I remember telling a friend some time ago what I thought the job of a product manager was. I said —
“Being a PM is about discovering and propagating truth.”
A PM’s job is to find out what users actually want & then corral the team to believe it so you can then build / distribute it to the rest of the world.
Now, what your users really want is usually not obvious (hence all the different frameworks to help guide you). And as I thought about this more, I realized that this notion of ‘discovering truths’ may be applicable to other things.
Namely discovering good startup ideas.
There are a number of sayings about good ideas, but a common one is that you have to be non consensus and right (from Howard Marks). If we plot ideas on a 2x2 matrix (one axis being consensus & non consensus, the other being right & wrong), the only ones that matter are those that are non consensus and right. Anything wrong is wrong. But being right and consensus is also bad— everyone already knows it, so there’s nothing interesting there. In Peter Thiel’s words, “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”
The thing about finding unknown truths (or being non consensus and right) is that it’s hard. They’re not lying in plain sight. And so to find truths, you have to always be on the lookout. An always on radar, searching.
So in an attempt to be more systematic / structured in my discovery of truths, I started to think through adjacent areas with a similar goal. And one of best analogies I found was that of an investigative journalist.
First off — what is an investigate journalist? By definition, it is:
“Exposing to the public matters that are concealed — either deliberately by someone in a position of power, or accidentally, behind a chaotic mass of facts and circumstances that obscure understanding. It requires using both secret and open sources and documents.”
An investigate journalist’s entire job is to discover truths that are obscured from the public.
And what makes a good investigative journalist:
An alert mind to recognize story ideas and important facts which people are trying to hide
An ordered mind to make notes, file information and fit lots of facts together
Patience to keep digging for information
Good contacts throughout society
Courage to withstand threats from people you are investigating
Sounds very much like a founder looking for an idea. Or an investor looking for a promising investment. Maybe that’s why so may journalists are becoming investors.
So to apply this — the job of an early stage founder is analogous to that of an investigative journalist. Less about looking for a problem to solve, more about discovering an important truth and building on top of that.
A frame that has been helpful to me is to think about the idea through the lens of a writing a big expose. Start with a hypothesis, and then using facts / public / private knowledge + referencing people in the know to prove or disprove it.
And as with most things in life, start small. Like a reporter, start with small truths / stories. Pay attention to the world around you, and listen to things that seem important but are being ignored. Dig into them, and report on them. Keep a blog (external or internal) and frame your idea journey as a series of stories. Each post reveals another key piece of data that further validates the overarching story. Eventually these form the building blocks to a large expose in which you now have enough evidence to prove that your hypothesis is now a foregone conclusion. It may lead to nothing, or it may lead to an idea that changes everything. Repeat until you find something interesting :).
In short, find a thread and pull on it until it unravels.
