Kassen Qian

You’re a hammer: You live and you die based on your ability to convince other people to do what you need them to do for the good of the product. A hammer swings and builds -- push your team to ship.

1. The Role of Technology: in strong product companies, technology is not an expense, it is the business.

Your team dynamic is something you can always affect, even if you have no meaningful influence over the major strategic decisions of an organization.

Three consistent themes for identifying winning product organizations:

1. Know Your Team's Dunbar Number : Building real relationships both broadly and deeply within the company while not overextending. Engineers should have a keen and current understanding of not only what the work is, but also the decisions behind each product feature. Context is king for cross-functional teams.

The way you get things done is very relationship-driven at our company. So you have to be able to build influence.

The PR/FAQ process merely increases the odds that your product would succeed; it doesn’t guarantee it.

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