Being a leader is about accepting that you’re not the center of attention. You can’t be a leader without a group of people or a team. As a founder, you provide the vision, the values, the structure, the processes and you hire smart people to take your ambitious ideas to the next level. Like Tobias van Schneider states it, your job is to put yourself out of a job.
In a recent tweet, Tobias van Schneider is reminding us about how market research can be tricky. Especially because we deal with human beings. Let’s be honest, we are never 100% sure or right about our feelings, we won’t say anything to be embarrassed and, above all, we rarely do what we say. So why should we trust this type of feedback? From my experience there are three things to remember when doing market research. (1) The persons you interview don’t have the solution to what they want or need. (2) The persons you interview are telling you what you want to hear. (3) The persons you interview are thinking about themselves first. By knowing this, how would you approach, value and do market research? From my perspective, if you see market research as a way to collect data to convince some people with vanity insights then fair enough. However, if the final objective is to define a roadmap then I would suggest not investing too much energy in research. In fact, market research doesn’t provide you with answers but with more questions. If you’re not prepared, there are great chances you will feel powerless and take dangerous decisions. Market research is not about confirming or disconfirming hypothesis, that is the role of A/B testing a tangible thing. Instead, see research as a never ending process that imply observations, documentation, analysis and experimentation. Your time is better invested in testing a beta product than to worry about some random interpretations. Learn by delivering, the rest is only suppositions and guesses waiting to be put to the test.
I’m sure, it already happens to you. You stumble upon a piece of work, you stare a few sec at it and you think: ‘’I could have done it too’’. It’s a protective reflex, a kind of hack we use to feel reassured about our capacities or a way to console ourself for all the things we never had the courage to start and achieve. It’s easy to comment and overlook someone’s work until we realise what it takes to make it happen. As Tobias van Schneider sums it up: ‘’Execution is what counts’’ in the end. The next time you think you could have done something ask yourself one simple question: ‘’Why didn’t I do it?’’ and work on the reasons. Is it because I have a lack of skills, a lack of gut, a lack of focus, … ? But, maybe the best way to have the answer is to try and do it.
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Being a leader
Being a leader is about accepting that you’re not the center of attention. You can’t be a leader without a group of people or a team. As a founder, you provide the vision, the values, the structure, the processes and you hire smart people to take your ambitious ideas to the next level. Like Tobias van Schneider states it, your job is to put yourself out of a job.