Key Insights

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  60 to 90% of product ideas fail to improve their intended metrics, illustrating the need to stop defaulting to 'go'.

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  Good strategy involves clear diagnosis, guiding policy with identity, and coherent action to address challenges effectively.

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  Repeated incongruence—leveraging competing incentives—helps teams adjust strategies by surfacing disagreements and truth.

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  Building political safety through trust—recognizing excellence, inducing stress, sharing info, and showing vulnerability—is key for decisions.

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  Data-informed decision making balances qualitative insight and quantitative data, avoiding data-driven pitfalls like the Challenger disaster.

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  Survival metrics are time-bound, contextualized, and tied to decision points, enabling teams to stop, pivot, or invest as needed.

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  Avoid sunk cost fallacy by cultivating repetition and muscle for re-diagnosis, adjusting guiding policies, and coherent actions.

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  Feature roadmaps and strict delivery dates erode trust due to noise buildup; decision journals and retrospectives improve transparency.

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  Anti-fragile organizations benefit from stress and shocks by avoiding technical, UX, and political debt through early small stress tests.

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  Storytelling frameworks like ABT (And, But, Therefore) enhance communication by framing strategy around problems, actions, and villains.

Notable Quotes