The 40th Edition - On SPADE, Labor Perception Bias, North Star Metric Patterns and Asking For Help
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Read: Square’s Framework For Difficult Decisions
Another day, another framework, another acronym.
The decision-making framework is called SPADE, an acronym that stands for Setting, People, Alternatives, Decide and Explain.
I’ve been thinking about execution a lot. (I nearly shared this cringe article which suggests that we should just execute better.)
I am definitely starting to feel like lift-and-shifting someone’s frameworks can be a fool’s errand.
(What’s better is perhaps hiring analysts + poets to unpack and then re-contextualise the actual frameworks in use in our orgs.)
Alas, it’s a framework from Square, it’s an article in the First Round Review, so I bet you’re curious.
Watch: Steve Jobs on Failure
Steve Jobs from the deep past urges you to ask people for help.
He says that most people don’t ask. And while that might sound like a hook for a cliche Twitter thread, I can 100% co-sign this one.
Most people actually don’t ask.
Everything changed for me when I started asking: questions, favours, even showing plain curiosity. Simple?
Who outside of your circle have you asked for help in the last 30 days?
Remember
When in doubt: scope way down, shorten the timeframe, & make it a requirement that at the end something is shipped. Never fails to unlock creativity and impact.
Maggie Crowley (source)
The number of daily users runs to well over a billion, perhaps it’s closer to two. Yet we never thought about such big numbers. We were too busy focusing on small details. Every day at Apple was like going to school, a design-focused, high-tech, product-creation university.
Ken Kocienda (source)
Consider
Labor Perception Bias: The growth.design guys dropped another banger and taught us all about Labor Perception Bias. The reason why I highlight it is that we’re so often focusing on “making something easier” in product & UX, which often translates into “faster”. It turns out that in some cases, fast can hurt. (source)
Free Distribution Is a Moat: Teams overtook Slack’s DAU when the pandemic hit (by a lot). Someone quipped that Microsoft knows the key to success in Enterprise software is pleasing CIOs and CTOs, not the end users. Those times were hectic, so the solution with the least amount of friction obviously won. To be fair, B2B software is the most backwards thing, but sounds like relationships, proven business models and long-standing agreements are key. (source)
North Star & Input Metric Patterns: The post I wrote about common North Star Metric patterns didn’t hit my success criteria for a sequel. But you can have my notes for the sequel, because I like you. (source)
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