Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making - The New York Times bestseller

How to identify your invisible asymptotes

One way to identify your invisible asymptotes is to simply ask your customers. As I noted at the start of this piece, at Amazon we honed in on how shipping fees were a brake on our business by simply asking customers and non-customers.

Here's where the oft-cited quote from Henry Ford is brought up as an obje... See more

At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. “No,” he replied, “because customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. “Do you want to see something neat?” When he flipped it open, i... See more

The product management team had an allergic reaction to prioritizing potentially good features above features that might hypothetically beat BladeLogic. They would say, “How can we walk away from requirements that we know to be true to pursue something that we think will help?” It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figurin

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But an orientation toward storytelling and vision can sometimes cause challenges with execution : The only new product launch that succeeded was Airbnb.com. Every other big launch over the last eight years has actually been a complete flop.