12 Things I Learned in 2023
The 12 things I learned in 2023
1. Don't delegate anything that you wouldn't do yourself.
It's extremely important to work on little things to show your team that nothing is too small to spend time on, and sets a precedent that you are willing to work on the ground next to them.
E.g. Elon Musk sleeping at the gigafactory to show his team that he was there next to them.
2. Be curious and humble enough to be willing to ask dumb questions.
If I don't know something, I never pretend understanding what the person is talking about.
I would take the knowledge over a "smart" label, any day.
3. Implement feedback loops on everything you do, otherwise you can't adapt.
Last year I decided to work on tracking our employee engagement, and this is one of the best and most valuable initiatives I have worked on.
It has provided us tons of feedback that we were able to act on, and improve what it's like to work for OpenBB. More information on this here.
4. UX is more important than UI.
I keep seeing tweets about UI improvements on a website and/or product. I love that type of posts, and wish there was a similar trend going on for UX improvements.
While UI is critical to attract users, UX is king to retain them.
It’s like dating - the looks is in the UI and the personality is the UX.
While they may be perceived as their own separate bubble, they are not. Someone with an amazing personality (UX) will appear as more beautiful (UI).
5. If in presence of a 2-way door decision, you should decide fast.
Being fast to decide to do A instead of B in a 2-way door decision is ideal because even if that wasn’t the correct decision, adapting after will still be better than being stuck at the decision stage.
Plus, you’ll be surprised by how many time you actually get it right given the level of context and knowledge you have in the space.
Knowing what is a 1 and a 2-way door decision, separates great from poor leaders.
I like this video from Jeff Bezzos talking about this.
6. There’s a ton of data in intuition and common sense.
As a leader, most of the times you have to make decisions with no hard data evidence. And by hard data I mean a spreadsheet with numbers or a powerpoint with charts.
However, you do have that data. It’s just not in a clean format and lives on your head.
This data has been aggregating by spending more time thinking about the problem you are solving than anyone else, by talking with customers, by talking with partners, and everything in between.
Trust your intuition, more often than not presentations are done to justify decisions that you knew were right all along. Skip that and you will be able to move faster.
7. Hear feedback from everyone but only listen from a few.
People paying for your product, will provide you 10x feedback compared to others. Use common sense for others.
8. Be there for your team.
Make sure to remind your team that you couldn't do it without them.
A single off-line event per year is not enough.
Show that you care by being there: asking about their family/pets/hobbies, messaging them when they perform above expectations, send them gifts when something negative happens, ... act like a friend but manage like a captain
9. Fire B and C players early.
Keeping a team of A players is hard but extremely rewarding, and necessary.
It sets the precedent that average work is not enough to work at your company, and high performers will want to work for you to be surrounded by people that push them everyday.
10. Distribution is more important than product.
Took me some time to understand this, but I have no doubts about this now.
This is why the sentence of “A good product with great distribution will almost always beat a great product with poor distribution.”
11. Leave your comfort zone.
I'm really shy on stage and this year I've presented a few times. And I’ve impressed myself, while I'm far from good I've come a long way.
When i started learning english my goal was to be able to make people laugh in english, that took a while.
I've now been able to make people laugh whilst on stage and I didn't expect that I’d be able to do this anytime soon.
12. Tell your loved ones how much they mean to you.
Most of us have someone by our side that allow us to keep performing at highest level day in and day out.
Ensure they know you couldn't be the person you are today without them.