Pritesh

I had a conversation with Chris once about why good product thinkers are like good novelists. In both cases, didacticism is the enemy. Designing consumer internet products requires viewing humans as we really are, not how we wish we were.

A razor is a decision rubric that has an element of paradox or counter-intuitiveness to it, and as a result is particularly challenging and costly to apply.

There

are lots of rewards for heroic saves at work. But heroic saves undermine the desire to build better systems.

“An insight is a non-obvious truth about how one or more inflections can be harnessed to change people’s behavior.” While inflection points are about a tech wave, or regulatory / cultural shift, insight is fundamentally about customer behaviour. Inflections provide the ‘why now?’ and the insight helps you take advantage of it.

Novelty for novelty’s sake is addictive and makes one insufferable.

Identities are interfaces. They mediate between your interiority and the outside world. Each identity provides a set of affordances—things they allow you to do. If you have access to the identity “cop,” you can do and say things that others can’t.

Animator and cartoonist Walt Kelly reminds us that a lot of hard work is wasted:

“Having lost sight of our objectives, we redoubled our efforts.”

Source: ​ Pogo ​​​