Are you stuck in a creative rut? Extreme questions could be your ticket out. They challenge conventional thinking, provoke innovation, and inspire better ideas. Let's explore how these potent queries can revolutionize your problem-solving approach.
A fantastic idea fulfilling the right extreme can be a company’s entire strategy, unlocking a long-term competitive moat.
There will be 10x more customers in the future than there are now, but only if we build a product for them
- Unique business models emerge when at least one dimension of reality is so extreme that it defies critics and competitors to even conceive of its possibility.
Meetings are still the best way to accomplish certain things
Social bonding, deep discussions where ideas rapidly ricochet off each other, decisions where it’s important to “look in everyone’s eyes” to get the final agreement, and more
- But one of the most common complaints in any company is “too many meetings”—too many useless/bad/wasteful/inefficient/boring meetings
- Systems and processes can not only prevent them, but increase utility beyond that
- If you could never talk to your customers again, how would you figure out what to build?
- Measure their behavior so well that you could quickly measure whether any change was positive or negative, so at least you could iterate your way to a better product
- Could you analyze online, in what customers or competitors are saying, that would inform your strategy or even product roadmap?
How would on-boarding need to be improved to the point where customers would self-serve and be happy doing it?
This might be the hardest step because the customer is least-familiar with your product and therefore less-motivated to power through barriers to their success.
- Where would the product need to provide the user with more control?
Flipped business model
What if you were forced to charge customers in a completely different manner?
- Would you have different kinds of customers due to prices effectively being much higher or lower, and how would that affect brand, messaging, marketing, or sales?
- Shaking up the business model shakes up the value/cost equation; sometimes a different business model is actually better for everyone.
What would be the most fun thing to build?
It has to be something that makes our product better
- Building a feature you just think would be cool for customers to use
- Developing a technology that would be fun to work on that happens to deliver a feature customers want
- Refactoring infrastructure or architecture using some interesting modern technology
No meetings
What if you made your most introverted teammates’ dreams come true?
- No more synchronous meetings!
- On-board new employees without meetings.
- Make decisions without meetings-the process as well as the result of that decision
- Brainstorm ideas could be even better without meetings
Only one thing this year
Think of only the absolutely most impactful ideas, which are probably the ones you should be focused on regardless of the time constraints
- “The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it”
Complete rip-off
Competing only on features results in bullet-point battles
- Creating a bigger and more emotional distinction is a powerful way to win, and breaks us of the habit of believing that incremental product updates will dramatically increase differentiation, or growth.
- To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time
Summary
A 1000-page book can be summarized in a 40-page Cliff’s Notes
- The key lessons of Cliff’s Notes can be summed up in a 1-page blog post
- It can always be smaller, if you trade things off
- Hackathons prove you can code really cool things in a short time, when you want to, and if you make certain trade-offs
