The two main business modalities are more different than you expect. When you hit PMF, it’s a culture-shift to switch from one to the other.

…

So, what needs to be done? A radical shift in working style, from “Explore” to “Execute”:

Explore
Figuring out what works, as quickly and flexibly as possible.

Execute
Becoming excellent at doing what works, while scaling.

Explore vs Execute #

Explore		Execute
experiment	→	standardize
fail fast	→	fail never
speed	→	reliability
creativity	→	stability
learning	→	leveraging
gathering evidence	→	data extrapolation
manual labor	→	automation
discontinuous jumps	→	continuous optimization
question assumptions	→	leverage assumptions
short-term tactical planning	→	long-term strategic planning
new	→	valuable

Before Product/Market Fit, you’re figuring out what works. That means answering questions like:

• Who is the perfect customer?
• Why aren’t all of them buying?
• What is the best niche?
• Which few features make them buy?
• What makes them want to buy?
• What is delightful?
• What distribution channel will work?
• What makes us different?
• What does the customer value?
• What is the customer trying to accomplish?
• What is the right price?
• What are our biggest risks?
• How do we avoid the obvious fatal mistakes?

After Product/Market Fit, that list of questions have been answered.

…

The “Execute” modality is required to answer the new challenges:

• Hiring & managing, not building things only #
• Fixing the shortcuts, not new features only #
• De-risking, not new innovation only #
• Solving for rare things becoming common #
• Predictable processes #
• Addressing stalls in growth #
• Measuring “success” #
• Different people, different skillsets #

It’s impossible to keep up with everything. Consider thinking of areas of your life like rivers, not buckets.

Oliver explains rivers not buckets in “Treat your to-read pile like a river”.

(from the Oliver Burkeman article above)

The problem, as the critic Nicholas Carr explained, isn’t filter failure. It’s filter success. In a world of effectively infinite information, the better you get at sifting the wheat from the chaff, the more you end up crushed beneath a never-ending avalanche of wheat.

…

My challenge, information-wise, isn’t about finding a needle in a haystack. It’s that I’m confronted on a daily basis, in Carr’s words, by “haystack-sized piles of needles.”

…

It’s not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for all your “big rocks”, but of accepting that there are simply too many rocks to fit in the jar. You have to take a stab at deciding what matters most, among your various creative passions/life goals/responsibilities – and then do that, while acknowledging that you’ll inevitably be neglecting many other things that matter too.