[MUSIC] So I'm distrustful of any CEO who doesn't know the products of their company while. In particular when they don't know exactly where the value is for customers. In the readings you'll find two posts from intercom, the Dublin company that have now raised a total of 116 million. These are an example of a sharing culture. They have a blog, they have podcasts, they have talks and they are all excellent. And why do they do this? Think back to Salim Ishmael and his concept of Scale and Ideas. Scale S-C-A -L-E, Ideas I-D-E-A-S. In order to attract talent to engage with community, to generate sales to word of mouth. They put out information about their company and they believe this is of overall benefit. Also, they have an attitude to those employees that the work can be done from anywhere. Their director of support is based remotely in the Italian alps. This gives them perspective to think deeply about problems rather than engaging all the time in tactical triage. The first reading is called your product is already obsolete. In this reading it's a long post, you can read it for yourself, but just think of this. Just think of this quote which is from a children's book. The Little Prince. The quote is as follows, perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away. This is quite a profound way of thinking. If you think about your job as a product designer, even in a product centric company. A product centric company is, by the way, a company which has generally been set up by founders created product they want to use for themselves. With their job is adding usually. So it's the idea of USBS and cars in hotel rooms. It's the idea of adding functionality, adding, adding, adding. However a key function of all product design is also subtracting, the idea of taking things away. I remember when Steve jobs removed the described from the first version of the iMac, it was a huge huge issue. What can we do with all our floppy drives? If do you even know what floppy drives are now? If you also think about the back of the seat pockets on Ryanair planes. If you think about what they've done they took away back of the seat pockets then people don't put things in. And that makes the plane easier to clean and therefore easier to turn around. The second reading is that not all good products make good business. Not all good products make good businesses. I'll say the second time. We enter into the territory of the viability, feasibility, desirability triangle. It's probably something you've not seen before. It's the balance between three different things. Something has to be viable, feasible and desirability. It's not good enough to have just one of those things. In the reading, the reference for separate things that you need to be aware of. First, just be aware of small, rare problems. In other words, something that is of great interest to a small number of people. But not enough for mass market scalability. If you're too close to these people, you may think it's a bigger problem than it actually is. The second is to be aware of offering a cheap, complex product. The danger of offering something cheap is that lots of people will buy it. But they won't use it, and ultimately you need people to use your product isn't enough just to get them to buy it. Thirdly, is beware of solving problems that people know about or don't care about. In other words, these this idea that lots of people know about it, but no, they don't care enough about it. And number four is this idea of solving problems that you can't experience yourself. This is a really dangerous thing. Somebody tells you something is a problem. But if you're heading a company, if you're investing resources, can you really tell that this is enough of a problem? Sometimes people can lead you in the wrong direction. Looking at these four things is really the last check that you need to make on your product before you pour in the sales and marketing dollars. We discussed that scaling up a company is really about that. In other words, you have product market fit, you have found something that's a valuable. What you need to do now is poor in sales and marketing dollars in order to ramp up. Make more people aware of your product and sell more product. So one of the most influential books in Silicon Valley is Andy Grove's book high output management. Andy Grove is the guy that scaled intel. He wasn't a founder, but he was the guy that scale the company. Andy he has a famous phrase called only the paranoid survive. He talks about how success can breed complacency, and complacency then leads to failure. To say to someone only the paranoid survive seems very strong statement to make. But as I mentioned in scaling, you're actually more at risk than you are in starting. Even though it feels better because you've achieved amount of success, you start to feel less vulnerable. But actually you're making big decisions could really affect the company. As we've mentioned before scaling is much harder than starting. So you have to have a mentality that any amount of success can be complacency. You need to warn against this and you need to be paranoid. [MUSIC]
