Tell me you’re a novice without telling me you’re a novice; examples:
- Product Managers who quote frameworks instead of *using* frameworks (with experienced PMs, product frameworks are so internalised they almost never cite them; got this from )
Conversation
- Judoka who focus on throws instead of grips. (Grips are often as if not more important than throws; assuming everyone can throw equally effectively)
- Founders who do marketing by talking about features instead of pains.
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Note, thanks to a prod by — these observations are meant to be positive, not negative! Do: “for every observation, this is how you can go after expertise”, not “oh so you’re a novice boohoo.”
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So:
- Internalise the intuitions behind product frameworks
- Focus on grips in addition to the mechanics of a throw
- Learn how the best founders link product features to customer pains.
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(I realise the framing of ‘tell me you’re a novice without telling me you’re a novice’ is somewhat negative, but then this tweet was literally inspired by a PM telling me “oh, I think so-and-so is still quite inexperienced; he keeps talking about theory.”)
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Is this a specific case of the general truth that novices and experts direct their attention differently? Novices tend to focus on the outcome more than the setup, etc.?
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I haven’t thought about this, I was mostly going off the observation (common in expertise research circles) that expert-novice differences are one of the most fruitful ways to dig into a particular form of expertise!
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Yep! I don't love the expert-novice research paradigm, but there've definitely been studies on how both groups differ on what they attend to -- perceptual expertise, for sure, but also a wide range of occluded video studies (with cricket and baseball, for instance)
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Oh, what about the expert-novice research paradigm do you not like? I've found it quite useful as a practitioner (to figure out what experts in my domain are paying attention to that I am not).
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Two things, really:
- all expertise research has the small-n problem, so you either have to broaden the expert group or run the risk of idiosyncracies skewing results.
- they're observational studies, which limits their explanatory and effective power; they could fall victim...
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to a similar sort of attention problem (if the researchers don't detect or ask about some important factor that happens to differ between the groups)
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