Most ideas (and thus projects) fail:

The vast majority of [ideas] fail in experiments, and even experts often misjudge which ones will pay off. At Google and Bing, only about 10% to 20% of experiments generate positive results. At Microsoft as a whole, one-third prove effective, one-third have neutral results, and one-third…

1. Be Interested In Other People
2. Let The Other Person Feel That The Idea is His or Hers.
3. Talk About Your Own Mistakes Before Criticizing The Other Person
4. Dramatize your idea
5. Talk of in terms of the other person’s interests (whats in it for them)

There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery. — Enrico Fermi

Why do people love their job? Because of Creativity, Control, and Impact

Approach with a Craftsman mindset, “what can I offer to the world? And will I love the process of getting better at this?”

Take on challenging projects. It forces you to learn rare and niche skills.

Having a good KR in OKR

“Launch features to enable instructors to create more engaging videos” is an initiative — and a bad one. A good Key Result would be “Increase video watch time from X to Y.”

Marissa Mayer — “It’s not a Key Result unless it has a number”

As you go from a single contributor to a manager, no one tells you the rule that you are not longer graded on how hard you work by rather the decisions you made. So when you are stuck, instead of working harder, try to figure out the priorities of the company and how you and your team can execute on them.

We need to scale meaning, before we scale teams.

When we put more people on projects, we need to make sure that responsibilities, autonomy, and meaning remains intact. When everyone creates values they can observe and understand, they keep operating effectively.

Three broad categories of churn specifically in relation to online services like SaaS companies:

• Account Churn- Where the customer is completely lost and is no longer using or paying for the service.
• Product Churn- Where the customer has lowered their subscription profile but remains a paying user.

“You have to look at the net profitability of the retention campaign. If I offer an incentive to customers most likely to churn, they may not leave the company, but will it be profitable for me? The traditional method is focused on reducing churn, but we contend the goal should be maximizing profits, rather than only reducing churn.