The hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz
[A CEO who has seen many ups and downs in his career, shares his
wisdom words. I simply like his definition of good product manager]
Calculus vs. Statistics:
"There are several different frameworks one could use to get
a handle on the indeterminate vs. determinate question. The math version is
calculus vs. statistics. In a determinate world, calculus dominates. You can
calculate specific things precisely and deterministically. When you send a
rocket to the moon, you have to calculate precisely where it is at all times.
It’s not like some iterative startup where you launch the rocket and figure
things out step by step. Do you make it to the moon? To Jupiter? Do you just
get lost in space? There were lots of companies in the ’90s that had launch
parties but no landing parties.
But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability
and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world. Bell
curves and random walks define what the future is going to look like. The
standard pedagogical argument is that high schools should get rid of calculus
and replace it with statistics, which is really important and actually useful.
There has been a powerful shift toward the idea that statistical ways of
thinking are going to drive the future. With calculus, you can calculate things
far into the future. You can even calculate planetary locations years or
decades from now. But there are no specifics in probability and statistics—only
distributions. In these domains, all you can know about the future is that you
can’t know it. You cannot dominate the future; antitheories dominate instead.
The Larry Summers line about the economy was something like, “I don’t know
what’s going to happen, but anyone who says he knows what will happen doesn’t
know what he’s talking about.” Today, all prophets are false prophets. That can
only be true if people take a statistical view of the future."
— Peter Thiel
Struggle:
The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the
first place.
The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you
don’t know the answer.
The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you
think they may be right.
The Struggle is when food loses its taste.
The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your
company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you
know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are
an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes
self-hatred.
The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone
and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The
Struggle.
The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is
unhappiness.
The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you
feel worse.
The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all
alone. The Struggle has no mercy.
The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams.
The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that
you feel like you are going to spit blood.
The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if
you are weak. Always if you are weak.
Some stuff that may or may not help:
- Don’t put it all on your shoulders
- This is not checkers; this is mutherfuckin’ chess
- Play long enough and you might get lucky
- Don't take it personally
- Remember that this is what separates the women from the
girls
Most people are not strong enough. The Struggle is where greatness
comes from.
There are three key reasons why being transparent about your
company’s problems make sense:
- Trust: Without trust, communication breaks. In my human
interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely
proportional to the level of trust. For example, if I trust you
completely, then i require no explanation or communication of your action
2.
The more brains working
on the hard problems, the better. Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.
3.
A good culture is like
the old RIP routing protocol: bad news travels fast; good news travels slow
If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming
psychological pressure to be overly pressure positive. Stand up to the
pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.
Take care of the people, the products, and the profits in that
order.
I roll with the hardest niggas, make money with the smartest
niggas
I ain't got time for you fuckin artist niggas
Better shut your trap before you become a target nigga
Y'all army brats I'm the motherfuckin sargeant nigga
- The Game, "Scream on
'em"
Good product manager / Bad product manager:
Good product managers know the market, the product, the product
line and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.
A good product manager is the CEO of the product.
A good product manager takes full responsibility and measures themselves
in terms of the success of the product.
They are responsible for right product/right time and all that
entails. A good product manager knows the context going in (the company, our
revenue funding, competition, etc.), and they take responsibility for devising
and executing a winning plan (no excuses).
Bad product managers have lots of excuses. Not enough funding, the engineering manager is an idiot, Microsoft has 10 times as
many engineers working on it, I'm overworked, I don't get enough direction.
Barksdale doesn't make these kinds of excuses and neither should the CEO of a product.
Good product managers don't get all of their time sucked up by the various organizations that must work together to deliver
right product right time. They don't take all
the product team minutes, they don't project
manage the various functions, they are not gophers for engineering. They are not part of the product team; they
manage the product team. Engineering teams
don't consider Good Product Managers a "marketing resource."
Good product managers are the marketing counterpart of the
engineering manager. Good product managers crisply define the target, the
"what" (as opposed to the how) and manage the delivery of the "what."
Bad product managers feel best about themselves when they figure out
"how".
Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing
as well as verbally. Good product managers don't give direction informally.
Good product managers gather information informally.
Good product managers create leveragable collateral, FAQs, presentations,
white papers. Bad product managers complain that they spend all day answering
questions for the sales force and are swamped. Good product managers anticipate
the serious product flaws and build real solutions.
Bad product managers put out fires all day. Good product managers
take written positions on important issues (competitive silver bullets,
tough architectural choices, tough product decisions, markets to attack or yield).
Bad product managers voice their opinion verbally and lament that the
"powers that be" won't let it happen. Once bad product managers fail,
they point out that they predicted they would fail.
Good product managers focus the team on revenue and customers. Bad product managers focus team on how many features Microsoft is
building.
Good product managers define good products that can be executed
with a strong effort. Bad product managers define good products that
can't be executed or let engineering build whatever they want (i.e. solve
the hardest problem).
Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value
to the market place during inbound planning and achieving market share and revenue
goals during outbound. Bad product managers get very confused about the
differences amongst delivering value, matching competitive features, pricing,
and ubiquity.
Good product managers decompose problems. Bad product managers
combine all problems into one.
Good product managers think about the story they want written by
the press. Bad product managers think about covering every feature and
being really technically accurate with the press. Good product managers ask the
press questions. Bad product managers answer any press question.
Good product managers assume press and analyst people are really
smart. Bad product managers assume that press and analysts are dumb because
they don't understand the difference between "push" and
"simulated push."
Good product managers err on the side of clarity vs. explaining
the obvious. Bad product managers never explain the obvious.
Good product managers define their job and their success. Bad
product managers constantly want to be told what to do.
Good product managers send their status reports in on time every
week, because they are disciplined. Bad product managers forget to send
in their status reports on time, because they don't value discipline.
Management Debt:
Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the computer programmer who designed
the first wiki, the metaphor “technical debt” is now a well-understood concept.
While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will
eventually have to pay it back—with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense,
but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the
front of your mind. There also exists a less understood parallel concept, which
I will call management debt. Like technical debt, management debt is incurred
when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive,
long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes
sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt
without accounting for it, ten you will eventually go management bankrupt
One challenge is the Peter Principle. Coined by Dr. Laurence J.
Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1969 book, The Peter Principle holds that in a
hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or
later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent
(their "level of incompetence"), and there they remain being unable
to earn further promotions. As Andy Grove points out in his management classic
High Output Management, the Peter Principle is unavoidable, because there is no
way to know a priori at what level in the hierarchy a manager will be incompetent.
Another challenge is a phenomenon that I call The Law of Crappy
People. The Law of Crappy People states:
For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that
level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.
The rationale behind the law is that the other employees in the
company with lower titles will naturally benchmark themselves against the
crappiest person at the next level. For example, if Jasper is the worst Vice
President in the company, then all of the Directors will benchmark themselves
against Jasper and demand promotions as soon as they reach Jasper’s low level
of competency.
As with the Peter Principle, the best that you can do is mitigate
the Law of Crappy People and that mitigation will be critically important to
the quality of your company.
Fine line between fear and courage:
I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a
coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No
difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and
getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to
face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does
what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People
who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.
—Cus D’amato, legendary boxing trainer
What makes people want to follow a leader? We look for three key
traits:
- The ability to articulate the vision
- The right kind of ambition
- The ability to achieve the vision
Books recommended:
Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle
Andy Grove’s High output Management
