by asking, for example, “How does that make you feel?”

As for (2), when someone speaks, summarize it back to them and ask if you got it right. If not, repeat till you do. Sometimes we’re in a hurry to rush to the solution and we don’t fully hear what the other side has to say. Linger with the problem before going to the solution.

If you find someone repeating themselves, stop and summarize it for them. Then ask if you got it right. Once they say yes, they won’t repeat themselves. Sometimes, when we’re when we’re sharing our problems, the listener interrupts and gives a solution. e.g., if you’ve gone to the doctor and describe your symptoms by saying “I have a headache and —” and he interrupts by saying “Take Chloromycin” you’re not convinced if he’s heard all your symptoms and therefore whether Chloromycin is the right treatment for you. Once you’re convinced that the other person has taken all the facts into account, you’ll trust that the solution will be appropriate to our problem.

Giving Feedback
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Caution the person receiving feedback that you’re about to give feedback, so that they’re in the right mental state for it and it doesn’t come as a shock.

Distinguish between these three things:

Facts: “You turned up late to the last three meetings.” Facts are something a video camera could record.

Opinions: “You’re careless!”

Feelings: “When this happens, I feel disrespected.”

There’s no place for opinions in feedback.

Sharing feelings requires you to be vulnerable. Many people are too afraid to do this. They instead share opinions like “you’re careless!” which comes across as an attack. If you’re not going to be vulnerable enough to share your feelings, why should the recipient show vulnerability to you by accepting your feedback?

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Must read for all CEOs

A very methodological presentation of most important points of a successful company. I highly recommend for CEOs to have an efficient personal, meeting, recruitment, and sales.

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