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Go Ahead? It is important to note that, during our time with Amazon, most PR/FAQs never made it to a stage where they were launched as actual products. What this means is that a product manager will put in a lot of time exploring product ideas that never get to market. This may be because of the intense competition for resources and capital among the hundreds of PR/FAQs that are authored and presented each year within the company. Only the very best will rise to the top of the stack and get prioritized and resourced, whether the pool of capital comes from within a large company like Amazon or from a startup investor. The fact that most PR/FAQs don’t get approved is a feature, not a bug. Spending time up front to think through all the details of a product, and to determine—without committing precious software development resources—which products not to build, preserves your company’s resources to build products that will yield the highest impact for customers and your business. Another one of the biggest benefits of a written PR/FAQ is that it enables the team to truly understand the specific constraints and problems that would prevent a new product idea from being viable and aligning on them. At that point, the product or leadership team must decide if they will keep working on the product, addressing the problems and constraints surfaced by the PR/FAQ and developing solutions that will potentially make the product viable, or if they will set it aside.
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
The best tribute to our homegrown training program was the astounding learning curve we achieved in the first couple of years. Building only two airplanes every three months, we enjoyed a better learning curve—78 percent—than other manufacturers had reported while building twenty-five airplanes a month. The rule of thumb in the aerospace business was the more you build, the better you get at it. Our view was that efficiency was mostly the result of quality training, careful inspection, supervision, and high worker motivation. And we achieved these efficiencies in the face of a glaring shortage of trained workers as the Reagan defense spending program began to accelerate in the 1981–1984 time period.
Skunk Works
Ben R. Rich and Leo Janos
But as preoccupied as he was, when it came to Diane and Sharon, he was a doting father who sheltered them from his own fame. He enjoyed telling how six-year-old Diane had asked him if he was Walt Disney. “You know I am,” he answered. “The Walt Disney?” she questioned. When he chortled that he was, she asked for his autograph. He would chase the girls around the house, cackling like the witch from Snow White, or he would twirl them endlessly by their heels, “for hours and hours,” Diane would say, or he would stand in the swimming pool and let them climb to his shoulders. “I thought that my father was the strongest man in the world and the most fun,” Diane recalled. At night he read to them. And on the weekends, after he picked them up from church, he would take them either to Griffith Park to ride the merry-go-round or to the studio, where they would follow him as he snooped about, or pedal their bikes around the empty grounds while he worked. “They used to love to go with me in those days,” Walt would reminisce. “And that [sic] was some of the happiest days of my life. They were in love with their dad.”
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