Jordan Bowman

People in our industry think they stopped doing waterfall and switched to agile. In reality they just switched to high-frequency waterfall.

Any sort of testing only provides simulated answers. Looking at something and judging it is not the same as using it and judging it. There’s no skin in the game, and you can’t imitate the pressures that users will endure in everyday…

Are we just showing off our design skills to other designers? Does the average consumer notice? Do aesthetics have a direct impact on revenue?

Self-tracking is only useful if it leads to new self-knowledge and—ultimately—new action.

Truth: Profit is the only metric that actually, truly matters.

1. Mental fatigue and exhaustion. Following group chat all day feels like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda. And in many cases, a dozen all-day meetings! You hear it from people all the time — it’s exhausting…

Once you cross the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite. It’s a qualitative change, like the stars turning into lines and disappearing when the Enterprise accelerates to warp speed. Once you’re profitable you don’t need investors’ money.

Exponential growth gets all the glory. Every startup story that lands on the cover of a magazine has a hockey-stick chart to flaunt. Yes, disruption is driven by such violent expansion, and the world needs some disruption some of the time. But for the other 360 days out of the year, what it also needs is some modest, linear growth.

There’s no such thing as being too aligned. Whatever amount of time you think you should spend making sure your team is on the same page, you can probably triple it. You should over-communicate until it feels awkward and repetitive.

42% of startups failed because they didn’t solve a market need.