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Notes:

  • Introduction
    • Focus on the users, create great services, figure out the money stuff later
    • Hire as many talented software engineers as possible, and give them freedom
    • Offer employees plenty of freedom and use communication as a tool to keep everyone moving in the same general direction
    • Three powerful technology trends have converged to fundamentally shift the playing field on most industries: Internet, mobile devices, cloud computing
    • Product excellence is now paramount to business success
    • Product development has become a faster, more flexible process, where radically better products stand on the shoulder of lots of iterations. The basis for success then, and for continual product excellence, is speed
  • Culture – believe your own slogans
    • When starting a new company or initiative, culture is the most important thing to consider
    • ponder and define what sort of culture you want at the outset of your company’s life
    • The difference between successful companies and unsuccessful ones is whether employees believe the words
    • Those values should clearly and plainly outline the things that matter most to the company, the things you care about
    • A product manager’s job is to work together with the people who design, engineer, and develop things to make great products. Product managers need to work, eat, and live with their engineers
    • Be very generous with the resources they need to do their work, be stingy with the stuff that doesn’t matter
    • Obligation to dissent – if someone thinks there is something wrong with an idea, they must raise that concern
    • The rule of seven – managers have a minimum of seven direct reports. With that many direct reports, there simply isn’t time to micromanage.
    • There are tipping points in knave density. It approaches a critical mass and people starts to believe they need to be knave-like to succeed
    • Give your smart creatives control, and they will usually make their own best decisions about how to balance their lives
  • Strategy – your plan is wrong
    • The plan is fluid, the foundation stable
    • The company didn’t need to document its plan, but in order to hire new people and keep everyone moving in the same direction, it did need tot document the foundation for that plan
    • Google strategy – bet on technical insights that help solve a big problem in a novel way, optimize for scale, not for revenue, and let great products grow the market for everyone
    • Technical insight example – PageRank, using the web’s link structure as a roadmap to the best answer
    • A technical insight is a new way of applying technology or design that either drives down the cost or increases the functions and usability of the product by a significant factor
    • Scale – to grow something very quickly and globally.
    • A platform is, fundamentally, a set of products and services that bring together groups of users and providers to form multisided markets
    • Platforms generally scale more quickly when they are open
  • Talent – Hiring is the most important thing you do
    • For a manager, the right answer to the question “What is the single most important thing you do at work?” is hiring
    • In a peer-based hiring process, the emphasis is on people, not organization
    • A workforce of great people not only does great work, it attracts more great people
    • Passion is crucial in a potential hire, as is intelligence and a learning mindset. Another crucial quality is character, someone who is interesting.
    • Diversity in hiring is the right thing to do
    • Look for someone who can do the job well tomorrow as well as today
    • Dos and Don’ts
      • Hire people who are smarter and more knowledgeable than you are
      • Don’t hire people you can’t learn from or be challenged by
      • Hire people who will add value to the product and our culture
      • Don’t hire people who won’t contribute well to both
      • Hire people who will get things done
      • Don’t hire people who just think about problems
      • Hire people who are enthusiastic, self-motivated, and passionate
      • Don’t hire people who just want a job
      • Hire people who inspire and work well with others
      • Don’t hire people who prefer to work alone
      • Hire people who will grow with your team and with the company
      • Don’t hire people with narrow skill sets or interests
      • Hire people who are well rounded, with unique interests and talents
      • Don’t hire people who only live to work
      • Hire people who are ethical and who communicate openly
      • Don’t hire people who are political or manipulative
      • Hire only when you’ve found a great candidate
      • Don’t settle for anything less
  • Decisions – The true meaning of consensus
    • When it comes to making decisions, you can’t just focus on making the right one. The process by which you reach the decision, the timing of when you reach it, and the way it is implemented are just as important as the decision itself
    • One of the most transformative developments of the Internet Century is the ability to quantify almost any aspect of business
    • Consensus is not about getting everyone to agree. Instead, it’s about coming to the best idea for the company and rally around it
    • Exhibit a bias for action, to cut off debate and analysis that is no longer valuable, and start moving the team to rally around the decision
  • Communications – Be a damn good router
    • In Internet Century you hire people to think
    • The most effective leaders today don’t hoard information, they share it
    • It must be safe to tell the truth
    • Conversation is still the most important and valuable form of communication, but technology and the pace of work often conspire to make it one of the rarest
  • Innovation – Create the primordial ooze
    • Innovation is the next big thing
    • Innovation entails both the production and implementation of novel and useful ideas
    • For something to be innovative, it needs to be new, surprising, and radically useful
    • Determine the pursue of an idea:
      • The idea has to be something that addresses a big challenge or opportunity, something that affects hundreds of millions or billions of people
      • They have to have an idea for a solution that is radically different from anything currently in the market
      • The breakthrough technologies that could bring that radical solution to life have to be at least feasible and achievable in the not-too-distant future
    • Not everyone is innovative. So the ooze doesn’t just allow the innovators to innovate, it needs to let everyone else participate and thrive too
    • The obvious benefit of thinking big is that it gives smart creatives much more freedom. It removes constraints and spurs creativity
    • If you want to create a car that gets 10 percent better mileage, you just have to tweak the current design, but if you want to get on that gets five hundred miles per gallon, you need to start over. Just the thought process – How would I start over? – can spur ideas that were previously not considered
    • Creativity loves constraints
    • When you want to spur innovation, the worst thing you can do is overfund it
    • Engineers can spend 20 percent of their time working on whatever they choose
    • Ship and iterate: New ideas are never perfect right out of the chute, and you don’t have time to wait until they get there
  • Conclusion – Imagine the unimaginable
    • It is a world of platforms
    •  Technology progress follows an inexorable upward trend. Follow that trend to a logical point in the future and ask the question: What does that mean for us? Start by asking what could be true in five years

 

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