There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitor focused, you can be product focused, you can be technology focused, you can be business model focused, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day 1 vitality.

Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.

Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight.

It’s always worth asking, do we own the process or does the process own us?

Good inventors and designers deeply understand their customer. They spend tremendous energy developing that intuition.

A remarkable customer experience starts with heart, intuition, curiosity, play, guts, taste. You won’t find any of it in a survey.

Over the past decades computers have broadly automated tasks that programmers could describe with clear rules and algorithms. Modern machine learning techniques now allow us to do the same for tasks where describing the precise rules is much harder.

Machine learning drives our algorithms for demand forecasting, product search ranking, product and deals recommendations, merchandising placements, fraud detection, translations, and much more.

To keep the energy and dynamism of Day 1, you have to somehow make high-quality, high-velocity decisions. Easy for start-ups and very challenging for large organizations.

Many decisions are reversible, two-way doors. Those decisions can use a light-weight process.

If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.

use the phrase “disagree and commit.” This phrase will save a lot of time.

If you’re the boss, you should do this too. I disagree and commit all the time

recognize true misalignment issues early and escalate them immediately.

We can have the scope and capabilities of a large company and the spirit and heart of a small one. But we have to choose it.