"those who are most adaptable and focused on impact are the ones who will succeed. For entrepreneurs and teams working on new things, scrappiness is a critical component of achieving your goals, staying focused on your vision, identifying opportunities, and navigating setbacks as they arise."

"The Cambridge Dictionary defines scrappy as ""having a strong, determined character"" and a willingness “to argue or fight for what you want”."

"scrappiness is the ability to face challenges head-on and be resourceful, without letting the potential for failure stifle the potential for getting things done. Being scrappy means that even when you're faced with a roadblock or obstacle, you’re able to push through and make things happen—even when they seem daunting."

"when you build something new, you don’t know where that good soil is. The process of iterating and testing helps you find the right ground for your idea to take root. I like to call this ""scrappy A/B testing"": finding a product-market fit through experimentation."

"If you get bogged down in bureaucracy, you’ll never be able to move fast enough to succeed in a competitive marketplace."

"Deciding who has the final say—and who needs to get out of the way—is the key to making sure the approval process isn't causing more problems than it solves."

"Recollections of past moves can be helpful for avoiding future mistakes, but they can also hold companies back from taking risks and trying new things. It's important to strike a balance between learning from past failures and being paralyzed by them."

"If we can't embrace failing well as part of the path to success, we end up making perfect into the enemy of the good. This perfectionism can stifle scrappiness and make it harder for innovation to thrive."

"Scrappiness is a philosophy of rolling with the punches, adjusting quickly, and learning as you go. It's about testing and adapting, not just moving fast and breaking things. It's about using mistakes as learning opportunities, rather than failures while celebrating the small successes each time you get closer to your goal."

"by fostering a culture of scrappiness, where teams are encouraged to test, learn, and iterate, companies can embrace risk-taking and achieve great things."

"tell people what you want so they can help you achieve it."

"If we seem open to opportunities, others will make us aware of them. If we solicit people’s opinions on how to grow, we are showing that we are willing to take feedback, and will continue to get advice."

"Opportunity doesn’t usually fall into your lap. It’s there, but sometimes you have to shake a few trees in order to get access. By making your goals known, you are giving others the chance to help you achieve them."

"No one can read your mind. I often tell the people I coach, ""If you don't ask for what you want, don't be surprised if you don't get it."""

"Your mentors and sponsors don't always have you at the top of their minds. Even when something seems important or obvious to you, it may not be to them; in fact, they may not even know you want it! That’s why it’s so important to reach out and ask."

"You’ll never know if you don’t ask. Putting yourself out there like this can be difficult, but the potential reward is worth the risk of getting an answer you don’t want."

"a lot of times they weren't sure exactly what I wanted, because although they knew I was looking for opportunities, I wasn’t clear about what kind. That was when I realized I needed to be specific. By inviting help, and clearly defining how others can provide it, you are making it easier for them to give it to you."

"The desire: What is it that you want?  The why: Why do you want this?  The timing: Why is now the right time for this?   The invitation: What can the person you’re asking do to help you get there?"

"Those who ask are more likely to get what they want because their asks are naturally top of mind."

"Signaling your openness, telling people what you want, and giving them permission to help you will reduce the friction to having your requests met. Yes, it feels risky, but as the saying goes, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.”"

"Faced with the pain of having to use the Ancestry tool for work communication, the team gained a greater understanding of the problems with it, as well as a better idea of how to solve them."

"Dogfooding forces you to experience a product as your users do—not just in a theoretical or roadmap sense, but in a real, practical, everyday sense."

"When you use your product yourself, you'll find blind spots that you never noticed before and gain insight into how to address them."

"A common pitfall that we fall into when we get really close to our product is forgetting what it's like to be a new user. This makes it easier to overlook issues that might be obvious to an outsider."

"Sometimes we get so deep into our experiences that we forget what it’s like to start using our products for the first time. We forget that not everyone has the same knowledge and understanding that we do."

"One thing I encourage you to do is to sign up for your service again, using a brand new account. Do this every few months to stay up-to-date on the experience, and to remind yourself that there's always more to learn and improve."

"What are the pitfalls and challenges that people run into? Does the product feel easy or hard? What makes the product sticky?"

"Having customer empathy means putting yourself in the shoes of another and experiencing the product from their point of view. It’s about looking outside yourself and seeing through their eyes, without the debugging tools and the access to engineers."

"We're building products for people who may not have computers, or phones worth a thousand dollars apiece, and if we forget that, we risk leaving them out of the equation."

"Sometimes we think the whole world is made up of people just like us. In reality, it’s quite different. Our perspectives are often limited by the places we live, the technology we use, and the issues we run into in our day-to-day lives. Dogfooding can give us a different viewpoint, enabling us to see how our products affect people who are different from us."

"Growth does not drive product-market fit. A growth team focused on growing a product with poor retention is fundamentally flawed. Great growth efforts on top of a leaky funnel mean more people having a poor experience."

"wait for retention to stabilize or start increasing before investing in growth."

"Growth is not about manipulating people. In testing growth tactics, it is important to stay true to the job the product does."

"Using tactics like hiding a “dismiss” link or s-out may help your growth metrics in the short term; but they will not help you attract and engage people who actually want to use your product"

"Growth is not scattershot “growth hacking.” Spraying and praying can yield short-term gains and move metrics, but without a clear hypothesis of why something works these ephemeral gains will likely fade over time or be unsustainable."

"At its core, growth work is about making it easy for people to use your product and get value out of it."

"Once there’s product-market fit, a growth team at a minimum should have a product manager, data scientist, and three to five engineers."

"The goal of the team should be achieving a certain outcome (e.g. grow transactions to X)."

"the goal should be easy for teams to understand. Avoid fancy composite metrics that combine multiple different actions since it will be difficult for teams to understand why the metric is moving up or down."

"A growth mindset means being willing to challenge the status quo and seek improvement without prejudice."

"Reduce friction in flows, but be careful not to go too far. One of the tried-and-true growth tips at Facebook is to taking friction out of flows to increase conversion."

"Listen to consumer reports and take action. It can be hard work to listen to customer feedback, particularly when you’ve got millions of people using the product. But looking into this feedback and being responsive can yield customer experience wins and growth wins together."

"Product strategies are guides to the future based on the information that you have at the time. They are living documents; as things change and more information comes to light, they should be revisited, revised, and added upon."

"Section 1 - Understand the Problem"

"Every product strategy starts with a clear and cogent problem statement. Know what problem you want to solve and for whom. Identify the opportunity and size it."

"Define the problem: What problem are you trying to solve?"

"Think of your favorite product. Then think of the unique problem it is trying to solve in 10 words or less."

"Airbnb: Connecting travelers with unique places to stay Amazon: Find anything to buy online at a good price Coursera: Accessible quality online education for everyone Facebook: Connecting with friends and family about things you care about Google: Organizing the world's information WhatsApp: Private messaging for low connectivity environments YouTube: Sharing videos and finding an audience"

"Define your audience: Who are you solving the problem for?"

"Knowing whose problem you are solving, and who is deciding if you get to solve the problem is an important distinction. In consumer products, they are often the same person, but in enterprise products, they are often entirely different."

"Amazon: Booklovers Facebook: College students PayPal: eBay sellers and small online sites  QuickBooks: Small businesses Snapchat: Teens in western countries on iOS"

"Before you build for the world, win in one market. You can later take the capabilities you built and move to adjacent verticals or experiences."

"Understand the market: What is the competitive landscape?"

"Segments - define based on behavioral or needs based on segments Market size - opportunity size, number of potential customers Competitors - leaders in the space, the concentration of competitive strength"

"Section 2 - Identify your unique value"

"Amazon AWS: Computation capabilities at scale Apple iPhone: Human-centric design Facebook Marketplace: Buy & Sell Groups and profile selling"

"Section 3 - Outline how you will execute"

"Strategy is easy, execution is hard. Many companies have similar strategies, but what separates those who win from those who don't is execution."

"Be clear where you want to be in two years, and then break it down into workable units. Know what you are learning in each six-month phase which will inform the next six months."

"Define success: What does winning look like?"

"Define success as something measurable so that you continuously monitor if you are on your way there."

"Identify risks: What are the pitfalls?"

"Confidence is built through assessment and clear thinking in the face of adversity, not by hiding from potential headwinds."

"The perfect strategy that is not executable is no better than having no strategy at all."

"The right strategy at the right time will often feel obvious, and if it doesn't you should ask why the organization or the world was not yet ready for it and what it would take to prepare them."

"Perfectionism can be a strong motivator, but it has rapidly diminishing returns. It quickly robs you of time, energy, and attention that you could be putting toward what’s really important in your life and your job. Sometimes just aiming for good enough is the best thing for yourself and your sanity."

"Do your best, but don’t allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good."

"1. Let go of perfectionism"

"2. Break free of the sunk cost fallacy"

"If something isn’t working, despite your best efforts, sometimes the best thing to do is bite the bullet and walk away. Rather than doubling down, think back to when you started down your current path."

"3. Stop ruminating"

"Rather than worrying about what was beyond my control, I worked to reframe my thoughts in terms of what I could control. What could I learn from these experiences? How could I be proactive going forward?"

"4. Think of your future self"

"Remember, your future self is responsible for the stress created by your current self, the one doing the procrastinating."

"The next time you feel the temptation to procrastinate, think about your future self. Put yourself in their shoes, and ask yourself what they would wish you had done today."

"5. Make space for the small things"

"Build five minutes into your schedule between meetings. Then, during those five minutes, if there is anything you can resolve immediately, do it. Reply to that email, set up that meeting, or submit that ticket."

"If you let the small things build up, you will be left with an hour of five-minute tasks to do at the end of the day. You will also spend twice as much time context-switching in and out while the work sits in the back of your mind all day."

"6. Look forward, not back"

"You will stumble on your way forward if you are always looking backward."

"When you allow the past to anchor you, you are not allowing the future to blossom."

"By opening yourself up to the future and looking ahead you can focus not on what can’t change, but on what you will change going forward."

"7. Run your own race"

"""Comparison is the thief of joy.”"

"focus on the progress you can make, the challenges you can overcome, and the goals you can set for yourself. You may be faster or slower than others, but the most important thing is finishing the marathon on your own terms."

"8. Embrace the risk of being judged"

"Growth does not come without the risk of being judged, but by being okay with that risk, you are allowing yourself to be part of the conversation."

"If you often notice yourself holding back your opinions or contributions, start small. Choose one thing to do each day that goes beyond your comfort zone."

"“Don’t be limited by other people’s limited imagination.”"

"“You're either ripening or rotting.”"

"“How you ask for feedback matters.”"

"""When faced with a choice, choose the difficult option. You will never regret challenging yourself to see what you’re capable of.”"

"“Run your own race.”"

"the race is the point—not the finish line—and to enjoy where I am."

"“Hang Up, Call Again.”"

"The key is to have the perseverance to keep calling until you get the answer you want!"

"a generic request for feedback isn’t helpful, because most people, when asked that question, simply reply, “You’re doing a great job.” Instead you should be specific."

"as leaders, we have to be careful not to be the ones who are the limiting imagination for others."

"Five years after launch, the Marketplace Tab on Facebook now has over a billion monthly active users, more than Snapchat and Twitter combined."

"in many early research studies, more than half of people studied in many countries cited Facebook as a place they had bought or sold things. This was less common in Western markets, which made it a blind spot for many of those at the company."

"Kids generate a lot of used goods, many of which are insanely expensive to buy new. I also had friends in Asia who talked about how meaningful buying and selling in groups was to them, and how Facebook was the place to connect for commerce."

"We decided to set up a way to allow group admins to opt into becoming classified commerce groups. This allowed us to track organic behaviors on the platform."

"We also started to rank the group content to help people discover products for sale. Prior to this, no group content was ranked—it was purely chronological."

"We evaluated a number of options for building the V1, balancing speed and functionality, and decided to use React Native, one of the first major products to do so. This enabled us to build nearly twice as fast, at the cost of flexibility."

"Our early bet was that supply would drive demand—that having sufficient inventory would get buyers excited about coming to this new tab to browse. To do that, we had to get sellers on board."

"A small bug in the fraud queues resulted in a massive flood of violating items."

"1. Focusing on trust"

"Buying and selling face-to-face meant that trust was a huge factor, especially when it came to bulky items that required people to meet up in person."

"He felt more comfortable seeing their real identities and the duration they had been on the Facebook platform, something that wasn’t possible on other, anonymous platforms."

"3. Integrating with Messenger"

"Being integrated with Facebook Messenger makes communication fast and easy. It allows you to pin your location and have someone come to you, or easily send a deposit to someone."

"4. Leveraging the Groups community"

"This idea of people-powered commerce, buying from your neighbors, and reducing waste was part of the ethos of the product from the start."

"Knowing someone had mutual friends or had been active on Facebook for over a decade provided confidence to those who were looking for someone to live with. The same goes for car selling: Trust is important, since you are meeting and getting into a car with a stranger."

"1. Follow the data"

"Following the data, we were able to iterate and evolve the product to be what users were looking for."

"2. Device matters"

"While the product started primarily for mobile, we realized that to be competitive, we needed to add a desktop version. This was important for larger purchases and would make listing easier for high-volume sellers."

"3. Navigating scaling"

"To address both violations and transaction measurement, we settled on encouraging buyers and sellers to report transactions by incentivizing ratings and reviews."

"The term ""scrappiness"" came from my friend and Facebook engineering partner, Vijaye Raji."

"For entrepreneurs and teams working on new things, scrappiness is a critical component of achieving your goals, staying focused on your vision, identifying opportunities, and navigating setbacks as they arise."

"The Cambridge Dictionary defines scrappy as ""having a strong, determined character"" and a willingness “to argue or fight for what you want”."

"Being scrappy means that even when you're faced with a roadblock or obstacle, you’re able to push through and make things happen—even when they seem daunting."

"Scrappy sowing is accepting that sometimes things fail, learning from those failures, and growing in the process."

"Let me start by saying this: process is not always a bad thing."

"One of the reasons the approval process at PayPal was such a hindrance was because it allowed anyone to say no, torpedoing the whole idea before it had a chance to get off the ground."

"Many companies are like this. It's important that organizations really think about who gets to say no and who gets to say yes to things. Deciding who has the final say—and who needs to get out of the way—is the key to making sure the approval process isn't causing more problems than it solves."

"Institutional memory can be a powerful thing, but it can also be a dangerous thing when it leads to a fear of risk-taking."

"When I was first pitching the idea of building a marketplace at Facebook, people pointed to Beacon, a previous product, as well as a partnership for a marketplace tab—neither of which worked out."

"The last horseman of anti-scrappiness is failure. This one is especially interesting because despite how failure-friendly Silicon Valley is, as organizations, we still don't allow our teams to learn through failure."

"When we aren't hitting the numbers we wanted, we assume we must be doing the wrong thing, rather than recognizing that occasional missteps are a natural part of making progress. This kind of thinking can prevent us from learning, adapting, and iterating."

"Scrappiness is a philosophy of rolling with the punches, adjusting quickly, and learning as you go."

"The scrappy mindset is crucial to success in any industry."

"Being scrappy is about embracing failure as a natural part of the learning process and using it to improve."

"We are solving real needs in the world, and a product strategy should reflect that."

"Knowing whose problem you are solving, and who is deciding if you get to solve the problem is an important distinction."

"Choosing who you will not serve is just as important as knowing who you plan to serve."

"Eventually, you can choose to expand but start with a beachhead and a place you are likely to win."

"Having a clear audience means you can focus your efforts on their needs first, and then expand from there. Before you build for the world, win in one market."

"It also helps you see if it is a prize worth winning."

"Understanding and using those strategic assets is what makes your approach unique."

"Identify your unique assets and how they can give you the “right to win” a specific space."

"This is the unsexy truth. Strategy is easy, execution is hard."

"Many companies have similar strategies, but what separates those who win from those who don't is execution."

"I joined Facebook, and in those same three years, I built two different billion-dollar businesses."

"Two-year roadmaps are not four six-month roadmaps attached to one another."

"When you read a clear product strategy all of the pieces come together like a symphony."

"Opinionated: A point of view about why this strategy is unique is important."

"Objective: Clearly outlining opportunity and risks in equal measure is important."

"Operable: A product strategy needs to be doable without expecting lightning in a bottle"

"Obvious: The last test of a great strategy is how you feel after reading it."

"A product strategy is a living document that is written at a moment in time but evolves as you build."

"I always quote the poster that used to hang near my desk, which read, “Data wins arguments.”"

"In short, girls stopped coding because of the marketing of Apple and Tandy personal computers, which sent the message that personal computers were for boys."

"2. How Commuting Can Be Worse for Your Happiness Than Losing a Limb"

"Although you can lose a limb or win the lottery and still return to close to your original setpoint, a long commute is a net negative to your happiness forever."

"3. The Happiest Age Is Not What You Think"

"I am old enough to have watched a show called “Thirtysomething” as a teen, where everyone seemed super unhappy in their 30s."

"Contrary to popular belief, we are happiest when we are young and when we are old, while we are most unhappy during our middle years. Those are the “striving years,” when life feels the hardest and the most uncertain."

"She said that young people suffer the most anxiety because their stories are not yet written."

"Well, it turns out that the costs are not coming from direct care but from the rise in administrators over time. We have grown the resources needed to administer care more than the people actually giving the care."

"5. The Hidden Cost of Motherhood"

"When they talk about the cost of motherhood, it's not just a theoretical discussion about the hardship of pregnancy, lost wages during maternity leave, or getting mommy-tracked. There is a real, hard cost to women for having children that is reflected in their lifetime wages."

"6. The American Dream Is Getting Harder to Achieve"

"Less than half of American-born people make more money than their parents. We are not advancing; we are regressing."

"We have been saving for our kids’ college for well over a decade, and I still worry it may not be enough. So what’s the deal?"

"College costs have grown so much because of a reduction in state funding for higher education."

"At the same time, at private schools, there has been a massive increase in administrators over faculty members (ref), both of which are growing much faster than the student population."

"Yet somehow, there is a misconception among white Americans that racism is greater for other white Americans than it is for Black Americans."

"9. People, Especially Young People, Are Turning Away from Organized Religion"

"It illustrates how the number of people living in extreme poverty is going down with the advent of industrialization and modernization. Though Voc thoroughly goes through why this is not enough, the numbers show that we are moving in the right direction."