Nate Sullivan

Elephants

One consistent factor across the now numerous early-stage companies I've worked at for the last decade or so is the presence of proverbial "elephants in the room". Everywhere I've been, there has always been something bigger and more fundamentally important than the things we were working on, that everyone senior-enough knew was more important, but that we all knew wouldn't/couldn't ever be addressed. Sometimes it was a business model issue, and what we were selling just wasn't as valuable to people as we wanted/needed it to be. Sometimes it was a product issue where we built out too many mini-solutions to user issues and ended up with a confusing mess that no one would ever get permission to purge (because everything that comprised the mess, individually, solved a customer issue somewhere). Oftentimes the issue was a technological one, especially when our business leader wasn't sufficiently technical, and our technical leader was perfectly happy to watch the ship slowly sink as long as it continued to prove he was the smartest guy in the room.

On the other hand, I have never worked at a company without at least a couple of talented people (often many, many more) who really impressed me, and this has been especially true during my startup binge from 2008-2022. So there have always been voices -- loud, frustrated, pleading -- calling out these elephants, suggesting ways to engage with them, and ultimately giving up and either accepting the way things would have to be, or moving somewhere where the elephants were either more palatable, or less obvious.

No Refunds

Although the "talented" adjective is debatable, I'm pretty sure I'm from the bucket of people who have trouble looking past the elephants. I've left all of my jobs pretty amicably, but I can tell you the exact moment when I knew I had to leave each one. So far, every single time it's been over the collision of what the company wanted me to do, and one of these elephants. My favorite was back at Bamboo -- I wasn't even 30 yet -- where our new CEO and his consultants wanted us to create a "Bamboo Way", not unlike their favorite store Bauhaus, where we'd guarantee that customers would be happy. This sounded very ambitious, so I asked if we'd be expanding our refund policy for customers who weren't happy, since we'd usually get a decent amount of those. The CEO looked at me like I was crazy. "No, definitely not. We're not talking about refunds, here. This is more of a feeling than a specific policy."

At 28 or 29 or whatever I was at the time, I thought this was rank hypocrisy, but now that I've had more C-level bosses, I realize that it was really just garden-variety self-justification. Customers should always be happy, yes, but there are LOTS of ways to make customers happy, and we should just do the ones that don't require us to ever give them money. We should build better products, and provide better support. Easy!

But ultimately the elephant in the room was that we weren't actually built to do that, and we were cutting costs at the same time with a mandate to increase profitability, so there was no reason to think we would suddenly become more capable anytime in the future. We were setting ourselves up to not only fail, and lie to customers, but then to allow everyone to blame nebulous factors and boogeymen for that failure once it happened. When there was no real counterargument to this existential assessment other than "it's more complicated than that" without any follow-up explanation of what those complications actually were, it was pretty clear what was about to happen. Over the next couple of months, some people left, some people didn't, but for everybody in that room it was pretty clear you were either able to ignore the elephant in the room or you weren't, and if you weren't you needed to go. For the first time in my career, I was one of those people who needed to go, so I did, despite an incredible amount of affection and loyalty to the place.

Deck Chairs

At most of the other places I've worked, the elephant in the room is usually related to the nexus of product, technology, and business (which makes sense at the kind of growing technology startups I've spent my time at). I wrote about this in another post, but the venture capital treadmill makes many of these elephants almost inevitable. You start with something powered almost exclusively by vision, and then begin the process of delivering that vision with resources that have extremely specific strategic and operational milestones and timelines attached to them. They aren't articulated, but they're there -- you start burning money at a rate that necessitates more funds than you can generate from customers (which means going back to VCs or finding new ones), and those new funds rapidly become contingent on promising to operate a certain way or focus on certain things ("we are moving upmarket!"). Having only vision (versus an operating strategy) allows you to accept resources that -- eventually, inevitably -- dictate your operating strategy further down the road, vision be damned, and that's exactly what happens. Vague visions will survive (self-justification!), but they will quickly become eye-rolling corporate totems of resentment to everyone outside of new-employee orientation groups or ask-me-anything sessions with founders, because the vision is secondary to the operating requirements, and the operating requirements get more onerous every year. And no matter how far away the vision still is from reality, it's not getting any closer once the idea of product development becomes nothing more than a liability, and technology becomes nothing more than a cost.

Elephants all the way down, man.

At a certain size -- and it's not really that big -- the relevance of what you're working on to the actual stated purpose of a company (whether that is making money, or something else) can get pretty vague. You start to have goals that, if reached, seem to indicate that you are good at your job, and your function/department is a high-performing function/department, but if unpacked, may not actually have a whole lot to do with the stated purpose of the company as a whole. If you are in Marketing, you will probably get some sort of lead goal, and the way to succeed at work is to hit that lead goal, or maybe come up with a good, believable excuse for NOT hitting that lead goal. It is not to say "wait, do we actually need more leads?" Partially that's because that question is annoying, but mostly it's because the answer to that question is often complicated and opens up additional, cross-functional questions that are even more complicated, or worse, NOT that complicated but quite uncomfortable to answer honestly. Here's an example.

---

Q: Why do we need more leads?

A: To make more money.

Q: Can't we make more money off the leads that we have?

A: No.

Q: Why not?

A: Most of our leads don't buy anything.

Q: Why is that?

A: They don't think the product is worth paying for.

Q: Should we make a different product?

A: No. Product development is very hard and takes a long time, so we are better off getting better at selling what we have.

Q: But you just said most people don't think the product is worth paying for. Should we charge less?

A: No. In fact, so few people want this, we should probably charge the few people who DO want it a lot more.

Q: But then... won't an even smaller percentage of leads buy anything?

A: Yes.

Q: But... you want more leads?

A: Of course, we need more leads because even fewer of them are going to buy the same thing at a higher price. It's basic math.

Q: But if this product makes sense for such a small segment of people, isn't the pool of possible leads not just finite, but actually pretty small?

A: This other software company has a blog post that says they generated eighty kazillion leads last quarter, that's a lot more than us.

Q: Does our product do something similar to this other company's product?

A: It's software. We also make software.

Q: Right, but our software calculates the number of steel beams required to build bridges of different sizes, their software is for taking online payments.

A: Exactly, B2B software. We have some of the same investors.

Q: (blinks)

A: (stares)

Q: Is it possible that we've built a business that requires people to pay a lot of money for something they don't want that badly, but that also has extremely aggressive growth targets?

A: I have a hard stop at 2:18.

---

The correct move here, from a career development perspective, is to start visibly working on lead generation while simultaneously looking for a job at a different company. The correct move here from a management perspective is to provide at least somewhat better answers. I have been on both sides of this conversation, especially as I got older and got into management. Just as I became a parent of two very curious, very question-oriented children, I also became a manager facing a lot of these same questions from people who sounded like better educated versions of me from ten years earlier.

And there are better answers, to be sure. When the market for your product seems constrained, you can almost always expand it -- with a lot of effort -- at least a little bit more. When the product seems critically limited, there are almost always ways to make it a little more useful with non-technology tactics like templates, guides, and services. I learned about those avenues from smart, creative managers, and I did my best to suggest them when appropriate to people I managed. It went okay. I never got fired, and most of the places I've worked have ended up basically okay.

But the elephants are there for every one of them, and I don't expect them to get addressed... probably ever.

At the end of February, I left my job at Botify after an extremely eventful two years. I enjoyed my time there, and worked with a lot of cool people (from all over the world!) in a very weird, largely COVID-dominated environment that forced me to interact with everyone almost entirely via Zoom and Slack. Botify had an excellent financial 2021 as they continue to move up market pretty quickly, and just raised another $55 million dollars to do everything bigger and faster.

Also… I got extremely bored.

This isn’t really Botify’s fault, per se. Part of the appeal of working in a startup environment — in theory, at least — is that every one is different, and the capacity is always there to chart a new course. But that’s more mythology than anything else, because I’m actually talking about a very specific flavor of startup — the venture backed, B2B kind that tends to want to hire people who do what I’ve historically done. And those are… basically all the same. That probably sounds like lunacy to many of us who spend our time working in the nooks and crannies of different businesses, mastering obscure industry workflows and customer personas, but those are just the details. The details are important when you’re actually operating — you can’t ignore them — but in terms of fundamental challenges, when you zoom out (as I have after 15 years of this), it’s really just the same thing over and over again.

1. Find an inefficiency (especially one that results from things being not-distributed, or not accessible, or something else internet dust could conceivably address).
2. Raise some money, get a growth target from investors.
3. Do crazy, wacky things like listen to your customers. String everything together. Make a lot of slide decks. Hit some growth targets, miss some others.
4. Realize you need a lot more money to do this the way you want, or more commonly, the way your investors want.
5. Raise more money. Get a bigger growth target.
6. Look for richer customers. Maybe get one or two. Realize if all your customers were like this, you’d be fine.
7. Move UPMARKET.
8. Realize moving upmarket is very expensive. Raise more money, get an even bigger growth target as a result.
9. Move UPMARKET-ER

This is usually about when I quit. The reason I tend to last about 2 years at places like this is that, if you do a good job, that’s about how long it takes to go from “let’s move upmarket” to “this is great, let’s move upmarket-er”. The latter is when you really start to get removed from your product, increasingly dependent on relationship selling and professional services, and if you do it right, start to make a ton of money. We all turn into our parents or die trying to, and our startups all turn into Oracle or die trying to. I’m kidding, but only a little.

None of this is even remotely unique to Botify; I’ve literally done this four times now with different details but essentially the same fundamentals, which in short are “how do we take what we already have and make it interesting to people with insane amounts of money”. Doing this at FiscalNote — soon to be a public company! — from 2015 through 2018 was one of the most rewarding challenges of my career. I can’t take a lot of credit for pulling Gooten out of the dumpster (a lot of that work happened before I got there, which made hiring me even possible), but it was definitely challenging and interesting, even if the mechanics of the business model were a little different (more on that someday). Botify was, situationally, almost a carbon copy of FiscalNote’s up-market-er scenario, and at some point you just feel like you’re watching some forgettable slasher flick on TNT late at night, yelling “NO, DON’T GO IN THE OLD BARN!!!” at your TV. You need to watch some different kinds of movies, or go to bed.

Another Movie

My Dad never pushed me into sports, which I am generally really grateful for, as I have a very healthy relationship with sports as a crazy middle aged man from New England, and that’s not as common as it should be. But he did want me to try playing organized basketball instead of baseball, because I was objectively horrible at baseball (and often miserable even though I loved it), and weirdly good at driveway basketball. I didn’t listen — I was too nervous to try something new and fail — and as a result, I never got as good at basketball as I probably should have, given how much I loved it and was willing to work at it. As I got older, I eventually stopped playing baseball anyways, kept playing basketball at the playground, and eventually battled/hustled my way onto the junior varsity bench of my high school team where I turned the ball over constantly and was generally terrible and unplayable. Then again, I also chased down a kid once and blocked a shot off the glass to the delight and delirious cheers of my varsity teammates, a silly moment I remember to this day. Basketball was good to me and I will always love it.

Is Marketing is my baseball? Something I keep doing because it’s the first discipline I found that would take me, but ultimately not what I should be doing? Or is it the version of basketball I managed to avoid (thanks, Dad) — the thing I’m ultimately wired best for, but one that I’ve spent too much time with and thus simply don’t want to do anymore? I don’t know the answer (although I have theories, clearly), but either way it’s not something I should be doing right now if I can avoid it, and the fact is that in rampantly inequitable, tight-labor-market America, I can absolutely avoid it right now.

So then... what now?

I'm in a weird position. I have some subject matter expertise in a bunch of fairly useful, lucrative things that I don’t really want to do anymore, namely high growth sales & marketing process/strategy/tactics. I’m also pretty plugged in to the basics of modern software applications at a time where those things are really important and affect a lot of people. I’m not going to pivot to being a developer — I took computer science in college, I know not just that I am bad at this, but exactly why and how — but I’ve got some real literacy there. Also, I’m kind of a lunatic and I’ve done a lot of overthinking for the last four or five years about how businesses work.

All of this is why I am making a product. It’s called Resolution, and I’ve actually been working on pieces of it (and then throwing those pieces out and starting over) for a couple years now, in the background of going to work and raising kids and making my wife laugh. I’ll have a lot more to say about Resolution soon (duh), but here are the details that exist now and are important to me.

• Resolution is a general purpose tool designed to help non-math professionals use real math along with their own expertise to make better plans and decisions.
• It is not magic. It does not use AI/ML or do anything predictive. It might someday, but that will never be the core point of it. Instead, it will often make you smarter. But it does not do your work for you.
• I have been looking for something like Resolution for the last five or six years, to address a problem I’ve used whiteboards and spreadsheets to solve, but it is very much neither a whiteboard or a spreadsheet.
• I have not raised any money to build this. It is currently bootstrapped and self-funded (thanks, years of tech industry jobs!), and is being built by me and the fine people I’ve hired at Viget.
• The initial version of Resolution isn’t going to be fancy, but it is going to be cool and potentially useful to you. I have a big long, exciting (and feasible!) roadmap of additions and improvements that I think many of you will love.
• I will probably have some kind of Kickstarter-like thing to fund the next round of improvements, where you’d get access to this version in the meantime. But it’s not vaporware; I’m using it right now, and we should have something legitimately cool for you to try early this summer (or maybe even earlier).

The Part Where I am Weird

The toughest part about explaining Resolution to people is that there are several stories to tell inside all of this, and despite being generally disconnected, they are all pretty important and fairly nuanced. But in order of importance, the short versions are:

1. There is a huge gap between “data driven decision making” culture and people’s actual holistic understanding of what they are working on, and I think a big part of it is caused (or at least not improved) by the kinds of tools we use every day. This is the product/problem story, and that’s really what is most important to me and the driving impulse behind everything.
2. I have become increasingly disenchanted with how software is thought about and built. Entirely AI/ML-based solutions to everyday problems are simply not viable yet, and we’ve allowed the fact that ML can legitimately do some really cool things (like find pictures of things) to convince us that it’s going to be able to do the hard parts of our jobs (or our team’s jobs) soon. This is delusional, plain and simple, and I think very little energy is going into dealing with it.
3. Much of this is due to the fact that B2B software is dominated by venture-backed companies that have no long-term strategy other than being bought by a huge company (where their product will die from internal politics/innovator’s dilemmas or simply be forgotten about), or improbably IPO-ing and turning into Salesforce, at which point it will be able to be a piece of shit without any market consequence.
4. Therefore, as important as my product vision & purpose is (and it’s very important, that’s why it is first on this list), my “corporate” vision and strategy is almost as important, because simply going by the book and doing what I’m supposed to right now (“4x ENTREPRENEUR MARKETING GUY RAISES SERIES A, BECOMES QUIPPY THOUGHT LEADER”) would probably be a wild ride if I was even able to pull it off, but would absolutely not result in (a) good software or (b) solving the problem I’m allegedly passionate about. If I build a “lifestyle” business where I’m taking home what I’d be taking home at one of my normal jobs, but this thing is awesome and cheap and improving, and people are going less crazy at work because of it, I will continue doing that forever until I die.

In short, I never wanted to be a guy who started a business without a real purpose just because he wanted to be in charge or feel important, and — I swear to God — I don’t feel like that’s what I’m doing now, which is good. That being said, do I want to be in charge? Do I feel important? Yes, and… sort of yes, I suppose.

But that is all largely irrelevant. I will either get to do this because I build something useful and successfully get people to use it/get value from it/pay for it, or I will not, and I will be back at work somewhere teaching sales guys how to sound like they have some idea what they are talking about. It’s a living, and it’s a living I’ve enjoyed at certain points, and a bunch of people will vouch for me that I’m pretty good at it, so if that happens I’ll be fine.

For now, though, I’m just happy to be focused on thinking and building, at least for now. I’ll have lots and lots to share in just a couple weeks, whether it’s in this space, or somewhere else.

I have been lucky enough to work -- mostly -- in places that are primarily motivated by accomplishing something. How interesting that something actually is can vary quite a bit, but compared to organizations that work simply to maintain the status quo, or divide up the spoils of some long entrenched operation, most of my jobs have been comparatively idealistic. We will make this software, we will find these people, we will share this story, we will grow, and build, and succeed to a greater extent than we did the year before.

This is mostly a good thing, which is why I continue to try to spend my time working with these kinds of places. But it generates a specific kind of challenge, one that I've been dealing with for most of my professional life.

That challenge is... cost denial.

What is Cost Denial?

Cost denial is a term I just made up about ten seconds ago, sitting in this coffee shop. But, more importantly, it's also a form of bias that's -- sort of -- the opposite of loss aversion.

Disclaimer -- I am not an economist, or really any kind of scientist, nor especially good at math, or, if we're being honest, reading. Like many people, I have read scrolled through interesting listicles about logical fallacies, and it's possible I'm basically describing one of those. Either way, I want to establish a definition here so my examples and conclusions make as much sense as possible. So... sorry not sorry.

So anyways, yeah, cost denial. It's actually not really the opposite of loss aversion, because that would just be preferring gains to avoiding equivalent losses, which is probably just a description of FanDuel's business model, and not that interesting. Instead, I'm talking about cost denial, which is seeing the upside or potential gains of something and either denying or not understanding the existence of either the risks, or more likely, just the straight up costs of seeking the gains.

One of my favorite youthful exuberance stories is about a trip I took with my friend Jeff to see Wyclef Jean in concert, and yes that is a sentence I just wrote. It's not a complicated story -- we were driving on the highway to get to some faraway amphitheater, and missed our exit. This was way out in the middle of nowhere, so the next exit was several miles away, and of course we were late because we were a couple of dumb 19 or 20 year olds in a Ford Escort. I was stressed out by the situation, but Jeff wasn't. He got into the high speed lane, put his left turn signal on, turned onto the giant grassy median, and did an incredibly illegal u-turn on a major highway while I screamed "RISK ANALYSIS!!! RISK ANALYSIS, JEFF!!!!" and gripped the cupholder next to me for dear life.

Nothing bad happened to us, and we weren't late to see the local opener for Wyclef, thank God. But what was funny about the whole thing was the way both of us thought about the situation. I was screaming at Jeff to reconsider the cost-benefit analysis of doing a U-turn on a major highway to avoid being late for a Wyclef concern, but that didn't work because even when he reconsidered it, Jeff simply didn't see the same costs I did.

Life as a Series of Highly Illegal U-Turns

When this happened twenty years ago (and for some time thereafter), I wasn't able to articulate what really bothered me about Jeff's decision making in that moment, so I simply wrote off this and other debacles as "sometimes my friend decides to do idiotic things", and he probably wrote off my thinking as "Nate worries too much". Neither of these things are very good descriptions of what I now think -- after working with other people for years and years -- was actually happening.

In fact, just like at work, Jeff and I were basically talking past each other. Jeff, like a lot of startup founders/employees, was thinking about the opportunity at hand. He felt like he had a perfectly good command of what was going on -- very light traffic, a sufficiently flat median to cross -- and felt confident he could achieve the available gains without paying a price, despite having very limited time to assess the situation, consult others, etc. And... he was right!

I, on the other hand, was thinking about something different. Namely, what is the cost of generally making decisions in this way? It's not so much that I thought "this situation is extremely dangerous". I didn't think that then, and I don't really think it now. But what I do think is dangerous is a general tendency to act impulsively in response to making a mistake.

So while it probably felt like I was saying "why are you making this u-turn?", what I really meant was "why do you choose to operate this way?"

With the benefit of hindsight, I now think this is a classic example of cost denial. In this case, it required looking at every example of doing things a certain way (impulsively, in response to error) individually, and not in the aggregate. You then write off the things that don't work as outliers, and use the things that did work as justification for the lack of cost. In reality, if you zoom out, it's much easier to see the overall cost (and benefit!) of acting either "impulsively" or "decisively", depending on how you want to look at it, but this kind of cost denial prevents most of us from doing that when we've already decided we prefer acting one way or the other.

To be fair, you can probably guess that I'm a little more cautious than other people in my scenario, which means I have cost denial issues of my own. These usually manifest in me obfuscating away the cost of inaction, BUT, I'd like to think that over 15 years of professional work has given me an opportunity to correct that a bit, especially since it's a known issue and I work on it. You're reading the guy who once authorized thousands of dollars to get the Plain White Tees to play at a work event. I'm willing to shoot from the hip from time to time.

Benefit/not-Benefit Analysis

When you work at early stage companies -- especially ones with venture backing -- growth often fixes everything, at least in the immediate term. If you're growing but losing money, someone will usually give you money, or even buy your company. If you're not growing, or that growth is slowing, you're in trouble. There's a place for this mindset, but again, it does have a tendency to create a certain kind of opportunity bias. When I worked at FiscalNote, we literally had a company value called "Bias for Action" (I think we had something similar at Contactually) that meant when we weren't sure of what the downside of something was, but we felt good about the upside (or at least not bad), we'd often go ahead and do it. This is really common in venture startups, because standing still is death, and moving slowly isn't much better. You're burning cash and the clock is running. Something needs to HAPPEN.

This is all well and good until you get some traction and start growing. At some point -- usually 50-100 employees, maybe a little more, your organization becomes your biggest problem simply because now there are too many people doing too many things and pulling everything in different directions. Well-intentioned, usually inexperienced founder-leaders will come out and say something like "OUR UNIVERSAL GOAL IS THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE, IT'S OUR OBSESSION AND EVERYTHING IS UNIFIED AROUND THAT", but that's obviously meaningless as a true guiding device because there are a million things you could do to improve the customer experience and many of them will make that experience better in one way and worse in another.

So instead what happens is people bring ideas to other people (like me) that have some sort of upside, and say "let's do this". The first thing I ask, either literally or figuratively depending on the request, is "what is the cost of this." The ideas I am the most interested in are ones that have a very clear, often large cost, like deprecating a product line, or focusing on a smaller subset of customers. I'm interested not because I like getting rid of things (although sometimes I do), but because it's at least plausible to me that something with a large cost ($$$ or otherwise, but usually both) could conceivably have a large benefit, whereas most things that appear to have no cost either have no benefit, or more likely, have a secret, very large cost you will have to pay later at an incredibly inopportune time.

Given that most people's understanding of marketing departments is "those guys sure waste a lot of money", you'd think there would be a healthy appetite for discussing the cost of marketing activities. But there usually isn't, outside of raw channel dollars. Product and development teams tend to have a pretty clear license to say things like "if we build this thing you want, there will be an ongoing cost to support it", but for some reason that never seems to come up in marketing, or if it does, it's quickly hand-waved away because we need to act, dammit.

Cost Denial in Society

I've been talking a lot about cost denial at work because it's a pretty sterile way to feel out the concept. But I actually worry much more about cost denial in society, especially nowadays. A lot of the "move fast and break things" concepts that were born in the web software era have metastasized into general society at large, and many of the people who were so eager to bring that mentality to the world are either moving on to other things or just cruising around in space lighting money on fire. But the resulting problems are very real, and the costs we've denied even existed for so long are now here.

In fact, I read two Washington Post articles this week that I think are horrifying, existential examples of cost denial coming home to roost, either right now, or in the near future.

• First, there's this exhaustive breakdown of how investment funds are taking over huge swaths of what used to be starter homes for families. Back in 2008, these (already rich) guys all thought, hey, this is great. Huge upside! And a policy world of financial deregulation had already decided to focus on the upside of a fat, healthy investment market without considering the (then probably unclear) downside of all these assets being owned by for profit funds, instead of non-profit families. Well, guess what? There are costs -- not just dollar costs (passed onto renters), but secondary social costs that come from fewer people building any family wealth or being able to afford to own a home. And those costs not only suck, but were also certainly ignored/dismissed when this entire thing was originally conceived.

• Next, there's an even more chilling deep dive into child trafficking conspiracies and how they affect both the people who are inaccurately included in them (as victims or perpetrators), and the actual, real-life process of helping people trapped in real trafficking scenarios. I'm sure we're all exhausted with yelling about social media deconstructing basic elements of our society, but what you're seeing here is the impact of saying "what if random individuals could immediately create huge, informal, leaderless organizations with massive reach" and only seeing the potential upside. Now we're here, and we have no idea how to keep these things from destroying people and undermining actual functioning parts of society while the guys who did this have moved on to wearing goggles over their faces and designing legless avatars.

So, to wrap it up... remember, cost denial is NOT about arguing over the costs and benefits of something. We all do that, costs and benefits can be subjective, that's all fine. Instead, it's about denying the existence of a cost at all -- i.e., that it is abjectly good for people to be more easily connected, or that a freer market is inherently more efficient AND, assuming that is true, that a more efficient market is the primary, defining characteristic of a world we want to live in.

As a person who spends his work days trying to make helpful over-simplifications, know that these are dangerous over-simplifications, and in all likelihood were put together by people who knew better, and chose to live in a personally profitable fantasy world instead.

Merry Christmas.

This is a weird angle, for a couple reasons.

There's a fairly exhaustive amount of reporting in this piece that has me absolutely believing this headline is true -- that small children are climbing giant scary trees to harvest the açaí that I can only assume goes into the acai bowls we get on the weekend (assuming they actually have açaí in them, which I do not know). So no argument there.

The article itself is interesting, and I think valuable. I couldn't stop reading it. What goes on around the world to make little things happen in your living room is important, and I'm glad we get to read about it. But while I'm not a global supply chain expert by any means, I've dabbled a little bit thanks to working with my wife, who has dabbled a lot in places like China, Vietnam, India, and yes, Brazil. And other than the giant trees, what this piece describes applies to just about every consumer product you interact with. It's just that instead of giant trees, other products have other hazards, be they unsafe machines, long hours, or other treacherous means to acquire raw materials.

The real news in this piece that people should be aware of is that we don't have a very good system for ensuring that things we buy don't exist (or exist at a price we find acceptable) as a result of things that are morally questionable or just straight up wrong. Some of that is logistical (auditing is hard and inherently flawed in a lot of ways), but some of it is just the everyday forces of downward-price-driving capitalism we usually praise. In fact, it's pretty rich to see this article in the post after weeks of inflation panic dominating the headlines, as if these two concepts have no useful relationship.

To counter the human evils (indifference, essentially) that aren't caused by capitalism, but are often perversely incentivized, we have a regulatory state. People complain about regulations causing price increases, but that's kind of what they're for. We decided that no one should be able to sell you cheaper meat because they don't follow expensive safety protocols, so we don't let you do that. When you operate globally -- as we all do, basically -- you quickly discover that there's no great way to do things like that, and it's even harder when the wrong you're trying to take off the table doesn't materially impact the product (i.e., rancid meat), but just the people who produce it. It's hard to hide the product if you want to sell it to consumers, but it's easy to hide workers and the things they have to do ESPECIALLY if they are located in a country that is not interested in protecting them.

Given all of this, ordinarily I'd react to a piece like this by assuming that the Post is simply trying to use an interesting anecdote to highlight a larger issue. But they don't really talk about that larger issue or do a very good job pointing out that it even is a larger issue. You can read all about the child labor issues of açaí production and still walk away from this article thinking the problem of both child labor and labor safety in general is disproportionately localized to açaí, which I don't think is true at all.

Worse, they add this bizarre additional (and less important) moral component that "elites" like açaí fruit and sketchy people promote açaí as some healthy superfood without especially strong scientific evidence. This, frankly, does not seem relevant, but it DOES feel morally comforting if you don't eat açaí products. Why? Because you're now, by default, standing up against kids falling off of trees. And that's exactly how some people feel after reading this, apparently!

Way to stick it to THE ACAI CROWD, Chas. How about this guy?

FIX IT, STARBUCKS. Did you not read the article? Starbucks has no idea how to fix it! What the hell are they going to do, open an Acai farm? Vertically integrate everything? I'm only half kidding, because I actually think that might be the only way to do this, but it's an absolutely massive undertaking I don't think most people can even comprehend.

And that brings us back to my original point -- it's not just açaí. Good lord is it not just açaí, it's like, everything. And if (like me) you've dabbled in international audit world, you know for a fact that we're asking corporations to make moral decisions based on information and leverage that they absolutely do not have, and honestly, do not know how to even get.

Would they make the right decision if they had that information? Different question, and probably very different answers from very different companies/leaders and all that. But we're not there yet, because it's basically impossible to reliably tell what's even going on. "Well, the Post found out!" No, the Post found out something bad exists (which, in case this isn't clear, is a good thing and what the Post should be doing, because it's a newspaper). But you don't get to run a supply chain based on one-offs. You have to know if this kind of thing is happening A LOT, and once you try to fix it, you have to find out if this thing still happens. And then, you have to decide what to do if it keeps happening, and those options are usually very close to "shut down this process because it can and has in at least some instances been done immorally", or "do not shut down this process". And that doesn't even address the extremely salient issue of what happens to the very people and communities we are worried about if and when BIG ACAI pulls out.

(Hint: they do not all get union jobs and a regulatory state that cares about them. At least not overnight.)

Look, actual sustainability people work on this and it's obviously more complicated than my dumb blog post is making it out to be, but for the purposes of having a generally accurate sense of how something like this would/could actually be dealt with, I'm not really that far from the truth here. Basically, the idea of using your purchasing power or (even more laughably) harassing corporations on social media to "do the right thing" when you really mean "figure out a way to create the right outcome that you unequivocally do not know how to create" is a fantasy. That doesn't mean it's a BAD thing to attempt to buy ethically sourced thing -- it's good! Being willing to pay higher prices than you have to, if you can afford it, is something that is directly related to being able to solve these kinds of things.

But it won't simply be buyer choice. We didn't massively reduce child labor and other industrial hours in the United States with purchasing power -- we did it with organized labor, strikes, and regulations. Until we figure out how to do that globally, a global supply chain for basically ANY product, not just "elite" superfruits or whatever, is going to be morally suspect.

I saw this piece on Eric Clapton's sudden turn to COVID politics in the Washington Post, and thought a lot about people in my life (many who are older) who have taken sudden political turns.

“He’s the anti-Bono,” says Bill Oakes, who managed Clapton’s label throughout the 1970s. “He is the epitome of someone who is there for the music, and he’s never rubbed shoulders with world leaders and never wanted to.”

Most of these political turns -- in my experience -- don't go very well for a couple of reasons. There's an art to talking about potentially incendiary issues, and if you don't spend some portion of your life practicing it, even informally, you're unlikely to be very good at it. Even worse, if you've always been politically quiet, it can be surprising how offensive people can find your views, and that's often made even worse when you're not very good at expressing them.

What I often see is a bit of a vicious cycle. A newly engaged citizen dives into the conversation, throws a few quasi-informed haymakers, almost inevitably puts their foot in their mouth and (often legitimately) offends someone. Since they've always been quiet, this reaction is completely new and completely unexpected. It feels bad to have your views about life and society itself repudiated, and when it's never happened before, you're inherently thin-skinned. You feel attacked, and start seeing yourself as a victim. This doesn't make you better at making your points or figuring out other people -- it makes you worse. Which leads to more offense, hotter takes, and a lower standard for your own thinking (since you feel increasingly okay blaming everyone's reactions to your uncompelling arguments on how "sensitive" or "brainwashed" they are, or whatever).

People who never veer too far into politics are nodding right now. "That's exactly why I stay out of this stuff," they say.

You can stay out of politics, but politics won't stay out of you

Since I was a little kid, I have always been very interested in why society works the way it does, and why we have the rules and systems in place that we do. Growing up the way I did, that was an itch that was easiest to scratch by following U.S. electoral politics, which I did, although I never got involved in a campaign, or canvassing, or any Young Whatever groups. I liked (and still like) my own history, and I'm an American, so I find American history pretty interesting, and obviously our political and electoral history (as well as the history of our government structures) is all a part of that.

I majored in political science in college, and I thought a lot of it was interesting even though I have no desire to participate in electoral politics other than to vote and maybe share my perspective, when relevant, on various policy issues and things like that. I graduated and never really looked back, although I pay a decent amount of attention to state and federal policy (I should pay more attention to local but I keep moving). I don't read like, Politico or any of that horserace crap about who won the day or whatever.

Here's my point. A lot of people didn't do this, or stopped doing it early in their adult life. They are "not political", and probably say that with happiness and some amount of pride. And in the sense that they aren't haranguing their friends and family about the VA governor's race or how judges get installed in Texas (assuming they don't live in those places), they are probably right to feel that way.

But...

One of my first political science professors said to me -- on our first day -- something very basic but very eye-opening to me. She said "Politics is power. That's it."

Not politics leads to power, or powerful people understand politics. Politics is power. You don't need political parties, or elections, or talking heads on CNN to have politics. If you're in a room with 10 people and 9 chairs, you have a political problem. You can say "oh, I don't follow politics", but odds are you're only going to say that when you have a chair, and when you lose it, you're probably going to get "political" very fast.

I think this is the real challenge for so many people who are suddenly motivated, for the first time in their life, into speaking up about politics. They don't think they are political, but almost no one is not political in the sense that they are simply opinion-less and completely neutral on how power affects them. Instead, most ostensibly non-political people are living life, not expressing themselves, and having very political reactions over time, quietly, and often developing increasingly strong opinions about all kinds of things. And then, all of a sudden, they don't have a one of those chairs I was talking about.

The moral of the story (I think) is simple.

[getyarn.io/yarn-clip...](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/f9978651-839d-4432-bb9b-c4181218afe3)

You have to engage! You don't have to engage with horserace electoral nonsense (you should vote, but that's another topic). But you do need to engage with what you think, why you think it, and where that plugs into the experiences of your fellow citizens. You may not want to do that, because you might embarrass yourself (God knows I have) and you might find out some things about yourself that you don't necessarily like. For instance, I'm glad no one wants to be racist in theory, but the sooner we can get over the existential dread of realizing we have dumb racist instincts we can definitely learn to manage with the non-lizard parts of our brain, and that this is perfectly okay, the better. Not engaging with any of this doesn't keep it from coming out eventually. It just keeps you from refining any of it before it does, and figuring out how to deal the world as it really is, which is a combination of different experiences, and -- bluntly -- not just yours.

Start with people you know and love. Your commie-hating grampa. Your endlessly protesting nephew. Go in with love and humility. Don't match the tactics of these people if you find that they want to debate you -- not because those tactics are necessarily bad, but just because you are probably bad at them. Just engage, throw in some jokes, and try to learn something. See if you can defuse something, or relate, or whatever. Don't come at things from the dumb cable news angle. Ask a broader question like "how did school handle the ugly parts of American history when you were there?" You know, an actual question the person you're talking to can add value to, and provide perspective that you literally cannot. It may start off as work, but you're a human being. You're a social creature -- you have a natural aptitude for improving at stuff like this.

The alternative is, really, just to stew quietly. You'll get radicalized in some way (we all do), and then, when you can't take it anymore, you'll decide it's time to take a stand.

And you probably won't like how that goes.

The Department of Why

I have been working in something called “Product Marketing” for a long time now. What that something actually is has varied from job to job, sometimes to pretty wild degrees. When I look at (or write) job descriptions for product marketing, even inside of very similar companies, it tends to focus on very tactical things like “go to market strategies” and making little documents to give to prospective customers that say how great the product is. When I was younger, this is almost exactly what I did, and I have a work history and (unofficial) portfolio to match.

These days, I’m a little older/slower/wiser, so I get fancier titles and, unfortunately sometimes, more existential questions to answer like “what is the purpose of these little documents you keep making”. As a result, I have to think a little broader than I used to, and if I’m being honest, my job has transitioned very much into “The Department of Why”. Some of those whys include:

• why do we do something the way we do
• why should someone buy something we have
• how should they use it if they buy it
• what will happen if they don’t use it that way
• what is it worth to be able to use it
• etc., etc., and so forth

These are all very reasonable, important things to have answers to, so I definitely feel like my job is important. In fact, coming up with answers to these kinds of things is probably the most rewarding part of my job. But it’s not easy.

Explaining vs. Arguing

As I’ve written before, my background is actually not in sales or marketing. It’s in support and technical writing. It’s just that in the kinds of spaces I’ve worked, being able to explain how or why something works the way it does is so important to the challenge of selling it that the right kind of technical writer is actually the perfect person to lead the Department of Why. In my experience, if you are explaining why something is great, you’re in a much better position than when you’re arguing that something is great. In general, don’t argue with your customers if you can avoid it.

The thing is, arguing is often easier even if it’s less effective, because you have a whole variety of different tricks you can use. You can bully people, frighten them, confuse them, trick them, or do all sorts of things that aren’t limited by either reality, or the audience’s comprehension. You’re basically trying to get the sale however you can.

Explaining something is way harder. The biggest reason — by far — is that in order to be successful, you need the other person to understand, accept, and internalize what you’re saying. Ask a teacher; ensuring comprehension is very difficult. It’s great to have truth on your side, but if the truth is overly complex — or just as badly, hand-waves away complexity that people can detect but don’t feel comfortable with — it doesn’t matter.

This is why great technical writers can make great technical “marketers” (provided you define the term narrowly enough). Spreading comprehension is their primary goal, and in many cases, a highly motivated one. My first explanatory writing wasn’t trying to get you to accept the value of a label printer; it was trying to keep you from cutting off your hand by sticking it in the wrong part of the machine.

Technical writers rely on a host of tools and tactics to leverage the fact that they have truth on their side, and compensate for the challenge of needing to ensure 100% comprehension. Diagrams, charts, specifications, even stuff like equations are often included in documentation because they’re very compelling and help people understand the concepts that support your “argument” that isn’t really an argument as much as it is simple operating reality.

Now, you might be saying — you people didn’t invent charts! Everyone uses charts! There are charts in every single sales deck, whether some documentation nerd was involved or not!

And this is true. But the goals of those non-technical-writer charts are often different, because (as mentioned) they’re simply being used to get to an outcome by any means necessary. Comprehension isn’t required; action is required. If you don’t actually understand what our software is for, but you sign a giant contract to deploy it, Sales is not going to have a post-mortem on what went wrong. They are going to have a party. But I don’t just need you to agree with me that (a) you don’t want your hand to be cut off and (b) that the printer can do it. I need you to understand how to not cut off your hand in the printer, because you’re going to have to successfully execute that task every day, forever, or I am going to get an email from Legal and probably PR.

Arguing is a Bad Way to Make Decisions

At the kinds of places where I work, Sales is understandably influential, because they bring in the money we need to operate. Unfortunately, even internally, Sales-thinking often stays in Argument mode, and not in Explaining mode. And this isn’t a salesperson problem; many of us have a tendency to argue instead of explain, either because explaining is hard, or (just as likely) because we don’t actually really KNOW what we’re talking about and just have a preference or a feeling that we’re right.

Like a lot of people, I sometimes really enjoy arguing. Hell, I’m arguing right now! But arguing leaves gaps in people’s comprehension, often by design. No sales team goes into a proposal worrying about making sure a prospect really understands what is better about the competition, unless they are going to use that understanding to somehow undermine the other guy in the long run. Instead, you actually HOPE the other person doesn’t really get that part of the situation, because that understanding would actually hurt the chances of your desired action occurring. In those situations, ignorance is bliss.

But you know when I really, really don’t want to argue? When we’re dealing with something boring, but very important. Marketing budgets, for instance, are very important. They are also very boring, compared with the things you actually want to DO with those budgets, which are usually much more interesting to work on. In fact, the marketing budget might be the most important, impactful thing in my professional day-to-day life that I want to be done with as soon as humanly possible. With the marketing budget, I don’t care about being right, or getting the exact numbers I want in exactly the places I want. I just want the marketing budget to give me what I need to do the things I want, without creating unrealistic expectations or headaches down the road.

In other words, what I really want is for everyone to understand the marketing budget, and my place in it.

Tooling for Understanding

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, we have extremely bad tooling for understanding in the modern digital workplace. What I mean by that is that we have a staggering array of ways to collect, organize, and visualize information, but they’re all completely open-ended, so authors can use them any way they want, whether it facilitates understanding or not. And just like most decision-making-meetings turn into a series of arguments, most data visualization gets used the same way — to make an argument. Sometimes data viz doesn’t even do that. In those cases, it’s just data displayed visually, with no real purpose at all.

(FUN FACT: Tableau was acquired for $15.7 billion dollars in 2019).

I don’t mean to be overly negative. Building a visualization, or a spreadsheet, has the capacity to be a very informative process. And people do create data visualizations that are amazingly informative and give people context and understanding of data and the things that data represent. That’s why data visualization is so exciting! But there’s nothing inherently educational about visual or interactive data, just like there’s nothing inherently educational about a Word document just because people can write really enlightening things in it. And from a tooling standpoint, I haven’t seen anything out in the wild that prioritizes understanding as the primary goal of the tool (versus presentation, or flexibility, or extensibility, or whatever).

You might open a spreadsheet to try to figure something out. I certainly have, and I’m not even that good with spreadsheets. But a spreadsheet isn’t designed with the primary goal of helping you understand something. It’s designed to help you do a lot of math at once, very quickly. That’s a noble and necessary goal, but it’s not the one I’m looking to solve. And that matters, because in order to prioritize understanding, a math/logic tool would have to put pretty crippling guardrails on what people normally do with something like a spreadsheet. Guardrails that very specifically don’t allow you to simply do math without (one way or another) including context, or what that math means, or whether you actually know or not.

If that all sounds crazy, well, it sort of is. We live in a world and a culture that is driven almost entirely by arguments that actively depend on a lack of understanding. Just look at cryptocurrency.

When Will Technology Prioritize Understanding?

I don’t think the present economy and technical zeitgeist is built to solve for this problem. Today’s investments continue to be in shifting as many things as possible away from people, and to machines, regardless of how realistic or impactful that actually is. As always, there’s a blind faith that business will invest in whatever solves the most valuable problems of the day, but that’s only true inside of a certain risk profile, and today that profile is extremely narrow. We are increasingly dependent on a relatively small number of massively successful and capitalized corporations to decide “what’s next”, and we shouldn’t be surprised that the answer is often doubling down on what’s already happening and cheap to provide. Right now, that’s going to be cloud computing services and heavily branded “AI” versus anything that empowers regular people at work.

There’s also business culture itself. Many large companies are hilariously profitable; day-to-day work and even strategy is powered by internal ambition and land grabs versus really getting to the root of what’s going on, or facilitating a tough decision. Arguments are fun, and a lot of decision makers have come to power making compelling ones. The beauty of living and dying by them — and selectively using data here and there — is that no matter how wrong you are, or how bad the facts on the ground are, you can still win, at least theoretically.

So if something like this happens, it will have to be bottom up. There are still many — most, even? — people working every day with some kind of operational reality in their face, even if it’s an arbitrary one like a budget or a corporate mandate. Those people do have to deal with reality, and do their best to do so with systems and tools that are pretty reality-neutral. But their lives could be easier, and their work more effective, with tooling that took advantage of their knowledge of the environment — and just as importantly their knowledge of what isn’t actually known.

I am very interested in building this.

This afternoon I saw this WSJ quote on Twitter:

In case the tweet dies (and the tweet always seems to die eventually if I embed it in something I write), it's basically an anecdote about a woman who worked for a long time in a hard, pretty thankless job for a big corporation until the pandemic broke out. She was then furloughed, and shortly after, laid off.

She's in her early sixties, and has some health issues, but she's retiring with less money from Social Security rather than go back to the work force, and one of the main reasons is that feels betrayed by her old employer -- that she was always told that work was a family, but as soon as it was financially challenging for her "family" to help her she was thrown out and discarded.

"Family" and Work

Because I've worked at often idealistic technology startups for the last fifteen years or so, I've often sat next to debates about whether work is a "family", or a "team", or whatever. It's a fine debate, and various companies with PR departments have exposed various slide decks with different thoughts about it that you can go find and read.

I do find it interesting that we've landed (in many cases) on "family" or "team" as our ends of the acceptable spectrum. Nobody is saying "here at Widgets Inc., we are proud to support our collection of revenue-generating cogs until their productivity drops below replacement value" because that seems obviously out of bounds even if it's pretty accurate in things like sales. Instead we say "team", where the team really needs to win and therefore will be patient with you if you start being bad at your job in a way that indicates you might become good again.

While the "family" idea of work was always too high of a bar for most organizations to ever seriously approach (I'm sure there are some privately run places that actually take this seriously), it was attempting to capture something that really is important, and really is missing from how we think about employment and labor in general.

That something is decency.

"What is decency in a largely capitalistic society" might seem like too vague a question to ever really answer, but a lot of our problems seem to stem from our hesitation to do so. When everything is fine, or about people in the abstract instead of you, someone you know, or someone you hear about, a lot of us accept a pretty performance-heavy definition of decency. You know, the whole "team" thing. Dave works here, Dave used to be at least nominally useful, but now Dave kind of sucks and we'd make more money -- sorry, "better achieve our mission" -- if Dave was gone and we replaced him with someone better. So Dave goes, and we all generally accept that, since this example includes no real perspective from Dave because I made him up.

But why does Dave suck? Does he suck because he's sick? Because his Dad got in a car accident? Because he's 50 and his marriage is not going great? Or is it not even really Dave at all -- did Dave spend a long time selling a product that's no longer profitable, and is struggling to sell the new stuff? Or was there a global pandemic that left Dave with very little to do after 35 years of doing a lot?

Given how important work is to things like personal identity, our social lives, survival, and other stuff, it's entirely understandable when someone is sad after they lose a job. There are many things they may miss, including (for many of us) the ability to pay for non-optional things like food and a place to live.

That being said, they don't necessarily have to feel betrayed. That only happens when people feel like they were lied to.

What makes people feel betrayed?

The woman in the example above feels betrayed because of the implied "family" nature of her job that turned out to be fraudulent. Not unlike the equally enraging "privatized gains, socialized losses" concept, this was a classic case of "you treat us like family, we treat you like an operating cost". Being treated like an operating cost sucks, but being told you're family first, and holding up your end of that implied bargain for years is a recipe for feeling betrayed -- because you were betrayed.

It doesn't help that this is all avoidable, and everyone knows it's avoidable. It's avoidable by simply aligning what you tell people with what you're willing to do to back up what you told them. The HR department shouldn't write checks the Finance department can't (or won't) cash.

For instance, there's no reason something like an employee handbook, or an offer letter, or whatever, couldn't include conditions that would result in layoffs, pay cuts, or other horrible things. Not from a legal compliance perspective ("YOU ARE AN AT WILL EMPLOYEE" lets you do whatever you want but does nothing to prevent feelings of betrayal"), but simply from an expectations alignment perspective. Marriott (or whoever) could say -- listen, once we have less than 50% capacity for more than two months, we're going to start cutting people. That's the nature of this relationship. We are telling you that now, when we WANT you to work here, but things like terrorist attacks and pandemics and such do happen, and we are unwilling and/or incapable of being your Mom and giving up everything to give you the best future we can. And frankly, private business could adjust those thresholds to anything they'd like to provide the balance of protecting their workers and protecting their profits that they are comfortable telling everyone. Everyone would be a little pissed sometimes (investors when "unproductive" workers were paid for "no reason", employees when the terms of their forcible removal were discussed and/or implemented), but nobody would feel nearly as betrayed.

Because decency is optional...

Of course, very few organizations do this. Why align expectations when you can, in most scenarios, tell everyone what they want to hear without any negative repercussions? Workers will think they are family -- and sometimes commit accordingly! -- while things are humming along, and when they aren't, those workers will be gone. Current (remaining) and future employees might be angry for a while, but eventually someone will need a job and you will have a job for them and they will come and do it literally like nothing ever happened. And eventually there will be robots.

Except... shit! No one is taking this job! And there are no robots, because they were all 3D renders made to trick VCs into pumping billions of dollars into pretend companies that don't make anything. Decency -- or rather, the lack of decency -- has never had a cost, because people need to work to eat. Right?

There's obviously a lot at play here, and no one reason why the labor market isn't snapping back like it would in a computer simulation. But at least part of it is that at least some people really were working in part due to the expectation of decency, and that expectation has not been met. Sometimes it's not met by employers, who instead of really dealing with how crappy and painful working 10 hours a day in a warehouse is, are throwing temporary, short-time bonuses and perks at people that probably come out of the marketing budget. Sometimes it's not met by customers, who are crueler and more demanding and less empathetic with basic human suffering than ever for a bunch of reasons that could definitely take up an entirely different post.

Plenty of people have no choice. The true engine of American productivity -- the fear of dying alone in a gutter -- will propel most of us back to the salt mines of e-commerce or food service or in-home Boomer care or whatever else can't be done by a large collection of cloud-computed if/then statements. But -- hilariously, in a dark way -- there may not be enough of those people to maintain the current profit margins of our most successful corporate overlords.

And that is why... we need to cut taxes.

Kidding.

... but that's probably what we'll do.

In my line of work, I hear a lot about “MVP”, or “minimum viable product”. I complain about MVP all the time, because while the term is historically used to describe making products that are sufficiently safe for public usage (which is good), in my line of work it’s a concept that actually exists to reduce business risk, not make better products. In theory, you want to “avoid building products that people don’t want”, but (1) there are lots of ways to do that, and (2) there are upsides to taking large, creative risks, many of which have lead to some of the best products. That’s why the real problem with minimum product thinking isn’t that it leads to very basic initial releases of products (although that is A problem). It’s that it outsources product development decisions to crowds, so it’s inherently hostile to the major innovation and coherence that comes with a single person, or small team, driving towards a vision.

Minimum viable product — and subsequent iteration — spares you from the MacBook Pro TouchBar, but also kneecaps the iPhone. Yes, Apple iterated over years and years to improve their phones and watches, but you have to admit that they launched with VERY aggressive “1.0” versions with clear visions. When they were wrong, they eat the loss (which can take years), but that usually means rather than reduce risk, they work on getting better at executing risky things, because making transcendently good, successful things requires risk.

I find it especially bizarre how conservative a lot of software development is at venture backed companies. These are literally organizations with millions of dollars artificially pumped into them to give them the ability to operate in a bigger, more aggressive way than their present status would ordinarily allow. But these are, in my experience, often R&D environments that are incredibly risk averse when it comes to product innovation, and require confirmation of user interest on even the smallest changes before they’re comfortable investing any additional time or effort. “Move fast and break things” has proven to be a potentially disastrous way to run a growth company, but part of the problem was that Facebook ITERATED so quickly — not that the steps they took were so large and unconfirmed by user engagement. Facebook is what it is today precisely because it was always MVP based, and hyper-responsive to A/B testing and crowd/mob-sourcing. They’re also institutionally incapable of addressing their existential challenges for the same reason — no sufficiently bold solution could ever be broken up into small enough steps that would, iteration by iteration, be confirmed as good for Facebook. They may be able to take 2 steps forward and one step back, but they can’t take 10 back and 20 forward. The 10 is just too far to go without affirmation.

However, the counter-argument to this is maybe the most interesting part of all, and I know because I’ve had this argument with CEOs and product managers for years. And it’s that the degree of risk I’m asking companies to take on is simply unacceptable to some form of leadership. Product leaders don’t want to risk being responsible for wasting R&D resources or being “wrong”. Executives don’t want to risk the business failing. Investors don’t want to risk losing their money.

All of that is irrelevant. No one (including me) advocates for taking on more risk by saying “the downsides of increased risk are good things and I hope they happen to us!” Of COURSE those risks exist, and of COURSE those people would pay part of the price of that failure. Hell, I work at these companies — if they go out of business, I will be out of a job! I don’t want to fail, either!

But… there are many kinds of failure. The obvious kind is making a big, vision-driven gamble and failing to make it stick, either due to poor execution or just being flat-out wrong. The less obvious kind is failure by irrelevance — building a bland, uninspiring product driven by the requests of people who are naturally drawn to re-creating the world they already know, versus what could be. It’s a pretty comfortable way to fail, though. It often takes a while, and it’s slow, like a frog boiling in a pot, so you can blame an infinite array of discrete events (“remember our crazy VP of Sales?”) or shifts in the market for the fact that you were never going to be able to hit a home run because you sat there with the bat on your shoulder hoping for a walk.

If you follow my bold vision, and it falls on its face, I’m willing to be held accountable for that. That’s why I work at startups, and in technology. If I’m not willing — and this happens, I can do cost-benefit analysis, too — I’ll let you know beforehand. But in general, there’s a home run available in every strategy. I don’t mind that people don’t necessarily want to pursue it, but I’m getting a little tired of people talking like they do, but operating like they don’t.

(I hate when people try to make some facet of their little niche industry into a professional maxim, but I’m going to do it anyways, because it’s a really easy way to write on the internet. So just know that I work at small-medium sized software companies and take my myopic view of the universe for what it’s worth.)

One of the most frustrating things for me at nearly every company I’ve ever worked for is inconsistency in decision making. I’m not talking about the actual decisions being made — I’m talking about the way they are made, and what’s expected/required to justify them.

I often mention my favorite quote — “if we have data let’s use data, if all we have are opinions, let’s use mine” — but this isn’t really about that, either. Or at least, it’s a more nuanced version of that. Because now, as I rapidly approach middle age (ed. You’re already there, champ), I’m completely at peace with the idea that people are going to pull rank in any kind of “tie goes to the runner” kind of decision scenario. That’s cool, I get it, “that’s what the money is for”, etc.

Instead, what I struggle with is one level up — what IS the role of data and objective evidence for any given decision, and more importantly, can we decide that before we start debating potential solutions?

More On Data (see what I did there?)

Now, I swear, I’m not here to beat my usual drum about people being wildly delusional about their ability to collect, normalize, or analyze data. In fact, let me give you an example of a theoretical discussion where what I’m talking about is a challenge.

QUESTION: Should we build Product A, or Product B?

PERSON 1: 65% of customers said they would consider buying Product A, if we built it.

PERSON 2: Our competitor does not have Product A.

PERSON 3: It would be especially difficult for our company, of all companies, to build Product A.

PERSON 4: Companies that offer a version of Product A are able to charge an average of 25% more than our current price.

PERSON 5: Product A is basically just a simpler version of Product X, which we want to build anyways.

PERSON 6: Product A is not something our normal customer would buy — we would need someone with greater/different purchasing authority.

PERSON 7: Everyone is talking about Product A like things. It’s on the cover of Wired.

PERSON 8: We will need to hire 10 experts to build Product A.

PERSON 9: Some rich guy will give us 10 million dollars if we promise to build Product A.

PERSON 10: Our current Product will be illegal by 2024, so we should definitely learn how to build something else.

Now, I very intentionally didn’t put anything worthless in these examples — all of this stuff is important, and while you can argue about the relative weight each should receive, I would never blame company/management team for (a) bringing one of these things up, or (b) considering it in the decision. But… OVERALL, this is a horrendous way to make decisions, and also how basically 95% of the important meetings in my life have gone (just make everything vaguer and extend this to an hour or two).

Obviously, part of the problem is just how complicated of a decision my theoretical situation appears to be. There are (apparently) a lot of highly consequential things to consider! So it’s not surprising that one of the hardest decision making things groups of people face is successfully breaking down complex discussions into smaller ones, without losing the overall context of the larger decision. For example, you could have some giant series of meetings about the costs & challenges of hiring the necessary experts to build Product A, only to then realize later that you have plenty of money and your current product is going to become illegal. But of course, if you try to solve all of this stuff in one mega conversation, it’s going to train-wreck and you’re going to both over-cover and under-cover various factors.

As usual (for me), I blame this entire nightmare on typical business thinking that values precision over coherence. And as I listened to my son explain to me the many small differences between his three to five (the exact number is unclear) imaginary dogs the other day, I thought about how to solve for this.

Performance Decisions & Non-Performance Decisions

“Performance” may have a real business-school term (the hell if I know), but it’s come up a lot for me lately as sort of a clarifier for “quantitative” things. To me, it represents the idea of getting a very specific, very visible return on something that you do. Now, obviously, it’d be nice if everything we did was like this, because then there’d be no risk to anything that we do (or at least no risk greater than what we put in to find out the performance of something). In fact, that’s SO compelling to people (especially rich and powerful people with a lot to lose), that the business world likes to pretend the secret to making an entirely performance-driven organization is simply to demand that everything be a performance decision all of the time. And you can do that! That is, as long as you are an enormous monopoly, a bank, or some other form of established value-extraction.

If you’re building something new, or trying to grow on the non-margins, you are kidding yourself if you think you can make exclusively performance driven decisions. You won’t have the data, and just as importantly, relying solely on reasonably short-term data as the arbiter for everything is going to restrict what you choose to do to a suffocatingly narrow breadth of things. Companies that make purely performance driven decisions are often sitting ducks to be — yes, I’m bringing this word back, just for today — DISRUPTED!!! That’s because you aren’t going to be able to A/B test the impact of sitting still while someone else changes the fundamentals of your market, customer experience, pricing structure, etc., so when it happens you’ll just be standing there scrolling through Excel trying to figure out where it all went wrong.

That’s why to either build something new, or keep your company from getting knifed to death in an alley by Apple or some other non-bank, you simply HAVE to make some non-performance decisions. These are decisions that DON’T necessarily have a measurable impact, or at least not one that you’ll want to use to validate whether you made the right decision or not.

Wait, this already exists, doesn’t it?

Ok, yes, you could write this off as “strategy vs. tactics”, or “qualitative vs. quantitative”, but I actually don’t think that’s quite right for a couple reasons.

1. Non-performance decisions can and probably SHOULD consult some quantitative data. For instance, you might move into a market that — via actual numbers — you decide is potentially very lucrative. Or you might see customer behavior that indicates an easy path to up or cross-sell. But in a performance decision, those things wouldn’t be enough to get you to pull the trigger. You’d need conversion rates and all this other forward looking stuff you won’t have to be able to say “THIS WILL HAPPEN IF WE DO X, SO LET’S DO X”.
2. Performance decisions are often tactical, but I don’t necessarily think they have to be, and I actually think I’m starting to see more and more growth-stage organizations try to set strategy via performance. Theoretically, with good enough, broad enough data (and a really wise hand guiding the whole decision making process), I think you could use performance style data to generate strategy. Think of something like Apple’s decision to get rid of the big HomePod. Yeah, sales probably weren’t great, but I bet they weren’t HORRIBLE, either. Given their history and willingness to stick things out (like the watch) I feel like there was something more specific about that sales data, usage data, or something else that made Apple think “let’s do this with small, cheaper speakers instead” besides “that’s what everyone else is doing”. Unfortunately, YOU are not Apple, and you do not have anything even remotely approaching their customer base, operational skill, or data literacy, so you can’t really do this unless you want to delude yourself.

What I’m asking for

So, let’s get back to my original terrible meeting point (my egg sandwich is gone and I’m going to try to bring this home). If all that stuff is important, how are we supposed to make this decision?

Well, again, what drives me up the wall isn’t that we make the wrong decision. You can’t control for that. But we can get rid of the apples and oranges thinking that lumps all of this stuff together and causes people to pretend they are making performance decisions when they are not, by doing some of the following:

Identify risks and rewards.

Most people won’t want to quantify the big, broad, existential ones, but back of the envelope math can help you at least decide whether something is small, medium, or large. Saying “we will need to hire people to integrate these platforms” is important, but taking a minute to roughly outline that it’ll cost about five million bucks or whatever is worth it, because now you can compare that cost to other costs, and potential benefits. Too often, everyone has a different idea in their head about what a proposal is supposed to cost & do, and then it just turns into whether people like it or not.

“Why?”

I had to adjudicate a lot of GDPR concerns at a relatively small company with a relatively junior staff that was way too eager to drop everything in the name of GDPR compliance. While I’m all for following the law, it was a useful exercise to unpack the actual, operational impact of some of their many doomsday scenarios, especially when the law was brand new and enforcement and penalties were entirely unclear. The same thing applies to other broadly “good” or “bad” things — make sure you aren’t comparing 65% improvement in X versus “Y is better for customers”. If this is a non-performance decision and we want to do Y because Y makes logical sense, just do it, and throw the 65% away. But be prepared to not get that decision validated by data in three months, because it’s not going to happen.

Don’t kid yourself

Way, way, WAY too many people (especially executives) just want to do something for reasons they can’t (or are scared to) articulate, and desperately want numbers to cover their butt for them. I get it, that’s fine, everyone does it — the problem is that you’re basically exchanging your expertise and the value of your intuition for numbers that can be generated by anybody, and if you DO have good intuition you probably aren’t as good with that data. So now because we did your idea, we have to do this other, much dumber idea, because it TOO will increase retention by 5% using the terrible math you don’t even believe. And what are you going to say then?

I think a lot of more senior leaders are concerned with becoming “because I said so” types of people. But here’s the thing — the problem with that isn’t your lack of data, it’s your CRAPPY EXPLANATION of why you want to do things a certain way. If you’re bad at explaining your intuition, relying on numbers you are probably also bad at explaining isn’t solving anything, especially since (as in the aforementioned scenario) when someone else brings those same numbers to undermine you, you’re going to tell them to go back to their desk, or pat them on the head and never actually prioritize their idea.