Weekly antimanager satire · Product · Engineering · Management · People · Startups
Every Tuesday I talk to Manolo about product, engineering, management, people and startups. At 7 A.M.
Management problem
Choosing which problem deserves solving, what not to do, and how to avoid confusing motion with direction.
Guiding question: How do you tell a strategic decision from a list of initiatives?
Manolo discovers that an AI agent never tires of asking to cancel. He mistook loyal customers for people who couldn't spare a morning to leave.
confundir bajas abandonadas con fidelidad oculta si el cliente sigue encontrando valor en el producto.
Manolo bills customers for his AI's tokens. One customer asks why she should also pay for its failed attempts and detours.
trasladar tokens y reintentos al cliente hace visible el coste interno pero oculta el trabajo útil y verificable.
Nobody asks Manolo how he is doing. He never asks either. On one-on-ones that are audits and the cheapest question nobody ever asks.
responder bien no compensa haber preguntado mal.
Today Manolo scolds Jose: pausing seven months for perfect architecture is blindness. Satisficing, OODA loops and the Red Queen versus the code cathedral.
la excelencia sin necesidad real construye productos sin usuarios.
Manolo's exclusive contracts look like a moat, but they're ice in a desert: entropy, game theory and the heat death of a competitive advantage.
un foso basado en capacidades copiables no es defendible.
Manolo designs a frictionless onboarding and Jose teaches him the LinkedIn Easy Apply lesson: B does not pay for clicks or leads, B pays for signal.
una señal sin relación causal induce decisiones falsas.
Manolo discovers the S-curve and wants infinite growth. Jose brings up Geoffrey West and why Lindy rewards those who learn, not those who last.
una empresa debe iniciar la siguiente curva antes de agotar la actual.
Manolo comes down from Mount Sinai with a business plan and no realistic scenario. Jose explains the danger is not ignorance but believing you know.
la precisión del plan no elimina la incertidumbre.
A guy picking his nose at the train station teaches Manolo what Strategic Product Thinking means: perception is built from the very first move.
la actividad visible puede esconder ausencia de estrategia.
Manolo wants to scale by launching more flavors because it always worked. Jose reminds him of BlackBerry: past success is the most potent narcotic.
repetir fórmulas conocidas no crea una propuesta nueva.
Manolo wants a magic MVP. Jose explains prototype vs pilot vs MVP: hypothesis, success metric and kill criteria, or you are just burning money.
construir antes de entender el problema produce falsos MVP.
Corporate cargo cults: copying Google OKRs or Netflix culture without understanding why leaves you building fake runways for planes that never come.
copiar prácticas sin contexto destruye su utilidad.