I personally won’t be losing any sleep over Zillow failing at house flipping. But there are several lessons we can learn from their failure. To create great businesses and great products, we have to focus, think long-term, and understand it’s as much art as science.

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This month we are reviewing the book Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. In order to truly understand people, their problems, and ultimately our society, we have to use qualitative and quantitative data effectively. We have to cut through the noise and the lies we tell ourselves and each other, and get to the truth. 

Book: Everybody Lies
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Product discovery is critical for building excellent products. And doing good product discovery interviews is critical for good product discovery. To do that, you need to understand your goals, create a plan, talk to your customers, and share what you’ve learned in order to improve your future discussions and ultimately the solutions you offer.

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Understanding our users and our customers is critical for the success of our businesses and products. The best way to do this is to actually talk to them. Not to pitch them or sell them, but to understand their problems and needs and how they are trying to solve these things. Once we develop this understanding and empathy, we can create the best products and experiences.

Book:The Mom Test
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This week I’m highlighting some interesting articles and podcasts that I’ve been reading and thinking about. A little different than our normal format, but lots of good content, including food shortages, labor shortages, wage shortages, Apple's monopoly and the paradox of choice.

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Weekly newsletter: Supply Chains, Shortages, Monopolies & More
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We have to ask questions, probe, and get to the core before we can create solutions. If we try to add water without addressing the real problem, we may create temporary fixes, but they won’t be long-term solutions. And we’ll end up spinning our wheels again and again. So rather than stopping with the superficial, get to the heart of the problems with your users and your customers. Understand why they have a problem, what they are trying to accomplish, and what outcomes they are trying to create. Then you can do something far more meaningful. 

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Ultralearning is a strategy for aggressive, self-directed learning. This book helps create a framework for learning new skills quickly and effectively. It is not only possible, but necessary for our rapidly changing world.

Book:Ultralearning: Master Hard Skills, Outsmart the Competition, and Accelerate Your Career
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Having true ownership of products, features, metrics, and outcomes ensures that someone cares about those things, can focus the right attention on them, and can ultimately drive their success. If there isn’t ownership, there can’t be success. Watching teams, whether professional sports teams or product development teams, without ownership and accountability is always disheartening. They don’t win like they should be able to. But with real ownership, asking tough questions, and holding ourselves to a high standard, we can achieve amazing outcomes.

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This month we review Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs. We take a look at some of the insights and lessons from how Apple developed Safari and the keyboards for the iPhone and the iPad. And whether to add the book to your reading list.

Book: Creative Selection
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There isn’t a science behind sticking with a feature versus killing it. There isn’t a formula or definitive playbook for this. Which is why it is so difficult. Which is why product is so difficult. It is as much art as it is science. It comes down to the goal, the metrics, the timeline, and good judgement. In this episode, we look at Twitter's decision to kill Fleets and analyze the various factors.

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Weekly newsletter: Killing Features: The Art of Persisting Versus Ending Features
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