Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
One person can do more
AI has widened what one person can do. The unicorn hire used to be someone with product sense who was also an engineer and maybe a designer, able to flatten the layers of translation between functions. Now anyone can spin up a set of designs, build a first prototype, and model out pricing scenarios. Ambition is no longer limited by what a person can execute or communicate alone.
A page of ambitious projects
The hardest part is expanding thinking fast enough. Patrick Collison keeps a page of unreasonably ambitious projects that were executed in a really short time, and every one predates tools that let you learn to build something almost instantly or ask one question to summarize a complicated book. If those projects were possible before, an exponential increase in them should follow now.
Lifting other people's ambition
That makes lifting other people's ambitions a core part of the product manager's job. When a teammate settles on a timeline, or calls something a first version, the useful question is whether the ceiling is meaningfully higher and whether it could be tried faster.
Why do hard goals beat vague ones?
Psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham spent decades studying this and summarized it in their 1990 book A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance. Across many studies, specific and difficult goals produced higher performance than easy goals or an instruction to do one's best. The effect holds as long as people accept the goal and have the means to pursue it. It became the foundation of modern goal-setting practice in organizations.
Why do handoffs between roles cost so much?
Fred Brooks noted in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month that communication paths grow much faster than headcount. A team of 10 people has 45 possible pairs, and a team of 20 has 190. Each handoff between roles also loses some of the context in the original idea. Brooks managed development of IBM's OS/360 operating system before writing the book.
More from Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career
