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The narrative is the story of what you’re building in the context of why it matters.

• What inspired the idea?
• Why does it need to exist?
• What makes it relevant?
• How does it make the future better?

Prime your audience to the point where they know: 

• Why they’re there 
• What they can accomplish 
• What to do next

For any product with aggressive growth aspirations more than 30% of your energy should ...

The best leaders of productive teams are the ones coming up with clever ways to get their colleagues to act:

• Promote plans, through graphic representation of milestones, a communications campaign that repeats goals or time-bound declarations like Pinterest’s “Year ...

The paradox of product success is that when you focus on pleasing your most engaged users, you stop engaging new ones. The sad reality—and the opportunity for start-ups—is that most established products take their large user bases for granted and fail to maintain simplicity over time.

Forci...

Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora, has advocated for every project having a “DRI”—a Directly Responsible Individual—whom the entire team knows to go to and rely on for that particular area. Things leaders must do to make sure DRIs are effective:

• #delegate:

When you make a bold decision that changes your strategy and the day-to-day responsibilities of your team, your job is to foster alignment. The most effective way of communicating this vision was to declare it. Not blunting the blow with a narrative that made the changes sound less drastic.

“The question that I find most helpful to ask is [when asking people to read my drafts]:

If you had to keep 10% , which 10% percent would you keep, and if you had to, absolutely had to cut 10%, which 10% would you cut?

The interpretation:

It only requires one vo...

The lazy-vain-selfish principle is true for all kinds of first product experiences:

In the first 30 seconds, your visitors are lazy in the sense that they have no extra time to invest in something they don’t know. They are vain

As the team grows, misalignment happens: deadlines are missed, communication is inconsistent etc. Process is how we force alignment when it doesn’t happen naturally: Check-ins, organisational diagrams, approval processes etc. But process can slow down progress, because people don...