The importance of culture has been becoming more evident as more and more workplaces strive to redefine what it means to work and be happy. Books like Delivering Happiness and The Culture Code are becoming required reading for early-stage startups to unicorns like AirBnB.
Bottom line: a good culture is important.
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.”
- Not actually Abraham Lincoln
This quote has almost become cliché but I constantly see that, by and large, its message is being ignored.
I am laying out a framework to aid decisions around whether training is worth it and at exactly what point is it worth it.
What is a North Start Metric (NSM)? Let’s start with a definition:
The North Star Metric is the single metric that best captures the core value that your product delivers to customers.
- What is a North Star Metric
It serves to unify a company or department to produce a single result that everyone can concentrate on.
tl;dr: skip to the bottom to see the template.
Perhaps the most generic title I’ve ever written. It sounds like it’s straight out of a 1,000+ page 80’s textbook on “Testing Duties in Middle Management”.
The problem is that I frequently run into terrible bug reports. Googling brought about some decent results, but the articles I found were still lacking.
I was recently observing a couple programmers attempt to fix a bug and watched (with considerable tension) the painstaking stabs in the dark as they tweaked and changed different lines of code.
I instantly knew what I would do, and it is much more similar to a binary search (see example below) that rapidly solves almost every bug I come across.
This is an unofficial list of repeated sayings I have found in my studying of startups. This comes from reading, listening, watching, and working in a YC company.
Make something people want. [1, 2, 3] Talk to users. [4, 5] Do things that don’t scale. [6, 7] A small number of users that love your product is better than a lot of people that like your product.
