When we judge new ideas, products, or people, we often find ourselves gravitating towards weaknesses.
- When we interview people, we find ourselves listing “weaknesses” for reasons why the candidate wouldn’t be a good fit.
- When we review a product (or for PMs & engineers, build a new product) we find ourselves tempted to point out why the product will suck because of “missing” features.
- When an employee discusses challenges with a manager, often the discussion centers around areas of “improvement”.
The common strand that runs through these examples is the focus on “weaknesses” that need to be “improved”. As people, we are possibly wired to see weaknesses.
However, if we look at successful people and products around us, we increasingly see examples where leveraging few key strengths creates exponential value (literally)
When it comes to people, silicon valley provides an excellent microcosm. Some of the most successful tech companies are run by teams that pair consummate managers with visionary tech leaders. At Google, it was Eric Schmidt & Larry Page. At Facebook, it is Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. At Intuit, it was Scott Cook and Bill Campbell.
Removed from leadership, at an employee level, there is recent focus on strengths based feedback, where employees are coached how they can leverage their strengths better (shoutout to FB where we did a round of strengths based assessment). There is tremendous value to be realized by composing teams of members where they compliment each other’s skill set.
When it comes to products, the last decade has seen very successful products that did a few things, exceedingly well.
Google nailed search, Gmail nailed email, Facebook nailed social, Apple nailed the iPod followed by the iPhone, etc. Looking at a few startups, Snapchat has nailed ephemeral sharing, Slack has nailed team communication, Trello is nailing one form of project management, etc. These examples are deliberately scale invariant. If you asked me to list weaknesses in these products, I could write a dozen. But that would be deficit based thinking. Dividend based thinking suggests that these products do few things exceedingly well, and reap rich rewards as a result. On the other hand, I think Outlook does everything but I can’t point out one thing that it does exceedingly well.
So when we find ourselves thinking about “what’s missing”, we should stop and think about “what’s good here”, and wonder how we can leverage that better.
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