Product org to enable creation

💡 JC's Newsletter #166 - 2023-04-11

Dear friends,

In JC’s Newsletter, I share the articles, documentaries, and books I enjoyed the most in the last week, with some comments on how we relate to them at Alan. I do not endorse all the articles I share, they are up for debate. 

I’m doing it because a) I love reading, it is the way that I get most of my ideas, b) I’m already sharing those ideas with my team, and c) I would love to get your perspective on those. 

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🔎 Some topics we will cover this week:

• Very interesting insights into how LVMH works internally to enable highly creative people

• Why it is so important to make contrarian choices, avoid average

• How shopify is ‘flattening’ its org structure to incentivize more employees to become individual contributors

• Bestselling author Simon Sinek’s view on starting with why

• The importance of commitment

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👉 LVMH Bernard Arnault on enabling creative talent (Link)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• Very interesting insights on how LVMH works internally to enable highly creative people

• Love how advertising lives right inside the design team and is not separated

• Building a good brand takes time - managers cannot be in a hurry

Innovation:

• It begins with radical innovation—an unpredictable, messy, highly emotional activity that the company wholly endorses. 

  • Indeed, unlike many executives who oversee the work of creative types—be they engineers, writers, or designers—Arnault does not believe in managerial limit setting. 

  • Artists must be completely unfettered by financial and commercial concerns, he insists, to do their best work. 

  • You don’t “manage” John Galliano, the wildly iconoclastic head of the House of Dior, just as no one could have “managed” Leonardo da Vinci or Frank Lloyd Wright.

• I don’t have alarm bells when it comes to creativity. If you think and act like a typical manager around creative people—with rules, policies, data on customer preferences, and so forth—you will quickly kill their talent.

• Our whole business is based on giving our artists and designers complete freedom to invent without limits.

• Our philosophy is quite simple, really. If you look over a creative person’s shoulder, he will stop doing great work. 

Small overhead:

• Each brand very much runs itself, headed by its own artistic director. Central headquarters in Paris is very small, especially for a company with 54,000 employees and 1,300 stores around the world

• There are only 250 of us, and I assure you, we do not lurk around every corner, questioning every creative decision.

Long-term ownership:

• Quality also comes from hiring very dedicated people and then keeping them for a long time. We try to keep the people at the brands, especially the artisans—the seam-stresses and other people who make the products—because they have the brand in their bones—its history, its meaning.

Marketing:

• The last thing you should do is assign advertising to your marketing department. 

• If you do that, you lose the proximity between the designers and the message to the marketplace. 

• At LVMH, we keep the advertising right inside the design team. With the Dior campaign, John Galliano himself did the makeup on the model. He posed her. The only thing Galliano did not do himself was snap the photo.

• Some brands out there will make it to stardom. But their managers cannot be in a hurry. It takes time. But once you get the elements of a star brand aligned, they last for a long time. They stay and stay, and they deserve to.

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👉 Shreyas Doshi on Twitter (Twitter)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• Why it is so important to make contrarian choices, avoid average

• And how you can “do everything right” and still have a bad product because you didn’t take risks

• We need to fight for creativity and risks at Alan

• Why do most teams that understand their customers still fail at creating winning products? They fail to translate that understanding into the right product. Why? Chiefly, because they make a long series of average choices.

• They choose between 2 or 3 obvious options but remain oblivious to the other 10 options that were available to them, with just a little more thought & creativity.

• Do this repeatedly, over the hundreds to thousands of choices that a product team ends up making, and you get an average product and pedestrian positioning of said product.

• So what do they do next? Talk to the customer. Talk more to the customer. Go on a customer listening tour. Fixate on the customer. Answer support tickets to build more empathy. etc. etc. All good things, but none of these things will solve the real problem: inadequate creativity, which stems first from a lack of appreciation of the role of creativity in product work.

• This is why most teams out there are forever stuck on the treadmill of “doing all the right things” but still not winning in the market.

• The takeaway: You need to understand that you cannot consistently build winning products in your career without translating customer insight into the exactly right product, UX, and positioning. And creativity will provide you the greatest alpha there. So, embrace the importance of creativity and thoughtfully inculcate it within your product team.

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👉 Shopify is ‘flattening’ its org structure to incentivize more employees to become individual contributors (Business Insider)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• I like the notion of crafters, it is a lot clearer than “IC”. Should we replace it internally? 

• Shopify is grouping its employees into two categories: managers and crafters. The goal is to reward individual contributors for their growth, even if they don't become managers.

• It aims to reward employees who continue to grow without becoming a manager. Going forward, being a manager would have no effect on compensation.

• That's also why we introduced scope and mastery, so crafters can spend a majority of their time building, and they can continue to rise up the mastery levels and make more money.

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👉 Bestselling author Simon Sinek on starting with why (ICONIQ)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• 100% agree on mission / vision, always found it hard to define

• So, what is the Why for Alan?

  • Why do we exist? Roughly my view:

    • Because, we believe we can really help millions of people to access more prevention, better care, cheaper, in a 10x more intuitive way. 

    • I believe we are the only ones that can do it at scale, with a member-first, technologically differentiated approach.

    • We believe that if we do that very well we can build one of the biggest companies on the planet

• The problem with the terms “mission” and “vision” is there is no standardized definition of either. 

  • You can go read 50 mission statements on 50 corporate websites and there's no consistency to how they're written. 

  • Sometimes vision comes first, sometimes mission comes first. Sometimes they've got other things like purpose. 

  • I don't know which ones are actually driving behavior or if it’s prioritized.

• “It’s why we exist. It's why we do what we do.”

• Many people think NASA’s “WHY” is to “go to space.” Not really. 

  • They're not leading that like they did for a while, and now it's commercialized. 

  • How about “land on the moon?” No, that's just a goal—a big hairy, audacious one without a doubt. 

  • But if you go down deep into the origins of NASA, the actual act that formalized NASA, it’s about doing things that no one else can do for the good of humanity.

  • So the reason for NASA is to literally go to the places that no one else can go, would go, or should go. There’s no commercial benefit whatsoever for them. And NASA goes further than any commercial enterprise would, and that's what I love. It's about pushing, pushing, pushing, further, further, further.

• I asked a three-star Marine who was in charge of all Marine Corps training what makes the Marines so special. He said, “love of country, love of Corps, love of your fellow Marine.” Show me one company that says that the reason their company is so dominant is because of love.

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👉 All in. All the time. (Farnam Street)

❓ Why am I sharing this article?

• I love this notion of being fully committed, all the time, or it is not worth it. 

• It’s easy to trick yourself into thinking that if you put in half the effort, you can get 80 percent of the results. While that might work for some things, it doesn’t work for anything important. If you’re half trustworthy, you’re not trustworthy. If you’re often reliable, you’re not reliable. If you’re mostly consistent, you’re not consistent.

• The key to doing anything well is commitment. Not only does commitment help you become better at what you do, but it also makes other people want to help you.

• If you see your job as punching the clock, not only will you never be great at it, but your employer won’t invest in you. The best relationships are the ones where both partners go all in all the time to make the relationship amazing. 

• If committing sounds like a lot of work, it is. That’s why so many people are half-in. The problem with half-in and half-committed is that it doesn’t get you the results you want. If you're not committed, get out. The committed person gets both the opportunity and the results.

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