In her new book ‘Quit,' Annie Duke shares that the best poker players only play 25% of the hands they are dealt, whereas others play 50%. Ms. Duke talks with Stewart Butterfield, the founder of a few startups, most recently Slack (which is an acronym, which I didn’t know). Slack wouldn’t have been born if Mr. Butterfield didn’t drop a video game company to start Slack. Likewise for Twitter which was born out of the failed blogging company Odeo. Ms. Duke's lesson: winners quit. On a more personal level, we may think of quitting in terms of relationships. May I ask: are you married? If you had not broken up with the person you dated before marriage, you’d never have found that special someone.
John List, the University of Chicago economist, also extols quitting in his book 'Voltage.' Mr. List shares that by quitting the college golf team he could major in economics and make a notable impact (he has consulted for the White House, Uber, and Lyft). Quitting often unlocks a competitive advantage. By not doing something, we can then do what we’re better at than others. At a micro-level it propels us to adopt our competitive advantage and at a macro-level it allows society to maximize output via a division of labor. (A shout out to my economist homies David Ricardo and Adam Smith for inspiring that last sentence.)
Quitting helps us avoid future losses and incur future gains. Mr. List and Mr. Butterfield didn’t simply quit and do nothing thereafter. They quit to do something else. The end is just the beginning: quitting is the start for successful people, never the end This leads us to ask: what can Bridge quit? What is taking our time that could be better spent elsewhere? For example, should we quit the Product Syncing service and instead build a POS?
We have to quit things to win. Like a good Game of Thrones episode, we need to kill off projects and services. Let’s imagine that we could turn off features like a light switch. People would notice if we turn off the Registry or the shopping cart. If we turn off file sharing, would they notice? Twice a year we should host a Features Killing Party and actively seek to kill projects.
For example, we were using the domain bridgcatalog.com for almost 10 years. We left that domain for bridge.org in 2021, and nine months later moved again to a new domain, shoplocal.org. But that’s not enough. We should be looking at each of our Bridge services and explain why it's better to work on vs. other projects. To do this, we need to know what our least performing services are.
With measurement, we can know what to quit. Mr. List spent a weekend at the library assessing his colleagues’ golf scores to reach his conclusion to quit golf. Likewise, Bridge can use tools like Google Analytics to better know what to quit and what to invest in. The order of things is: measurement, quitting, and repurposing the time and money elsewhere. By quitting we can spend more time on developing other services, like a POS or a gift registry marketplace. If we start something else that is 10% better, we can make 10% more revenue or make customers 10% happier.
The Catch-22 in software is that once a company builds something, it often doesn't cost much money to keep offering it. Therefore, in software management the ‘kill' may not be removing it but rather deprioritizing it. What can we deprioritize? When we look at our Dashboard, which is our member's internal home page, the News area appears higher up the page than the Registry area, but Registry is a much more important feature. Are we doing a disservice by displaying News higher? Grocery stores place milk in the back of the store for a reason, and we place our News tool higher up to garner more usage, but it may be time to put the milk section at the front of the figurative store.
We have reached the end of this weekly post. Note: I’m not quitting. I’m simply stopping to begin next week's :)