In my opinion.

• A great product manager understands the market, how the business works as well as the company vision and goals.
• A great product manager has deep empathy for the users of the product.
• A great product manager needs to be strategic enough to help craft the vision of the product and a strategy to get there, but tactical enough to ensure a smooth execution.
• A great product manager works with the team in developing and validating ideas and in marrying business goals with the user goals to achieve value.
• A great product manager says things like "I think the most costly thing we can do is build this product without knowing it's the right product to build. How do I test it and ensure that this is actually what we want? How do I become more confident that we are on the right path before I invest money in this?"

I've been pondering about career advice lately. What would an older and wiser me say to this young student 19 years ago?

Work with the right people

Yes, the company, their vision, values and your tasks are important, but don't forget your future colleagues.

Work with people you can learn and grow from. You adopt the thoughts, attitudes and standards of the people around you.

Working with the right people is one of the best educations you can get.

The team you choose to join, and your boss, are huge factors in the value of a professional experience early in your career.

Simply do the basics well

Take initiative. Take ownership. Do what you say you will do. Be the one that people can count on to show up and figure things out. Ask questions. Get along with people. Do more than you are asked.

Care about your colleagues. Be humble. Listen to understand. Be on time. Be proactive in seeking new information, knowledge, and skills. Being willing to change things.

These basic things stand out. It's character. It's the result of your little choices and little actions, and they are completely under your control.

And I believe they will help unlock your potential.

Add communication and non-sales selling into your mixture

In addition to whatever your professional skill is, add communication, either written or verbal, into your mixture.

Learn how to formulate and tell clear, concise narratives. Good stories beat good spreadsheets.

Also learn yourself non-sales selling. You sell ideas, a vision, a strategy, a solution, even yourself.

These are skills for life that will be valuable in any role.

Find something to hold on to

You will face uncertainty, changes, and chaos. For me, having a set of personal values to hold onto has been a savior. A compass.

What's most important to you?

When you face situations where you have no idea what to do, hold on to your values and use them to guide your next steps.

Don't stress. It took me years to figure this out.

Take care of yourself

Breathe. Take care of yourself today, mentally and physically. Take rest seriously. It plants the seeds for a healthier, happier life decades later.

Follow your energy. When you have energy for something, go for it.

Find a balance between things that give you energy and things that drain you of energy.

Reflect and write down the things that stress you out and the things that make you happy.

Use your colleagues, they are here for you.

What's your career advice?

Do you want to make things worth making? 

Here's my key takeaways from Tony Fadell, "the father of the iPod", co-creator of the iPhone and co-founder of Nest labs.

Cool technology isn't enough

A great team isn't enough. Plenty of funding isn't enough. You have to time it right. Customers need to see that your product solves a real problem they have today - not one that they may have in some distant future.

You can't wait for perfect data

It doesn't exist. You just have to take the first step into the unknown. Use what you have learned and take your best guess at what's going to happen next. It's not data or intuition; it's data and intuition.

Your product isn't only your product

It's the whole experience that begins when someone learn about your brand for the first time and ends when it disappears from their life. It's when you give care and attention to every part of that journey you create something that people will love.

Every product should have a story

A narrative that explains why it needs to exist and how it will solve your customer's problems. Make the story easy to remember, easy to repeat. Someone else telling your story will always reach more people than your own talking.

• The story appeals to people's rational and emotional sides. Recognize the needs of your audience and connect with something they care about, like their worries and fears.
• The story takes complicated concepts and makes them simple.
  
• The story reminds people of the problem that's being solved. Why does this thing need to exist? Why does it matter? Why will people need it? Why will they love it?
  

You can only have one customer

You cannot make a single product for two completely opposite customers for two different customer journeys.

You need constraints to make good decisions 

... and the best constraint in the world is time. By forcing a hard deadline on yourself, you can't keep putting the finishing touches on something that will never be finished. Don't allocate too much money at the start. People do stupid things when they have a giant budget.

The best teams are multigenerational

Experienced people have a wealth of wisdom that they can pass on to the next generation and young people can push back against long-held assumptions.

Always be training someone on your team to do your job

There should always be at least one or two people on your team who are natural successors to you. Take vacations, they are a great way to build a team's future capabilities and see who might step into your shoes in the years to come.

"Build" by Tony Fadell

• Your hypothesis is testable when it can be shown true (validated) or false (invalidated), based on evidence (and guided by experience).
• Your hypothesis is precise when you know what success looks like. It describes the precise what, who, and when of your assumptions.
• Your hypothesis is discrete when it describes only one distinct, testable and precise thing you want to investigate.

• "We believe that ..."
• "To verify that, we will ..."
• "And measure ..."
• "We are right if ..."

• "We believed that ..."
• "We observed ..."
• "From that we learned that ..."
• "Therefore, we will ..."

To summarize: Key Hypotheses + Experiments + Key Insights = Reducing uncertainty and risks.

"Testing business ideas" by David J. Bland and Alexander Osterwalder

• What would it look like if it were possible? What would it look like if it were easy?
• Imagine a miracle happened and your problem was solved. How would you know?

• "This is so hard / bad / problematic ...", ... compared to what?

• How do you know that? How do you know that this is the right thing to do?
• What leads you to that conclusion or to that assumption?
• What might happen if it's wrong?
• What are the uncertainties in your reasoning?

When you are presented with new strategies, directions or processes, don't you sometimes wonder ...

• Do we have to change in an obvious way in order to execute this strategy?
• What do we need to do in order to deliver on this? What do we need to stop?
• How do we know if this new strategy, process or whatever is successful? How do we recognize a successful execution?

• But what happens if we do nothing? Maybe that's a question we should ask more often.

• What are we trying to accomplish here?
• What are we up against here?
• How would you like me to proceed? How can we solve this problem?

• What have surprised you the most?
• What's the most difficult thing you did the last X weeks/months, and what did you learn from it?

• What are you currently working on that you are most excited about?

What questions do you tend to ask and why?

You are not you in an organization, but you are what the stories tell about you. In many different organizational contexts, you are your narrative.

It's hard to get better if you don't know what better looks like

The product leader

A product leader leads the product managers building ships (products). They hire the best shipbuilders, create a proper environment for building ships, and they provide their people with the support and tools they need to do great work. The ships your teams build can only be as good as the shipyard that produces them.

The product manager's job

It's the product manager's job to come up with a product solution that is valuable to the user, usable by the user, buildable by your engineering team, and still viable from a business perspective. It's all about finding a balance between these four dimensions.

Again, what's the job you said!?

• Go out there and listen to your users and customers to understand their problems and how you can possible solve them.
• Conduct several experiments and prototypes to test your assumptions and various solutions before building them (to minimize the risk of building the wrong thing in a beautiful way).
  
• Maximize value but minimize the effort to build the actual solution and make sure the winning solutions can be built by the team in a reasonable amount of time.
  
• Deliver the product and optimize (or even innovate on) it based on feedback.

By this definition, a product manager is not a person who only collect requirements, write concepts, and maintain a backlog without making any decisions.

Do you know what better looks like?

If you don't know what makes a good product manager, how do you make sure your product managers know what they are expected to do? How do you hire the right person? How do you show them their necessary areas of personal growth?

Help your product managers understand what you think makes a good product manager. Help them identify their gaps to see what they should get better at, and help them understand what better really looks like.

Product vision, product strategy, goals and principles

For some organizations, product vision, strategy, goals and principles are very scary things - so much so that they avoid creating some or all of them. People think that it's a complicated and difficult process.

In fact, it's all about decision making. These things provide the guardrails for making decisions and prioritizations faster, and better. You need that, because there will always be more work than there is capacity to do it.

How can I grow and learn as a product manager?

• I can learn by consuming books, podcasts, blogs, conference talks.
• I can apply what I have consumed and learned to my daily work.
• I can reflect and get feedback on what I have applied.
• I can contribute back to the community and my colleagues by showing up at events to share my experiences, teach others, write articles, onboard new product managers, and become a mentor.
  

"Strong Product People" by Petra Wille

One, they are expressed as goals, without saying anything about how to reach those goals.

Two, they are generic and shared by pretty much all the other brands and companies in your category.

Three, they are fluffy and written in such a loose and broad way that there are no obvious actions falling out of it. What does "leverage synergies" mean? What do you do with that?

• What must you do to deliver on this?
• What needs to change?
• What do you need to stop doing?
• What needs to be added?

If a strategy doesn't prompt ideas automatically then it has a problem - probably one of being too abstract, and not practically grounded enough.

"No Bullsh*t strategy" by Alex M H Smith

I'm a Yes-person! Yes to everything and everybody.

I don't think I am alone. We say yes too often.

Saying 'No' to people when they ask you? Hell no. I don't want to disappoint people or hurt any feelings. I want to be polite. And what if I miss out on something if I turn it down?

But I also know that my reluctance to say "no" leaves me overcommitted and overwhelmed.

Zoe Chance decided to let 'no' be her default response for an entire month, which she dubbed 'NOvember'. As the month progressed, she started to feel less stressed and more in control of her own decisions, her time, and her life.

She started giving her MBA students a 24-Hour 'No' Challenge. To practice saying no! 

It's about being kind to yourself. People won't hate you. You may find it empowering.

• Why are you asking me?
• Whom else have you asked?
• When you say this is urgent, what do you mean?
• According to what standard does this need to be completed? By when?
• If I couldn't do all of this, but could do just a part, what part would you have me to do?
• What do you want me to take off my plate so I can do this?

I read somewhere that the best and most polite excuse is just to say you have a rule, like “I have a rule that I am home for bath time with the kids every night" or "I have a rule that I don’t decide on the phone".

People respect rules and they accept that the rule allows you no choice.

We all have our practical skills which can be acquired through education, training programs, learning by doing. Skills we are not born knowing. Something we must teach. "Hard skills" as we often say.

In the book 'The Song of Significance', Seth Godin says we let ourselves off the hook when it comes to skills like 

• Decision-making, 
• Eager participation, 
• Dancing with fear, 
• Speaking with authority, 
• Working in teams, 
• Seeing the truth, 
• Speaking the truth, 
• Inspiring others, 
• Doing more than we are asked, 
• Caring, and 
• Being willing to change things.

He says that we tend to underinvest in training on these skills, fearful that these things are innate and can't be taught. 

We downplay them, calling them "soft skills", making it easy for us to move on to something seemingly more urgent.

These are interpersonal skills. Leadership skills. Human skills. Skills that amplify your hard vocational skills.

Adam Grant refers to "character skills" in his hook 'Hidden Potential', which are never too late to build.

• Take initiative to ask questions, 
• Seek information, 
• Get along and collaborate with peers, 
• Pay attention, 
• Take on challenging problems, 
• Do more than the assigned work, and 
• Persist in face of obstacles.

These skills can actually all be learned. Even though they are more difficult to measure, that doesn't mean we can't improve them, can't practice them, or can't change the way we do our work.

Why do we need empowerment?

What must leaders overcome mentally and emotionally to give up control yet retain full responsibility? Do you give employees specific goals as well as the freedom to meet them in any way they choose? Or do people really just want to do as they are told?

Leader-follower

In a leader-follower structure followers take orders and do what they are told to do. They rely on the leader to make all decisions. 

They have limited decision making authority and little incentive to give the utmost of their intellect, energy and passion. 

You must release them instead. Recognize their inherent genius and creativity, and allow those talents to emerge. Let them make meaningful decisions. 

Are you as leader willing to be vulnerable to the effects of their decisions?

Turn disempowered phrases like 

• "I would like to", 
• "Could we", 
• "What should I do about" 

... into empowered phrases like 

• "We intend to", 
• "We plan on", 
• "We will". 

Ask people to state their intentions. Let them make meaningful decisions. Turn passive followers into active leaders.

Rather than giving specific lists of tasks, give broad guidance and context and tell them to prepare the tasks instead. Don't tell people to do stuff they already know they have to do. 

Resist the urge to provide solutions.

When the performance of a unit goes down after leaders leave, it is taken as a sign that they were good leaders, not that they were ineffective in training their people properly.

What comes first, mindset or behavior?

Instead of trying to change mindsets and then change the way you act, start acting differently and the new thinking will follow. You can choose to change your own thinking and hope this leads to new behavior, or change your behavior and hope this leads to new thinking.

Empowerment does not work without competence and clarity. The new decision makers must have a higher level of technical knowledge and clearer sense of organizational purpose than ever before. This is leadership.

When you explain a change, people hear and think they know what you mean, but they don't. They have never had a picture of what you are talking about. They can't see in their imagination how it works. Think out loud. Be honest about what you intend to achieve and communicate that all the time, at every level.

That's how you turn a ship around.

The majority of the interactions we have at work and at home are negotiations that boil down to the expression of a simple, animalistic urge: I want.

But can negotiation techniques used by FBI to deal with drug dealers, terrorists and brutal killers also work with normal humans? Yes!

Active listening

We all want to be heard, understood and accepted, and listening is the cheapest, yet most effective way to get there. Negotiation is not a battle. It is a process of discovery. 

Extract and observe as much information as possible. Work in teams because these extra sets of ears will pick up extra information. We tend to hear what we want to hear.

Labeling

Imagine yourself in their place. Labeling is a way of validating someone's emotion by acknowledging it. Give someone's emotion a name and you show you identify with how that person feels. Once you have thrown out a label, be quiet and listen.

"No" is pure gold

For good negotiators, "No" is pure gold. "No" is the start of the negotiation. A "no" gives the other party the feeling of safety, security and control. It provides a great opportunity for you and the other party to clarify what they really want by eliminating what they don't want.

"That's right"

The sweetest two words in any negotiation are "That's right". They then feel they have assessed what you have said and pronounced it as correct of their own free will. They embrace it. 

Use a summary to trigger those two words. 

Hearing "You're right" on the other hand is a disaster. They then agree, in theory, but don't own the conclusion.

What's the consequence of inaction?

To get real leverage, you have to persuade them that there is something to lose by inaction. People will make more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Most people in a negotiation are driven by fear or by the desire to avoid pain. Too few are driven by their actual goals.

Don't forget to make it happen as well

Your job as a negotiator isn't just to get to an agreement. It's getting to one that can be implemented and making sure it happens. 

Asking "how" forces your counterpart to consider and explain how it will be implemented. By making your counterparts articulate implementation in their own words, you convince them that the final solution is their idea, and that's crucial.

Incomplete information

People operating with incomplete information appear crazy to those who have different information. Your job when faced with someone like this in a negotiation is to discover what they don't know and supply that information.

"Never split the difference" by former FBI hostage negotiator Christopher Voss

It is in our nature, and we love it.

What images are evoked when you hear the word "learning"? Sitting passively in classrooms or meetings and listening? 

Taking in information is not the same as learning.

When we have learned we are able to do something we never were able to do. Learning is about expanding our ability to produce the results we truly want. We never "arrive". It's a process.

The best learners get comfortable being uncomfortable. The way you like to learn is what makes you comfortable, but isn't necessarily how you learn best. Practicing something before you master it is uncomfortable, so you often avoid it. Accelerating learning requires you to use your knowledge as you acquire it.

The most powerful learning comes from direct experiences. As babies we learn eating and walking by trial and error. We didn't learn to speak our mother tongue in a textbook, starting with grammar and, checked by bi-quarterly exams, systematically fitting words to the acquired rules.

There is a dilemma here. Yes, we learn best from experience but we never directly experience the consequences of many of our most important business decisions. How do you and your organization learn then?

Teams, not individuals, are the fundamental learning unit in modern organizations. When teams are learning, the individual members are growing more rapidly than could have occurred otherwise.

Is it crazy to say that the primary objective of a team is to learn? Isn't the primary goal to deliver value? But how do you know you deliver optimal value without learning? The faster you learn, and the quicker you can integrate those insights into your delivery, the more value is created.

One of the best measures of any group's culture is its learning velocity - how quickly it improves its performance of a new skill.

You probably have performance goals. What about learning goals? Getting A in French vs. Learn to speak French. Which one leads to mastery?

But hey, we don't learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on experience someone said. But we are busy, so we don't have time to just sit around and talk, right? We barely have time to think. 

Reflection that isn't connected to action is what makes people think they don't have time for this. We need a culture and the discipline to integrate reflection and action.

Teaching others is a surprisingly powerful method of learning. My favorite. The protégé effect. 

If we know that others are going to learn from us, we feel a sense of responsibility to provide the right information, and fill our own gaps. It is simple. Next time you have learned something, explain it to someone else.

Learning starts with me. I can never expect the people around me to be more open and willing to learn and improve than I am. 

To learn I must be humble enough to realize I have something to learn.

They planet ...

We fear uncertainty

We fear uncertainty. We don't start walking until we find an approach that's guaranteed to work. How can you know what you are doing when no one has done it before? 

The secret is to start walking before you see a clear path. If you stick to the familiar, you won't find the unexpected.

First-principles

Reason from first-principles. Doubt everything you can possibly doubt until you are left with unquestionable truths. That's where you start. With each commitment, each presumption, each budget item, ask yourself, what if this were not true? Why am I doing it this way? Can I get rid of this this or replace it with something better?

Compare oranges and apples

Approach life not with the assumption that we know (or should know) the answers, but with the desire to learn, experiment and absorb. Compare oranges and apples, look for connections between seemingly unrelated things.

Tackle the hardest part first

If your goal is one percent improvement, you can work within the status quo. But if your goal is to improve tenfold, the status quo has to go. You must then start with a blank slate and question all assumptions. Picture the perfect and ask what it takes to build it. Move backwards. Tackle the hardest part first.

Problem reframing

In schools we are taught to answer problems, not to reframe them. Problems may have multiple causes, don't stick with the first that pops to mind. Don't fell in love with your favorite solution and define the problem as the absence of it.

Opinions are sticky, hypotheses not

We undervalue evidence that contradicts our beliefs and overvalue evidence that confirms them. Opinions are sticky. Instead, generate several working hypotheses. Opinions are defended, but working hypotheses are tested. Your goal should be to find what's right, not to be right.

Failure is success if we learn from it

Celebrate lessons from failure, not failure itself. Good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. In uncertainty, outcomes are not completely within your control. Focus on the variables you can control – the inputs – instead of the outputs. Even if the project fails, you can take the input that worked and use them elsewhere.

Surviving your own success

When we succeed, we believe everything went according to the plan. When we succeed we stop pushing boundaries. Surviving your own success can be more difficult than surviving your own failure. Instead of risking something new, we maintain the same "proven" formula that led to our success.

Remain in Day 1

The rocket-science mindset requires remaining in Day 1. We must keep devising thought experiments, taking moonshots, proving ourselves wrong, dancing with uncertainty, reframing problems, testing as we fly, and return to first principles.

That's the mindset of a rocket scientist!

"Think Like a Rocket Scientst" by Ozan Varol

Consulting is the art of influencing people at their request. People want some sort of change, or fear some sort of change, so they seek consulting.

What are some of the Gerald Weinberg's secrets?

• In spite of what your client may tell you, there is always a problem, and no matter how it looks first, it is always a people problem.
  
  
• Remember that once you eliminate your number one problem, you promote number two. The ability to find the problem in any situation is the consultant's best asset. You must give up the illusion that you will ever finish solving problems.
  
  
• Things are the way they are because they got that way. You never start with a blank slate. There were, at the time, good and sufficient reasons for decisions that seem idiotic today. Study for understanding, not for criticism.
  
  
• When you point your finger at someone, notice where the other three fingers are pointing.
  
  
• The name of a thing is not the thing. We have a tendency to attach a label to every new thing we see, and then treat that thing as if the label were true and a total description. Each person sees a part of the whole and identifies the whole with that part. The true expert can see multiple aspects of a situation but the novice sees only one thing.
  
  
• Deal gently with systems that should be able to cure themselves. Repeatedly curing a system that can cure itself will eventually create a system that can't. And remember that every prescription has two parts: the medicine and the method of ensuring correct use. If the treatment stops too soon, the disease springs back.
  
  
• Nothing new ever works, but there is always hope that this time will be different. Accept that the new will fail. If it can't be perfect, how can you use it so it will be better than the one you have today? Improvement is easier than perfection.
  
  
• You can make buffalo go anywhere, just so long as they want to go there. You don't make people change when you more interested in what you want than in what your clients want.
  
  
• If we want to learn anything, we must not try to learn everything. When you stop learning new things, it's time to move on. You are hired for knowing what others don't know, so a consultant that stops learning soon decays in value.
  
  
• Give away your best ideas. Do everything to encourage your clients to take over your work. This increases the chance they will give you future business, or recommend to you others. If you try to have an answer to every question, you drive your clients away. The best marketing tool is a satisfied client.
  

"Secrets of Consulting" and "More Secrets of Consulting" by Gerald M. Weinberg

As understanding deepens, the strategist seeks the crux - the one challenge that both is critical and appears to be solvable.

A diagnosis of the situation. Figure out what's going on here and understand the challenge you face. The challenge can be to deal with change and competition, it can be triggered by a large opportunity or it can be internal like outdated routines, bureaucracy, or lack of collaboration.

A guiding policy, i.e. what will you do and what will you not do with the challenge. It is "guiding" because it channels actions in certain directions without defining exactly what shall be done.

A set of coherent actions that will carry out the guiding policy. This part is so easy to leave out because people like to think of strategy as a high level conceptual thing. Strategy is about action. There must be enough clarity about action to bring concepts down to earth.

When deciding what you will do with the challenge, find your source of advantage. Do you know something that others don't? Do you have a skill that others don't have? Do you have a reputation, brand or existing market system that others cannot replicate? Do you have scale, technology, experience or other resources that others don't have?

A bad strategy is fluff and fails to face the challenge, it lacks the diagnosis. If you don't frame the challenge it is difficult to assess the quality of the strategy.

Another mistake is to treat goals as a strategy. Many bad strategies are just statements of desire rather than plans for overcoming obstacles. Good strategic objectives are the outcome of a strategy, not its input.

Bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy. One common reason for choosing avoidance is the pain or difficulty of choice.

Good strategy requires leaders who are willing to and able to say no to a wide variety of actions and interests.

Strategy is not mysterious. It is about solving the most important problem you are facing. You need to be focused on something doable and be consistent about it.

When we are going to do something we have done before, we know what we don't know. 

We know where and why delays are likely to occur and we usually know what to do if something goes wrong. We can plan the steps ahead. In this world, clarity and process optimization is good.

Wicked or complex problems on the other hand are different. There is no one right answer. There are no agreement on what the problem really is. 

You face many stakeholders with conflicting objectives. No solutions are right or wrong. You can make the outcome better or worse, but you are never done. Forcing clarity in this world will inevitably hinder innovation.

Getting married is not complex, but having a happy marriage is. There is a manual for getting married. But there is no "best practice" for a happy marriage. It's the sum of many small parts which makes it difficult to make a detailed plan. You cannot copy someone else's work and expect the same results because no two complex problems are alike.

All the analysis, plans and methodologies used to build a car are useless if your problem is car traffic. A car slowing down will cause ripple effects in the traffic difficult to predict. The issue with traffic is not the cars, the buses, the bicycles, or the pedestrians. It is in the relationship between them.

Building the Titanic out of LEGO bricks is not complex. You can simply follow the instructions. The whole equals the sum of the parts.

What about development of digital products that you haven't built before, either at all or in your context?

Market conditions change. Technology is changing. People's behavior change. We don't quite know how we are going to do it. We don't know what people want. You don't know what you don't know until you do something and get feedback. That's when the actual development starts.

Leading in complexity calls for something other than plans and best practices. Sense what's happening. Get some data. Take small actions based on the data and see what happens. Learn from it. Do more of what works, and less of what don't. Find the small changes that have a large positive effect.

Easier said then done. We are humans and we fear uncertainty. When we face uncertainty, we often manufacture excuses for not getting started. We don't start walking until we find an approach that's guaranteed to work.

It's hard to say to your stakeholders that you don't know exactly if it will be a success, when it will be finished and what it will cost.

What we can do is to deliver something early and often and let people try it and give feedback. 

We can also share what we believe (our hypothesis), what we will do to verify it, how we will measure it, what we observed, what we learned from it and what we will do next based on that.

In complexity, how do you measure success? You get what you measure you know ...

In our team workshop last week I shared some technology beliefs, principles or statements (don't know what to call it).

They help me approach (digital) technology in this uncertain, complex and fast-moving world.

All technologies serve a purpose. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes you must dig deeper to discover it and it can also change over time. Find and understand the purpose.

Technologies cause new problems for every problem they solve. The problems of today are caused by yesterday's successes, and the technical solutions today will cause the problems of tomorrow.

All technologies are combinations of existing technologies. Look for surprising innovations and benefits in the combination and remix of different technologies.

All technologies come from social interactions and exchange of ideas. Not the lone genius. Go out and observe and talk with different people.

Technologies thrive in ecosystems of highly interdependent technologies that support each other. The success of one technology often depends on the success of others in a mix of collaboration and competition. You see this with all the partnerships and collaborations being established by tech companies. They compete in one dimension, but collaborate in another because their technologies benefit each other.

The more powerful a technology is, the more powerfully it will be abused.​ Unfortunately, new technologies will also unleash new ways to lie, cheat, steal, spy, and terrorize.

We tend to fit all new technologies into the old frame we already know.​ It's just harder to imagine how the known and comfortable frame can and should change to exploit the benefits from new technologies.

Nothing is as easy as it looks like. Period.

Technology in the future will be a series of endless upgrades. Nothing is finished. Nothing is done.

No matter how it looks first, it is always a people* problem (* = process, people, organization). Yep, usually the things that make or break technologies are process, organization and people challenges.

Successful technologies are the ones we only notice when they don’t work. They have become invisible. We don't even call them technologies anymore. Just look around you in the room you are sitting in now.

The coolest and most disruptive technologies of all have not been invented yet.

What do you think?

Problems typically have multiple causes and can be addressed in many ways.

Frame the problem. Write down the problem you are trying to solve and list the people who are involved. Is the problem clear? Is a solution "baked into" the problem framing? How do you know the statement is true?

Then start to look outside the frame. What's missing from the current problem statement? Look beyond your own expertise. Avoid framing a problem to match whatever technique you are most proficient in. Look to prior events. Did something happen before the period of time you are looking at? Look for hidden influences. Are there higher-level, systemic factors at play that influence the people involved?

Rethink the goal. What is the goal you are trying to achieve and why? What would success look like? Are you pursuing the right goal? Is there a better goal to pursue? Are key assumptions actually true? What is the goal behind the goal?

Examine the bright spots to identify positive exceptions that can give you a new perspective on the problem, and even point you directly to a viable solution. When do we not have the problem? When was the problem less severe? Have the problem already been solved at least once? Who else deals with this type of problem? Who seems not to have this problem, even if they are in a similar situation? What are they doing differently?

Take a look in the mirror. What is my role in creating this problem? Is it possible that my (or our) own behavior is, on some level, contributing to the problem? Scale the problem down to your level. Is there a part of the problem I can do something about?

Take their perspective. Invest time in understanding other people. Discover how they see the world - and in particular, how they see it differently from you. What's their needs, emotions, and general point of view? What are their problems? Goals? Beliefs? What information do they have? There is often a reasonable explanation behind the actions of other people: something that you might have done too, had you been in their shoes.

Move forward. The last step in the reframing is to validate your framing through real-world testing. Describe the problem to stakeholders and get feedback. Get outsiders to help validate your problems. Test and find out if the problem is real or important enough for your stakeholders to really want to solve it.

At the end of a reframing, schedule time for a new one. 

The problem change over time. Repeat. 

Create routines and practice the mindset.

"What's your problem?" By Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

On his sixty-eight birthday, Kevin Kelly decided to give his young adult children some advice. 

To his surprise, he had more to say than he thought, and he kept going until he had about 450 bits of advice he wished he'd known when he was younger. Timeless knowledge, advice he have heard from others mixed with his own experience.

Here are my favorite advice from Kevin's book which I may pass on to my children one day.

• Don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid, because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.
  
  
• The best way to learn something is to try to teach what you know.
  
  
• Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don't focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.
  
  
• Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you will get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.
  
  
• In all things - except love - start with the exit strategy. Prepare for the ending. Almost anything is easier to get into than out of.
  
  
• It is much easier to change how you think by changing your behavior than it is to change your behavior by changing how you think. Act out the change you seek.
  
  
• To succeed once, focus on the outcome; to keep succeeding, focus on the process that makes the outcome.
  
  
• The purpose of listening is not to reply, but to hear what is not being said.
  
  
• To get better at speaking, watch a recording of yourself speaking. It is shocking and painful, but an effective way to improve.
  
  
• Pay attention to who you are around when you feel your best. Be with them more often.
  
  
• Reading to your children regularly is the best school they will ever get.
  
  
• The biggest lie we tell ourselves is "I don't need to write this down because I will remember it".
  
  
• That thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult - if you don't lose it.
  
  
• When a child asks an endless string of "Why?" questions, the smartest reply is "I don't know, what do you think?"
  
  
• To write about something hard to explain, write a detailed letter to a friend about why it is so hard to explain and you will have a great first draft.
  
  
• To have a great trip, head toward an interest rather than to a place. Travel to passions rather than destinations.
  
  
• The natural state of all possessions is to need repair and maintenance. What you own will eventually own you. Choose selectively.
  
  
• You can be whatever you want to be, so be the person who ends meetings early.
  

"Excellent Advice for Living" by Kevin Kelly

I didn't know it then, but in this period of my life I built a foundation which I use to this day.

I learned that I couldn't win alone. Being in a team meant we were committed to a common goal, and we depended on each other to reach it. Put your own needs above the team, and we lost.

I got used to distributed and remote-only teams common in many companies today. We used Ventrilo and mIRC instead of Microsoft Teams and Slack. We met in person during the school holidays to get to know each other even better. The energy and mood in the basement when we won were unforgettable.

I didn't know about psychological safety back then, but we had it somehow. We had it because we stuck together over time through victories and losses. We learned each other's strengths and weaknesses and how to leverage it to our advantage. We respected and wished each other well. I learned that teams take time to form and become effective.

I didn't know about Tuckman's forming, storming, norming and performing stages, but I now know from my experience back then that the model is not linear. In one moment we were high-performing rock stars, but in the next we were middle in a storm. Nurturing a team is a continuous never-ending job.

I always go externally to learn from the best in class, just as we did 20 years ago playing Counter Strike. As a team we didn't start off great. We learned and became better by playing games and studying HLTV recordings from the best teams and players in the world.

I learned the importance of having a game plan, but more importantly how and when to change and adapt it when the circumstances required it. We had a plan A, B and C and when none of them worked out we relied purely on experience and intuition.

I learned that great skills and experience was not enough, it also depended on the surrounding environment. The graphics card, screen, mouse, mouse pad, configurations, headphones, and chair mattered, a lot. We needed the right tools and a support system around us. Parents cooking dinner and transporting us and our computers to wherever we needed to be.

So want to learn more about teams? Play computer games!

• How did we achieve our results? 
• How ambitious were the targets? 
• Was there a headwind or tailwind? 
• Which risks were taken? 
• How sustainable are the results? 

These evaluation questions require more effort than comparing two numbers.

Hitting a target does not necessarily mean that this was the best performance possible because it assumes that the "right" target was set.

Beyond Budgeting is a journey where the direction is clearer than the destination, if there is one.

Changing what we do helps little unless we also change how we think. That is the hardest part.

"This is Beyond Budgeting" by Bjarte Bogsnes