Talent Code by Daniel Coyle. It’s an amazing book about how the best teams and most skilled people in the world learn and get good at their craft. I started learning piano as an adult which is incredibly difficult. Reading this book made a huge impact on how I approach learning. And it’s made a big difference to my playing skills.
His other book Culture Code is also brilliant (about building world class teams).
My latest failure was Wize, a mobile app that let anyone share their skills. It was a great idea, a bit early for its times (live streaming app before Instagram Live and Tik Tok), and it had a great start--we were in the top 20 at the Launch Hackathon, won an award from Google, and we had grammy award music teachers teaching on the platform. It failed because we pivoted too early. Building the two sided market was challenging, but instead of narrowing our focus to one topic, we decided to pivot to a "professional 1-1 coffee chat platform", and then again to a networking app–"Tinder for professionals." After going to a lot of conferences and meetups and talking to professionals, the resounding message we heard was that this domain was tough to dominate and it was going to be an uphill battle for us.
The biggest lesson I learnt in this is take advice with a pinch of salt. There are many successful apps today that resemble v1 (Maven), v2 (Intro), and v3 of Wize, and I think we would have been fine if we had persisted.
I’ve pivoted from full stack to frontend to product. The switch from engineering to product can be challenging. Two tips.
- start contributing to product on the side while on your current engineering job, and try to get a PM position with your current employer. After a year of working, you should be able to remove the junior label when switching companies.
- start your own business (even if on the side) and make your own label.
Quality ideas don’t come up on demand. They come sporadically over time, so it’s best to have a system to capture these ideas. I capture my ideas using Drafts on Apple Watch or phone if I’m not on my computer and eventually move them to Roam where I have a super flexible tagging system to keep them organized. I do this for insights and lessons learned as well.
To generate ideas on demand (for example if I want to come up with questions for my next podcast guest, I’ll go for a walk and jot down notes on my phone as I’m walking. My brain works best when walking.)
The first is developing good habits—list out all edge cases and just manually test it out. If you work in a team, the PM, developers, and QA can brainstorm these edge cases together. It’s these simple things that make a huge difference and you’d be surprised how many teams don’t do this.
His other book Culture Code is also brilliant (about building world class teams).