“Dream in years; plan in months; evaluate in weeks; ship daily.”

“People are always going to ask you to do more. If you follow them blindly, you can end up being in a different market. Your product can have more features and a bigger footprint and more complexity than it originally had — and lose the focus that made it so valuable in the first place,” says Basecamp product manager Ryan Singer.

Discover for value and then deliver on that value. Use your product vision as a lens to focus your discovery, but use the qualitative feedback from your customers to refine what you deliver.

Along with finding out who pays you the money, it’s important to understand who influences the use of your product and who evangelizes your product. In complex product sales the person buying from you (e.g., line manager) may not be the person paying you

Successful leaders don’t assume that hiring smart people is enough, just as they understand that using smart tools or processes is not enough. Without the right guidance and direction, neither great people nor perfect processes will produce good results.

“One KPI is revenue. That’s just a simple one. If we can’t sell it, can’t generate revenue, then it’s not performing. The other [metric] is NPS, net promoter score, which has swept basically all industries by storm.

Avoid the expense of failure and product debt by doing as much lightweight testing as is reasonable. This is the best way to ensure that what you’re building is going to be useful and usable.

He believes that a vision is long term, but the strategy is probably no more than a year or so. “The roadmap is even shorter, maybe six months out. It tells how the key features will come in actual releases.”

The first principle is that we think big but start small. This means thinking about a big vision and then ruthlessly cutting the scope so we can ship. Because our next principle is ship to learn, which means shipping as fast as possible so we can learn as fast as possible. The third principle is to design from first principles — to start with a bla