Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.

Good product managers create collateral, FAQs, presentations, and white papers that can be leveraged by salespeople, marketing people, and executives.

anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors.

a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.

Desks made out of doors

“We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” If you don’t like sitting at a door, then you won’t last long at Amazon.

Ten dollars per minute

Move fast and break things

“Should I attempt this breakthrough? It will be awesome, but it may cause problems in the short term,” you have your answer. If you’d rather be right than innovative, you won’t fit in at Facebook.

to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong.

Ones sometimes get bored with many of the important execution details required to run a

company, such as process design, goal setting, structured accountability, training, and performance management.

The story of the company goes beyond quarterly or annual goals and gets to the hard-core question of why.

firm so good that it attracted all the top talent in the world, then he would shift the economics of the industry from the corporations to the talent, where he felt that it belonged.

I understood the importance of hiring for strength rather than for lack of weakness, and I understood the meaning of “fit.”