“Instead of finding the product through discovery and iteration the goal is to reverse engineer the vision,” he explains. “If you take an incremental, discovery-led approach, then you might find yourself with product-market fit in a local maximum, building a company that you don’t want to lead.”
When you’re focused on something few others are thinking about, you find yourself constantly making the case to yourself and others that your vision is worth pursuing and worthy of other people’s attention. This ongoing need to justify your work creates a significant emotional overhead.
Building a great product is a bit like marriage: if you commit your life to making it excellent over long periods of time, and earnestly care about understanding the other person (users), you’ll be surprised at what you can build.
Cultivate what Adam terms a “challenge network,” a cohort of people you can rely on to give you unvarnished feedback
If you want to reach your full potential, you’ll need to have your logic torn apart to discover holes, allowing you to improve your reasoning, so you make better decisions
I look at product as an act of, how does this get communicated through the distribution channel we need to use. Said another way: if this product doesn't make a pretty compelling social ad -> we ain't doing it.