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This is the blog of Adam Kalsey. Unusual depth and complexity. Rich, full body with a hint of nutty earthiness.

Management & Leadership

Think Systems, not Symptoms

Designing processes can be tricky. Often, people create individual processes to solve specific problems. Running around plugging holes might feel effective in the moment, this piecemeal approach is counter productive.

When you focus only on individual problems, you risk creating a heavy and cumbersome process. Over time, these processes can feel authoritarian and arbitrary, leading to frustration and disengagement among your team. Instead, it’s crucial to adopt a systems thinking perspective.

Systems thinking helps solve complex problems by looking at how the components of a system interrelates. The systems thinker evaluates actions in context of all the other actions, activities that take place. To apply systems thinking to your policy creation instead of focusing on isolated incidents, consider the overall problems facing your business. Ask yourself:

  • What outcomes are we trying to achieve?
  • How can we create those outcomes effectively?
  • What else will happen if we implement this policy?

By shifting your focus to the larger issues at hand, you can design processes that are not only efficient but also aligned with your business goals.

Evaluate the underlying causes of problems rather than just treating the symptoms. This way, you can create policies that genuinely add value and support your team, rather than constraining them.

Management & Leadership

Your Policies Aren’t Your Culture

Traffic chaos

Company culture isn’t what’s written in your handbook. It’s how your people live every day. Culture is the collective behavior and attitudes, the norms and standards. Policies and formal rules can help reflect and reinforce the culture, but they are not the culture itself.

This confusion is seen yesterday’s Wall Street Journal headline, “Netflix’s Extraordinary Parental Leave Was Part of Its Culture. That’s Over.” The author implies that this signals a culture change. But the parental leave policy isn’t their culture. Netflix has a culture of “freedom and responsibility.” Netflix may have thought that the policy wasn’t driving the culture they wanted. People were using the freedom part without taking responsibility. Removing their unlimited parental leave policy doesn’t change their culture. The culture at Netflix was already built around the idea of taking the time you need and being responsible about it.

Unlimited vacation joke on Twitter: If your company offers unlimited vacation, see what happens when you try and take all of it.

Policies can...

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Lighten Your Process Burden

Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.

Process should add value, not prevent it. Lightweight processes can drive a business forward. But when policies are layered on top of each other, it leads to a bureaucratic bulk that’s a drag on productivity.

No one intends to build a cumbersome bureaucracy. Policies are a response to corporate trauma. A Bad Thing happens. You create a system to prevent that problem. At some point, more Bad Things happen and your new system didn’t stop them. You react to the trauma with more policies.

Over time, your process becomes complicated. It slows productivity. It prevents real work from happening. To fix it you add more processes to make sure work happens. Things slow down more. But somehow, Bad Things still happen.

When your process consumes more time than the value it...

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Product Management

Product Add-Ons Are An Expansion Myth

Multitools and purpose-built tools

Add-on products won’t help you grow. They’re limited to your current customers and only some of them will buy an add-on. Your total market is constrained.

Creating and selling add-ons to existing customers is easy. It’s hard to envision how you’d sell a standalone product.

Add-on sales can boost revenue, but this isn’t sustainable growth. Some customers won’t buy this, so the add-on will grow more slowly than your main product. Even if the combination attracts some new customers, you’re still mostly selling to existing customers.

While add-ons don’t work as a growth lever, they can help you reach more customers by unbundling your product. They are a powerful pricing and packaging tactic. By splitting your product into a lower core price and paid extras, you can still capture the higher revenue from those that need the extra capabilities while still serving a broader market.

Too many add-ons will create choice fatigue. Focus on features that have a clear standalone value. Avoid breaking up your features so much that customers feel you’re charging for every little feature. An add-on works best for features with an obvious value that’s not part of the core...

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Product Management

Protecting your Product Soul when the Same Product meets New People.

When your next product is going to use your same technology but sold to new people (the Same Product strategy) the product must truly be the same. You can expect to make product changes, of course. You might add features. You might re-package and re-brand the product. You might change how you sell it. But it’s important to keep the main benefits and the core technology the same. These are the soul of your product.

If you try to change the core product concepts and sell to a new audience, you’re changing everything about the product. It’s no longer a market expansion where you use your existing knowledge for a new market. With no overlap between the old and the new, you’re not gaining leverage or efficiencies. You’re just doubling your work.

It’s easy to mess this up. You find a similar market that needs your product. But they need some tweaks. The more you dig in, the more differences you uncover and the more changes you make. Eventually, you’ve created a completely different product and sold it in a different way to different people. The new product has a different Product Soul. There’s so little overlap that the two products might as well be separate companies.

You can avoid this by identifying your product’s core value proposition. Define the Soul of your product. If you ask your customers why they buy the product, you’ll see a pattern in the responses. These patterns form the basis for your Product Soul. The further you stray from the common...

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Product Management

Building the Next Big Thing: A Framework for Your Second Product

Illustration of a small historic building that’s extended into a modern structure

Startups often need to introduce a second product sooner than expected to sustain growth. Because you’ve tightly defined your market and ideal customer, you can quickly saturate that market.

The early adopters you mostly sold to begin to dry up. You targeted a tiny niche. As a startup, you needed to focus on the few people who needed something badly enough to take a chance on an unproven company. But now, you’ve seen success, defined a market, and competitors are starting to appear. They’re putting pressure on your first product.

Growth slows unexpectedly. There isn’t a new product on the horizon. This is a stall that can kill a company.

A second product is the cure. But when is the right time to add one? And what should it be? There’s a framework I like to use to pick when to launch that product and identify the right second product.

Timing

There’s no perfect formula, but generally, it should be around the time you’ve solved the initial market for your first product. You have product-market fit, you know who the buyers are, how they buy, and why they choose you. Your primary constraint is how fast you can...

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Recently Written

Think Systems, not Symptoms
Dec 15: Piecemeal process creation frustrates teams and slows work. Stop patching problems and start solving systems. Adopting a systems thinking approach helps you design processes that are efficient, aligned with goals, and truly add value.
Your Policies Aren’t Your Culture
Dec 13: Policies guide behavior, but culture is the lived norms and values of your team. Policies reflect culture -- they don’t define it. Netflix’s parental leave shift didn’t change its culture of freedom and responsibility. It clarified how to live it.
Lighten Your Process Burden
Dec 7: Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.
Product Add-Ons Are An Expansion Myth
Dec 1: Add-ons can enhance your product’s appeal but won’t drive significant market growth. To expand your customer base, focus on developing standalone products.
Protecting your Product Soul when the Same Product meets New People.
Nov 23: Expand into new markets while preserving your product’s core value. Discover how to adapt and grow without losing your product’s soul.
Building the Next Big Thing: A Framework for Your Second Product
Nov 19: You need a first product sooner than you think. Here's a framework for helping you identify a winner.
A Framework for Scaling product teams
Oct 9: The people, processes, and systems that make up a product organization change radically as you go through the stages of a company. This framework will guide that scaling.
My Networked Webcam Setup
Sep 25: A writeup of my network-powered conference call camera setup.

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