Tech Inspirational Quotes

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.

5 Ways To Build Your Brand on Social Media: 1 Post content that add value 2 Spread positivity 3 Create steady stream of info 4 Make an impact 5 Be yourself

It's easier for a rich man to ride that camel through the eye of a needle directly into the Kingdom of Heaven, than for some of us to give up our cell phone.

Tweet others the way you want to be tweeted.

If you are in a position where you can reach people, then use your platform to stand up for a cause. HINT: social media is a platform.

Just because you have baggage doesn't mean you have to lug it around.

Further, your industry is constantly moving, and we must create products for where the market will be tomorrow, not where it was yesterday.

A full-out rebellion would take a major amount of luck and coordination. The Tech Nos and Domotor looked at me, waiting. No one else would be able to organize both sides. I drew in a deep breath. We had the technology, the intelligence and the people—put enough sheep together and you have a herd, a force to be reckoned with. We needed a leader.

I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything. The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note - it's a record of our survival.

Don't bore the universe.

There are worse things than dying." "Really?" said Meg. "Of course," said the tech. "Living badly.

The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

I’m not standard; I’m deviant. But I’m not alone. I’m a complete freak of nature, and I emerged from a set of circumstances that are improbable on an astronomic scale. The same is probably true for you too.

Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution.

What you're really seeing is Agile for delivery, but the rest of the organization and context is anything but Agile.

The nation once idolized astronauts and civil rights leaders who inspired hope and empathy. Now it worships tech innovators who generate billions and move financial markets. We get the heroes we deserve.

Finally, it's all about solving problems, not implementing features. Conventional product roadmaps are all about output. Strong teams know it's not only about implementing a solution. They must ensure that solution solves the underlying problem. It's about business results.

That is, there are two essential high‐level activities in all product teams. We need to discover the product to be built, and we need to deliver that product to market.

I was just a kid growing up in Jamaica with dreams, and I want people to know that it’s possible to dream bigger and accomplish those dreams.

If you are not embarrassed or ashamed of your first version then you are shipping too late’.

The difference between Amazon, Netflix, Google, Facebook, and the legions of large but slowly dying companies is usually exactly that: product leadership.

product managers are constantly asking developers to look at the code to tell them how the system really works, then you're probably missing a principal product manager.

No matter what your title or level may be, if you aspire to be great, don't be afraid to lead.

Historically, in the vast majority of innovations in our industry, the customers had no idea that what they now love was even a possibility.

one of the most critical lessons in product is knowing what we can't know,

Rather than being measured on the output of their design work, the product designer is measured on the success of the product.

In the model I'm describing, it is management's responsibility to provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle. The difference is that they are now prioritizing business results, rather than product ideas. And, yes, it is more than a little ironic that we sometimes need to convince management to focus on business results.

The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work. There are many reasons for an idea to not work out. The most common is that customers just aren't as excited about this idea as we are.

Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.

To summarize, these are the four critical contributions you need to bring to your team: deep knowledge (1) of your customer, (2) of the data, (3) of your business and its stakeholders, and (4) of your market and industry.

Why would I what?” Will asked, wanting another bite of his burger. “Why would you risk your job teaching some stupid fantasy book?” “Because alternative universe literature promotes critical thinking, imagination, empathy, and creative problem solving. Children who are fluent in fiction are more able to interpret nonfiction and are better at understanding things like basic cause and effect, sociology, politics, and the impact of historical events on current events. Many of our technological advances were imagined by science fiction writers before the tech became available to create them, and many of today’s inventors were inspired by science fiction and fantasy to make a world more like the world in the story. Many of today’s political conundrums were anticipated by science fiction writers like Orwell, Huxley, and Heinlein, and sci-fi and fantasy tackle ethical problems in a way that allows people to analyze the problem with some emotional remove, which is important because the high emotions are often what lead to violence. Works like Harry Potter tackle the idea of abuse of power and—” Will stopped himself and swallowed. Everybody at the table, including Kenny, was staring at him in openmouthed surprise. “Anyway,” he said before taking a monster bite of his cooling hamburger on a sudden attack of nerves, “iss goomfer umf.” “It’s good for us,” Kenny translated, sounding a little stunned

We say if you're just using your engineers to code, you're only getting about half their value. The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers' struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Bad teams gather requirements from sales and customers.

The racial oppression that inspired the first generations of the civil rights movement was played out in lynchings, night raids, antiblack pogroms, and physical intimidation at the ballot box. In a typical battle of today, it may consist of African American drivers being pulled over more often on the highways. (When Clarence Thomas described his successful but contentious 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearing as a “high-tech lynching,” it was the epitome of tastelessness but also a sign of how far we have come.) The oppression of women used to include laws that allowed husbands to rape, beat, and confine their wives; today it is applied to elite universities whose engineering departments do not have a fifty-fifty ratio of male and female professors. The battle for gay rights has progressed from repealing laws that execute, mutilate, or imprison homosexual men to repealing laws that define marriage as a contract between a man and a woman. None of this means we should be satisfied with the status quo or disparage the efforts to combat remaining discrimination and mistreatment. It’s just to remind us that the first goal of any rights movement is to protect its beneficiaries from being assaulted or killed. These victories, even if partial, are moments we should acknowledge, savor, and seek to understand.

Where a lot of novice product people go sideways is when they create a high‐fidelity user prototype and they put it in front of 10 or 15 people who all say how much they love it. They think they've validated their product, but unfortunately, that's not how it works. People say all kinds of things and then go do something different.

If the first time your developers see an idea is at sprint planning, you have failed. We need to ensure the feasibility before we decide to build, not after. Not only does this end up saving a lot of wasted time, but it turns out that getting the engineer's perspective earlier also tends to improve the solution itself, and it's critical for shared learning.

Advances in technology can be empowering, progressive and enriching. History has shown this across civilisations and societies. But it has also shown, and the present and future will continue to show, that it is foolish, risky, flawed and folly without us raising our individual and collective consciousness and mindfulness to accompany it - to ensure we use it shrewdly, kindly and wisely.

a quote from John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers. In a dedicated product team, the team acts and feels a lot like a startup within the larger company, and that's very much the intention.

A bilo je to itekako dražesno, smatrala je Mary. Nekako je humanije, promatrati različite rukopise, različite tinte, različite načine na koje bi netko nekad nešto krivo napisao. Bio je to vizualni ekvivalent razgovora, svatko bi u zapisu ostavio nešto sebi svojstveno, unikatno - za razliku od unosa uvijek istih, provjerenih natipkanih riječi. Međutim, to je donekle otežavalo traženje neke određene bilješke ili napomene. S druge strane, iščitavanje svega od početka moglo bi vam pomoći da primijetite nešto što vam je možda ranije promaknulo.

Despite being a nonprofit, we have been able to build a team that rivals those of the most resource-rich tech companies. Hundreds of incredibly talented people have committed a major part of their careers to be part of the Khan Academy team, often taking considerable pay cuts to do so. Thousands of volunteers all over the world have now translated Khan Academy into over fifty languages. Inspirational leaders like Bill Gates, Reed Hastings, and Elon Musk have become some of our biggest supporters and advocates. This journey seems so serendipitous that it has become something of an inside joke among the Khan Academy team that perhaps benevolent aliens are helping us so that, through education, we can prepare humanity for first contact.

The Objectives and Key Results (OKR) technique is a tool for management, focus, and alignment. As with any tool, there are many ways to use it. Here are the critical points for you to keep in mind when using the tool for product teams in product organizations. Objectives should be qualitative; key results need to be quantitative/measurable. Key results should be a measure of business results, not output or tasks. The rest of the company will use OKRs a bit differently, but for the product management, design, and technology organization, focus on the organization's objectives and the objectives for each product team, which are designed to roll up and achieve the organization's objectives. Don't let personal objectives or functional team objectives dilute or confuse the focus.

The unfortunate truth is that right now men's voices dominate and we see the results. Popular products from the tech boom - including violent and sexist video games that a generation of children has become addicted to - are designed with little to no input from women. Apple's first version of its highly touted health application could track your blood-alcohol level but not menstruation. Everything from plus-sized smart phones to artificial hearts have been build at a size better suited to male anatomy. As of late 2016, if you told one of the virtual assistants like Siri, S Voice, and Google Now, 'I'm having a heart attack,' you'd immediately get valuable information about what to do next. If you were to say, 'I'm being raped,' or 'I'm being abused by my husband,' the attractive (usually) female voice would say, 'I don't understand what this is.

Why “Pixar”? The name emerged from a back-and-forth between Alvy and another of our colleagues, Loren Carpenter. Alvy, who spent much of his childhood in Texas and New Mexico, had a fondness for the Spanish language, and he was intrigued by how certain nouns in English looked like Spanish verbs—words like “laser,” for example. So Alvy lobbied for “Pixer,” which he imagined to be a (fake) Spanish verb meaning “to make pictures.” Loren countered with “Radar,” which he thought sounded more high-tech. That’s when it hit them: Pixer + radar = Pixar! It stuck.

Remarkably, in the vast majority of companies (not the ones that are good at product), the actual product teams don't do much ideation themselves. This is because what's really going on is that the ideas are already handed to the product teams in the form of prioritized features on product roadmaps, where most of the items on those roadmaps are coming either from requests from big customers (or prospective customers), or from company stakeholders or execs. Unfortunately, these are rarely the quality of ideas we're looking for.

Good teams have a compelling​ product vision that they pursue with a missionary‐like passion. Bad teams are mercenaries.

I discovered that there was a tremendous difference between how the best companies produced products and how most companies produced them.

While almost everyone today claims to be Agile, what I've just described is very much a waterfall process.

There are essentially three ways for a product manager to work, and I argue only one of them leads to success:

In this talk, I tell the story of how, when I was first a manager at New York Tech, I didn’t feel like a manager at all. And while I liked the idea of being in charge, I went to work every day feeling like something of a fraud. Even in the early years of Pixar, when I was the president, that feeling didn’t go away. I knew many presidents of other companies and had a good idea of their personality characteristics. They were aggressive and extremely confident. Knowing that I didn’t share many of those traits, again I felt like a fraud. In truth, I was afraid of failure. Not until about eight or nine years ago, I tell them, did the imposter feeling finally go away. I have several things to thank for that evolution: my experience of both weathering our failures and watching our films succeed; my decisions, post–Toy Story, to recommit myself to Pixar and its culture; and my enjoyment of my maturing relationship with Steve and John. Then, after fessing up, I ask the group, “How many of you feel like a fraud?” And without fail, every hand in the room shoots up. As managers, we all start off with a certain amount of trepidation. When we are new to the position, we imagine what the job is in order to get our arms around it, then we compare ourselves against our made-up model. But the job is never what we think it is. The trick is to forget our models about what we “should” be. A better measure of our success is to look at the people on our team and see how they are working together. Can they rally to solve key problems? If the answer is yes, you are managing well.

It normally takes about two to three months of dedicated work for a new product manager to get up to speed. This assumes you have a manager who can give you the help and access you need to gain this expertise, including lots of access to customers, access to data (and when necessary, training in the tools to access that data), access to key stakeholders, and time to learn your product and industry inside and out.

Discuss netiquette.xyz internet rules to follow with friends and family. Use the site as a reference. Set boundaries. Share.

This is because what's really going on is that the ideas are already handed to the product teams in the form of prioritized features on product roadmaps, where most of the items on those roadmaps are coming either from requests from big customers (or prospective customers), or from company stakeholders or execs. Unfortunately, these are rarely the quality of ideas we're looking for. In general, if the product team is given actual business problems to solve rather than solutions, and the product team does their job and interacts directly and frequently with actual users and customers, then getting a sufficient quantity and quality of product ideas is not really a problem.

The idea behind business objectives is simple enough: tell the team what you need them to accomplish and how the results will be measured, and let the team figure out the best way to solve the problems.

A strong product culture means that the team understands the importance of continuous and rapid testing and learning. They understand that they need to make mistakes in order to learn, but they need to make them quickly and mitigate the risks. They understand the need for continuous innovation. They know that great products are the result of true collaboration. They respect and value their designers and engineers. They understand the power of a motivated product team. A strong VP product will understand the importance of a strong product culture, be able to give real examples of her own experiences with product culture, and have concrete plans for instilling this culture in your company.

The hallmark of a great CTO is a commitment to continually strive for technology as a strategic enabler for the business and the products. Removing technology as a barrier, as well as broadening the art of the possible for business and product leaders, is the overarching objective.

strong product teams understand these truths and embrace them rather than deny them. They are very good at quickly tackling the risks (no matter where that idea originated) and are fast at iterating to an effective solution. This is what product discovery is all about, and it is why I view product discovery as the most important core competency of a product organization.

It is management's responsibility to provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle.

The key is to understand that the root cause of all this grief about commitments is when these commitments are made. They are made too early. They are made before we know whether we can deliver on this obligation, and even more important, whether what we deliver will solve the problem for the customer.

The difference between vision and strategy is analogous to the difference between good leadership and good management. Leadership inspires and sets the direction, and management helps get us there. Most important, the product vision should be inspiring, and the product strategy should be focused.

The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk) And it's not enough that it's just the product manager's opinion on these questions. We need to collect evidence.

If the product manager doesn't have the technology sophistication, doesn't have the business savvy, doesn't have the credibility with the key executives, doesn't have the deep customer knowledge, doesn't have the passion for the product, or doesn't have the respect of their product team, then it's a sure recipe for failure.

Strong tech‐product companies know they need to ensure consistent product innovation. This means constantly creating new value for their customers and for their business.

As you'll soon see, coming up with winning products is never easy. We need a product that our customers love, yet also works for our business.

However, a very large component of what is meant by works for our business is that there is a real market there (large enough to sustain a business), we can successfully differentiate from the many competitors out there, we can cost‐effectively

But the way most companies do them at this stage to come up with a prioritized roadmap is truly ridiculous and here's why. Remember those two key inputs to every business case? How much money you'll make, and how much it will cost?

It's what I call the two inconvenient truths about product.

If that's not bad enough, the second inconvenient truth is that even with the ideas that do prove to have potential, it typically takes several iterations to get the implementation of this idea to the point where it delivers the necessary business value. We call that time to money.

In modern teams, we tackle these risks prior to deciding to build anything. These risks include value risk (whether customers will buy it), usability risk (whether users can figure out how to use it), feasibility risk (whether our engineers can build what we need with the time, skills, and technology we have), and business viability risk (whether this solution also works for the various aspects of our business—sales, marketing, finance, legal, etc.).

A big part of the concept of product teams is that they are there to solve hard problems for the business. They are given clear objectives, and they own delivering on those objectives.

We need design—not just as a service to make our product beautiful—but to discover the right product.

Discovery is very much about the intense collaboration of product management, user experience design, and engineering. In discovery, we are tackling the various risks before we write even one line of production software.

Just because we've invested the time and effort to create a robust product does not mean anyone will want to buy it. So, in the product world, we strive to achieve product/market fit.

First, collaboration is built on relationships, and product teams—especially co‐located teams—are designed to nurture these relationships.

The first truth is that at least half of our ideas are just not going to work.

projects are output and product is all about outcome.

The purpose of product discovery is to address these critical risks: Will the customer buy this, or choose to use it? (Value risk) Can the user figure out how to use it? (Usability risk) Can we build it? (Feasibility risk) Does this solution work for our business? (Business viability risk)

it is management's responsibility to provide each product team with the specific business objectives they need to tackle. The difference is that they are now prioritizing business results, rather than product ideas. And, yes, it is more than a little ironic that we sometimes need to convince management to focus on business results.

The difference between vision and strategy is analogous to the difference between good leadership and good management. Leadership inspires and sets the direction, and management helps get us there.

Product evangelism is, as Guy Kawasaki put it years ago, “selling the dream.” It's helping people imagine the future and inspiring them to help create that future. If you're a startup founder, a CEO, or a head of product, this is a very big part of your job, and you'll have a hard time assembling a strong team if you don't get good at it.

CHAPTER 12 The Engineers In this chapter, I describe the engineering role (also commonly known as developers or, in some circles, programmers). But as with the last chapter, I'm not trying to speak here to the engineers—I'm aiming this discussion at product managers who need to learn how to work effectively with engineers. There's probably no more important relationship for a successful product manager than the one with your engineers. If your relationship is strong, with mutual and sincere respect both ways, then the product manager job is great. If your relationship is not strong, your days as product manager will be brutal (and probably numbered). Therefore, this is a relationship worth taking very seriously and doing everything you can to nurture. This strong relationship begins with you.

QUANTUM LEAP TO BUYERS WORKSHEET Name: ___________________________ Date________________ Instructions: This is a brainstorming session. Take 15 minutes with a pen to paper and write out 10 ideas for each question. All ideas count! Who can I team up with, who is already established, to reach my right buyers? Which large companies would my work be a fit with? (i.e. If you draw robots as your main theme, think tech companies) Which Large Charities? (i.e. If your art is inspired by a cause or world problem, which charities or celebrities care about the same things?) Which Trade Shows? (I.e. if your work is music inspired, think NAMM Show or other music industry shows)

It's also important for tech product managers to have a broad understanding of the types of analytics that are important to your product. Many have too narrow of a view. Here is the core set for most tech products: User behavior analytics (click paths, engagement) Business analytics (active users, conversion rate, lifetime value, retention) Financial analytics (ASP, billings, time to close) Performance (load time, uptime) Operational costs (storage, hosting) Go‐to‐market costs (acquisition costs, cost of sales, programs) Sentiment (NPS, customer satisfaction, surveys)

To be absolutely clear, the product manager is not the boss of anyone on the product team.

First we lose, then we win in Life." Recently many people in the IT and Tech sectors are facing a difficult phase of their life. I had similarly faced a difficult phase in the Finance sector in the year 2008. We all have gone through failures in life. But that should not stop us from trying for success. Staying hopeful and working toward our goals bring us an opportunity to achieve success.

They saw me as an “Important Manager” at an “Important Company,” whereas the colleagues who’d started out with me at New York Tech just saw me as Ed. As my position changed, people became more careful how they spoke and acted in my presence. I don’t think that my actions changed in a way that prompted this; my position did. And what this meant was that things I’d once been privy to became increasingly unavailable to me. Gradually, snarky behavior, grousing, and rudeness disappeared from view—from my view, anyway. I rarely saw bad behavior because people wouldn’t exhibit it in front of me.

For that particular session, everyone said they picked it because of the word entitled in the descriptor. They’d all encountered people who acted entitled at Pixar—people who insisted on having their own piece of equipment, even if it could be shared, or who groused that they couldn’t bring their dogs to work. “This is a job,” one animator said. “A great job. We are well paid. These people need to wake up.” What was most striking to those in attendance at the “Great Workplace” session was how much they had in common. The Systems guy told a story about answering a frantic call for tech support. He rushed over to assess the problem, only to be told by the aggrieved artist that the machine should be fixed during lunch—because that’s when it would be most convenient for her. “I need to eat lunch, too,” he told the group, as everyone nodded their heads. The chef told a similar story about a last-minute request to cater a working lunch that came without any acknowledgement of the hassle (and hustle) it would require of her staff.

John Doerr, the famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist: “We need teams of missionaries, not teams of mercenaries.” Mercenaries build whatever they're told to build. Missionaries are true believers in the vision and are committed to solving problems for their customers.

The MVP should be a prototype, not a product. Building an actual product‐quality deliverable to learn, even if that deliverable has minimal functionality, leads to substantial waste of time and money, which of course is the antithesis of Lean. I find that using the more general term prototype makes this critical point clear to the product team, the company, and the prospective customers. So, in this book, I talk about different types of prototypes being used in discovery and products being produced in delivery.

In product companies, it is critical that the product manager also be the product owner.

There are a few product teams out there that have modified their product roadmaps so that each item is stated as a business problem to solve rather than the feature or project that may or may not solve it. These are called outcome‐based roadmaps.

I believe the major risk facing most efforts is value risk. On a startup canvas, this shows up under solution risk—discovering a compelling solution to customers. A solution that your customers will choose to buy and use.

We must validate our ideas on real users and customers. One of the most common traps in product is to believe that we can anticipate our customer's actual response to our products. We might be basing that on actual customer research or on our own experiences, but in any case, we know today that we must validate our actual ideas on real users and customers. We need to do this before we spend the time and expense to build an actual product, and not after.

Weak teams just plod through the roadmap they've been assigned, month after month. And, when something doesn't work—which is often—first they blame it on the stakeholder that requested/demanded the feature and then they try to schedule another iteration on the roadmap, or they suggest a redesign or a different set of features that this time they hope will solve the problem.

good teams are asked to deliver business results.

This role is often called a player‐coach role because of this dynamic of leading your own team, in addition to being responsible for coaching and developing one to three other PMs.

This is the organization responsible for architecture, engineering, quality, site operations, site security, release management, and usually delivery management. This group is responsible for building and running the company's products and services.

The critical context is comprised of two things: The overall product vision The specific business objectives assigned to each team We will discuss both of these key topics in the coming chapters. Problems arise if the leadership does not provide clarity on these two critical pieces of context. If they don't, there's a vacuum, and that leads to real ambiguity over what a team can decide and what they can't.

The product vision describes where we as an organization are trying to go, and the product strategy describes the major milestones to get there.

Make sure that members of the senior engineering staff are participating actively and contributing significantly throughout product discovery.