Kassen Qian

The Lean Startup model has pretty much become the orthodoxy for launching a new product or company today: build an extremely rough version one, launch it, find some users, and then iterate on the product as quickly as you can (pivoting).

Most PR/FAQs are rejected, and the ones that pass often generate further questions that need to be answered. This is a feature, not a bug. Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product preserves your company's resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and the business.

You're a CEO: Gross overstatement except for senior PM roles. The majority of PM jobs involve ... little meaningful control over resourcing, zero actual reporting authority over anyone, nor much, if any, say in the budgeting process. But in terms of responsibility, the buck stops with you. If the product fails, it is your fault.

I want you to consider instead the possibility that Waterfall came to exist, and continues to exist, for the convenience of managers: those who need you to promise them something specific, and then deliver exactly what you promised them, when you promised you’d deliver it.

1. Focus only on what warrants discussion

We don’t launch on date, we launch on quality.

Stripe values quick-thinking, quick-acting people with "taste": if you spend the time and you put a lot of thought into appreciating something, teasing apart what makes it great, and building a thoughtful, opinionated perspective, that’s taste.

There are idiosyncrasies of software development that are invariant even as technique and technology improves, and so you are bound to recapitulate these patterns eventually.

How can we understand the different types of value that PMs of different levels bring to the table and use that information to effectively build a PM organization?