The law of strategic planning: the number of people involved in creating the plan is inversely proportional to the actual amount of strategy it contains.

Yes. And also, you should hire an agency for your product, design and engineering.

Ads don't wear out (not really news from System 1, Millward Brown were saying it 20 years ago) but a really important finding nonetheless. You are almost certainly changing your ads and campaigns too often. When you are sick of it, your audience has probably only just noticed it

Airbnb cut all paid growth during Covid (which accounted for 10-20% of new users), and never turned it back on. Instead, invested in PR, events, and brand. It's rare you see a company get off the paid growth addiction. And seems to be working. A really interesting case study.

No AB tests, no growth tactics, no hashtags, no marketing department, no cartoon characters on ladders. Just trying to explain the product in clear terms with good taste and design

A beautiful African proverb says it takes a village to raise a child, it certainly does to build a company too. Proud to cross 100 million people designing in Canva and incredibly grateful for our team and global community who brought our wild dream to life.

For example, I've noticed that the founders of successful startups tend to become much more commanding. You can start out as a diffident hacker, but you can't run a big company as one. Gates and Jobs are the rule, not the exception.

Apparently a significant part of Google's business is selling you traffic you would have gotten anyway. I talked to one founder who used to spend a huge amount on keyword ads. They stopped completely, and they still got 95% of the traffic they would have gotten.

(also worth noting: ten years ago essentially no one predicted this. the common wisdom was that we would have self-driving cars very soon but that creativity was out of reach for AI, maybe forever. predictions made today about how AI is going to develop are likely as bad.)

trying to make the price of housing go up over time instead of down is one of the most destructive policies i can imagine, and makes ~everything worse. so many things would get better if we could get this one thing right.

When my app hit No. 1, users asked us everyday to add DMs. So we coded nights & weekends to ship it. Within hours growth came to a grinding halt: sharing had dropped 90%. Users no longer needed to ask on Stories who sent them the anonymous messages. Don't always listen to users.

the audacity....after decimating an entire economy

Apple going full Russel Conjugation here I personalize, you track across apps, they invade your privacy.

One problem with having a high ratio of PMs to other functions is that energetic PMs will find ways to start new work, leading to lots of disconnected work across teams, which then makes management think there’s a coordination problem, for which the obvious solution is… more PMs

Corporate life is just repeating this loop until you retire:

If you are a politician the only thing you hate more than housing being unaffordable is housing being affordable. High cost of housing in Australia is a national scandal and demand side “solutions” are usually a con. All parties and all levels of Govt in Australia are complicit.

GDPR and Apple’s App Tracking Transparency have decimated more small business jobs than any policy change in the last decade. All in an attempt to inflict pain on Facebook by a handful of privacy absolutists in Cupertino & Brussels.

There are two types of people in tech: 1. People who are good at “alignment”, “framing”, “scaling teams”, and “roadmapping” 2. People who ship

Agree, and this is also true of design. Design leaders should be highly technical and spend a large % of their time actually designing and reviewing work

I strongly believe that all managers in a technical area must be technically excellent. Managers in software must write great software or it’s like being a cavalry captain who can’t ride a horse!