RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

Focusing is great for analyzing alternatives but terrible for spotting them. Think about the visual analogy — when we focus we sacrifice peripheral vision. And there’s no natural corrective for this; life won’t interrupt our focus to draw our attention to all of our options.

— Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work by Chip Heath, Dan Heath

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Habits are behavioral autopilot, and that’s why they’re such a critical tool for leaders. Leaders who can instill habits that reinforce their teams’ goals are essentially making progress for free. They’ve changed behavior in a way that doesn’t draw down the Rider’s reserves of self-control. Habits will form inevitably, whether they’re formed intentionally or not. You’ve probably created lots of team habits unwittingly. If your staff meetings always start out with genial small talk, then you’ve created a habit. You’ve designed your meeting autopilot to yield a few minutes of warm-up small talk. The hard question for a leader […]
  2. Innovation Accounting (IA) is a way of evaluating progress when all the metrics typically used in an established company (revenue, customers, ROI, market share) are effectively zero. It provides a framework of chained leading indicators, each of which predicts success. Each link in the chain is essential and, when broken, demands immediate attention. It’s a focusing device for teams, keeping their attention on the most important leap-of-faith assumptions. It’s a common, mathematical vocabulary for negotiating the use of resources among competing functions, divisions, or regions. It provides a way to tie long-term growth and R&D into a system that […]
  3. Exploration almost never results in a single plan, but rather exposes several alternatives that are promising enough for serious consideration. Evaluation of alternatives typically occurs “on paper” before an artifact is produced. Once an artifact has been produced, there is almost always an evaluation through testing by the user. Users are clearly best at assessing, through their own experience, whether an artifact actually closes the sensed gap in their experience. — Design: Creation of Artifacts in Society by Karl Ulrich Source: Amazon Kindle […]
  4. A well-conceived vision consists of two major components — core ideology and an envisioned future. Notice the direct parallel to the fundamental “preserve the core/stimulate progress” dynamic. A good vision builds on the interplay between these two complementary yin-and-yang forces: it defines “what we stand for and why we exist” that does not change (the core ideology) and sets forth “what we aspire to become, to achieve, to create” that will require significant change and progress to attain (the envisioned future). To pursue the vision means to create organizational and strategic alignment to preserve the core ideology and stimulate […]
  5. Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology. Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers’ struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users […]

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