10 Things About Building The Right Things, Right
I am slowly returning to my routine after a 2-weeks vacation has disturbed my morning, writing, reading, and every other routine. 😊 This made me think about how to design life to withstand disturbance. Which also got me to think about building things, the right things, the right way.
I am a builder—an engineer at heart. Until I got to high school, I was breaking things hoping to fix them, or I would get excited when things broke, so I could look at what was inside to get them fixed.
I miss those electrical shocks I experienced trying to explore things when I was probably around 4 or 5. Back then, they didn’t have baby-proofing checklists. It was the 80s 😊
As a sophomore, I once programmed a hand robot armed with a camera to play Monopoly. It was fun, but the dice would sometimes fly to the roof. The system was buggy, but I could play for an extended 15 min or so. No wonder Elon is bringing his army of code reviewers from Tesla to review the Twitter code base. If only he can open source it, it would be a lot faster and cheaper 😉
I have also built systems and algorithms to price bonds, futures, and swaps and trade them.
I have also built things that have failed, could not scale or took a lot of time to release until the opportunity was missed.
Therefore, I have a thing or two to say about building things. Building the right things, the right way.
Currently, I am building a startup, teams, and products. And worried that my head would explode :P
What is worse than building the wrong thing? Building the wrong thing the right way thinking you are building the right thing 😊
You want to increase your odds of building the right thing while making sure you are building it the right way.
Building the right thing the right way should go hand in hand.
Here are my two cents. I will elaborate more in future lists.
1. The WHY - MTP
What is your mission or your Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP)?
If the WHY is clear, the how can change. If one thing fails, you can pivot when true to your why.
Also, building things takes a lot of work. A string WHY gets you through the grueling and mundane of building things.
2. Decide
“Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again.” ― Michael Jordan
It sounds intuitive, but it is not. Deciding what to build also means deciding what NOT to build. It also means committing to building something of value.
3. Ship early
“If You’re Not Embarrassed By The First Version Of Your Product, You’ve Launched Too Late” ― Reid Hoffman
It has yet to be determined what the right thing is initially. Your chances of building the right thing aligned with your mission and strategy are higher if you get customer feedback and test it quickly.
4. Ship often
5. Measure of Success
6. Fast Feedback loop
7. Buy Option to Decide Later
8. Building vs. Building for Customer vs. Building for Scale
9. Design for Failure
10. Design for Predictability
Reactive -> Proactive -> Predictive
More on this in future lists.
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