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?’
Conversation
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.
4
6
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.’
1
12
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.
3
1
8
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.
Replying to
following the thought around "bets have costs" does it then make sense to say that the closest way to be good at this would be to know how to reduce the cost of the bet to a relatively negligible amount?
1
Replying to
I suppose some bet costs can be reduced. But all bets have costs, the most expensive of which is time and focus.
Quote Tweet
It strikes me that every business operator eventually comes to realise that “opportunities have costs”.
This sounds very trite, but I guarantee you you will make this mistake at least once, because it’s so hard to internalise.
Show this thread
1