Understanding beats solutioning

Oftentimes there's things that come before that that need to be addressed ahead of time so that you can really understand what the plan for meeting those outcomes is going to look like. And so I refer to that as the frontier of understanding.

If you really fully understand the problem, you know the solution. All you have to do is really fully understand the voice in your head through a series of experiments and the whole thing goes away.

If we'd gotten it in the other order, we might not have done it. It's another good example of why not and what if, right? Where we got really lucky that we saw the what if part, that we saw how cool a document in a browser that you could collaborate on would be, because if we understood how hard the collaboration piece would've been first without understanding that value, we might've been like, 'Eh, it's not worth it. It's going to be so hard to solve that problem.'

If you want to make good decisions, we need options and we need to evaluate the pros and cons of each. The same is true in the product world.

The brain is like a college campus that has different departments in it. Most people rely on their history department way too much. If you instead send things to the more experimental, open-minded science department, the more creative art department, you get dramatically better answers.