Sad products

This tweet summarizes a complex topic that I’ve been grappling with over the course of the last few years.

How does a leader walk the tight-rope of building a product that is both qualitatively and quantitatively successful? I’m not entirely sure if there are many leaders for whom both carry equal weight.

In the startups I’ve worked in and those I’ve observed, it becomes clear that in any cofounder mix some are driven by the mission & vision and others by the money & metrics. All the above are equally important.

Yet so much of the machinery we use to decide whether a product is successful elevates what can be measured and easily parsed at the expense of that which can only be understood through intuition, feeling and experiencing the products.