Einstein’s Desk.
Reflections on Process and Vision.
There’s something to be said about Einstein’s genius:
It was simultaneously creative and methodological.
His desk and blackboard perfectly encapsulate the very embodiment of that conflict, and what I think made him so powerful. The desk itself is a cluster fuck, yet the blackboard has some unbelievably advanced and precise math.
The image visualizes a conflict I’ve been mulling over for some time: I find that founders and founding teams are either too process oriented, or too vision driven.
Process Oriented Product People
The process oriented founders have usually spent a fair amount of time either as engineers, or as PM’s at larger companies. The keywords they most often use in their repertoire are:
<Testing><Customer Development><Data Driven Development><Iteration><A-B/Testing><Optimization>
They’re incredibly proficient as product development as a process. They get that intuition around UX and product isn’t always right, and they’re perpetually pushing for things to be tested with users, whether it’s a UX wireframe, or a recently shipped product. They believe in incremental gains, and testing options before going with one.
If you ask them what their gut tells them about something they usually respond with “I don’t know, what does the data say?”
Vision Oriented Product People
These guys are also pretty easy to spot. They like to talk endlessly about the “white space” they’ve identified. They use the word “space” to talk about a cohort of companies working towards the same problem. They like to theorize about where the world is going, and never cite a single study to back their claims.
They fly by the seat of their pants, always. They have really big ideas, and they’re perpetually theorizing. They start phrases with “I believe” or “I think”, or speak in cliches: “Hire slow, fire fast.”
A startup with an amazing customer development and iteration process, but no vision, will find local maxima, but will never change the world.
A startup with a vision to change the world, but no process to bring that vision to a product people understand and love, will die frustrated the world never understood their dreams.
The “perfect” process allows room for both. If you perpetually test small iterations, tiny incrmeental improvements on your platform, you’ll optimize to find a local maxima, but may miss the larger opportunity.
If you spend all day theorizing on where the world is going, but have no ability to hone your product iteration of that vision, you’ll build products that people have a hard time understanding, with low adoption curves.
To all my friends who are process oriented::
Don’t be scared of the timeout to think. Reflect. Try to visualize where the world is going, and aim your incredibly efficient process in the right direction before starting. Optimizing the best sign up flow or viral hook in the world will be of no use if what you’re building isn’t needed by the world.
To all of us who are vision driven:
You may be right about your vision, but you may also be wrong. If you’re wrong, a good process will help you learn what was wrong about your vision quickly, and help you hone a new one faster. If you’re right, you still need to build a product people understand, and a good process will hone and polish your product so that it ships faster, and is best understood by people.
So…are you a process or vision driven person?
Take a timeout and see the benefits of the other side: It’ll only make you better and more impactful.
