Quotes from Scott Berkun

The problem was coherence. We certainly launched many things, but did it add up to making a better product?

By framing the problem around my simple scenario, we had a way to evaluate the merit of specific feature ideas: Will this feature get more people further along in the scenario? Will this get them more rewards when they publish? We decided feature ideas that address these goals were more important than all others.

Betrayal bleeds backward into the past, putting doubts and worries into what were once wonderful memories of connection. Betrayal is poison not just for the present, but for the past and the future too.

Urgent problems were assigned to the developer with the least on his plate, but as these issues accumulated, I worried we'd spend more time doing maintenance than new work. All services require maintenance, but when you spend more time maintaining than growing, something is wrong.

Be relentless "The world responds to action, and not much else." — Scott Adams

We eventually decided to wander out for a meal, but our wandering did not go well. Despite the massive computing power of our smart phones and general street savvy of our group, our travel fatigue led to the mistake known as the walk of indifference. We strolled past various restaurants stopping to glance at menus or peeking inside, but were just indifferent enough about everything we saw to keep wandering on.

safeguards don't make you safe; they make you lazy.

all problems can be solved if enough intensity and focus are applied.

a leader in a crisis situation has better odds of success if she can see emotional patterns and make use of different ways to manage them.

What was the vision for our team? What big goals would we sign up for? I wanted to decide this in Athens, as a team with Matt in person. I wanted us to make big bets and show the company we could have visions of cathedrals and build them with bazaar methods. What I didn't want was to spend days riffing on yet more ideas, only to return home was as much ambiguity as when we'd arrived. The bottleneck is never code or creativity; it's lack of clarity.

information is a form of garbage and yet we're oddly addicted to cramming more of it in our brains.

To start big projects, you must have the capacity for delusion. All the rational people, despite their brilliance, are too reasonable to start crazy things. And working against us in this sense was that we'd spent the day walking in the footsteps of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, spurring us all to believe in our grandest dreams.

refuse to quit until every possible alternative has been explored.

Effective management of open issues is purely about diligence. Someone has to both investigate potential problems and take the time to write them down.

Many smart people can recognize when there is a problem, but few expend the energy to find a solution, and then summon the courage to do it.

I want to be taught, not told. I don't mind being proven wrong or trumped provided I learn something, but I did not follow decrees well.

When an idea is fully formed in your head, there's no escaping the fact that for the idea to change the world, it has to leave your brain—a journey that only happens with hard work and dedication.

Months before I started at Automattic, some of the happiness engineers studied the kinds of requests that came in and realized that if they changed the user interface, they might get better information straightaway from customers. They decided to force customers to answer three good questions: What did you do? What did you see? What did you expect?

And the gap between what people think is wrong and what is actually wrong can be quite far indeed.

For every awkward debate on a P2, there was often a private Skype chat where it was resolved. Matt set good examples for praising in public and critiquing in private.

good thinking wins,

Persuasion is stronger than dictation

Rarely did I think our work suffered because we were working remotely. But I did have times where I thought our work would be even better if we were in the same place and time more often.

evil that looks like evil couldn't be as evil as evil that looks like your friend. We can see the bad guy in most films from miles away. Real evil doesn't come at us with a scar over its eye or with a hook for an arm. We don't hear a sinister orchestra play when it walks into the room. In real life, we are on our own to sort out what is evil and what is good and to decide if those terms are cleanly divisible from each other.