Value is created through innovation, but how much of that value accrues to the innovator depends partly on how quickly their competitors imitate the innovation. Innovators must deter competition to get some of the value they created. These ways of deterring competition are called, in various contexts, barriers to entry, sustainable competitive advantages, or, colloquially, moats. [Taxonomy of Moats - Reaction Wheel]
Debugging with Jam.dev -- super great tool for capturing and communicating bugs, has some AI features built in with more on the way.
In 2009 Yishan Wong wrote a series of blog posts based on his time at Facebook.
His essay "Let process be implemented by those who practice it" advocates for a bottoms-up approach to implementing process where those who are directly involved in its day-to-day application are the ones to design and enforce it.
This concept forms a cornerstone of my philosophy on operational leadership.
You should read and save the entire post. Out of fear that link rot, I've copy/pasted 5 key highlights here.
Read on, bookmark the original, and use the principles!
No fluff
These are my 3 go-to resources whenever questions on the topic of establishing a customer success function come up.
This is a simple list of great reading on strategic operations.
This post contains 3 template docs, 2 of which are foundational for a great hiring process.
As always, this is standing on the shoulders of giants, largely:
3 frameworks/templates that make it easy to clarify and productively thrash any problem.
Operations rules everything. It’s the operators in the control room. It’s the engineers trying to figure out why the oxidizer keeps going down. It’s the guy in the warehouse making sure it’s first in first out. It’s the account manager getting yelled at on the phone by a customer. It’s the technician making $15/hour waiting for the viscosity to stabilize before signing off on a passed quality test. You need it all to work in harmony if you want to stay in this game for the long run.
Value a company based on their ability to ship products and samples at progressively higher scales as fast as your customers can send the requests. Bonus points if they can pivot at a reasonable pace when given new information too.
Resources and notes on running effective 1:1s.
May they save you some Googling 🫡
If you read only one thing, read The Update, The Vent, and The Disaster.
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