Another business expertise thing that doesn’t seem talked about as much, mostly because the skill is so context specific:
Managing the tension between ‘bias for action’ and ‘wow, that was a really stupid waste of an iteration, wasn’t it?’
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I’m absolutely sure this skill exists, that people with more experience/expertise in a particular business eventually learn it, but I’m not sure how to teach it or even learn it for myself (for a particular business)
It seems most people just trial and error their way to it.
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And, yes, ‘stupid iteration’ and ‘trashing wildly’ are real failure modes, and common in earlier stage companies, mostly because ‘doing the grindy work makes us feel good about ourselves, and helps us avoid the difficult questions about our product.’
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To be clearer: the skill lies in deciding WHICH hypotheses are worth testing.
In nearly every business/product, some hypotheses are so dumb they shouldn’t be tested.
The problem is having the judgment to make that call consistently.
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What this looks like in practice: saying “well you wouldn’t know until you try, right?” to everything.
This is true, but bets have costs.
Also it probably implies that no judgment or intuition for the space exists.
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I generally consider "bias for action" a philosophical/cultural/process decision more than a skill.
(i.e., a person's read for when to use it depends more on circumstances/context/emotion.)
Curious to learn more alternative perspectives/examples tho!
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Steve said "one thing I've learned working for Jeff is that he is a man of action. If there's a traffic jam on the highway, he'd rather take the side roads even if it takes him longer to reach his destination. He must always be moving. It's inspiring, and sometimes infuriating."
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Tempering ‘bias for action’ with ‘reflect and learn’ is the skill. The failure mode is too much of one or the other!
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In my experience many people have pretty good intuition by default. But these gut-feelings are often polluted by pressure to perform. More experience, next to helping with pattern recognition, has a side-effect to reduce pressure, and listen to the voice that was there all along.
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