This essay was inspired by: http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engineer/
If engineering is rapidly becoming commoditized, what's the other part of that billion-dollar one-engineer startup? What does it mean for your role as a product person?
Creation = Technique + Intention
Creation has always been the combination of two components: technique and intention. Technique is the ability to translate a mental concept into something tangible. Intention is the ability to come up with what you'd like to express and for the audience to experience.For artists, it's the difference between the hand and the brain. The hand is the implement that can accurately translate mental images to paper. The brain is what comes up with the interesting things to draw.
For musicians, it's the dexterity of their fingers vs. the musical narrative they want to tell. To make something great, you need both: no one wants to hear you play arpeggios all day and even if you have the most heart-rending song, it's useless if people can't hear it.
In current technology companies, this relationship is stratified into the engineer and the product manager. The product manager internalizes customer needs, design resources, business economics and details a product spec. The engineer takes this spec and renders it into a tangible product.
The point we're reaching today is that product managers who have just enough technical know-how can start to deploy and auto-scale on Amazon AWS / Google Cloud.
Some incredible things lie waiting in a world where technique and intention happens in a single brain.
Future as a Taste-Based Industry
If we're trying to prognosticate the future, we can look towards a very old industry that went through a similar paradigm shift.For writers, the Gutenberg printing press was the Amazon AWS of the written word. Previously, in order to distribute a hundred copies of your book, you had to hand-write a hundred copies. This marvelous piece of technology reduced the required work for duplication by a few magnitudes.
Writing is now almost entirely about taste. What required complex technique is now reduced to intention. If you can write something great that makes people feel, getting it published and distributed is a solved problem.
You can predicate success of writing not by it's ability to be productized and published, but by the quality of the writing.
What is a Product Really?
I'd argue the process of finding a cover artist, illustrator, font stylist when publishing a book are commoditized roles fulfilling a well-worn path.In that same vein, I risk alienating some people, but I posit that today's graphical and interaction designers fulfill a similar commoditized role in tech products alongside engineers.
When you look at Product Hunt (http://producthunt.com) on any given day, you see an incredible number of visually stimulating products prettied up and ready for getting picked up for usage.
The tech industry originally understood taste to mean great at visual design. In the past two years, this definition has morphed to mean great at interaction design. Now as design as a whole becomes commoditized, you need to figure out the next key competitive differentiator. The earlier you make this mental jump, the better off you'll be.
I am in no way discounting the importance of great design. (Much like how you shouldn't discount the importance of a superbly engineered product, running quickly and smoothly.)
But it can't be the differentiator, much like how a beautiful piece of cover art or clever illustration placement won't guarantee a book becoming the next Song of Ice and Fire.
Product is Emotion
If a product isn't engineering or design, then what is it?I believe the answer is much more human. All we really care about is how this product will make us feel. In fact, that's the only thing that ends up mattering.
When you purchase a book, you're purchasing how you want to feel when you've finished it. You could feel satisfied having learned more about business management. You could feel satisfied having learned how to bake a souffle. You could feel satisfied having vicariously experienced adventures of a boy wizard and his two friends.
A book is defined unique by novel emotional sensations it provides to its user. Taste is the ability to infuse a product with emotion.
In a taste-based industry, its products are stripped down to their very core: how it makes its users feel. We see this phenomenon happen in books, music, movies, games and increasingly tech products.
Mediocrity and High Beta
One inextricable and discouraging aspect of a taste-based industry is the high beta. For every successful writer, musician, standup comic, movie star, there are tens of thousands struggling to pay rent.For writers in particular, anyone can put words on a page. You're in competition with the entire world. These are not favorable terms for anyone with a smidgen of esteem.
I won't sugarcoat the grim reality that if you don't have taste in a taste-based industry, you'll be relegated to commodity jobs. (Though they can be very lucrative given the incredible demand.)
If you want to be a tech founder who wants to change the world in 2014, you must have world-class taste.
Finding Success in a Taste-Based Industry
The only way to succeed in this new world is to build taste better than anyone else. For astute aspiring founders of today, a lot of your mental cycles should be spent on figuring out ways to get that world-class taste.This is also with the baseline requirements of understanding engineering and visual / interaction design.
With the difficulty of assembling a world-class team with the fragmented landscape—anyone ambitious who is actually world-class is likely to be off building their own thing—you should try your best to become superb at all three: taste, engineering and design.
This is a tall order, but then again, nobody said becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg would be easy. I sincerely believe someone who has all three in a single brain will be able to create truly unique, gratifying experiences.
Actionable Team-Building
The great thing about taste is if you yourself have it, not only can you recognize others that realized the same insights, but you know just how valuable it is. I think most people think it's a small-time multiplier.This is one of my secrets, in the Peter Thiel sense. Taste is a stupidly powerful multiplier that will make your tiny team provide value to billions. Most people think 2x or 3x. Tech people think 10x. I've realized the truly gifted commandeer a multiplier of 10^6 x.
We've already seen how the taste of a single individual, whether that be J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin can effect massive emotional change to the world.
What this means is that you need the absolute best, because the absolute best will be responsible for those crucial magnitudes. The good news is you only need a very small number of them.
Here's how you find people with taste:
- They have unique insights about taste you've never heard before. This means this is an active area they've been contemplating about and think it's important enough to spend their spare cycles ruminating.
- Somehow all the products they create have soul. It just feels great to use them. They provide a feeling unlike anything you've experienced elsewhere. They use some very clever, unique features that enhance that feeling.
- They write well. They do photography. They sing. They draw. The funny thing about taste is once you recognize that is the way creativity works, you can cross-apply it to other creative fields.
- They're obsessed with people and the way people work. They have an insatiable curiosity to figure out what makes people tick. It turns out this knowledge becomes the fundamental ingredient for making taste actionable.
They are out there in the wild today. Much like a young, penniless J.K. Rowling going door-to-door between publishers, it's up to you to discover them. By the time they've created their masterpiece, it's already too late because everyone will want them.
It's telling when companies like Facebook will acquire highly talented product people with proven taste at a premium. Josh Miller (https://twitter.com/joshm) would be someone who comes to mind.
If I were running a $100 Billion company and had a few thousands of millions to spare, I would consider acquiring such founders the best bang for the buck. They are the most likely to produce future products with novel emotional experiences the world will want to enjoy.
Be sensitive to taste. Realize it exists and permeates the world around you. It is the kingmaker. When you find someone who has it—dear god, hold on to them with all your might. Treat them like actual kings.
How to Move Forward
To the product people with taste, the world is your oyster.A funny Catch-22 exists in that you can't really prove you have taste until you have built a successful product. In order to build a successful product, you need to convince people you have taste.
To escape this, build something by yourself or a very small team and infuse as much of a unique, experience that you can't find anywhere else and finish it.
This will be your Reservoir Dogs. Reservoir Dogs was a very scrappy production made by a very small team.
For Quentin Tarantino, Reservoir Dogs never got mass recognition until Pulp Fiction was released. It was then the world looked back and realized, yes Reservoir Dogs is pretty fucking awesome. It was evident even in his earliest movie that he had taste.
Your Reservoir Dogs might not get mass critical acclaim. That's ok. Use your Reservoir Dogs as a gravitational slingshot for more influence and a higher budget. You can use it to convince your team members and angels that yes, you do indeed have taste. With expanded resources, you can then dare to apply your taste to more ambitious aims.
Perhaps that billion-dollar one-person startup isn't so far fetched, after all. Instagram had it down to 13 people. What's a magnitude of progress in the span of a few decades of technology?