Resources for product teams from industry experts.
Treat a startup as an optimization problem in which performance is measured by number of users. As anyone who has tried to optimize software knows, the key is measurement. When you try to guess where your program is slow, and what would make it faster, you almost always guess wrong.
Number of users may not be the perfect test, but it will be very close. It’s what acquirers care about. It’s what revenues depend on. It’s what makes competitors unhappy. It’s what impresses reporters, and potential new users. Certainly it’s a better test than your a priori notions of what problems are important to solve, no matter how technically adept you are.
— Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
So what do you do when there is a real need for a culture change “…”? Ideally, you introduce a new story while also valuing and honoring the old one. This is a little like having one brand identity while recognizing the power of the category essence. An organization’s fundamental story is usually derived from its product line, its founder, and early decisions that were made and encoded in an oral history that becomes its story.
Over time, the company hires people who have the right chemistry—meaning that they live by the same story. You can introduce new stories, but they are like new software. At this point, it works best to think of the historic brand identity as the operating system, which is inevitably still defined by the old story. All the new software needs is to be compatible. You can update the operating system, but replacing it requires you to start over, losing your brand equity.
— The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark, Carol S. Pearson
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